Archive for January, 2009
I’ve got approximately 12 hours left before I spend 40 hours traveling to LCA, and I’m excited; I’ve wanted to come for the past 3 years ever since I first heard about it, but living on the other side of the world more or less put it out of reach for logistical and financial reasons. No more!
Thanks to the encouragement and support of a great many people and organizations (a huge thanks to Walter, Pia, Martin, David, Greg, Tabitha, Google, and multiple people named Chris) and recent events which caused a sudden lack of any schedule conflicts, I have acquired plane tickets (and learned how not to acquire plane tickets in the future), stuffed an eigenset of belongings into my brown backpack, and started to repeat the mantra “I am young and foolish,” because… really, how else do you describe the decision to spend your severance pay on a last-minute trip to a hemisphere you’ve never set foot in? (“Educational,” perhaps?)
I’m attending as a volunteer for two projects – OLPC and Sugar Labs. Last-minute plane tickets mean I’ll miss the miniconfs, but I still plan on, among other things, getting over my long-held (vague and irrational) “Here Be Dragons” fear of kernel hacking by finally mucking with my own. I’m also looking forward to meeting a good number of people (including many LinuxChix) in open-source whom I’ve admired for quite some time and asking them lots and lots of questions once I get excited enough to forget that I’m shy. And I will, for the second time (in 2 weeks, too) miss a keysigning. Oh well. I’ll make one someday, I’m sure.
Suggestions for things to do, people to meet, and events to document are very welcome – I’m playing most of this by ear, and my transcription skills* are open to anyone who needs ‘em.
*Old journalistic habits die hard; I type, sketch, record, or photograph everything I go to. As Ed McNierney said at FUDCON: “I’ve discovered a new form of communication. It’s called the Mel-a-gram. If you want to document something, you send Mel there, and then magically, you know everything.”
Sunday, January 18th, 2009 | events, lca | 3 Comments »
I wasn’t particularly proud of stuffing in code comments like “horrible abuse of global variables” or “wastes memory, but we can afford it” yesterday, but… it worked, and it’s a one-off that’ll never have to be touched again.
Shiny: liquidpcb looks like a nifty thing to try – and I finally have plane tickets to LCA! (And much less money – but more than I thought I’d have. I’m going to be able to stay within trip budget, it looks like!) Adam pointed me towards Edward Hasbrouck’s books on being a nomad, so next time I travel I’ll have to actually look at that and do it with more planning.
Yifan’s curled up at the head of the bed in a fetal position in front of her attempts to make Python produce a tetrahedron and I’m sitting at the foot of my twin mattress listening to “Stacy By Gaslight” (my favorite song by Shreyas’s band).
I’m rambling now. I started having fun with classical piano again at the acetarium last night, messing with the rhythms and inversions on some Beethoven sonatas. It feels comfortable – but I know I’ve been on that plateau too long and need to keep pushing myself to get off it. So it is with many other things; now that doing community facilitation stuff at the level I’m doing it at has lost its terror (putting together an unconference, moderating a meeting…) I feel this great compulsion to rest and just be okay at it. I’m okay at a lot of things compared to many folks, but that’s not the point – the point is whether it’s okay compared to what I could do. The ghost of what I could be is my most persistent and annoying competition.
So I slammed through a bunch of OLPC support-gang tickets to get my rear back in gear (thanks to cjl for setting an excellent example), and now – well, 303 emails is better, down from 360 or so. I’m still not all that responsible or reliable, but at least I’m now painfully aware of it when I fail, which is the first step to failing less, right? Gotta set up my feedback mechanisms before I can respond to and learn from them.
Yifan and I have decided that tomorrow is our vacation day, even though I “don’t have work” and she’s been “on vacation” for 2 weeks. I’ll be working late tonight to get things done so that I can take tomorrow “off.”
And then we also realized that we don’t know what to do with free time. (Our current best attempt: “There are… restaurants around, and we could eat.”)
Perhaps we work too hard.
Friday, January 16th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I’m playing jazz music continuously through my earbuds at the moment. It’s curious how the way I listen to it has changed over the weeks (now several months) since I started. At the very beginning, it was a “this is new and interesting, but very strange!” reaction, and after a few minutes I’d have to switch back to another style of music so I could listen to something comfortable again. It’s like how when soil goes without rain for too long, it parches up and becomes almost waterproof, unable to absorb the precipitation.
I’m noticing much less discomfort now, and a growing ability to relax into hearing long strings of Monk, Mingus, Tatum… still new, but not so much uncomfortably new. Okay, the things you’re doing start making sense, start fitting into patterns. I can’t play them; I sure don’t understand them. But I can see there’s some sort of pattern forming here in my mind of how this language sounds. There are syllables. The rain has started to soak into the soil. That’s where I am with jazz music; now there are syllables.
And here I also am, feeling like a child; I’m listening to jazz, I’m playing piano, I’m eating eggs and potatoes and drinking cranberry juice from the carton, sleeping underneath a pile of jackets and blankets while others work steadily and tirelessly late into the night at 1cc, on IRC. I’m seeing conversations on picking up the pieces of last week everywhere I turn. I’m like a child sleeping soundly while the adults work; I’m peeking in on them and slipping in and out, but can’t sustain my focus on all of these conversations…
…and then I realize that I can’t, and that I shouldn’t be. Responsible adults know when they shouldn’t focus their attention, where they should drop back and rest so they can do the things that they have got to do, and my focus right now should be on clearing out some things so I can eat and sleep (that’s mostly done now; I can has nutrition) and then on whaling hard on 8.2.1 testing before I leave so that can get out of the way and folks can move onwards to other things like the Fedora/Sugar Labs migration.
I’m very, very blessed to be surrounded by so many people who are Doing Things That Need To Be Done, quietly and well. There’s no drama, no explosions; we don’t have time for that. Just moving foward steadily, holding each other up. I contrast this with the intense, explosive teamwork I experienced as a student, the desperate last days of projects where my teammates and I started sleeping in shifts on the floor, coding in the car, burning bright and burning out together, because we could collapse afterwards. This is how you run when you know that you cannot.
It’s time for me to go rejoin that marathon and continue learning how to pace my sprint.
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 | music, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Piano happiness of the day: shell voicings sound much less odd after two hours of practicing the same song repeatedly with them. In the beginning, I had to keep on cheating and crossing over with my right hand to play the root* because shell voicings sounded so foreign I couldn’t bring myself to play them. Now the trick will be to see whether I can do this for other songs. I’m trying to see if I can play a right hand melody, left hand shell voicings, and hum the root (while sightreading). Coordination! It is fun!
*In a C major chord, C is the root, and the shell voicing I’m playing is the 3rd + usually-the-7th, which would be E and Bb, respectively. Yeah, I didn’t learn this stuff until quite recently either.
Speaking of bass: I’m likely to be traveling a lot in the near and not so near future, and want an instrument I can take with me so I’ll have something I can practice regularly on the road. Being a pianist and a nomad is not, I’ve found, a great combination for someone who hopes for a daily practice routine (hah). The interesting constraint is that the instrument can’t go much higher than an octave above middle C, since that’s when I stop being able to hear notes easily. Tenor sax barely makes it, and is larger than I’d like to haul around. Harmonica and piccolo are definitely out.
However, a fretless travel bass + pocket amp seems to fit the bill quite nicely, and bass is one of the instruments on my short list* to play. This isn’t likely to happen in time for me to be a bass player in Australia/NZ, but I suppose I should be spending my time roaming Tasmania and Wellington in any case. Also, I should earn the money to buy that instrument first instead of just buying it, because… that would be… smarter.
*In order, they are: piano (jazz and classical about equally ranked), cello (in a string quartet, when I really dream), percussion (jazz, taiko, and classical in that order), bass (I’d prefer string bass to bass guitar, but practicality dictates the latter), guitar (I love the sound, but playing the instrument itself may be out because my hand is uncomfortably small; I may have to borrow Leslie’s guitar consistently for a few weeks and see), and saxophone.
During a conversation about portable musical instruments, we also came across a clarinet made out of a carrot and an ocarina made from broccoli, and I acquired new motivation to get my cello up to Boston (possibly in March, when I will hopefully be in IL for PyCon). And I was gratified to notice that in the past two months alone, I’ve gotten way less conscious about messing around with pianos in public spaces – or semi-public spaces, like at Mako’s house the other night. I don’t sound any better, mind you, but I care a lot less about what people think.
I really should record myself playing piano and post it so I can track my progress that way as well.
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | music, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
I’m in the wonderful position of being able to unjobhunt while being surrounded by friends more or less doing the same. It’s not that applying for jobs is a bad thing, certainly, and someday I will probably do it – send out my resume, fill out some forms, crank through some applications… at the very least, for grad school down the line. But honestly, after talking with people (including a very reassuring chat with Lynn – thank you, Lynn!) most folks don’t find their jobs that way in any case; you get hired more often through personal connections. More importantly, it’s hard to find a job you really love through blind applying; it’s like blind dating versus getting to know someone through school, a mutual friend, etc. first and then realizing that hey, you’re mutually single and attracted.
Likewise, I’m a happy freelancer, volunteer, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call it – perhaps “I’m temporarily retired.” I’m doing what I want to do, contributing to the world in the way that feels right to contribute now; I’m happy and I’m also warm and fed. Full-time work is a wonderful convenient package deal that most people take to get Things They Want In Life. But you can get that functionality in other ways – or at least I can for the time being. Here’s Andrea on jobhunting, with similar sentiments to mine:
First, let me address the “how’s the job hunt?” question: in short, it’s not.
Right now, I’m not actively spending my days pouring over job listings and sending out cover letters, and I won’t be anytime soon. Instead, I’m spending way more of my time just talking to people, not in the “I want a job from you” kind of way, but in a “hey, we both do interesting things, and I have the time, so let’s chat” kind of way. If jobs come out of these relationships, then that’s super. If not, that’s totally fine, since the relationships are more important to me. If a job falls in my lap in the midst of everything I’m doing right now, and it’s the right job at the right place, I won’t say no.
People I know are sending me links and leads to jobs, which is always helpful, as long as they fit what I’m looking for. But otherwise, I’ve eschewed the traditional job search for now. More importantly, I’m resting, spending my time doing things I’ve needed and wanted to do, and just enjoying life. I’ll let you know when things change in that respect.
I’ve been harping about the abundance mentality – folks, this is basically it. Today I’ve got a piano to practice and a project to build. If I have time (and I think I will), I’ll also have some testing to do, a massive inbox to go through, and an apartment to clean; plane tickets to book, and several conversations to have.
In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed such things as Indian food at the acetarium accompanied by a research survey discussion, and have worked out a good way to sleep warmly on my floor on my mattress topper, as Yifan is on the bed and Will (Chris’s brother) has borrowed my sleeping bag for the air mattress. You layer your two coats – one for your feet, one for your torso – between the blanket you’re using and the (somewhat anemic, after years of filling being matted into corners) comforter. The keyboard over your head blocks the light from the window and makes it rather comfortable.
I miss taxi rides with Scott now. I think I always learned something from them. Reckon I’ll have to visit Illinois soon, then.
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I transcribed the FUDCon sessions I went to, both Sugar-related. Here’s Greg’s discussion on .rpms vs .xos for Activity packaging, and then Walter’s presentation on Sugar Vision. I was frantically typing these as people talked, so some parts might be truncated into incomprehensibility – please let me know how I can make them more coherent, or just edit them so that they’re better. Thanks!
This is a side note, but the overwhelming thing that’s struck me at FUDCon so far, largely in the context of the OLPC and Sugar stuff going on there (only because all of the FUDCon sessions I’ve been to so far have been about those): I love craftsmanship. You can feel the thought and time and care good makers put into things they make, whether they’re painters, designers, writers, engineers, teachers, marketers, sysadmins, whatever. They have a little bit of their creators in them. I want to use things that were made by people who love making them, and who want me to love using them, and who want me to join them in making things as well.
Saturday, January 10th, 2009 | sugar | No Comments »
A cheerful old man saw my bamboo shinai (from Seth’s German longsword lessons) as I toted my things home from the office last night. “I used to do kendo when I was a teenager,” he remarked. “I can still do it with this-” and he lifted his aluminum cane and cut a few strokes through the cold air. “It’s good exercise.”
At FUDCon most of today. It was good to note that I had no feeling of being cut off, left out, or anything even though technically I no longer work for OLPC. The air is thick with possibility, and I’m enjoying the feeling of “anything can happen!” before things really start coagulating – people are still flying through the air and I’m looking forward to seeing where they’ll land.
But no, I felt at home today; I mean, I’m running through crowds, threading my way from geek to geek, sitting in on interesting talks with even more fascinating backchannels (which I transcribed, I’ll post these in a bit). I met people, set up conversations, kind of tinkered with getting discussions started here and there, laughing and talking and swapping ideas, just being around wonderful people who love what they do, and what they make. I haven’t lost anything at all. I’ve gained a much, much larger sense of wonder, freedom, and possibility.
It’s funny; I’m an engineer, right? Or at least that’s one of the things I am – I make things. But it’s only fairly recently that I’ve been appending another word to that phrase – I make things happen. Sometimes by making things, because sometimes that’s how you solve problems. But getting someone else to solve that problem is solving the problem too.
I feel like I should cultivate a stronger technical background (heck, just more… background) for myself before running off into the community-hat direction much more strongly, but community stuff just feels so right – so natural, in fact, that I didn’t think of myself as doing this stuff until other people told me that I was, and then I didn’t believe them until they started metaphorically shaking me by the shoulders and going “no, this is what you’re contributing; you’re not a lousy coder*, you build communities for good ones.” Then again, when was the last time I ever felt ready for anything I did? (And when have I last let it stop me?**)
*I would phrase this as “not just a lousy coder.” It’s something I’m continuously working on. ;-)
**Well, okay, I didn’t apply for grad school again this year because of that, but that was a different kind of “I’m not ready” – that was the kind that I should listen to, not just a lame argument trying to keep me from doing something I should try but am afraid of.
Yifan and I, inspired by our Wonderful Week of Free Time (all next week – we will spend some of it at XOcamp) have begun to look through textbooks to see which one we want to work through together while she’s here. I’m glad I finally got to spend more time with her and finally had the chance to really work with her on something (the IMSA deployment team).
Exhaustion. Must… hit… pillow. Blankets warm. Onwards to passing out. Posting transcripts first, though.
Saturday, January 10th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This was my last email as an OLPC employee.
Folks,
I’m psyched to be (re)joining the community as a volunteer once more – after all, I’ve been an employee for 3.8 months and a community member for… running over 2 years now. This isn’t an ending, just another step – and I for one welcome our new overlor^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean, I’m looking forward to it.
I’ll continue to manage 8.2.1 testing as a volunteer, among other things – see the scoop on how QA is moving forward as an all-community entity at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_testing_meetings/2009-01-08. I may
make an appearance around Australia (http://linux.conf.au/) and Oceania in general (hello, Welly testers!) and… oh, maybe other places. It’s a big world out there.
Now – I’ve got a bunch of embedded/signal processing/sociology/engineering-education books that have been calling my name for ages… and a piano that I have ignored for years. (Ideas on other fun things to do next are welcomed!) Thank you for all your help, support, teaching, ideas, tolerance, enthusiasm, critiques, inspiration and just plain ol’ companionship along this crazy ride. It’s been good – and will continue to be good. Sweet.
Cheers, then – I’ll be seeing you folks around.
–Mel (mel at melchua dot com, if needed, but @laptop will still work.)
PS: Michael, what’s a social-life? We don’t seem to include that in our packages (http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/joyride/2622)…
Friday, January 9th, 2009 | olin, olpc, sugar, testing | No Comments »
Happy moments today (also: talking with Brian Jordan about deployments, promising to return Henry’s books, plans for lunch next week, being here….)
11:32am: Oh… my god. I am so proud of the IMSA students right now. Arjun and Katie and Jason are standing up there pwning everything; their presentation has started a great discussion with a tough audience of very, very smart people at FUDCON.
1:30pm: Scott and the IMSA students head out – we’ll meet again soon. I’m due for a visit to Chicago in the next few months…
4:15pm: Martin jokes on #olpc-meeting (the last meeting as employees for many of us) that we should rebase to Debian Potato; the entire Amoeba breaks out in shared laughter, though we’re all silently typing into our screens. This is the bit that I will miss.
5pm: I think… that right now, I am the happiest person in the world. (Not for the reason you may think, though. Can’t say why quite yet.)
Now an email, then to Bernie’s. It’s a beginning.
Friday, January 9th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
An email exchange from fall 2006, posted with permission from Gui and Matt, who were kind enough to let me listen to their conversation. We were all strugglng students then, trying to find where our interests fit within the academic system at Olin that had taught us how to question everything, including it.
We still wrestle with tough questions like these as young adults, but I think we’ve also grown up considerably – Matt has been in two successful startups and is now involved with VC-fu in funding them, Gui is doing biomimetic robotics research that regularly makes the news, plus opening a hot new studio that’s almost singlehandedly brought blues dance back to Boston, and I… well, I’d like to think I grew up as well.
Posted without editing, typos/capitalization and all.
Gui Cavalcanti:
so as i’ve been studying for the PDEs exam while listening to mark and ryan talk about high school AP tests, i’ve begun to realize something. i think i’ve really wanted to be “just a gearhead” for a long time. my training as a “mechanical engineer” was mostly done in a series of machine shops where the environment exuded “we don’t need school to do stuff, we get along just fine”, and i think a lot of it rubbed off on me as i looked up to the machinists around me.
as such, sometimes it’s almost as if i want to do poorly in classes that don’t “make stuff”, and that i want to prove stuff can be done without math as often as possible. it’s an… interesting point of view. i think it has contributed to feelings of fear and disdain that i’ve had for math classes. studying for PDEs has definitely changed that, though. i’ve now taken over 45 pages of notes in three days, and i’m understanding it all. i don’t need to reject education for the sake of innate ability, they can coincide. nice.
Matt Ritter:
First off, I’ve definitely felt the desire to try and design entirely by instinct. I understand on an intellectual level why math and sciences are important, but it’s REALLY tempting to just say that I’m good enough (or at least that I can be if I go do exactly what I want to do right now). It doesn’t help that I’ve been unable to ‘break through’ on math like you have. (Tips on that would be awesome, BTW).
I think that a large part of the problem is that we’ve made the mature decision to take our learning into our own hands, but we don’t really know what we’re going to need out there (or maybe that’s just me). I always hear that math and physics are much less important than they seem in school, but to actually make the decision to decrease their priority significantly is a big risk that I’d want some experience before making.
On the other hand, college is only a tiny part of my life as a whole. Actually, what percentage of your learning do you think comes out of college? More importantly, is it /possible/ to learn what you need to know on the job without a college foundation? Maybe our math, while not explicitly employed, is vital to undertstand concepts that will be important. The problem is that I have no idea.
Gui Cavalcanti:
on designing by instinct:
it’s easy, and it’s *almost* fulfilling. it’s kind of like comfort food. you feel like you’re getting things done, you have measureable output, life is good.
after you do it for long enough, though, everything starts to look the same. you get into ruts. you start wanting to do more, but you don’t know how. you feel like you’re building the same thing over and over again. you feel the need to challenge yourself, but challenging yourself with new projects just results in tweaking your existing “build-the-solution” process to fit, and you don’t feel like you’ve learned anything. if you get good enough at tweaking in a certain build space (i.e., CNC mill-centric, lasercutter-centric, welded-tube centric, rapid prototyper-centric, etc. etc. etc.), it’s entirely possible to build prototypes for just about any system you can think of.
a computer architecture project is building a computer out of k’nex. i build what should be a laid-up composite frame out of delrin and garolite sheets.
here’s the thing, though. building approximations and prototypes always results in “good enough” standards. nothing’s optimized, nothing’s predictable before fabrication, everything hinges on the designer not forgetting what they think they know. would you fly in a plane you welded together? if you get to the point where you’ve built enough planes in a certain style to know you can fly safely in them, would you be willing to change build spaces and fly in the first one you build? how do you know their wings won’t be ripped off in flight? do you have any way of knowing other than living or dying in the maiden flight? how do you know if a component is over-designed, and impeding the performance of your plane due its added mass?
math and physics makes predictions and optimizations possible. they let you build good stuff, instead of shoddy prototypes. right now, you pick random dimensions in solidworks that look right. once you get good enough, the dimensions figure themselves out – you just need to plug in the right ones.
on college: you learn everything in college. you’ll probably never be in a place with such a high concentration of accessible diverse opinions and experiences again. the thing is, the *stuff* you’re learning doesn’t matter nearly as much as your *ability* to learn the stuff.
i tend to forget every specific of a math class two months after i stop doing problem sets, but i remember what particular methods are called and what they do for me. i can then look them up and relearn specifics, but the connection has been made in my head and i’m not afraid to learn more about them.
don’t call anything useless, though. that 7/8″-20 tap sitting at the bottom of your drawer is fairly useless until you have to facemount a pneumatic piston to a plate, at which point it becomes the only thing in the world that matters. don’t take tools out of your toolbox if you don’t know what you’re going to build.
design education encourages thinking in a certain way. drawing encourages thinking in a different way. solid modelling encourages thinking in yet a different way. each of these is equally valid, and the more viewpoints you can draw upon the more you can critique yourself and your abilities. math is an equally valid way to view the world, which will help you make certain cognitive leaps when attempting to understand a problem.
Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
