Archive for October, 2007
Rant #1: (subject = grandmother) (direct object = me) (verb = fuss). Gah.
Rant #2: Installing and configuring Trac is like running a marathon through the woods. You know you start at A and end at B, and that the distance as the crow files is finite and not-that-bad, but the path keeps doubling back in weird loops until you have no idea how long it’ll take, you’re getting tired… and then THE ICE WEASELS ATTACK. I’ve done it a few times before in the past few years, but it’s taken inordinately long each time (I’m finally taking notes this round) and it’s… not my favorite thing to wrestle with.
So, yes. Content. Poorly structured and organized as usual. Ah, braindumps.
I’m convinced that we need a primer titled “What the heck does a SparkE do.” There are many people in the world that haven’t the foggiest idea what the (not-so-mystical) art of Electrical and Computer Engineering actually is. This isn’t their fault or their shortcoming – it’s our fault for not adequately communicating what it is that our field is for.
But if we don’t do that, how are they going to know what we can do? And if we don’t do that, how are we going to get more people – with their different talents and perspectives – to join us?
Disclaimer: I don’t know what the heck a SparkE does. Heck, I’m not sure I barely qualify as one myself (despite the piece of paper that claims I can “BS my way through Electrical and Computer Engineering”).
If you don’t come in with some background in what you’re studying, you can wander around in a haze for years because you don’t see the big picture. I know this because that’s how I spent most of my undergraduate education.
I spent most of my undergraduate education in a haze because I am a masochist. I chose my major (yes, ECE) with a dartboard and decided to stick with it because it was the degree that I knew the least about and thought it would be an interesting challenge to see how I could learn how to learn something I hadn’t heard of before.
The answer, by the way, was “not very well.” However, I did learn how to learn electrical engineering. I also learned how to learn, so thrown into a similar soup in the future I think I could flounder better next time – and in fact am doing so now.
But what I’d put in a document like that is what I wish I’d been told 4 years ago, and it goes something like this:
0. Engineering is not about doing lots of math or building shiny machines. It’s about solving problems.
1. Electrical and computer engineering is about making things communicate. Whether they’re circuit components, a wall outlet and your PDA’s power port, bits of computers, computers, people (using technologies that you’ve made – cell phones, for instance), the point is to do whatever translation you need to do in the middle in order to get things to talk to each other.
2. To make a grand understatement: Electrical and computer engineering is a huge field. And I mean jaw-droppingly huge.
3. It’s fun! This was a huge surprise to me. I totally didn’t expect to have this much fun.
4. Hypothesis: there is a peculiar state of mind called “SparkEness” that ECEs enter at some point that gives them a peculiarly SparkE way of looking at the world (and fixing ECE-related things). It’s kind of like… electric satori. (Younger SparkEs may have occasional experiences of kensho.)
It is very, very easy for SparkEs to forget that not everyone has had the same revelations, and that in fact most people are staring at acronyms and spaghettilike diagrams in terror while muttering the single debugging phrase available to them: “It doesn’t wo-orrrrk.”
The common explanation is that these people are “stupid” and that those who become SparkEs must be “really smart.” This is not true. (Proof by counterexample: I am a SparkE.) It’s just a different way of thinking about stuff that’s hard to switch into if you’re not used to it. Native English speakers have a tough time learning Mandarin, but that doesn’t mean native Mandarin speakers are smarter than native English speakers. Same deal.
It’s that last point that I find elusive and hard to clarify and explain… and hopefully, eventually, teach – or as John Holt would say, “t-each.”* And it’s that last point that’s become the driving purpose of my life over the years; helping people slip in and out of different ways of thinking as they wish (especially technical ones, particularly those related to electricity and computers).
*T-eaching is turning your student into an obedient robot: follow this formulae, do this worksheet, clean the board, yes ma’am. In contrast, t-eaching is helping your student learn how to become her own master. The job of a t-eacher is to make herself obsolete.
So there are some thoughts, and my brain’s swimming in them now between projects. Wonder what will come of it.
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I’m not the only one who’s remarked on this recently, but reading the blogs of friends is an excellent remedy for depression. If all the cool people I admire have their moments of despondence and occasionally feel incompetent, then… maybe I’m sort of normal.
I’m still fighting past nontechnical problems in order to be able to solve technical ones. I am no longer bolting for the tissue box every few seconds; instead, I’m hawking phlegm into the sink every few minutes. It’s an improvement; at least it’s a great incentive for me to constantly chug water. Also, the wireless router is now more frequently on but the quality of the connection is somewhat more finicky (hey, have you ever tried to configure Trac on a remote server when your connection keeps hanging?)
Finally, I have yet to convince people that I’m not actually on vacation and that I have work to do even if I don’t go to the office for a regular paycheck. (Also on my list of myths to dispel: being an electrical engineer does not mean I can wire your house or fix your computer. My idea of “fixing your computer” probably involves installing Linux on it.)
Ok. My connection seems kind of stable now. Armed with the power of screen, I’m going to try getting Trac up again.
Thursday, October 4th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Grandma logic: “Can I do boxing?” “No, boxing is not for girls. It’s too violent.” “How about kung fu?” “Kung fu is okay.” “So… learning how to pummel people unconscious with my hands is too violent, but learning how to kill people with sharp pointy weapons is okay?” “Yes.”
Going in and out of air-conditioned rooms isn’t the most pleasant thing for my nasal passages, which have continued to drip into my lungs at an amazingly prodigious rate. My usual activities include chugging water, sleeping, and talking to people in a congested-sounding voice. The first thing people say to me is now “do you have a cold?” (instead of the usual “you are so tall!” – I’m 5’8″ but tower above nearly all the women in Manila… clothes shopping is entertaining because I’ve never been an XL before).
We went to the market this morning to get food for the week (I carried a box of tissues with me). Market day is not for the squeamish; fish guts and scales fly through the air, with skinny men in Mr. Bean t-shirts smacking cleavers into questionably sanitary wood blocks. Everything is packed in ancient styrofoam chests held together by faded stripes of packing tape; a pig’s head gazes hungrily at its own roasted hindquarters by way of advertisement for purchasing the latter (“My butt is so tasty even I want to eat it!”) and white squids lounge across the grills, dangling charring tentacles languidly above a sea of ash.
Some fruits and vegetables I almost recognize. The carrots are stubby and fat, the green beans are a half-yard or so long, the asparagus is downright midget-sized, but the mangoes are amazing. Others I pointedly avoid. Durian, which is a large spiky fruit on a stout stick that looks like a medieval torture implement, actually is – an olfactory one, at least. It smells like a cross between mildewing garbage and a backed-up toilet – tastes great, though. Then there’s ampalaya, a knobbly green melon that works wonders as a cough remedy because its sheer bitterness makes the phlegm choke itself out in an attempt to get away. (Ampalaya tastes great, says my grandmother. Ah, so I need to wait for more of my taste buds to die, I tell her.)
Merienda (second breakfast; we’re like hobbits) was purchased at the market as well. It consisted of two foods whose spelling I will proceed to mangle: bibingka and puto bunbun. The former is made by pouring a batter, sprinkled with salty eggs, into a leaf bowl stuffed over a charcoal fire, then covering it with a pan of more charcoal until it puffs up into a bright yellow cake. The latter involves neon purple rice steamed and packed in envelopes of banana leaf. I’ll need to take pictures of this at the next Sunday market.
After arriving home, we greet my late Angkong(‘s picture, hanging next to photos of his parents) in the tiny ancestral shrine in the living room, bob long sticks of red incense in front of our faces in his general direction, then bow three times; nobody can tell me exactly why we do this. It’s probably for the same reason we rubbed our clothes with packets of rice after the funeral (it “soaks up” bad luck, so of course you can’t toss it in your garbage – so the funeral procession detoured past McDonalds to toss the now-accursed papers into wads of discarded Big Macs) and why I technically can’t wear red (purple is okay but yellow is “too red,” so I’m not sure what color theory the ancients used) and other things.
Anyway. Back to the incense. You’re only supposed to burn it during the day because the ancestors, being rational people, sleep at night. This makes me unsure what my children will do if they decide to shrine-ify me after my death. (“Hey, it’s 4am and I want to BURN THINGS! Think mom’s still up?” “Yeah… where’s that flamethrower she asked us to use?”)
Then we drove to the crypt. Actually, I drove to the crypt. I think my family was more freaked out by my navigation of Manila traffic than I was. Downtown New York driving is an excellent way to ease into the more advanced Manila navigation dance – one foot for the gas, one hand for the wheel, one hand for the valium.
Angkong’s urn resides in space 275F of Christ the King. Getting his ashes to the Philippines (he had a heart attack while he was visiting my parents in Chicago) was an adventure; when you bring a Chinese person’s remains home, you have to call to their spirit every step of the way so they won’t get left behind. My dad was the one who flew back to the Philippines with the ashes. “Pa, we’re going into the car; come with us.” “Pa, we’re going into the airport; come with us.” “Pa, we’re going through security; come with us.” (“Sir, you’re going to have to put your carry-on baggage in the scanner.”) “Uh… okay. Pa, you’re going through the x-ray machine…”
He’s up in a little shelf with a door of pink marble now. It’s a pretty comfy spot after a long, full life. Some of the neighboring spaces contain much younger occupants, which sobered me; seeing photos of high schoolers and toddlers in bonnets taped to a spot always makes me remember how close I came to being a gap-toothed picture on a wall years ago. Then there was the single tomb that contained only a photograph of a baby and a single date for birth and death…
On the way back, I admired jeepney decorations. The local buses are usually airbrushed with neon renditions of Catholic saints, cartoon figures, or both. One jeepney proclaimed its decorations were THE JUSTICE LEAGUE! and featured Superman, a trio of colorful people that were either chubby cartoon Power Rangers or “Powerpuff Girls: Age 30″, and (at the head of this motley crew), SUPERJESUS! whose main power appeared to be RADIATING BEAMS OF HAPPINESS AND PEACE FROM HIS FACE!!!!
Which is a pretty cool power, if you think about it. Imagine…
Generic Villain: “Blah blah blah monologue about world domination blah blah blah”
SUPERJESUS: …turns the other cheek and suddenly a BLINDING BEAM of GOD’S INFINITE LOVE AND MERCY hits Generic Villain in the solar plexus
Generic Villain (after vomiting out a couple demons): “My Lord and my God!”
SUPERJESUS: “He’s yo’ daddy.”
I’m trying to persuade my cousins to accompany me, my Guama (my mom’s mom), and my mother and aunts to Shanghai next month. “Look, I’m going to be touring China with six women over the age of 45*. Now, if one menopausal mother has to pee at least once an hour… think about the amount of time I’ll be spending waiting in public toilets if you don’t come.” (“We could,” I pointed out, “tally how many bathroom breaks each mom takes, and start a betting pool for the grandkids.”)
*Technically, the youngest aunt is not quite 45. But still. Even traveling just with my mom requires an order of magnitude more bathroom breaks than I’d usually take alone.
The crabs need cleaning. I must be off.
Thursday, October 4th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Old immune system plus new germs means I’m writing this from bed, by dose stubbed dup so dat I dalk like dis, my head feeling approximately like someone’s scraped it out with a $2 K-Mart Jack-O-Lantern carving kit (complete with dull injection-molded knives and spoon of questionable integrity) and packed warm, oil-soaked cotton where my brain and sinuses used to be.
Chua Laoshi (yes, my Chinese teacher’s last name is the same as mine) is remarkably patient with my incessant questions. How incessant? Well, during our first session where I barely asked any questions, we got through 6 chapters in the book (which is, incidentally, written for 5-year-olds.) During the second lesson, I turned the question-o-meter way up. We barely squeaked through a single chapter.
Tushuguan (libraries) are sorely lacking in the Philippines, and my grandma’s private collection of books doesn’t quite intersect with the qualities I tend to look for in a library. First of all, all the books in the house could fit in one bookshelf (they’re interspersed between the much more numerous photo albums). Half the books are traditional Chinese. The remainder consists of Catholic tracts and novenas with the occasional health book geared towards those considerably older than 21; “ARTHRITIS: The Conquest!” is not exactly on my must-read list.
Learning Fukien/Fookien/Hokkien (my family’s dialect), Mandarin/Instik/Putonghua (technically, Putonghua != Mandarin; the former is spoken in the PRC, the latter in Taiwan, iirc), and Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino doesn’t actually help me understand what my family says, as they mix the three languages together with English, shamelessly using the grammatical conventions of one to conjugate vocabulary from another. (“Have you ever heard your 5-ee* conjugate?” my 7-ee said before proceeding to give an example – which I must get her to recreate sometime – of a Hokkien word mangled into Filipino grammar.)
*My mom is the 4th of 8 sisters. We refer to her sisters by number for convenience: 1-ee is the eldest, then 2-ee, and so on to 8-ee. The numbers are in Hokkien: 1= Ah, 2 = Di, 3 = Sa, 4 = Ci, 5 = Go, 6 = Lak, 7 = Chit, 8 = Pue. Actually, the titles of my various maternal aunts is the only reason I can count in Hokkien… and the reason I can only count up to 8 in Hokkien.
Vegetarians and people trying to avoid sugar will probably not be happy here. Incidentally, diabetes is an issue in these parts…
Ok. Head feels like packed cotton. Must… nap. (Dear immune system: if you happen to have my blog in your feed reader, please wake up. Tell those T-cells to hop to it already.)
Thursday, October 4th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
One memory from the summer: going to the ICA with Joe and Chris towards the end of our residency at Fenway. It was a crisp, sunny morning and a spontaneous trip; Joe said “there’s dancing,” Chris and I said “let’s go,” and we stepped into the heels of our sneakers and walked through a mini-architectural tour of Boston (commentary provided by the boys) stopping long enough to be denied entry into the conference center across the highway. “What’s the point of having a gorgeous building like that,” Joe muttered, “if the public can’t come in and appreciate it?”
We ran across six empty lanes of highway to the art center, where blue-and-gray dancers were undulating through the building, sweating slightly as they weaved arms before the windows, slapped palms under the staircase with a synchronized sticking sound, and rolled down the entry ramp flapping brown skirts behind them. We watched the dance twice, stopping into the gift shop in between. As the dancers swam off the stairs for the last time, we clambered onto them in time to avoid the first raindrops striking down onto the new wooden deck.
I crouched in the staircase hollow at first, sunken in a gravelly recess so that I was eye-level to the ground, watching the rain splatter cross-section. Chris stood on the outdoor stairs, shielded by the jutting overhang of the building that covered an entire back plaza. Rain rolled fat down the glass highway that covered the entire side of one wall and misted off the deck, sending spray and the smell of the sea to cling lightly to our shirts.
The glassy ocean turned into rough silk; thick fronds of moss brushed it from below, a neon orange buoy pinned it from above, tearing a white rent into the fabric of the water as it waved by. A poem about Orpheus was frosted onto a glass panel that stood at the edge of the water. You could peer through it at the albino-white buses parked across the way, rain streaming from the bright red eyes of their lights, steaming. The rain scoured and scrubbed and swept your lungs with calming cool when you inhaled, out, in, out with the breath of the wind.
When the clouds had hung themselves out to dry and were languidly dripping gray through a number of rainbows, we sloshed through the flooded parking lot in carefully dry sneakers and admired the whirlpool vortices that had placed themselves in precise crystal miniature above the four holes of a closed manhole.
More architecture – this time the world trade center – that we couldn’t access, but we ran across a wedding party and a system dynamics conference prep session instead, stuffed bags, took a program with paper abstracts back with us to the bus and then the train to Central square, where we shared Tibetian food and then split, stomachs full of buttered tea and hot lentils.
Chris went to work. Joe and I aimed for the garment district but ended up packing laptops in bubble wrap at the OLPC office instead. Joe hoisted the large bundle onto his right arm, I strapped the yellow kite-bag to my shoulder, and we walked back to the mural-painted walls of Fenway talking about sports bras, hyperbolas, heavy-duty zippers. That was the afternoon, and that was the day, and I went to Taiwan the next morning.
Just a series of moments I wanted to remember, or at least mark down in passing.
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
News flash: loneliness does take hold when you’re on the other side of the world from the majority of people you know and the culture you grew up in and the language you speak (and I don’t just mean English – I mean American Hacker English).
Fortunately, I have a lot to catch up on and learn. My current mode is “dah! I want to write and write and write!” so that’s what I’ll do.
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Manila is dangerous, according my elders who must therefore always be correct. (It depends on who you ask, but generally…) Kidnappings, robberies (yeah, even with the fences of glory), carjackings… they’re not just things you hear about on the news – they’re things that have happened (multiple times) to family and friends within my lifetime, and not just because we’re having a string of bad luck. Looking like a Chinese or someone from overseas (or worse: a Chinese from overseas) is, according to my parents, a “mug me! I have lots of money!” beacon – never mind that the entirety of my current finances would barely buy groceries for two weeks. That having been said, OH MY GOD I WANT TO WALK AROUND OUTSIDE.
Traffic… is fun. Manila has the highest population density of any city in the world. Sure, most of that population can’t afford cars, but it’s bad enough that they used to (maybe they still do?) set a restriction for which days cars could drive on the street (license plates beginning with certain letters could drive on some days, license plates with other letters could drive on the other days). The result? Everyone who could afford it bought another car with the alternate-letter plate. Traffic doubled.
Matt: Eating every three hours sounds fantastic, and it is for the first few weeks. But after a while of lunches and banquets and lunches, you start looking at your plate and the lazy susan full of food that people are still heaping onto it and see endless parades of fish, noodle, and unidentifiable meat dishes in your future… it’s not quite as fun any more.
Christie: My fingers are crossed that I’ll be able to get around it with scribefire, but not being able to see my blog from China would be a fantastic way to force myself to switch to a custom WordPress (I was flummoxed previously by Google’s move to the “new Blogger,” which broke the import API, but they’ve fixed that now).
Mark: Your room is huge! Boy, the firstborn son thing has perks… I can’t wait for you and the other cousins to arrive, though, because it’s way too quiet here.
Erin: “Mabuting kapalaran sa iyo,” I think… but I don’t actually speak Tagalog. Yet.
Today’s update is much less exciting. The sobering discovery that the wireless is only on when my grandma’s computer is on (and it’s in her room, and she turns it off when she sleeps, and…) has made my plans to work during the Filipino night (Boston day) a little more difficult.
However, my throat hurts; I had my first Chinese lesson today, and my vocal cords are not used to the sounds of the language (oh, I’ve made them before. Just not for several continuous hours). After 4 years of Olin-style learning, it’s vexing to have to go back to drill & kill worksheets, canned vocab lists, and handwriting practice – I feel like a computer being programmed – but that’s the predominant style of education here, and I want to get a taste of it before starting to suggest my own ideas…
Also, to my vexation, the sounds for j, q, z, s, sh, ch, zh, and x (probably a few more I’ve forgotten) sound absolutely identical. I really can’t tell whether they’re aspirated or you’re curling your tongue to the back of your throat or not. It’s not a question of having “American ears” – the k/t/p/s/sh/ch/c/x/h/…etc sounds are invisible to me in English. Consonants are high-frequency, and I just can’t hear them, period. But at least in English I can use context to figure out the words. Not so in Chinese (yet). It poses a slight problem, because the key to successful language learning is constant comprehensible input, and my hearing automatically makes the “comprehensible” part a little harder. I am therefore trying to learn how to read. Fast.
Finally, jet lag sucks. That is all.
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
In the Philippines, currently being deafened by a VERY LOUD AIR CONDITIONING UNIT and attacked by skeeters. I’m surrounded by old photo albums displaying weirdly young and skinny versions of my father. And whoever decided that 1am international flights were a good idea never flew coach.
I packed last night while my parents were at a wedding; one backpack and a laptop bag for my clothes and stuff, and a rolling red luggage for all the gifts they wanted me to bring (Mel Chua, human balikbayan box). Airplane food was surprisingly good. Asiana serves asian food on its flights, and bibimbap (rice and pickled vegetables smeared with a spicy-sweet red pepper sauce) beats the usual sad-looking omelet and dessicated beef hands-down.
My Amah (my dad’s mom) and Auntie Lily (my dad’s cousin? I think…) picked me up from the airport. First question: Had I eaten? I had. Was it lunch? It was. Was I hungry? Not particularly. “Ok, then we go to dim-sum.” (Chinese families: if you’re hungry, serve food. If you’re not hungry, serve food. The best strategy is to fast before arrival.) Several minutes later I was having dumplings and turnip cake piled on my plate by two elderly ladies who were also spooning noodles from their bowls into mine. I protested the oncoming food in English, then in Fookien, then (in an act of desperation) badly accented Mandarin.
Eventually I ran out of languages to say “wait, no more food!” in, and four dumplings, two turnip cakes, a beef ball, wonton, fish ball, and a bowl of noodle soup later, they relented and I waddled into the van. The traffic was pretty good; we only had 2 or 3 near-collisions on the way. I commented happily on the number of motorcycles in the streets and Amah gave me a “don’t even think about it” look. I got the usual litany of don’t go outside the subdivision, do you want more food, don’t go outside the gate, what would you like to eat, it’s dangerous, we’re going to have dinner. Food and paranoia: it’s how Asian families show they care.
We drove past the armed guard at the subdivision’s gate and down streets named, for whatever reason, after American politicians. The driver honked our house’s signal (each house honks their horns in a different rhythm to tell the maid to open the door – the Filipino garage opener) to signal Manang Lorna to unlock the GIANT SPIKED METAL GATE OF PARANOIA! Manila is a long, long way from Boston, where I could slip out the kitchen door to buy ice cream at a downtown convenience store at 2am without passing 5 layers of security on the way.
After sleeping through dinner, I woke before sunrise and took a shower – actually, not a shower, but tabo – the much more water-frugal Filipino variant. Basically, it’s a Navy shower with a bucket instead of the shower; you fill a large-ish bucket (~5-7 gallons) with clean water and use a large scoop to pour the water over you in the shower. I actually prefer tabo to showering – faster, saves water – but it requires a bathtub-length shower to be really comfortable, unlike the enough-room-for-one-person-to-stand stalls common in American dormitories. (The Olin suite showers could do it, but I’m not sure how my roommates would have felt about that.)
By the time I left “my” room, Manang Lorna was up and making oatmeal in the kitchen. I had leftover noodles from the dinner I’d slept through the previous night, some mangosteen, and atis, a knobbly green fruit with sweet, fleshy white pockets surrounding large black seeds. When I’d finished the sugary fruit, Lorna told me to leave my plate on the table (I’ve never gotten used to having maids in the house, although it’s de-facto for the upper middle class and above here) and showed me the atis tree growing at the corner of the building, and how to tell whether the fruit was ripe. “Have to eat, or else the birds will eat it,” she instructed. I told her I’d do my best.
I’m typing this while chewing a mouthful of sticky, bright purple sweet rice. (“Brunch,” said Manang Lorna, despite having fed me a full meal less than 3 hours ago.) I think portion control may be a slight problem here.
Monday, October 1st, 2007 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
