A hammer of sensory overload, sailing through the after Christmas sales in a mall. Excited families, affectionate couples, clusters of children, a sea of humanity. I feel disoriented at times, garish tinsel and a wash of sound threatening to capsize my calm. I consider my options carefully, and we eventually make our way to the exits.

Later at home, I look at Zappos.com (yes, I am buying shoes). No forces try to upset this juggernaut: in fact, here I am in my element, where I don’t have to traverse the length of a mall to compare shoe styles and weigh their relative qualities in a frustratingly unknown utility function. I wonder how much longer the big box retailers will go before being touched by these sites.

An anticipation before unconciousness, abrupt awakening awareness, undignified scampering, tearing of presents, hefty portions of food, and the end of a day well spent with family. Being together in a special time of thanks and wonder; this is the magic of Christmas.

When did we lose that magic?

We’re all grown up, now, adults or nearly so, having long ago shed our hallucinations of a jolly old man that delivered presents to the good and punished the bad (or only some of the hallucinations, but that post is for another day). Now this modern day approximation of a winter solstice celebration is almost just another day, bracketed by shopping sprees and frosted with religious trappings. Cherry picking the worst, outside of my family is worse: people dreading meeting their semi-estranged relatives, or trying to force some good cheer in an empty apartment.

This is is different from what we want: there is a culture-wide agreement that Christmas is best kept magical, that everyone could do with some good cheer once in a while (even if it is derived from a holiday co-opted into a capitalistic enterprise). In the tradition of only penning antagonistic opinions, I agree with the sentiment: Newtonmas should be kept magical. However, the way I propose doing it is by destroying Christmas (and not replacing it with Newtonmas: again, that post is for another day, and really, Newton isn’t that important).

Before I start, what is magic? Is it an alias for utils? An alias for hedons? Maybe: I like to think that this highly subjective and ill-defined term is shorthand for the amount of blowing-someone’s-mind-in-a-positive-way that happens (it seems like this sort of thing might be a discrete measure, but the amount by which you can blow someone’s mind is continuous. Blowing someone’s mind by showing them a youtube video of people base jumping is probably less of an impact of showing them the internet for the first time). Blowing their minds with kindness, blowing their minds with an invisible jolly obese elf that delivers presents to the children of the world, blowing their minds with good food: I know trying to tamp down a general definition on these words is a futile effort, but I think this will do.

So back to destroying Christmas: do I wish to kill the magic of Christmas? Wrong! I want to learn the secrets of infusing Christmas with magic so I can sustain it forever![1]

(That line might show up in future posts too. Sorry)

Another way of putting it: let’s explicitly optimize for magic while it’s Christmas, and then never stop.

Maybe I’m naive, that this can’t happen easily and that it’s in fact hard, but then I look around inside a church and see people passively accepting of the gospel that seems inane to me, and I think that maybe it isn’t so hard. We’re just swept up in the narrative of our lives, too busy to optimize, not knowing how we can optimize, or ignorant of the fact that we can (ignoring Mazlow’s heirarchy for now).

One way to think about this is through random rewards: research indicates that randomly timed rewards are better for reinforcement than regularly timed rewards. Now, our friends aren’t rats under the will of our carrot-stick methodologies, but it seems to indicate that a random gift is more impactful than one agreed upon beforehand, and also removes the awkward gift giving that happens because it has to happen, because, you know, it’s the holidays.

Or something longer term: people might object, claiming that people are built on cyclical natures. Boom and bust, hard work and relaxation, it all follows the deeper rhythms of life. But we’re on the edge of changing ourselves to not be constrained by such things: while people may object about infeasibility or short-term intractability, we can look to where we’re not constrained by crippled wetware, remind ourselves where we could be.

—

By the way, this is probably a bunch of bullshit. Actually, it is definitely a bunch of bullshit, with a small probability of being right. You will survive.

Sorry probably currently non-existent readers, I didn’t start writing early enough (since I don’t yet have a buffer), and now I’m too tired to put out a semi-okay post, or even a barely coherent post. I’ll put together two for tomorrow/today, especially since I’m done with the sometimes infuriating LIMBO, and I can resist the charms of Bastion for a while longer. Hopefully I’ll also make good headway with some of the apps I’ve been hoping to make.

The first and second days: sacrificed to the gaming gods, they have. It was an easy enough pit to fall into, with what seemed to be a small niggling feeling that I “deserved to have a break”, and that gaming was the perfect way to spend that break. Then, after buying up some games (yes, crazy steam sales got me) and playing for an hour or two, the gaming mechanics hooked into me (have some points! have all the points!), my latent gaming glands kicked into gear, and before I knew it Saturday night had rolled around and I hadn’t written anything yet (hence, this).

If you haven’t already inferred from the tone, I don’t like this turn of affairs. My break from being compelled to do sometimes silly academic things is quite short (maybe I’ll talk about why I’m done with academia another day), and I want to do something useful with it. But looking at what I want to do (cook all the things! write all the things! code all the things!) then it’s less clear that that’s a good thing, since none of my desired activities are purely recreational. The obvious rejoinder “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” comes to mind, and the objection “fun and useful” comes almost as quickly.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of hedons, perhaps you should go read a bit about them first. tldr; hedon is like a util for feelings. What’s a util? Well, that’s not going to fit in a tldr, so you should just follow the link. I bring up the concept mostly for shorthand, because it fits pretty nicely into an analogy with dieting: gaming offers a burst of cheap short-term hedons, but reading a seminal work of sci-fi offers nearly as many healthy hedons that last much longer: for example, I’m certain no game has not touched me as deeply as Solaris has. And then, when you look past books and look at things like coding, it should share the same deep-seated satisfaction that really good books offer.

Or, maybe I’ll get fewer hedons from coding. Then perhaps I’ll normalize: once I get fewer hedons flowing into my system, then the hedons I do get will satisfy more, analogous to how people that diet on sugar find dark chocolate sweet.

Enough theorizing: how can I change myself to reach my goals? If I could limit myself to playing an hour or so a day, then it might work: I could do other things that day, and not lose momentum on projects. However, I don’t seem to operate well under those conditions (example: reading sprees), so I might have to cut myself off: maybe finish Limbo, crack the mental knuckles, and then start flailing around madly in cyberspace.

An approximation of a nightmare ends, and something new begins.

Now that I have the time and the equipment, let’s do something new:

• Cook ALL the things: cook at least one thing a day. My cooking-fu is not nearly strong enough to survive on my own, so I need to level up quickly before I find myself alone in a New York apartment, wondering what to eat.
• Write ALL the things: write at least one post a day. My writing-fu is not nearly strong enough to meet my own goals, so I’m going to force myself to pump out writing to get better, preferably not writing about what I’m doing that particular day, because it turns out my weekly “what I did this week” blog posts from summer are kind of boring.
• Code ALL the things: obvious goal is obvious
• Maybe write some music too? I need to keep learning, and I have these melodies and rhythms rattling around in my head, begging for release.

Basically, the theme of this winter break is building stuff and keeping up with friends: I know it’s overambitious, but it’s about time I didn’t have to do something, and instead do what I want to do, even if it’s only for less than a month.

But now, it’s time to play some games (not Minicraft). See you tomorrow.

I have been the proud owner of a Kobo Touch for a bit longer than 3 months. So, what have I found?

• The device itself is pretty petite. Next to almost every other e-reader out there (maybe excepting the Nook Touch) it really sizes itself down and reduces itself to almost just a screen and a border. This is both a curse and a blessing: it’s not the 10inch screen I wish I had, but it fits comfortably in several larger pockets in my clothes.
• The touch interface is nice, and the gestures are natural. Finger smudges don’t matter quite as much as I thought they would, with the matte surface taking minimal finger oils. It is unnerving to have your headphones brush against the screen and move the page around, though, since the touch sensing is infrared based.
• Like I suspected, the touch interface makes reading PDFs bearable. Since lots of long-form web material is tied up in PDFs, this is a deal-maker.
• There are not a plethora of options in the software. This isn’t a deal breaker, though, partly because I couldn’t return it if I wanted (since Borders is dying and all) and because the defaults are usually good enough that I don’t care.
• I will say that I am not such a fan of the home screen with only 5 book covers: Kindle’s linear listing of books is much more my style. Ah well, such is life.
• The battery doesn’t last forever: I can maybe get 150 pages from a charge? I mean, I finished 2 around 200 page PDF textbooks in some 3-4 charges, so it frees up my cellphone from having to blast photons from an LCD. It’s a pretty good battery life, me thinks.
• It is not quite as convenient as I hoped it would be: social rules sometimes make it awkward to pull out the thing and start reading, or my subway stop is coming up, or other such things.
• Reading the thing in direct sunlight was wonderful.
• Not having time to read from the Kobo due to school is annoying.

With the next generation of e-readers quickly approaching (mostly ~$200 faux-tablets), this review may become quickly deprecated. Oh well?

Random thought: this does remind me of a potential e-reader format, which has e-ink on both sides and requires the user to turn the device over: you solve slow redraw rates and add in more physical interaction in one fell swoop. And end random idea.

Chilly night, possibly preceding a snowfall. Feeble jackets won’t keep the cold out for long.

My hackathon illness seems to have followed me from California: HackNY saw me talking with people rather than finishing something. And getting 4 hours of sleep, which is simultaneously tolerable and not.

Or more generally, it seems the pace of my hacking has fallen off, and other things shoulder in. The state of my writing in particular has fallen into disrepair, with a few posts sitting in the edit queue for a few months now.

Well, it’s more accurate to say that everything I’m doing is slowly starving for time. Time and will, but mostly time: there is only so much will to go around, and bioengineering isn’t good enough to fix that yet.

But really, the only reason I write here after 1.5 months of silence is the fact that missing an entire calendar month without blogging anything is… unacceptable. Even if nothing especially newsworthy happened to me this month, it would irk to be missing “October 2011” in that archive list. And so, I go. Hopefully next month holds more flash in store.

As Maker Faire is fast approaching, I happen to be in the making spirit. Actually, that isn’t the reason why I decided to try out DIY book binding, but no matter. The fact of the matter is that propaganda sometimes takes on long forms, and sometimes getting people to read things on the internet is a pain.

Surprisingly enough, doing the binding yourself isn’t hard: time consuming, perhaps, but not difficult (and even the time aspect is mostly because I had no idea what I was really doing). I followed the helpful instructions from diybookbinding.com, which essentially boils down to “tap the pages so they line up, and then slap glue on the spine”.

Some things I learned:

• White glue (Elmers, PVA, what have you) seems to be working just fine. A bunch of sites swear by gorilla glue, but it cost 4x times more, so I decided to make this first batch with Elmers and see how they survived.
• Dicing up everything without folding it first makes gluing the spine much easier: if you try to fold all the pages over into something that looks bookish (8.5″x5.5″ format), the cutting tends to go one way or another, and you end up with an uneven spine. If I had an even spine, then everything would have been hunky-dory.
• If you use a dedicated paper cutter (and you should), then cutting fewer pages at a time will make the cuts more accurate: too many pages lets the top pages slide around, so the spine is again uneven.

Honestly? It took around 4 hours to do 3 books. However, now that I know what not to screw up, I think the next batches should go faster.

And I’ll post some pictures of my very diy efforts soon.

EDIT: and now there are pictures! I’ll add more as I make more batches.

Upon finding out about Advanced Linux Programming through one of my social streams, I slotted it into the “to-read” queue and went off on my merry way. Once I got my Kobo Touch, though, I bumped up the priority on ALP because, well, it’s available as an ebook (pdf) (which I put together into one PDF with pdfsam). Plus, I’m taking OS (operating systems) this semester, which is apparently very difficult and all sorts of crazy, so dipping my toe into the C world wouldn’t be a bad idea.

What was a bad idea was reading ALP right after reading K&R. ALP reads like a glorified reference after reading K&R, lacking that organic feel and concise non-contrived examples. There was a sense in K&R that the authors were mini-gods, black belts of C, and they knew enough to know how much material was enough. Obviously, I didn’t feel that in ALP (there is a certain mysticism grown up around K&R, which is probably screwing with my calibration. Word to the wise).

I understand that not all examples can be non-contrived, but references deserved to be in an easily indexed format, not a heavy PDF. Instead of a reference, something… more like Why’s Guide would be better for getting people started with programming real things with Linux (why is there an Advanced in the title? I don’t understand that, either. It feels pretentious). Actually, that’s a terrible example, because Why’s Guide goes off the deep end in the other direction, and also in some ways falls prey to the same reference-rigidity that ALP does… but at least it’s not obviously a reference tome! And you get cartoon foxes.

To top it off, ALP finishes off with a medium-size program source embedded in the book. I still don’t know why people put this sort of information in books, reference information and source code alike: electronic applications solve these problems to such an extent that I’m befuddled why something that provides fine grain information consumption hasn’t killed everything yet. Oh well, +1 to the reference counter for working on Notesoble…

Positives: I did learn more about how Linux is put together, but not enough to replace my OS books. In particular, the multiprocessing/IPC things were interesting, and knowing about “Linux System Calls” a few days before we covered them during the 2nd session of OS was helpful. I’ll admit, I skimmed over “Inline Assembly Code” and the “Sample GNU/Linux Application”, but I think you can finagle why.

Overall, I think the book was a net gain: I did learn things, and it kept me company from Seattle to New York. However, I do look forward to killing this ebook and it’s ilk.

My next book is going to be something sci-fi, and after that I’m going to go finish up Visualizing Data, which I left unfinished and I have lots of homework to do oh god

Oh my. Last weekly post.

• Decided that the reprap would have to wait until I got myself across the country. Yup, no print in California before the end of the summer, very sad.
• Finished up my internship. I’ll post about it soon, but suffice it to say that I had loads of fun and got myself a fair bit of experience.
• Finished K&R. I learned stuff about ANSI C I hadn’t seen before, and saw some actual good C getting slung around (sans error checking, which is arguably not good C at all). Like all forays into lower level computing, it makes me really appreciate things like objects and exceptions… You know, things that our parents couldn’t have while they were going to school, uphill both ways. At any rate, taking things from the standard library as examples of how to write C style code is an interesting one: I have yet to see if this would work with python. The best thing about the examples is that they aren’t contrived: they solve fundamental problems in very C-ish ways, and introduce you to the mechanisms behind the libraries you will be using on a regular basis. It’s a very elegant way to introduce examples.
• Did a knight move: first up to Seattle, and then across the country and back to New York. Yup, I’m a chess piece.

So now here I sit, moving into a school dormitory for the last time (at least, in my undergraduate education). It’s been good, summer, but now it’s time to rest. Autumn is here, and I wouldn’t want you to see all the blood that’s gonna come out of this encounter.