Archive for October, 2008
Today was very good.
Erik took me sailing on the Charles, and taught me how to handle the jib. He’s right; it is like flying. (The aerodynamic principles are similar, too.) And when the wind hits and you have to drop the sail and climb to the edge of the boat so it won’t tip? FUN!
My day got even better when we had a totally awesome first community test meeting. And we ended 22 seconds under time. I ran out of the office all charged up and happy, and then…
…I ran into HGSE’s open house and got embroiled in conversations about learning stuff! and had sudden flashbacks to Olin’s candidates’ weekend, how it felt to be surrounded by so many people having the conversations that you’d had with wonderful, like-minded friends, but only really in bits and snatches that could never come often enough, and the sheer magic of saturation “zomg everybody here does this? all the time?” and so you know how I get when I get all fired up about engineering education and there was this rousing chorus of everybody pitching in ideas, and…
…and then still completely high on that, I learned to punch and now my arms are sore from whaling on a heavy bag, and the rest of me is sore from kicking, squats, crunches, jumping, and because gloves are heavy when you’re holding them up for upwards of an hour. (“Don’t think about how hard you’re hitting… think about how easy you can hit. Your elbows just straighten; it all comes from the hips.”)
And I am happy. Tired. Happy. The good kind of worn-out, finally. Mmmm.
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
(from various sources)
It cost too much, staying human.
Yes. I loved you. Now forget.
I’m your future, child. Don’t cry.
here – emergency stop – wires cut – shi-
Fortunately, its battery died before then.
Geez, a lot of good 6-word short stories are depressing – can somebody write a happy one?
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Cute animated cartoon with really awesome scene transitions. Please ignore the song in French that I can’t understand and the frequent ‘AGH GAK KISSING” moments – I love the flash-forward time-compression techniques of Happy Seamlessness. It reminds me of the 6-word-story exercise (also see 6-word-bios). I did a longer 50-word variant as an extra exercise for a high school English teacher who was encouraging me to write more.
Ah, Dr. Kuhl. And Mr. Panitch from 6th grade. They gave me writing as an outlet, for which I am forever thankful. I wish I had continued to hone it more than I did; there’s much that I can do to cut the cruft from what I write, and I am pretty sure I was a better writer at 11 and 14 (because of how much/seriously I concentrated on it) than I am today, though I have richer things and thoughts to write about now that I’ve actually been exposed to the world beyond my childhood home, my school, and the library in the town where I grew up.
I wonder what Dr. Kuhl and Mr. Panitch would say if they saw my writing now, over/nearly a decade later. I think one reason why they had such an impact on me is that writing was one of the first things I’d ever heard a teacher (or really, any grownup) say I had potential for – potential that went beyond the “give the correct answers, get good scores on tests” stuff I was doing in my normal public school classes. By no means was I a prodigy or anywhere near it; I was just a kid who liked to write. But the fact that I was good at something – and, more importantly, that this was Not An Awful Thing – was still a novel concept back then.
Some folks have heard this story; I may have written it down somewhere before. In any case, retelling the past is part of how we shape our future selves, or so my sociology class told me.
I remember being 7 years old one afternoon in school, listening in dawning horror as my classmates read their essays. I was petrified to realize I’d put visibly more effort into my own paper – in other words, my paper was Different, and this was a Horrible Mistake, because I was supposed to Be Like Everybody Else, and now I had brought Shame and Dishonor on my family for making such a dumb mistake at school… It seems a tiny thing now, but it was huge to me as a little kid. Later that day when my mom told me my teacher had called, I broke down in tears. I basically never cried, both then and now, especially in front of anybody else, but I was pretty much hysterical that afternoon. And all because I thought, at 7, that putting more effort into something in a non-specified, non-pre-requested-by-a-superior-officer way, was Terrible.
Turns out my teacher had called to ask my mom if she had read my allegorical description of myself as a mouse that hid in fortresses of books to escape the Cat of Reality’s vicious claws. (There was an illusration of a little mouse with a sword trying to fend off a cat with unrealistically pointy teeth and very, very anatomically incorrect Angry Cartoon Eyes. As a side note, this story is how I got my first online nick, ‘mouseymel,’ many years later.) I was reassured that I had gotten a good grade on the essay and that I could, y’know, stop crying now. (I stopped.)
The things which stick with you as you grow up are… interesting. And then there are things that don’t. So that’s the “Riting” part, this is the “Reading” one.
A friend of my parents told me last week that I floored him one afternoon when I was 10 – he found me reading a parenting book one day, was perplexed by this, and asked why. I explained to him I was trying to learn how parents thought, and that what I had learned was very interesting thus far. I remember reading the book (in fact, I read a lot of parenting books as a kid for just that reason), but what surprised me was to learn, 12 years later, that he’d been surprised at that. It seemed a logically normal thing to do; I found books, they looked interesting, I read them.
I’m very glad he didn’t tell me that he was surprised back then. If I’d known that somebody thought that it was slightly odd to do that, I probably would have stopped immediately. Although I guess book choice and reading quantity is something I deviated from the norm from when I was tiny – I think I would have died from boredom otherwise. I was overjoyed in kindergarten when I learned that the lower classes (us) could check out novels and textbooks instead of only picture stories. I think I thanked our school librarian for allowing me to read the encyclopedia set. (This was a privilege that I had not expected.) And I had no objections when she gave me a special higher limit for the number of books I was allowed to check out – almost every day, I’d get the max number of books I could (iirc it was 3, then 5, then 7), stagger home with them, read them all, return them the next day and get the next 3 or 5 or 7 more…
Then again, my classmates didn’t have to know about these things.
Re: “Rithmetic” – I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t love math today if it hadn’t been the shelf I chanced to dive behind while hiding from librarians in the Adult Section. I thought 4th graders (or was it 5th?) were not supposed to be outside the Children’s Section, and that I’d get in trouble if I was discovered. But I had read through pretty much the whole darn Children’s Section, and I wantd more, so I waited ’till the librarians weren’t looking and snuck in. It felt like Mission: Impossible. I was the rogue spy trying to get secret information! that I was not supposed to have – lucky that one of first Forbidden Books I found was Martin Gardner, and boom! a world of mathematics opened up before me…
What I am trying to say is that I was the kind of timid little kid who used to follow rules – a lot – and who needed to hear “you know, I know that you can go beyond these standard expectations, and it’s okay if you do – in fact, it’s really good.” I literally didn’t realize that rules could be created, bent, and broken (instead of merely followed) until a very mindbending freshman year
Of course, now I have to relearn that sometimes one should follow rules for the sake of longer-term changes to complex systems that one can’t just immediately hack… if your experience is the best teacher, mine is an incredibly sadistic one. Effective, though.
On the previous note of writing, is anybody planning to do NaNoWriMo this year? I don’t think I can do a fiction novel (as much as I really really want to finish “The World Is Too Much With Us” at some point – I’ve been saying this for… what, 3 years now?) but I’m trying to see if I can pull my copious word output into some sort of book-like form. I think the key for me is going to be building momentum and then directing it towards things that I want to write.
My favorite 6-word short story is the original by Hemingway. It smells faintly of young dreams, sad ones.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Y’know, plateaus are boring, but they’re awfully nice. Easy. Relaxing. Comforting. I’m used to being able to make decisions without thinking about them, either because I’m being thoughtless without knowing it, or because the things I am deciding are not hard.
If people rise to the level of their incompetence (a better way of phrasing it: people rise until they’re somewhere they can learn something, I try to be incompetence-intolerant enough to drag the wall of what I can do a few centimeters behind the reality of what I’m trying to do. Do things before you realize they can’t be done. That kind of thing.
During those moments, I have to think a lot. Decisions take a long time, even simple ones, because you’re breaking down assumptions and habits in your world so you can build them up again. (It took me 45 minutes to decide which sandwich I wanted for dinner, and 15 minutes to eat it.) Writing feels muddled because I can’t think straight. My brain is swarming. I can’t sit still, clutter accumulates everywhere, and I hyperfocus too long on the wrong things because I’m trying to avoid the clutter that I’m spuriously generating.
And weirdly enough, this is how I learn and how I make my biggest mental shifts. When I can catch myself and step into control long enough to step back from the hurricane, and then step back into it in a way that lets me function because of it rather than despite it, the storm transforms from something that pummels me into a force I can control to do things… and make the same decisions easily, without thinking, and without being thoughtless.
It’s tough, and a non-perfect process, and I backslide sometimes. And right now i’m being tossed around by one of those hurricanes. I keep dragging myself out, closing my eyes, and trying to think. I can’t always. Think, I mean. Not properly. (Don’t worry; this is normal. I have to relearn how to think. Happens every so often.)
The past 6 days or so especially, I’ve felt the weight of a million little things each day, a lot of tiny unimportant things that add up to ask: “Do you want to be the person that you are, or do you want to be a better person than you can be?” I look and curse the fact I have that choice, because if I take the easy out I’ve no excuse and it’s my fault for choosing not to be the bigger person. It would be easier not to know; it always is.
I drop things and I make mistakes and mess things up, let people down, and Fail A Lot. And then the failing sloughs away the parts of me that shouldn’t be there, and I build the parts that should be there up from the fragments of what I can learn from my mistakes, and so I Learn Things, and it’s good, and I am happy doing this – and I’m becoming the human being I should be (who I should be is always a step ahead of who I am; sometimes the steps are larger and more numerous than other times).
It’s just that… why is this so hard? GAH. The struggle is what makes it wonderful, though. There is something worth learning towards and fighting for. I don’t know what it is or what to call it (“masochism?”) but it’s – I mean, the… gah, I can’t speak English tonight. I get the notion that I am exactly where I need to be.
One thing I can’t forget during the times of non-plateau: I am alive. And this alone is plenty to be thankful for.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, or where I’m headed with this – ah, I know. It’s bedtime. I’m headed to sleep. Yes. That. I’m going to go to bed.
Ahhhhhhhh. May you live in interesting times, indeed.
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Oh geez. Geez. Stupid hyperfocus. Dah. Dah. Dah. l’m an idiot for not setting an alarm for stopping work.
It’s almost 4:30. I don’t know where the last 6 hours went (when I last saw the clock, it was 10:30, and I thought that maybe, maybe it was 1am, right now, before I looked). I have just realize that I am sleepy, hungry, that my right leg has cramped up underneath me, my wrists and my entire right hand minus thumb are sore (yes, I’ll stop typing soon) and that I theoretically should wake up in 1.5 hours.
Sure got a lot done, though.
I’m going to bed before I have any further bright ideas about productivity.
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
- Boston is cold (significantly so for an appreciable portion of the year)
- Mel is highly susceptible to cold (I have the masochism-fu to consciously endure it with no problem, but when I’m trying to concentrate on something else – for instance, work or sleep – it doesn’t work.)
- Mel loves living in Boston
Uh… yeah. Houston, we have a problem. Namely: I should live in your climate. But New England is just… awesome, and I don’t want to leave.
Currently wearing double socks, double pants, double shirts, a sweater, and a big down jacket, and it’s October for crying out loud. I need… more winter clothes…
Friday, October 24th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
This post is (as oftentimes my posts are) made of a number of somewhat unrelated thoughts.
Hurrah! I can eat lunch and go in to the office now – I got bitten by Something last night and my left eye swelled shut, and I’ve been working at home and waiting for the return of binocular vision. Perspective is a nice thing to regain.
This made me smile.
The two things that I like most about the phrase “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is that it doesn’t imply causality, and that it doesn’t immediately whip out the contrapositive. Maybe the teacher appears at times when the student isn’t ready. Maybe readiness is, in part, the ability to recognize that you can learn from something or someone.
I think of the world in terms of learning and teaching a lot, and often put myself into the role of student rather than any other, although (in fact, because) my aim in life is that I want to teach.
The things we do gain meaning in part through the things we don’t do because we choose to do something else – in other words, opportunity cost gives actions value. To say I came to visit you instead of bumming out and watching TV isn’t much. To say I came to visit you – spent half my monthly salary, skipped my midterms – says you are more important to me than those things; I chose you over them. That’s why we note in newspapers that rich and famous people spend time with their families oh my gosh.
However, just because you could be doing “something cooler” doesn’t mean your reason for doing what you do is any better than someone whose alternative is “not as cool,” by whatever metric you chose to measure that. It just means that you give up something different to make the same decision. To make a bad, broken analogy; I could buy a $5 sandwich or a $4 one; you could buy a $5 sandwich or a $2 one. In the end, we both spend $5 on the same sandwich; it doesn’t make my $5 sandwich taste better than yours. (But maybe it does make me think about my $5 sandwich in a different way.)
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’ve never been sufficiently able to explain to my parents why I like Boston, but this essay takes a good shot at it. Note that the section about overhearing conversations is one of the reasons why I like IRC so much (it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to experience that).
Wired also has a nifty article on open hardware – it’s neat to recognize some names in there (hello, Alicia!) and I’m reminded that I should go back to NYC and visit TOPP and Resistor and Cool People sometime before the winter gets too bad.
I spent this weekend visiting my friend Andrew in Nashville, and learned the South has
- really, really friendly people – they… they wave and talk with you! For no apparent reason! Just… everyone!
- fantastic weather
- Food Of Glory (oh my gosh fried okra)
- walnuts
On a related note, I learned that walnut stain is made from walnuts, and that if you try to open a walnut shell with your fingers, your fingers become walnut stained. Also, cows actually make a “moo” sound, and feeding horses tickles. And I need to go to grad school somewhere with a large and gorgeous library because wow. Wow.
I need… to spend more time in libraries. I’ve tried (successfully) to use them as a coworking space before – maybe I’ll try that again when I need to be more focused than the office will allow me to be during normal work hours. I’m going to go and walk and sit down and try to clearly define the problems that I’m trying to tackle; that should take the edge off some of the antsiness, and let me settle more (I’m coming to a much more painfully clear understanding over the past ~2 years just how all over the place my mind can get, as evidenced by many of my posts during this time).
Another item that’s been especially prominent on my “working on it” list the last few months: becoming a good speaker. By the start of next month, I should begin looking for ways to practice this in places other than my shower. I’m really self-conscious about my speech. I need strategies other than “become ridiculously excited about everything!!! and forget that you’re afraid of talking” because boundless enthusiasm is not always the way to go.
It’s walking time.
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Just for fun, an icon draft for the testing community is below, since it’s been a while since I busted out the Inkscape and I needed to take a break somehow tonight. Edits/counterideas welcome; the source is here. I’m just getting this party started; I don’t actually have icon design skills myself.
On a more serious note, a number of volunteers have expressed interest in learning testing along with me, so I’m hoping to make the community test group a great place for newbies to learn about QA. More details in the original testing mailing list post here. If you’re interested, have ideas on how we can do this, or (best of all) willing to teach something you know, please let me know, either through a comment on this post or by directly responding to the testing mailing list.
Tomorrow’s blog post will be in response to all the great feedback I’ve gotten on this week’s posts so far. Thanks for the thoughts and helps, everybody – please keep them coming!
Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | olpc | 3 Comments »
Boston-area geeks: Y’all should come to Information Superhighway One. It’s going to rock. Totally rock. Hard.
Also, it’s… not a good idea to eat homemade gelato when you’ve just come in from being cold outside. I don’t know why I did this. Oh, wait. “AIEE! IT WILL GO BAD! PUT IT IN BLENDER!” …..yeah, that’s what happened. Um. Warm fuzzy sweater, where are you?
There is a fortune cookie fortune taped to my door. I actually got it inside a fortune cookie.
You will always live in interesting times.
Sometimes it’s tough, but I do like to think of this one as a blessing.
Thursday, October 16th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
