• I moved into a new place. No more couch-bed for me!
• Learned how it really feels to whittle down to an MVP, and try to keep it an MVP
• Attended the Anybots open house. The tech wasn’t terribly exciting (and this Anybot shoots flames from its head!) but talking semi-shop with the employees was fun.
• Hit up another Less Wrong Meetup, and had a good enough time to miss my train (I’m really sorry guys)
• Hacker Dojo Happy Hour! I was somewhat apprehensive that it’d be only uber-geeks, but there were plenty of higher-functioning geeks too
• Read some more Russion SciFi by Lem, Tales of Prix the Pilot. Thought the ending stories lacked focus? This was brought on by the recent news that Solaris had been re-translated directly from Polish, but only in audio form #yes #Yes #YES
• Hung out at Noisebridge, becoming dehydrated and anti-social enough that I’ll have to hit it up again to get a fuller experience. However, did get good work done

Work is excellent, and going into the 3rd week I might actually start being useful.

And that’s a wrap! I promise (semi-sincerely) that I’ll have *something* document-able by next update, instead of using all my free time socializing and goofing off. Geez, if I keep up the no-project output, readers might even get the impression that I’m a normal blogger and will soon start posting cat pictures.

Not that there’s anything wrong with posting cat pictures.

Okay, so I’ve been settling in for the last week, and a brief recap:

• Started work: somehow ended up doing computer vision, which I probably won’t touch after next week
• Found a place to live that is not a couch
• Tried Xmonad, the amazing tiling window manager
• Failed to hit up Noisebridge, or the San Francisco Symphony
• Did run around San Francisco like a chicken with it’s head cut off

Note: I really hate looking for housing, but not so much I’m willing to spend twice as much to just rent a hotel room. That’s just plain silly.

And I was wrong about the projects thing: now that I’m not spending every single night going out and trying to find a room to live in, now I might be able to finish something. Probably hardware-related, because my motivation to write code has dropped due to work.

The “head cut off” reference is because I walked all over San Francisco, because there was a street game of epic proportions. Now excuse me while I nurse my poor legs.

Butterflies.

A familiar flutter, deeply set, matching the flutter of probability. I know the numbers, but I can’t quite put my irrationality aside and face up the facts as I fumble for my boarding pass.

So many people have died. Too many to ignore.

Shuffling forward, shoeless, I contemplate. The TSA agents let these people pass, but they will die, like the billions before them. Security? Only for a few hours, and marginal at that.

Now, the two hours I spend waiting for this delayed flight carries about the same risk of death as the two that will follow it: being suspended 10,000 feet in the air is a negligible risk next to the unseen microbes making their way to my gut. It’s unreasonable to focus on flying as a personal existential risk, this I know. This, I also feel. Then from where do the butterflies spring?

A reminder. A reminder that we can do great things, and that one day we can defeat death, when revised culture strides forward hand-in-hand with advancing science. Impossible?

They used to think flying was impossible, too.

And yet here we are, engines thrashing defiantly against gravity with a mighty roar.

Liftoff.

Fuck yeah, Humanity.

• Attended some graduations
• Tweaked the Arimaa Icon set up to version 3 4 4.1
• Attended a Classical Revolution session in Seattle
• Re-read Neuromancer
• Made progress on finding housing. I detest looking for housing. In fact, I detest looking for most anything.
• Failed to finish Halo: Reach
• Got to the Silicon Valley without dying

Start work next week! I should be able to actually start finishing projects again, so heads up for that.

I have rectified what I have previously noted as something negative. With less than a week of practice under my belt, I managed to not suck that much at a Classical Revolution session.

I’m coming for you, anti-generality. And lemme tell you, it’s going to be a wicked battle. Count on it.

• Tweaked/updated my Arimaa Icon set
• Got a job! Internship! Whatever you want to call it! Now I don’t have to rely on intrinsic motivators to get things done!
• Checked out Jigsaw Renaissance and Dorkbot-Seattle at the same time by failing to get to the Dorkbot meeting in time to see most of the presentations
• Attended a meeting of the Seattle BUG (Blender User Group) (instead of attending the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon)
• Got matched up through HackMatch right after getting accepted to aforementioned job, which got a bunch of people pinging me about summer jobs, right when I didn’t need it anymore. Too slow, HackNY, too slow.

I haven’t closed any projects this week, but I finally gave in and re-edited my /etc/hosts file to block off Reddit and Hacker News. My productivity should automatically boost by 200%! Additionally, not being bogged down with finals means I can actually attend cool events when I hear about them: I heard about the Dorkbot the day of, and found out about the BUG the day before. It’s pretty cool to be without massive amounts of responsibilities, but like I said above, it’ll be nice to let my intrinsic motivators take a rest.

So what’d I do this week?

• Got sick with Viral Gastroentrisis again
• Finished The Glass Bead Game
• Hit up Seattle’s Less Wrong Meetup group
• Finished Oryx and Crake
• Finished a project of mine. A small project, involving data visualization

Thoughts on book reading: I don’t quite get modern literature. Or any “fine” literature, for that matter. If I didn’t read the foreword for The Glass Bead Game, then I would have been totally lost. Heck, reading the foreword I get a glimpse into what people that know literature get out of reading literature, and much of the time I wasn’t getting that. Like with many things, once I knew that I was deficient in this area, I had an immediate urge to make myself not deficient. However, since I’d just be delving into more literature, a second thought tells me it wouldn’t be especially useful.

Oryx and Crake was a bit better: in particular, some people don’t know how to include technical riffraff into their work. However, Atwood does a good job of sprinkling technical tidbits throughout a text.

However, I’m not into the whole doom and gloom scenario put forth by Oryx and Crake. As I subscribe to secular humanism, I think that humanity is overall on a upward slope, not a constant degeneration. Just because I’m not into the scenario, though, does not mean I don’t think it’s important: even if we occupied several planets in the solar system (like Stephen Hawking says), we could potentially kill ourselves off with a single dedicated mad scientist (it brings to mind the saying “every 18 months, it becomes twice as easy to shoot ourselves in the foot” with respect to strong AI. I don’t know where it’s from, sorry). Something approaching protection from even deliberate attempts on the existence of humanity is interstellar colonization without faster-than-light drives, but I’m sure the only reason it seems safe is because I’ve been thinking about it for less than 10 years. And this is why I think HPMOR will end in tragedy: Harry will do almost everything right, but it won’t be enough, because you could do everything you were supposed to, and Nature is still allowed to kill you.

So for each of these 13 weeks of summer, I’m going to try and wrap up what I did each week. It’s probably not as satisfying as doing a wrap-up each night, but it’s some form of review, so I’ll take it. So, what I did this past week…

• Walked a graduation ceremony without actually graduating
• Kicked off stage 2 of my internship search (semi-successfully, I believe)
• Rooted my phone (finally)
• Turned out 3 project pages (these things take forever to write) (the Arimaa, Hunch Punch, and ttool ones)
• Finished single-player Portal 2, fell in love with Want You Gone
• No longer so pasty white: sitting out in the sun does a boy good
• Revamped the look of the image section of my website

And that’s a wrap folks! This next week should be more code writing, and less doing administrative stuff. I’m putting off hardware work until I know I’ll be somewhere for more than a few weeks.

It’s strange, looking back at the writing of a younger self. The things I concerned myself with are simultaneously familiar and foreign: I still cared about God, without any hints of my later de-conversion, but I would post up poorly-worded rants on terrible HTML practices in educator websites. I would whine about school, talk about math, and post random music tidbits. As I delve back through the years, some other observations:

• Spell check in the browser has made so much of a difference: I no longer look like such an idiot by default. Sure, I work hard to make sure I appear to be an idiot, but it’s no longer easy as pie.
• I made this thing called the Sarge engine, which apparently was supposed to be a forum engine. I had a thing for fancy project names that had nothing to do with what they actually did.
• I started doing Linux stuff around here. I was also posting TI-BASIC code in plaintext, so I guess the two cancel each other out.
• I thought heaps and stacks were incompatible, because C and Java used stacks and heaps, respectively.
• Twitter has certainly changed how I blog, for the better.
• I got excited when new versions of Blender came out (2.37!!! WHOOO!!), just like I do now (minus the fact I missed the 2.57 update).
• I was a very angsty child (boohoo why won’t anyone love me?! I’m so ronree!).
• I thought, at one point in time, that programming as a job would be boring. Which is why I did it all the time, apparently.
• I thought I could help my fellow nerds become less anti-social. Ha.
• I was slightly socially incompetent. Just slightly.
• I was also just slightly incompetent at making anything I wrote make sense to me 5 years later.
• I sure hope my kids don’t write like this for such a long time. To be fair, I posted almost every day, so it only seems like a long time when I read 5 posts at a time (5 one line posts all saying something along the lines of ARGHHH I IZ IDIOT or LOLZ MAH PRGRAMZ BROKEN), but it’s very much a product of not being competent: to be fair, these posts were part of the process that got me here, but it would be less embarrassing if it were a shorter part.
• Oh god, POVRay code.
• Very few of my long form posts contained coherent content: most of the time, longer posts could be decomposed into tens of one-liner posts. I believe this is a consequence of my inability to focus during my high school years, and/or just my general stupidity at that time. In retrospect, it’s amazing I even got anything finished.
• It reminds me that I wished I could go out of Christianity with a bang: make a huge scene while breaking with the church, screams of fire and brimstone going both ways. Now that I’m standing here, I didn’t get that, but I realize it’s okay. I’m still where I need to be, and it doesn’t matter I had gotten there with strife.

Overall, I get a sense of just how much I have leveled up over the last 6 years, which is some huge amount I do not care to try and enumerate. My writing is sensible, my code actually does things (instead of trying to do things), my thought processes aren’t trying to reason from contradictory bases using outmoded methods of thinking. I now view myself as a highly-junior member of the Interesting People Club.

In the negatives department, I don’t care quite as much about music: sure, it would be nice if I could pull some music out of my bum, but I don’t have the will to make it happen at the expense of my other pursuits (and if I’ve learned anything from that trip back, talking about things and doing things are very different. Didn’t exactly understand that back then). Another negative is the fact I can’t go back: at that time, I could have conceivably given up programming, gone to seminary, and lived out a simple life. It really is unfortunate that at this point, my only options are to rock the world or die trying. So be it.

And here’s to another 6 years of growing up!

Note: don’t try looking for these writings. As soon as I posted this, I deleted that blog account. Would it have been hilarious to look back on another 6 years from now? Not really, as it would’ve been even more pathetic than anything else. May as well put this content out of it’s misery now than later. So long, 2006-2004: it was nice knowing you.

Hi, I’ll keep this short and sweet. I just thought this was a natural time to touch base with the blog, so… here you go.

This HackNY (still sleep dep’d up from the previous 48~ hours), I actually got into a team and . It’s a basic game that leverages the Hunch API in a trivial way, meaning that the game mechanics didn’t actually depend on the existence of the API.

I do need to keep in mind that I have limited resources: this hackathon could’ve turned out something useful (I have a list of perhaps useful things that need creating that’s approaching, oh, say, aleph not), but instead I helped turn out something no one wants, and for which no one will want. I did help a crap ton of people get better at the craft, though, so I feel good about that; working on Notesoble would’ve been a bigger utility gain, though, in the end.

Boy, do I have a lot of things to do.

Brb, going to go take a level in doing work.