Oh, hi. I’m in California now, and it’s been way too long since I’ve made a post that wasn’t a story, and I’ve been in Cali for almost 2 weeks now and how can I call myself a blogger when I can’t even post when I dump my life upside down for two weeks? Hell, my internship thingie is almost 2/9ths of the way done, and I haven’t made a blog post about it. Okay, so I’ll quickly attempt to remedy this dire situation before going to sleep.

So, first things first: I’m in cali, but in the middle of nowhere cali. Okay, that’s not a very nice description of San Luis Obispo, but when you consider the neighboring cities of San Fran and LA, then SLO seems very much like the middle of nowhere. Even if it is the middle of nowhere, it’s a very nice middle of nowhere: there’s maybe been one fully overcast day, and yet the air is cooler than cucumbers. Get something of a tan (I’m indoor much of the time, so I’m not really being exposed to this famed Californian sun, but I guess I get enough from just walking around) while not roasting: I like it. I managed to score an apartment that’s close to the school and some shopping places (realizing in retrospect just how far all that other housing was: Google maps seems to do the distances less justice than it should). Note: walking everywhere is a pain in the butt (walking downtown to the farmer’s market… good berries, but it took a while). I’m still wondering if I should get one of those collapsible bikes, although it might translate to a literal pain in the butt…

Okay, so that’s where I am: but what am I doing? Well, we’re not sure, so I’ll hold off on explaining that. Although, I’ll comment that I’ve found use for my optimization class: it might involve very nasty non-linear optimization, but that’s even better! Now, if I can figure it out before my 9 weeks is up is a good question… Also, the pace of doing 9-5 research is much slower than the MCM. I have a feeling that the MCM is going to be my benchmark for frenzied progress from now on…

Since I have an aversion to breaking up posts into consecutive topic posts, I’ll just mash on some thoughts to the end of my update.

So I don’t think it’s the context switching that’s causing me problems (ref. 5 posts back): at least, context switching isn’t such a big problem as compared to others. For instance, just dicking around instead of doing things. Again referencing my previous post, I came up with this ginormous list of things that I want to do: it turns out that I have no will to do those things. More rigorously, it turns out that I have limited will to do those things while I’m working on research for around 8 hours each weekday, and I have a pretty strong compulsion to screw around and waste time rather than do something I’ll remember and have use for twenty years down the line.

Exhibit the first: I got a nice idea to work on an introductory video for git when I realized that no one teaches scm, at least in your usual comp sci curriculum. You have dozens of blog posts detailing why you should care about git (or hg or svn or w/e), and plenty of videos detailing how to do things, but nothing that just introduces the basics about why you should be interested in using a s(ource) c(ode) m(anagement) system like git. So, using Ignite’s (argh! I just remembered that SLO’s ignite night was tonight! argh! again!) slogan ’enlighten us, but make it quick’ I set out to put together a short and sweet video animating the principles behind git.

So, I allocated myself a little more than an evening to finish it, reasoning that if I used some sweet icons from the Tango icon set, I could stick this thing together reasonably quickly. Well, now I’ve been sitting on it for more than a week, and I think I have all the blocking nicely done. Yup, blocking. I haven’t even thought about how to do the custom music track I was planning on doing.

Looking back, it’s glaring how obvious positivity bias (I’m pretty sure this isn’t what it’s called, but I don’t want to dig through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just to find it: I won’t sleep all night if I try it) was present in my time allocation. So am I really that bad an animator? Well, not really: out of most of the days in the past week, I’ve maybe gotten less than an hour in working at the video, mostly because I wouldn’t let myself have at it until around 10 o’clock (Which reminds me, having a regular sleep schedule does not work wonders). Sometimes it’s because I’m context switching around and trying to get some reprap stuff done, or otherwise, but all this incidental work + dinner should take a maximum of 2 hours. The other drains are from surfing around the web: I would hate to see my productivity if I hadn’t blocked reddit, digg, and slashdot, although I still tend to stare at the screen and mentally scream for those mental sinks.

I wonder if it’s a withdrawal effect: if so, it’s a pretty long lived one. I’ve ditched most of those social aggregators a while ago, although I suppose it’s more like developing a taste for candy: you might go back to chicken n’ rice, but you never forget the taste of people catering to bored dudes on the internet.

In the end, I just want to make and know things. Please. Come on, mind, you should be able to pull this off. I think we can put aside our differences. For science. You monster.

So I’m going to dump core, and whine and complain for a bit. Feel free to ignore, rebut, or burn.

I think I’ve figured out why I can’t do anything: I switch context way too often. What I mean by switching context is switching from one task to another: for instance, going from sleeping to eating, or studying to practicing, or studying to adjusting the volume on my music. Yes, that last one is a context switch: it’s fast, but it still adds overhead. I’ve complained about overhead before: a certain amount of time each day has to be devoted to things like waking up, showering, eating, and all that. And context switching is another source for overhead. Overhead is terrible, because you’re usually too occupied doing things that don’t advance the self, and you can’t focus on something more meaningful. Overhead eats up your time without leaving you anything to show, aside from “hey, I’m still alive!”

So, I’m forcing myself to switch contexts several times a day, aside from the things that one must do to keep alive, by having too many projects open at one time. I’m trying to complete hardware projects (minty preamp, useless machine, pocket oscilloscope, didj hacking, monolith, book scanner, phone glove for a partial list), study physics (Feynman lectures) and math (probability theory and abstract algebra), on top of that I’m trying to do artsy fartsy stuff (on top of writing stuff, actually putting something in the musical section of my blog, and finishing that damn animation), and I have a few software projects jiggling around in the back of my head (mathematical note taking, sane photo management, doing deep integration of twitter and wordpress) as well as a redesign of a completely inane website for an organization that I was once part of.

Whew okay, so I have all these things I want to do, and I want to do them all at once. So that means I’ve been trying to divvy up my day into partitions, and doing different things for each part. But once you consider that switching things takes overhead, then that’s the wrong strategy. If you set a few days, instead of a few hours, you should be able to drop overhead, mental and physical, and get much more out of those few days.

Part of this has to do with not sleeping so much. Part of it also has to do with streamlining my life.

Part of it also has to do with my urges. I’ve said before that I would rather the bio-hackers hurry it up and get to the point that I can re-route my libido to mostly scientific inquiry. Leaving aside that particular urge, I’m also not very happy about the urge to create. No, not that sort of creation: we’ve already disregarded that one. I’m talking about the urge to create works and realize thoughts in objects. You might not feel it, but I do: I want to create. If I don’t create something new, then I’m just taking up space and pushing the universe faster towards an entropic death, and who wants to rush that? Another way of stating it: if you’re not saying anything, than you might as well die, and if you’re not saying anything worthwhile, you might as well say nothing (with speech defined in the broadest sense: by patronizing certain restaurants, you’re saying something about your preferences with your actions).

So it feels like I need to create things, so I flit between different projects with the hope that I push them towards being done. I guess I’m hoping for a breakthrough with the least amount of effort, so that I get that high of finishing something while knowing I have projects in the pipe, because starting things is difficult too, and has it’s own overhead associated with it. But then, it’s not nearly as vicious as switching context several times a day.

In closing: if I could just break the tyranny of creating, or the tyranny of time, then I could be happier. Maybe.