Archive for April, 2007
I said I was going to do some art tonight, so I did. (Yes, it counts as art. No, it’s not perfect, but I’m going to stop now. Yes, I want to replace it all with textpattern templates, but I’ll do that later.)
I believe this has provided me with enough momentum in making stuff that I can actually work on things that actually count for credit now. This is good. I also have to wake up in less than four hours. This is not so good.
Onwards to the sleep, then forwards in the systematic reduction of responsibilities.
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
This is not the post I started out writing.
I was originally going to write about how frustrated I felt – mostly with myself – after the conversation I just had with President Miller two hours ago. I wanted to save the world, do something that would help us understand engineering education at Olin and beyond; I wanted action. Now I don’t have concrete goals. No concrete action plan. I have an even vaguer idea of what I’m doing than I did when I walked into his office. I was aggravated because I felt like I was wasting his time because I couldn’t figure out what to do and I was burning to do something and help and why couldn’t someone just tell me what to do already.
During the drive to Wellesley, I realized that was just it. I’d been trying to get him to tell me what questions I should be asking. And like any good teacher, the response had been “I’m not going to tell you that. It’s something you need to find out for yourself.” I just hadn’t been willing to hear it.
It’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot, this refusal from my teachers to tell me what I should do. Just as I think I understand the rationale behind one layer of independence, they pull another rug out from under me. “Say something! Tell me something!” I’ll beg. “That’s great!” they say, with a twinkle in their eye. And I rant, and I rave, and I learn – reluctantly – how to stand on my own feet, how to evaluate myself, how to work with sensitivity to the input of others but confidence enough in my own words to forge ahead in the face of silence.
Hypothetically, at least. It’s a long, slow path.
(It’s worth noting that I only realized this because I was walking into my tutorial where I say exactly the same thing to students all the time. “No, there is no rubric. I am not going to tell you what to say in your paper. Do you think that data point looks reasonable?” I should keep teaching, if only because it makes me a better learner.)
I’m forgetting a lot of things in my attempts to be productive and forge ahead (an overshoot reaction to my recent extended bout with wheel-spinning chaos and overanalysis paralysis). When I waxed philosophical on the effect of different teaching methodologies on classroom effectiveness, Pres. Miller told me to turn around. I did, and two feet away from my nose was a plaque talking about how fundamentally, “we are not teachers of subjects, we are teachers of persons.”
He told a story about a professor who once walked out in the middle of a lecture with no explanation because he’d gotten an idea for a research paper mid-stride and just left his students hanging, wondering whether he was going to come back – an extreme version of the worship of ideas over the appreciation of people. Not necessarily a terrible thing. Ideas are important. But is that the priority I want to have? Am I focusing on knowledge for its’ own sake, or because I want to impact lives – and on what level?
He reminded me that truth is not the only thing you can seek. There’s also the beautiful. There’s also the spiritual. And that we forget that what is fundamental to us is usually not fundamental at all, and that we remember this when we work with people different than ourselves; the further back we need to go to find a common denominator, the more we need to examine the basis of our communication and our work. It’s the reason I’m getting so ripped apart in humanities classes. I’ve forgotten how to be an artist. Just a little bit, but enough.
So I’m going to do a little bit of art now. Perhaps it will get me back in more of a balance. Balance! It’s always a balance, seesawing between the sharp teeth of several utterly incompatible unstable equilibria. What I need is more time.
No. What I need is to do less. Not just do less and think more. Do less and think less and be more. Be present.
This is going to take a while.
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Funeral noise is still going on downstairs; lots of people are in the house. I’m holed up in my parents’ bedroom trying to get away from it, but the voices are still soaking up through the stairway.
It wasn’t so bad. We went for the visitation in the morning. He didn’t really look like he was sleeping, which is what everyone always says about the deceased. No corny pinstriped or red plaid pajamas, no slippers by the side of the pillow, no loud snoring. Everyone cried softly in a mix of Tagalog, Fookien, English, and Mandarin. We went through the rosary and a few boxes of tissues. There were shreds of kleenex scattered on the chair cushions because the grandkids had to keep pulling them out so fast to keep up with the demand.
The coffin was closed; we had the funeral mass, and my 18-year-old brother and 20-year-old cousin were pallbearers (“it’s very heavy,” I was told when I asked if they needed help). My dad gave the eulogy. He actually had folks laughing through most of it. I carried up some of the offertory (which involved picking up a container of wine, turning around, walking two feet, and handing it to the priest) and collected envelopes afterwards. There wasn’t much to do.
On the way back we stopped to rub paper packets of rice and salt over our suits (a Chinese tradition to nullify bad luck) and dropped them in the garbage bin outside the Jewel-Osco.
It’s odd to be the only one in my family that’s coming in from the outside; my mom was there right when he had the heart attack, my brother drove to the ER, my dad got to the hospital not long afterwards, and I’m a week late. Last night dad was up writing the eulogy in the loft (next to where my mattress was) and having a hard time because he said he’d been taking care of so many of the arrangements that he wasn’t able to let himself open up and feel hurt.
I don’t feel deeply grieved or anything, but I’ve been having a hard time working. I brought all my books and my paper outlines and suchlike, but my productivity this weekend has been… not zero, but very close to it. I can’t do much but stare at my screen and read books (mechanically, and not very fast; I feel like I’m just pushing my eyes across the page and nothing’s sinking in). Just trying to get away from the people that have been coming into the house all weekend, and the noise, and the constant sympathies. I even went to sleep at 10pm (!!!) last night trying to get away from it, intending to wake up early and work, but turns out the adults woke up before I did (I guess when you’re mourning, you don’t sleep very much).
At least there are dishes to clear and babies to play with and Disney movies to watch with the little ones that have come over with their parents. And I have a meeting for class right after I get back to campus. Stayin’ busy.
On a less depressing note, I got the new Thunderbird today. It looks fantastic; the UI is much more space-efficient (particularly with the miniBird icon set displayed without text). I love how one of the installation steps is “cleaning out the birdcage” (deleting old files, I assume). And they finally have message tagging! Now if only it and Firefox wouldn’t be such huge memory hogs.
Monday, April 9th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Instead of making movies, eating hot dogs, and telling stories around the bonfire last night with my friends, I spent a mildly awkward evening in Chicago getting ready for my grandfather’s funeral (my Angkong, my father’s father; visitation yesterday, Mass today, funeral tomorrow). My brother and I kept volunteering to go on grocery runs because being in the house was just so depressing. And since my twin baby cousins have displaced me from my room, I’m trying to write my AHS capstone paper in the middle of the night while sitting on top of a foam mattress crammed into the corner of the loft – it’s not tall enough for me to sit up straight while typing, so I’m lying on my stomach to use the laptop, with my books and papers propped up on my luggage so I can read them. I’ll get back to campus a little past midnight on Tuesday, just in time to be really hosed.
Ah, life’s unexpected moments. Those reminders of how fragile the equilibrium of staying alive really is.
I feel a little guilty that I don’t feel more sad, and that I feel mildly frustrated at the timing of this – it’s not like someone can choose when to have a heart attack. But the truth is, I’m glad it happened this way. He was old, he’d lived a grand and full life in relatively good health, he’d just gotten to see the children of his youngest son (which he’d been waiting for for over a decade), he went quickly, without very much pain, and he was with his wife and my mother outside on a beautiful day nearby a good hospital, not alone in a house in the Philippines; no what-ifs, no “if only I’d been there”s, no “if we’d had a doctor around it wouldn’t have”s. The best of all possible ways to go. You don’t want it to happen, but you know something will happen eventually, and since it’s got to happen, then – well… this is really the best way it could have happened.
My brother and cousins and parents and uncles and aunt seem to agree. My grandmother’s been hit hard, though. I’ve never seen her this quiet. I’m not entirely sure what to do; she says she can’t come to my graduation now that she’s lost her traveling companion, but I think that coming and being with the family will be better than sitting by herself in the big empty house they used to share. Four years ago, I thought all four of my grandparents would be able to see me graduate this coming May. (I was the first grandchild to go to college.) Now I’ll be lucky if any of them come.
Another thing this has made me notice is how far I’ve drifted from my family’s particular variant of Catholicism. They hold onto it so strongly; it’s like a lifeline now, with everyone talking about God’s grace and the communion of saints and talking about spiritual messages and His will. We even have a novena, printed in small booklets on the countertop, in my grandfather’s name. (Proceso. I was going to get him a food processor for his next birthday and use sandpaper to erase two letters from the label as a joke.) It’s not that I don’t believe in the things they’re doing – it’s that I don’t feel the same need to hold to it so tightly at this time, or use Catholicism as a citation for the words I’m saying. And I feel strangely irreverent and detached, and feel like I should feel more guilty for that, feel more grief over this… feel less able to cope with things, more confused over what’s going on. But it’s – well, this happened. We miss him. It was his time to go. It’s not ours, yet. We keep living. Life goes on.
The winter after Guakong (my mother’s father) passed away after a prolonged battle with Alzheimer’s, we stayed with my father’s parents in the Philippines for the holidays. I told my Angkong that I wanted to learn Tai Chi in memory of my Guakong. (In our dialect of Chinese, you call your paternal grandparents Angkong and Amah, and your maternal grandparents Guakong and Guama.) Angkong took me out to the shopping mall later that week, early in the morning when the parking lots were filled with people practicing boxing, dancing, qigong… and Tai Chi. He introduced me to the Tai Chi teacher there, and I was able to learn most of the Short Form that day.
That’s the first memory that comes back now – that and the evening, when I was still in elementary school, that he sat down after dinner with the grandkids and told us stories all night about his exploits in WWII. Or his 80th birthday/anniversary party in the Philippines when I was in high school which was a “small, intimate gathering of family and close friends” which occupied an entire ballroom (we ran out of chairs). My grandfather loved parties.
My dad and his siblings are flying to the Philippines with my grandmother next week for the burial. Dad’s taking his vacation days to do this, which means that the family summer trip to Italy that we’ve been planning for a year – my parents’ 25th anniversary, my college graduation, my brother’s high school graduation – is off. I’m okay with that. I was looking forward to it, but these things happen.
And now I’m going to go and catch up on the gigantic backlog of work I’ve accumulated.
Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Every once in a while when I get really bummed out because my idealism-o-meter is continually whacking its cranium on the roof called reality. (“But… I like running around in the rain. I don’t want a roof.” “Nonsense. You’ll get hypothermia. I’m cold; put on a sweater.”) At these times, it’s good to know that there are adults – brilliant adults – who are still daring enough to think idealistically. It’s possible to grow up and not sell out. Good.
The following passage is from Ian Bicking:
Damn, I want beauty, and the workflow machinations of a distrustful management are the antithesis of beauty and goodness.
And I should be making beautiful things! I shouldn’t be making ugly things to enable me to spend some time on beautiful things. That’s a shitty compromise. I don’t have to apologize for beauty, it’s not like making beauty is some luxury, or that my making beauty somehow deprives someone else of something …so many things suck in this world because people don’t have the imagination to see that they can be better, if we’d only try. I want to work on imaginative software, I don’t want to write software that is just an enabler for disfunction and distrust. Moreso, it’s unethical to enable that. I shouldn’t lower my expectations of myself to do no direct harm.
Meaningful work. Meaningful, beautiful work that creates value through functionality and has a positive effect on people’s lives. To use our talents for anything less would be a shame.
Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I just spent the entire morning spewing out prolific streams of stuff onto the keyboard. I think I can stop now and do work, if only because my wrists are starting to get sore from typing. Apologies to readers who suddenly find themselves with this huge textdump. I considered saving everything as a draft and just releasing one new post a day, but that wouldn’t have been very honest; this is a brainstream and stands as such.
My work habits are ridiculous sometimes.
Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I’ve been meaning to write this rant for a while, so it’s just going to be crap streaming out from my brain through my fingers with no organization whatsoever. Perhaps someday I’ll collect these thoughts into actual polished pieces. But it’s better to get them down first.
Sometimes I feel really left out from the geek community. Hackerspeak is a language; if you don’t pick it up by intensive immersion or within the first two decades or so of birth, you’ll miss out on the tichy little fables, idiosyncracies, sayings, turns of phrase, tiny cultural things like that.
When the guys swap stories about coding in BASIC in elementary school or building cars with their dad in middle school or making robots in high school, it seems silly for me to chime in and talk about how that was when I got totally into Shakespeare, or fractal mathematics, or pastels. I can’t share those early experiences. I love hearing about them! They’re fantastic stories! But I don’t have them and can’t connect to them on that level.
And the worst thing is that I know I’m in a really good position compared to many others. That I didn’t actually get in that late. That I’m lucky enough to have grown up by a library which happened to have a math book section, lucky enough to have been able to push my way into a magnet high school, lucky enough to have had friends who taught me how to code, lucky enough to be at an engineering college, lucky enough to even be here and be legitimately able to call myself a hacker. So I’m not missing out, really. Not that much.
I wonder how many other people feel like they’re missing out.
From Joel On Software:
The good news about our field is that the really great programmers often started programming when they were 10 years old …they were in their dad’s home office trying to get the Linux kernel to compile. Instead of chasing girls in the playground, they were getting into flamewars on Usenet about the utter depravity of programming languages that don’t implement Haskell-style type inference. Instead of starting a band in their garage, they were implementing a cool hack so that when their neighbor stole bandwidth over their open-access WIFI point, all the images on the web appeared upside-down. BWA HA HA HA HA!
So, unlike, say, the fields of law or medicine, over here in software development, by the time these kids are in their second or third year in college they are pretty darn good programmers.
Some people didn’t have computers when we were 10 years old. Some people didn’t know programming existed when we were 10 years old. I’m not saying that hey, affirmative action, it’s not our fault we’re not as fluent in code so companies should hire us anyway – I’m saying that it’s just really hard sometimes to catch up to the kids who’ve gotten a head start. I’m not running because I feel this desperate need to catch up, I’m running because I think it’s fun. But it often feels like a losing race, even if I’m not trying to race.
Sometimes it feels like I’m running by myself with crappy sneakers and parental shouts from the sidelines asking why I’m wasting my time on a path that doesn’t lead to an industry-standard job (less true now, but much more true years back when I was still just toying with tech and therefore couldn’t do anything really useful yet, and the usefulness of hacking skills hadn’t yet become apparent to the general public). And then I look over at these other people who have – oh god, they have actual running shirts, they’ve gotten coaching since they were 5, they used to watch their mom race, their dad is always cheering them from the sidelines, yes it’s useful, hacking is awesome, join the community, go.
And I think “man, I wish I could have grown up like that.” Or even “if I managed to get this far, how much faster could I have been if I’d grown up like that?” It’s a moot point, because that’s the past and it didn’t happen and I had lots of equally valuable experiences and all that stuff. It’s like wondering how much better I’d be at the piano if I could hear. My hearing has shaped my piano technique and the way I play and made it a certain style – my style as a pianist – just as my background has shaped who I am as a hacker.
I still have fun running around and hacking. I have a lot of fun, or I wouldn’t be doing it. But sometimes that feeling makes it a little less fun. (I try to ignore it; it doesn’t come very often.)
But every so often I’m reminded, like in this post about how what Fog Creek looks for in a resume:
Passion. We look for evidence that the applicant is passionate about computers and really loves programming. Typical evidence of this:
Jobs with computers or experience programming going back to a very early age. Great programmers are more likely to have spent a summer at computer camp, or building an online appointment scheduler for their uncle the dentist, rather than working at Banana Republic folding clothes.
Extra-curricular activities. People who love programming often work on their own programming projects (or contribute to an open-source project) in their spare time.
But there are kids who don’t have their own computers and can’t spend their time hacking. Or whose parents frown upon “frivolous internet usage” and wonder why they would want to talk to people about array indexing online when little Johnny down the street is a perfectly fine child to play with, thank you, why don’t you do normal things. Kids who don’t have the chance to hack in their spare time because their “spare time” is spent watching their little brother. Kids who… it’s not that they don’t get any chances, because in this world you make your own chances. But kids who get fewer chances. Or who don’t find out until it’s too late that they can make their own chances at all.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a radar people have to detect latecomers and fake-hackers. On rare occasions, I feel like I somehow don’t look or act like a geek. I’ll go to the Swapfest with some MechE guys and I know what the components on the table area and they don’t so much but the dude selling the components will talk to the guys first. So they start introducing me as “the computer person” of our group, and I start speaking up first with some question that indicates that I know what I’m doing. But I have to make sure I present myself that way.
Or I’ll be hanging out with some coder guy friends and someone’s looking for a programming intern, and they’ll ask them but they don’t ask me and – well, that time I didn’t really care, so I didn’t speak up, but still- to feel like you’ve got to speak up to get something, that’s something. Is there something wrong or different about who I am or what I do that I’ve got to keep a big sticker on my hat saying yes, I’m a hacker, not a hacker’s girlfriend?
I’m always amused when folks on forums or mailing lists assume that “Mel” is a guy. It’s a logical default; most folks on the non-Olin forums and lists I hang out with are guys, so statistically speaking it’s entirely rational. Statistically speaking, it’s entirely rational to assume that the guys at the swapfest or the conference are more likely to be hackers; it’s less probable given my demographics and background that I’ll be one. But I am one.
It’s not hard to shrug these things off. I do it all the time. I have to do it less, nowadays, since I’m starting to get to know people a little bit, and I’m getting to know the culture, and I’m starting to understand what the stories mean and at which points in them I ought to laugh and what things I should say suck, and what things I should say w00t to, or what. And when you get introduced by a credible member of the hacker community, you get some of that credibility yourself. I’m thankful for the folks who have befriended and mentored me; it’s done amazing things for my self-confidence and my ability to tinker with stuff, to make things happen and get things done.
I’m struggling not to pump out a story that sounds like I feel sorry for myself. I don’t. I’m sucking it up and dealing with it and doing pretty darn good for myself. But it’s frustrating. I forget about this most of the times, but it’s still frustrating.
I don’t know how to fix it.
Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 3 Comments »
(continuing the long line of “Mel is hyper! Mel can’t do work!” posts of the day…)
Note: This is one half of my brain; the other half does acknowledge that I have competence in a number of things and should probably seek reasonable financial compensation for it, but I am taking the summer “off” because I’m trying to make this half shut up a little.
Among other things this summer, I’m trying to find ways to volunteer as an electronics technician and code monkey (and if I can find IDDS teams that need stuff fabricated, a little bit of machining as well). I need to do this and not get paid for a while. It’s a psychological block I need to get over.
I’m willing to inhale as much solder fume as it takes. Basically, I want to learn how to Build Stuff, and I’ll do gruntwork in exchange for permission to ask stupid questions. (I know I always have permission from other people to ask questions; this is permission I have to grant myself. I always have to emit a net usefulness to whatever group I’m working for. This is how I can get around my perceived net self-un-usefulness.)
I’m trying to quantify how much more I have to learn to become a pragmatic member of a project. I don’t feel like I’m useful enough to get paid to do much technical stuff yet. Yes, I know companies expect new hires to need training. I am currently too terrified to be trained as a new hire. This is a personal tic, and my self-confidence in my ability to code or engineer will suck until I somehow get myself past my personal threshold of usefulness/comfort, and I think that a few months of specifically addressing that tic will let me move past it.
This summer I am taking time “off” (read: volunteering at random places) and (re)teaching myself engineering, focusing on EE subjects, until I’m at the level I deem suitable for starting in an entry-level position. It will be the experiment in unschooling I’ve wanted to do since 4th grade but never had the freedom to pursue. (When you’re 10 years old and your parents won’t let you drop out of school… well, you go to school.) I want to get a better hands-on feel for how other people design before I go out and make designs of my own.
I feel like I miss so much in my engineering classes because I never got the chance to play with electronics or machines as a kid – maybe my friends who hacked with their dads in the garage don’t know as much math as I do, but they sure have a better gut feel for how to slap together an elegant, working board, and they weren’t utterly mystified and intimidated by what the heck “solder” was when they first got here. You can cut past the cruft to see the content, the purpose of the things you’re learning. You see where things fit into the larger picture of becoming a master in your chosen field.
After a few months of doing gruntwork and quietly watching, then I think I’ll be able to really launch out and learn. Right now I’m so afraid of learning engineering that it’s ridiculous. I really should have taken that deferred year option before college and trained as an electronics technician, or a junior programmer, or an apprentice machinist – I think it would have given me the confidence to run a lot faster during my four years at school.
But since I didn’t do that then, I’m trying to do it now. Anybody need a volunteer?
Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
A freeform poem kind of thing. I’m writing until my brain quiets down enough for me to work. (God damn it. I can’t get anything done today. I wonder if this is what DaVinci felt like and why he pumped out things so prolifically.) This is a poorly done rendering of a mental image I had one day when thinking about the kind of engineering I don’t like.
Boxes and Arrows
we chunk life into nested boxes.
drill down / drill deep / wrap your details up and outline them.
how cleanly can you draw your lines,
make your abstractions,
orthogonalize,
and dissect,
vivisect
your problem?
we went out and saw
in the woods
a young deer. it was lovely.
and we followed it and watched it
quietly
as it drank from the water
as it fled from the highway
as it moved like a statue between the trees
as it ran.
it was a nuisance, wreaking havoc
on the petunias of the town.
so we wrestled with the image in our minds
and said “we have to understand it
find its needs and values,
then we can fix it, change it, fix it.”
so we shot.
pinned it down, sliced it open,
went through it with a fine pick
anatomy book in one hand,
surgical expert on the phone.
referenced its datasheet model from its ear-tag
traced the blood flow
calculated how many litres were pumping onto the ground
saying to the glassy eyes we’re sorry, sorry, but we have to know.
we’ll put you back together when we’re done
we promise.
and we disassembled and wrapped in plastic
and argued and fought until we could say
this is a model to the first approximation
which is imperfect
but close enough.
we had our boxes and our arrows.
and we’d promised to put him back together, so we did.
everything stitched into its right place,
everything completely summed,
no remainder.
we even siphoned the red pools off the ground and gently slipped them through a needle back into the veins.
we put him in a place of honor in a glass case
next to our diagram
and we said
problem solved.
I suppose in a second revision we could make him animatronic.
Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Some random thoughts on Olin’s competencies system. In addition to our letter grades in classes, we receive “competency evaluations” in each course where our professors tell us how we’re doing with our communications, qualitative analysis, design, opportunity assessment, and so forth. Competencies don’t go on your transcript. They don’t get seen by anyone other than you and your prof. They’re a well-intentioned implementation of a good idea to a pressing problem – the trouble is that the implementation isn’t really working because the ratings don’t mean anything.
When Ann, Gill, and Mark sent out a survey last week asking us about Competencies, I started writing down my thoughts, and here’s what I sent them.
Problems: They break down when you try to assign numerical values to them and use them as a grading system – I feel like competencies are a qualitative holistic framework being shoehorned into a quantitative assessment metric, which completely misses the point. It’s like rating your Honor Code compliance on a scale of 1-10 for each clause; it doesn’t really mean anything. Since it’s largely arbitrary and there’s no apparent standardization across classes or professors, they’re not useful metrics of feedback for us to receive.
Advantages: Competencies are a useful framework for thinking about learning, since they address meta-skills that work across disciplines and are generally good things to pick up in life (see: Woodie Flowers’ Big Conversations speech, in which he talks about how we totally forget thermodynamics 30 years later, but remember teamwork skills).
Comments: I actually feel we would take competencies more seriously if they were not meant to be numerical “grades,” but pervasive things to consider and discuss with our professors and advisors. The trouble is that you can’t mandate meaning; you can only facilitate things that lead to reflection and meaningfulness, but that’s no guarantee.
Thoughts?
There are a number of students researching the grading and competencies system this semester in an effort to see how we got to these systems, how they’re working, and how we could improve them – I know Chris and Cathy are looking at alternative grading systems at other schools, Boris and Matt are interviewing faculty on how they give grades and what they mean when they assign certain scores, Gavin and Boris are talking to employers and grad schools on what data they need to be able to meaningfully evaluate applicants, and Paul and I are looking through eons of old ABET papers to find out how competencies came about and whether they’ve changed anything (we can’t find very much about the history of our grading system – does anyone know where to find this?) If you want to help, let these folks know (or let me know and I’ll put you in touch with them.)
Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »