Did I mention that I’m really really excited about community stuff?
*runs around in circles, exhausted but too hyperactive to sleep*
WHEEEEEEEE
Archive for May, 2009
Last night in East Boston
Via Spot, a way you can know your Free or Open Source Software Project is doomed to FAIL. Amusement.
I’m back in East Boston for one last night; tomorrow I wake up ridiculously early, pack up, and move to pika for good. Departure from Raleigh was unintentionally hilarious, involving frantic text messages and Greg running after my departing car with a book. I also managed to lose my badge on my 2nd day – fixed now. (I figure it would have happened at some point this summer so it’s nice to have my stupid moments early.) My plane back got delayed for a bit over 3 hours due to weather, most of that sitting on the DC tarmac squirming restlessly and wishing I had 3G, so I got back to Boston much later than expected, and am exhausted now.
When the plane did take off from DC, there was a gorgeous, bold, crisp, huge inverted rainbow swinging down over the Capitol building right before we lifted through the clouds – and then multiple discrete layers of clouds, all with distinct textures and shading… hazy storm clouds sweeping the ground, massive purple-grey cumulonimbus floating over, then whipped-cream cumulus, then dots of… I’m sure they have a name, but they looked like small, tightly-packed cotton balls, then (very high above) some brushes of cirrus. It was almost worth the delay, just seeing that for a few minutes. It made me want to superimpose a GIMP layer palette over the whole scene and edit/modify the gorgeous clouds layer by layer, just to play (and then undo my work, because nature is a way better artist than I am).
The other side effect of the long transit delay was that I was very hungry when we finally landed. I demolished a giant sausage, a lamb kabob, bread, hot peppers, and a quarter of a monster-sized pizza (by that point I had slowed somewhat). I love having the metabolism of a teenage boy.
It’s been a fantastic first week… being around the CommArch team is like drinking from a dozen firehoses at the same time. They’re making me step up my game to a whole different level. I am still way too excited to actually be doing community stuff for a living. WHEEEEEEEEEokayIshouldgosleepnow. About 3 hours left before I ought to rise and pack.
Stupid Idea: The Gap Year Savings Plan.
Problem: Post-college gap years are great opportunities for young people to pursue their passions, exercise their newly developed self-directed learning abilities, and find ways to contribute to the world. They’re tough to bootstrap up, though – you’ve got to find ways to minimize the startup costs (in money, time, or otherwise) enough that you’ll be able to gather sufficient resources to do it. A lot of folks who’d benefit from a gap year find themselves unable to take it because their dream plans don’t match up with their available resources.
I was lucky enough to know I wanted to save for a gap year starting my freshman year of college, managed to work and save enough to take one, had it in mind all four years of undergrad as an option I should plan for, and… it is the best investment that I’ve ever made in terms of dollars-to-magnitude-of-life-changing-impact. Some of my friends saw that, followed, and likewise had a phenomenal experience. What if other people were made aware of the possibility that they could do the same? How do you do that without taking away the autonomy that makes a gap year truly yours?
Proposal: A program that consists of a linked set of 4 4-year CDs (or something else that’s stable with a fixed term and a guaranteed high interest rate… bonds?) into which you put $250 a month, every month, each year you are an undergraduate. That’s less than $10 a day. (Perhaps you could also hook them up with jobs which they could earn and save that much doing.) Assuming that the CDs average interest rate over those 4 years beats inflation, you’ll be able to draw a monthly stipend equivalent to $1000 of today’s dollars for a year after you graduate while doing Whatever The Heck You Want.
What happens to the interest generated that doesn’t go into beating inflation? That goes to fund the rest of the program, which provides bi-annual coaching sessions (with gap year alumni) and access to networks and directories of gap year opportunities plus a support network during the actual gap year and some followup afterwards. These networks will be open to the public, but the assumption is that people may be more willing to make a risky investment in a relatively unproven young person if there’s a coaching/support network in place to raise their chances of success.
Okay. That’s the idea; it’s very naive. Now tell me why this won’t work; I’m sure there’s something missing. (Or maybe there’s a better solution, too.)
A foodie in the making
New discovery: when you’re in a hotel room the size of your apartment, they will deliver silverware to your door so that you can eat leftover pasta. which you can take from your room’s fridge to your room’s microwave. I am still mindboggled about this. My hotel room has more sinks (3 – bar sink, bathroom sink, bedroom sink) than my apartment does (2 – bathroom and kitchen).
Greg brought me to a place called Ole Time Barbecue for lunch. It was fantastic. I learned what hush puppies are supposed to taste like! (Very, very good.) Also, any place that charmingly misspells “old” or replaces the first and last syllables of ‘nana puddin’ with parentheses is probably going to be both (1) tasty and (2) amazingly unhealthy for you (but you know, you’ve got to live a little). On the other end of the fine dining spectrum, Warren recommended an and jibarra for the next time I’m in town.
I’m still at the point in my life where well-executed good food is a rare treat (I can’t really afford it myself yet, so it’s only when other people take me out to places that I get to do the “fine dining” thing), so while I can easily tell between good food and well-made, great food, my “how great is this great food?” gauge is not yet well developed due to lack of experience. Developing that sense is an incredible pleasure and treat, and I’m grateful to my friends who have taken me to get Good Food. Mmm.
Now I have to step up my cooking so that I can try to recreate some of that experience for those I cook for. Woo!
Signs you may have found your calling
I just looked up and realized
- it’s dark outside
- it’s 8:15pm
- I’ve been working for about 12 hours so far today, and could keep going
- it’s my first day of actual work (before was orientation)
- I have just realized that I am Very Very Hungry (warning sign! must pay more attention to not hyperfocusing lest I destroy the good physical habits I’ve been trying to build!)
I think it is a fairly safe conclusion to say that zomg I love my summer job. “Work On Projects You Care About; Occasionally Get Paid” is turning out to be… a pretty good career (non)strategy.
Here’s what I’ve done so far this week at Red Hat (note that since all my projects are community projects, I can and should be transparent about everything). I have pictures of stuff, too, but uploading them will have to wait until tomorrow.
Mel Is (more) Excited (than usual)
Good lord my happy puppy enthusiasm goes to 11 today. “Newplacenewpeopleawesomeprojectsohboyohboyohboyohboy YAYYYY!!!!” Must occasionally remember to breathe. Red Hat intern orientation is over now, and I’m starting to Get Stuff Done (TM). More on this later when I emerge from today’s meetings with a better sense of what exactly I’m doing.
It’s great to be catching up with everything I’ve missed from being computer-crippled from RSI. Granted, I’m catching up slowly, since I’m still limiting my keyboard usage so I don’t have a relapse. But I finally got to see Gary’s pictures from SugarCamp Paris (it looks like great fun! I wish I’d been there – I miss everyone!) and listen to Diana’s chaos variation mp3s all the way through. I haven’t yet refreshed my memory on LaTeX or Scribus, but when I figure out projects I have to do anyway that I can make Better Looking Through Good Typography, that problem will be solved.
In the meantime, I will continue to approximate an overjoyed corgi who’s learned how to type at 130wpm.
“Mama, how old are you?”
We shattered my cousin’s world yesterday.
For my 5th aunt’s 50th birthday, her 7 sisters (and nieces and nephews and mother and friends) made a song-and-dance revue DVD. It featured such songs as 49 going on 50 (“Your life, Lynne May dear, is an empty page / that menopause will write* on”) and Drama Queen (“Drama queen / Young and sweet / Only go-tsap-he**”) We watched it yesterday, my aunt howling in laughter on the couch.
*they changed it to “rile on,” but I like the original better.
** Hokkien for “50 years old.”
In the midst of all this, Audrey (age 5) got a puzzled look on her face. “Mama,” she said in consternation, “how old are you?” It eventually came out that she had previously thought her mother was 29 years old. (We are not sure how that happened.) Upon being informed that her mom had actually turned 50, she burst into tears. Watching a small child vacillate between extreme drowsiness and distraught surprise is… weirdly entertaining and simultaneously kind of touching. (More the former than the latter, for this topic.)
Melanie and I played with Garage Band today and made a first attempt to lay down a 6-part a cappella on-the-fly rendition of (Coldplay’s Viva la Vida) with two people (after I tinkered a bit and came back with a one-Mel 4-track rendition of Don’t Worry Be Happy). Our version of Vida features me rhythmically coughing into my hands in a (failed) attempt to sound more like a bass drum and Melanie leaning back from the microphone and yelling the background “Whoooah-ooah-oooah-ooh-eh” that floats over the last verse. We are definitely not publishing that track.
That track also highlights the fact that neither of us is a soprano, no matter how hard we try. But it was fun! And it taught us things about the way the software worked and how we could record and layer sound in it. And eventually we found ways to tweak ourselves (I found a better bass drum vocal percussion method) and the software (Melanie started looping some of our better snippets) to make better music.
Tonight I’m moving (most of) my bed and (most of) my computer workstation to pika, and sleeping in my new room (sink with Matt, woo!) for the first time. Off to pack!
Breathing in
Today I found out what it means to take a deep breath, one that makes your ribcage expand, your whole spine stretch out as the oxygen comes in. There’s scar tissue that’s been in my chest for two decades from the pneumonia days. Imagine a 3-year-old with her tiny ribcage a battlefield of chest tube scars. Imagine this kid growing up, shooting up like a weed into lanky adolescence, scar tissue stretching across the much, much larger torso of a 23-year-old.
Imagine that some of that twisted corset just got released.
Imagine the surprise of feeling your ribcage move. Undulate. Articulate. Expand like a balloon when you inhale. Not fluidly, and not symmetrically – my ribcage feels like a blotchy tough thick latex balloon blowing out in weird lumps – but it’s enough for me to know that oh, it’s supposed to move, supposed to feel like something other than carved wood, that this expansion and contraction and elongation that I’m starting to feel should become my conception of What Normal Lungs And Spines And Ribs Do.
I wonder if I could find a peak flow meter somewhere and test out my new lung capacity. This kind of thing is what I’ve needed; a different physical and intellectual model for what my body could become. Your shoulders move! Your collarbones articulate! You should be able to exhale, inhale, run, sing – your body is a living, moving thing. Not just an ambulatory robot that can get your brain between keyboards; it only felt that way because everything’s been locked up for so long.
I need to find ways to not lose this.
3 things for tonight
- Maia has a good post looking at Olin admissions criteria (“What if Olin admissions had a maximum GPA?”) and peeling back the hood on why we might have them.
- Sour cream ice cream is actually very, very good, at least when made at Toscanini’s. Who knew? It is not a complete dinner, however. (I am going to remedy that now.)
- When I am tired, I should go to sleep before I get too silly.
What it sounds like to hear like Mel
Hm.
After some exercises that resolved into increasingly dissonant (to me) chords (“you have to get used to it,” said Kevin), I mentioned the Other Reason I started learning jazz piano months ago; the type of cognitive dissonance it gives me feels like the same kind of mental pain I get when I put on my hearing aids, and maybe by learning how to deal with one, I can better deal with the other. He was intrigued. Now I’m trying to find better ways to explain the relationship between my piano-playing and my listening, and how my hearing affects that, because I’ve discovered that my explanations only actually work well for engineers (“so imagine a filter that looks like this…”).
I will someday have to make better, custom-fit recordings of this sort of thing, but here are some sound files from Phonak and a bunch of mp3s . I have a severe high-frequency sensorineural loss that’s noticeably worse than the “moderate” loss displayed by Phonak (as far as I can tell by eyeballing the audiogram), and I can’t hear the 2000Hz sample (and higher) with my laptop speakers cranked all the way up (…not saying much, I know), and beyond that I’m not sure how to give others a good gauge for this, because I’m locked inside my own head, my own cochlea.
Incidentally, when I listen to the samples from both sites, I don’t notice any difference in sound quality – only volume. I hear all the same noises, as far as I can tell. They’re just softer. So I’m curious to hear what sounds disappear, reappear, transform, pop out, or otherwise sound different to you folks with normal hearing. I’ll also note that I’m listening to these on laptop speakers, not exactly known for their range and quality of audio reproduction.
Yeah, I’m spiral-learning on this. A lot. Forgive my repetition; these are as much for my present self to make sense of the world as they are for my future self to look back on what I used to wonder.
