Archive for August, 2006
Met up with two old friends this week; Sharon, my high school roommate, and Ashley, who I knew from elementary all the way up through middle school. We’ve all changed a lot; as one of my high school teachers put it, “you only become a Real Person after high school.” You can see faint shadows of the adults we’re becoming now, and they’re getting darker and more present every day.
Among the people I knew before I turned 16, I’m probably walking the furthest out from the beaten path, and trying to wander farther still. Spending time in the suburb where I grew up reminds me of how nice things are out here, and how much I don’t want to grow up to have a “nice life” like this - our house is gorgeous, but there’s nothing but houses and high-priced boutiques around it. Everyone’s kids are going to college in fairly lucrative careers, everyone has a nice car and does Pilates and golfs on the weekends. Lovely, high-paying, stable life. Not my kind.
I need instability. I want to have chances to fail, because I want to do new things and make new things instead of just successfully using old things. I want to bike around the city in the middle of the night, train-surf, talk to street musicians, and sing loudly in the middle of parks. I need randomness, geekiness, and less inhibition in my life, and I need it now. And it feels like I’m the only one around here that wants to do this, although I’m sure it’s not true.
I’m dismayed by how soft and lax my body’s gotten, but have almost no motivation to get out and run or bike - my mom won’t let me out of the immediate area; even the only mall with a bookstore, 5 miles away, is too far (and once she dropped me off there, I found out the bookstore had been replaced by a seller of designer handbags). Within the vicinity that I am allowed to roam in, we have… houses. And houses, and houses. And good public schools that aren’t actually open at the moment, otherwise I’d wander in there and offer to help out in the classrooms.
So here’s my compromise. I’m going to bed early (~1am!) and waking up early (6?). I’m stealing my brother’s bike to roam around town, probably outside the technical area-I’m-allowed-to-be-in, but as long as I’m not explicitly forbidden from it, I’m going.
I will:
- talk to at least one random stranger per day (still need to find mine for the day)
- read at least one nontechnical book per day (today: Linux and the Unix Philosophy, and probably The Cathedral and the Bazaar)
- read at least one technical book per week (today: Learning Python, which I never actually read cover-to-cover. I’m picking up a lot of small useful features and notes I never realized along the way.)
- finish at least one minor project per day. I am incredibly thankful that the things I like to do - coding and design - only need my laptop. (today: a little GUI app for the ODO.)
Basically, I’m pretending to be a very lonely and isolated freelancer right now, just one that has to listen to her mother all the time. (No, really. It’s good to be home. I love my family. But I miss my fellow students and coworkers and geeks something awful; I’m going through crazy-people withdrawal.)
Right. Off to bike. Not coming back until I’m good and sweaty, and done reading this book.
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Several things of note since I last posted.
1. Wikimania conference - more about this later, but suffice to say it was awesome, educational, awe-inspiring, and boy did I meet a lot of great people there. The Olin panel (thanks to Mark Chang, Debbie Chachra, Allen Downey, and Andrew Bouchard!) was nothing short of stupendous, and I kept on hearing compliments about it well into the evening and the next day. Sweet.
2. Work ended - I loved my time at Continuum, and plan on visiting next year (in two weeks for a brainstorm, actually). Olin people, check this place out; you’ll have a great time and learn a ton, and meet some wonderful people. Aside from the obvious internships in the engineering departments (I was in the EE dept, but there were a few ME interns as well), there’s also the Strategy department, which essentially does UOCD for a living.
I got a spiffy orange scarf and some chopsticks as a going-away present. Now that’s utilitarian. I use chopsticks on a not-infrequent basis, so this is a welcome alternative to the cheapo plastic sticks I’m used to.
3. Tax-free weekend was taken advantage of - I never thought I’d see my mom waiting in line outside a computer store at midnight, but tax-free weekend in MA sent its siren call out and we spent the afternoon - and then the night - at the Apple Store in Burlington getting a Macbook. This replaces the creaking Sony VAIO and Dell Dimension desktops downstairs. With the glory of ProCare, I no longer have to be my mom’s tech support, so the midnight run was well worth it (heck, I would have done it anyway; it was fun.)
4. I’m home - in Glenview, IL for the next two weeks. So if you’re in the area and want to say hi, drop me a line. I’m technically working as a freelance coder from now ’till school starts, but I’m hoping to spend more time riding my bike around town than sitting in front of my laptop.
Speaking of which, I’m going to go out and bike right now.
Sunday, August 13th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
One of the greatest pleasures in life is splitting a yellow Crenshaw melon the size of your head in the grass with a pocketknife, then smothering - alternately - your face and a spoon into it, making mandatoriliy loud slurping noises as seeds and juice and melon drip every which way.
When you’re down to the last shred of flesh and the skin is flopping around loose in your hands, you’ll be holding a bowl of sweet Crenshaw juice. Then you pour that down your throat, down your chin and shirt, and you’re done; no longer hungry or thirsty, and sticky with the smell of honey.
So then you move on to the strawberries…
Monday, August 7th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Muse at the Bank of America pavilion was my first real non-classical concert. Amanda had her own ticket, but DJ coordinated the getting of tickets for myself, Ginneh, and EricVW. He also coordinated the forgetting of said tickets in his car back at Eliot, something he realized when we stepped off the bus in front of the pavilion. So we listened to the opening bands from a bench outside a nearby restaurant while a slightly frantic DJ crawled through Boston traffic back to Newton, returning with tickets shortly before Muse started playing.
Concerts. Are. Loud. My eardrums were buzzing inside my head, and I could feel not only my pants vibrating against my knees, but my collar against my neck, my bangs against my forehead, and if I placed my hands on the side of my mouth, I could feel my teeth chatter along to the bass. There were the apparently requisite flashy media projections against the back, but the music was superb (although I couldn’t understand a single word of the lyrics, save for “Time is Running Out,” and that’s only because I’ve played keyboard for it.)
Eric noticed me looking around the pavilion during the concert instead of watching the stage, and asked if I was ok. Some people go to concerts to watch concerts; I go to concerts to watch concerts and to watch how people react to concerts. A sea of folks from goth punks to yuppies to balding middle-aged men were standing in the strobe lights, brows furrowed and lips bit in a pose of feigned with-it-ness, bobbing heads, screaming drunkenly, and dancing in their seats (which nobody sat in) as if they were the people on stage, not Muse. I wonder how many of them actually got into the music and how many of them danced because that’s what you’re supposed to do to appear cool at a concert. A half-clothed man clambered on the chairs behind us to get beer, using our shoulders as an unwilling handrail. Every time Muse spoke, folks would pump their hands, formed into a fist with the pinky and index finger sticking up (don’t know what the gesture is called) into the air and scream.
People are very interesting to watch. I don’t understand them.
I would, however, love to play with the lighting rigs they had there. Gels of all colors stuffed into the ceiling. Fog machines and small swiveling projectors that sent fingers of light through them. Strobes. There was a catwalk suspended from the center of the stage with four huge spots on it - and no visible means of getting to them. You’d have to take a crane up and back down. The acoustics must be fantastic.
Sunday, August 6th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Last Monday I get an email from Ozgur; our NSF subcontract has, after 9 months, finally come through from Stanford. Could I fly out that weekend?
Four days later, I step out of the airport and am momentarily stunned by the brilliantly flaming sunset of San Jose. There are mountains. And trees. I’m not used to this, having only lived in the flat industrial plains of Illinois and the . It’s the same visceral gut reaction I had to the thick fall leaves of Boston when I first went to visit Olin - something about the dynamic of the place, as Ozgur takes me through Palo Alto and around Stanford’s campus, just feels right.
Spent Saturday afternoon in the lab working on Informedia with Malte; we finish in 8 hours what Ozgur was afraid would take more than two days. So I spend Saturday evening at a wine-tasting restaurant with Ozgur and his old friends and colleagues (they have wine, I have lemonade and astoud everyone by having a full dinner and then tackling a huge banana-chocolate calzone; an almost-teenage metabolism has its benefits). I read all night at the W hotel, where Ozgur has somehow managed to get amazingly cheap rates. It’s the first time I’ve ever had my own hotel room. Designer sheets, funky soaps in the bathroom, a bathrobe - never worn one of those before - and $4 bottled water which I didn’t dare drink. I wonder what percentage of the markup goes towards design.
While I’m still able to have extreme irregularity in my food habits - I can absentmindedly forget to eat for 48 hours and still not be hungry, or down two lunches and three dinners in the same day without blinking - I can no longer do so for sleep. No more double allnighters followed by a 10-hour crash; I’m no longer 14, and need at least 3 hours a night, preferably 4-5. So I do that, wake up, read some more (a mix of investment books, tracts on higher education, and one on the dilemna of being a “renaissance soul” who likes doing everything) until Ozgur’s awake.
I had absolutely no responsibilities for Sunday; Ozgur was going around town with some friends. So I end up tearing across Stanford on Malte’s bike as fast as a slightly-too-large cruiser with broken brakes will take me. It’s a gloriously sunny day, and when it gets too hot I stop periodically to duck into air-conditioned buildings and ask people questions about Stanford culture while the sweat dries off my back and shirt and hair; repeat. This is punctuated by a quick trip to the Stanford bookstore (during which I read a book about the wartime experience of modern infantry and another on the mental process of learning to play jazz piano), a Stanford tour (where the tour guide? finishes every statement? as a question?), a longing peer into the Product Development master’s program studios (”we teach engineering to artists and art to engineers” - words to win the heart of this engineering student who really wanted to be an art major), and a sticker-shocking detour into Palo Alto where I attempted to obtain dinner for under $10 and failed.
An hour before Ozgur is supposed to pick me up at Stanford, my phone dies. I run to the library and desperately email helpme, then run to the CDR (Center for Design Research) lab in search of someone with Ozgur’s phone number. Fortunately, Chris Carrick back on the east coast gets the email and calls Ozgur, so I make my flight. Chris, I owe you a lavish dinner or cookies or something.
The 5:30AM flight back to Boston was totally worth it.
Sunday, August 6th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »