Archive for July, 2009
I missed my plane. A series of weird schedule mishaps (like a rental car shuttle passenger who stood in front of the bus and asked the driver questions for a long time, then once we all got on, had to be taken to another rental car company, go inside, consult with them on something while we waited outside, etc…) meant I made it exactly one minute late to check in for my 8:10 plane (actually, I arrived during the last minute one could check in, but nobody was at the counter, and by the time I went down to the office near the baggage claim I was one minute late). The next one leaves at 6am.
A smart person would spend money at this point: call a taxi, get a hotel room, sleep. I’m learning to be smart. After two hours going “wellll, it’s just 8 hours until the counter reopens,” I thought better of it, called my dad and had him talk me into it, and dropped $55 on a hotel room.
Paul Graham explains why I stopped sleeping at age 11. The schedule he describes, sleeping in the morning, working on a manager’s schedule in the afternoon, and then a maker’s schedule late at night – that’s what I’ve done for 12 years now, except without the “sleeping in the morning” part. I love the middle of the night. I get stuff done.
I should give myself 4 hours of sleep before I catch a plane tomorrow morning, because planes wear me out physically (I may even take a nap upon reaching pika again tomorrow.) Bed.
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
A shout-out to my Olin buddies, since a lot of you have played with laser cutters more than I have. For background, here’s the Fedora symbol…
Now here’s where the laser cutters come in. Simon Wesp is a technically-minded Fedora contributor from Germany.
“I love the fedora logo and I thought I can laser the logo on little stainless steel plates: WNr. 1.4301 (X5CrNi18-10), AISI 304 (V2A), material thickness between 5 and 15 mm, extra fine polished, for a noble look.” –Simon
In order to keep the middle bits from dropping out of the steel plate, the spacing between “holes” has to be at least equal to the thickness of the material being cut. This leads to a distortion of the mark, which is probably not the happiest thing according to the usage guidelines. Here’s the best response I had for Simon’s post to the Design list:
A thought – I don’t know what model laser machine you have, but the ones I’ve seen do both engraving and cutting. Could you engrave the “infinity” part and cut out the “f-cross” part? That would keep the aspect ratio intact. Another technique I’ve seen done involves creating slits for shading…
Then again, what do I know about laser cutting and/or design guidelines? How would you do this on a laser cutter?
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | fedora, olin | 4 Comments »
I am… exhausted. I think I ate too much for dinner – too much heavy food.
And then I had a protracted phone conversation with my brother (my wonderful, wonderful brother) who helped me work through a good portion of my unrest over my (correct) decision not to apply to engineering grad school (just because a choice is right doesn’t mean it’s easy or that I don’t complain about it). He’s in a similar situation – does he study engineering, which is safe and well-known, or design, which is “fuzzy” and “hand-wavy” and the kind of thing prospective employers look at you a little funny for having gotten a degree in? Several months ago, after a similarly long and somewhat agonized “I’ve made my decision, but I’m not sure how to live with it peacefully” conversation, he’s a happy design major. Just as I will soon be an ed school applicant.
This left me physically and mentally drained to a degree I didn’t expect, though – all the pent-up energy that I’d been counting on fueling me all night was actually anxiety that talking with Jason released. Now I’m going through the list of things I planned to do tonight and going “Mel, you overestimated yet again.”
I’m updating the Fedora Marketing schedule from the meeting with Paul and John today (Jack is moving on, so we’ve discussed it and I’m going to keep running forward with Marketing – I need to give Jack a huge thank-you for everything he’s done). Then I’m hollering out the traditional “MEETING TOMORROW!” to the Marketing list, pinging the Docs, News, Design, Websites, and Ambassadors teams to make sure our F12 schedules will be synced up by the start of next week, and going to bed. So yeah, I’m dropping the notion of finishing POSSE note transcription and post backlogs tonight.
And then I’ll wake up early and make semantic mediawiki work for the upcoming SoaS test sprint so I can show James tomorrow at our meeting, pack, check out of the hotel, and drive to work for yet another day full of meetings. I’m looking forward to a quiet rest-of-the-week so that I can sit down and get things done.
Monday, July 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Just switched my laptop over to the POSSE remix, and… hot diggety. F11 boots like a buttered cheetah with frickin’ rockets strapped to its back. Octave and Eclipse are ready to go. All right, I switched from xchat-gnome to xchat2. And nm-applet appears to dislike VPN, though I need to dig a bit more and find out why; after installing NetworkManager-vpnc, I can configure VPN but not connect to it, and the applet when I cancel editing a connection. Must debug. Or really, if I’m going to be efficient, I should just see helpdesk first thing tomorrow morning.
Saw Duke’s campus today – hung out in the student center, walked around, played a random Steinway piano (pretty resonance across the building I was in). This after extended (separate) conversations with Alyshia and Michael, both of which were quite enlightening for very different reasons.
Yesterday was also great; there was a country music festival in the park I happened to walk by on my way to multiple bookstores. Of course, I spent a lot more time in bookstores than I’d planned. I always plan to spend more time in bookstores than I’ve planned… and when I got lost on the way back I ended up watching two back-to-back improv shows (one short form, one long form) instead. They were extremely well done, and if I ever live in the area for any reason, I’m totally training at comedyworx. Improv theatre, I miss thee. (‘course, if I stick around Boston and travel less, I’ll see if I can train at ImprovAsylum. But fixing some things (like my hands and shoulders) first.
Speaking of which, sleeping is good for me.
Monday, July 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
My output is copious because my input is limited.
In the absence of being able to gather in the same amount of information others do – including peripheral awareness of feedback on how I am doing – I spew out lots of output (including output about my lack of input) in the hopes of making my processes more transparent, and in the hopes that others will directly course-correct me if I’m going wrong.
Conciseness makes me blind. When someone can teach me to be otherwise, I’ll gladly learn. ‘Till then, I’ve set my flags to -v.
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Because if it isn’t the right idea, it will become incredibly obvious that this is the wrong decision for Right Now as soon as I finish writing this.
I’m not going to apply to engineering grad school. In fact, I have no plans right now to go to engineering grad school – and by extension, no plans to become an engineering prof.
This could change. I am not saying that I’ll never have plans to go to engineering grad school and become an engineering prof; the option is still open, and I hope someday I will again. But right now, I do not.
If I pursue my PhD in EE, it should be out of love, not duty. I have a strong sense of like for EE research – maybe even a love of some of it (like hearing aid technologies). But I can’t say I’m passionate about it at this point to the same degree that I am passionate about other things, and to try and force that passion would be counterproductive. I haven’t found myself up until 5am reading papers on cochlear implants yet, but I am compelled to do community work and teaching in a way I can’t ignore. I can’t stop doing that any more than I could stop eating or sleeping. But I can stop doing engineering in the way we currently define it by the things we teach our academic undergrads. It’s painful, and I miss it, but I won’t die.
If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.
What I am going to do: I want to go to education grad school. Masters. And then educational sociology, because I’m hungry for that – I have been up at all hours of the night reading the research, trying in small ways to do it on my own, for over two years now. So now those are the only places I’m applying.
I planned on doing education and sociology before, but always alongside engineering, as if the engineering gave me some sort of validation that I was still okay, something that I could do so I could (if I had to) call the education and the sociology “just” stuff I’m doing “on the side.” In other words, dismissing it the way I am afraid I’ll be dismissed because I’m doing this – going against the value structure of a culture that I love and have been fighting to belong to for a goodly portion of my life.
So I’ll be studying engineers – but not studying engineering.
I mean, I’ll probably be taking engineering classes as electives. Because I do love it. And there are things I’d like to learn to make better, and because signal processing math is nifty, and because I want to finally come out the other side of calculus of variations, and because it’s fun to read papers about semiconductors. (And because I hope that somewhere in those engineering electives will be the impetus that sets me on fire for researching this exact thing! in EE or CS so that I do go get that second doctorate – but that’s me trying to force that love again. No. Let it go.)
If I have to choose between being a maker and being a mirror to makers, I’ll choose the latter. I want to be both; I love both. I’ll try to be both as much as I can. But there are better makers out there than I ever shall be. And I can be a darn good mirror. So I should optimize for being a darn good mirror first.
I am still an engineer. This doesn’t make me any less of one, nor am I any less an engineer than anybody else. It’s still a large part of my calling, who I am, and who I will be. (It’s funny, how something can go from “no idea what that is” to “core part of my identity” in less than 7 years.)
And then if along the way I start staying up until all hours of the night doing free body diagrams again, and love it – like I used to read Feynman in high school until I fell asleep (at 3am, with the book sprawled open on my stomach) – then yes, engineering grad school will be in my future again. I hope it will. I’ll be looking for that hope, and moving towards it whenever I get a glimpse. But I should do what I love and what I care about right now. And right now what I care about is community, and understanding it, and understanding learning in community, and shaping things that way.
I’m going to try this thinking on for size a while – I’ve been so deadlocked on moving forward with grad school that I’m being forced to conclude that this is the solution that I’ve been avoiding. And the moment I said it out loud, there was relief – and terror. So I’m going to go wrestle with that terror now. Out to the woods – I’ll be back later in the evening.
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
On my way to the art museum, I got waylaid by a sign that said “Farmers’ Market.” I was hungry. What the heck, I’ll swing by, get an apple, call it lunch.
Then I pulled off the exit and found myself sitting behind a giant pickup filled with watermelons, which was behind another giant pickup filled with cantaloupes, and we turned into a giant outdoor plaza filled with pickups filled with fruit, and I went holyshit.
An hour later, I bump-bumped my way off the parking lot (it was so stuffed with trucks that people had created an extra row in back by driving up the curb onto the grass) with free-range eggs (just fried two; mmm) some peaches, half a dozen ears of corn (that I’d intended to boil, but just spent a few minutes standing over the stove inhaling raw – they’re sweet!) blueberries, blackberries (must do laundry again; berry juice stains), goat cheese, fresh bread, a very, very ripe tomato, a sugar baby watermelon reserved for my trip out to something nature-related tomorrow, fresh whole milk, and an empty tub of banana pudding goat cheese frozen custard (I couldn’t wait that long).
Corn almost gone. Blackberries gone. Eggs dangerously low. (To my cholesterol levels: I apologize.) Time for a second course of ripe peach, blueberries, and milk later this afternoon. I thought this armload would last me the remainder of my stay in Raleigh (4 days), but I may have to get more food tomorrow.
Why would you ever get your food any other way, if you had the choice? Why do we have grocery stores? Why would you not want to walk up and down the aisles, ogling okra, pulling watermelon bits from outstretched sample forks, talking with a goat farmer about the herbs in her cheese logs?
I could get used to this.
Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Just thought about what I would like to do today, and had some thoughts on the last item on my list (reconfigure laptop after wiping it in order to install the F11-based POSSE remix) I wanted to sanity-check here…
I tend to favor the upgrade method of “nuke computer! fresh reinstall!” because I want to keep re-forcing myself through as close an approximation of the first-time user experience as possible (I figure other hackers will test out the other upgrade methods en masse). This means I spend perhaps a day or two a year just reconfiguring my laptop. I find this to be a useful time investment, since it keeps me fluent in new-laptop-setup, which means it’s easier for me to help new users through their process (thereby learning more about what to develop/poke-at to make that experience more friendly, etc.) as well as keeping down the inevitable cruft that accumulates on my computer during the course of a release cycle. (I’ve also moved to a new physical at least once a year since I was 14, so perhaps this is a habit by now.)
However, as a lazy geek, I’d like to have the option of automating the process too. So I have two questions to ask the Fedora community:
- What’s the best way to do this? I’ve saved .history before, but that doesn’t account for all the things I changed about the way I use my laptop since my last install – is there a way to say “snapshot all the packages, plugins, files, configuration settings, etc. from this computer, and then splurt the same stuff into a fresh install of a different release (or maybe even a different distro; my package list is not particulary Fedora-centric, and it’d be good to cross-compare distro experiences), and tell me what broke?”
- How can I not be stupid about security while doing so? In particular, I am debating whether pulling my RSA/GPG/WEP/etc. keys as part of the automated process is possible to do in a non-idiotic way. I could put them in git repos, which is how I’ll be pulling the rest of my (ok-to-be-public) stuff. (Private stuff is only on my computer + a backup hard drive at home right now.) I could password-protect the RSA key checkout (in its own repository, protected by a very, very strong password), then key-auth and check out the remainder of my private files. This makes me nervous, since a single password to protect all this stuff seems like A BAD IDEA. However, the alternative (put git repos on a thumbdrive instead) makes me equally nervous, because if I lose that thumbdrive, it’s all over. (I could have multiple password-protected thumbdrives, yes. But combining two broken solutions does not make a good solution.)
Solutions? The disclaimer is that I know very little about security, other than that It Is A Good Thing, and something I should learn about more. (Total side note: I think it’d be hilarious to coauthor a crypto paper someday with people named Alice and Bob (and Eve, etc.) – my legal name is Mallory.)
Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | fedora | 2 Comments »
What are we doing to do today, Brain? The same thing we do every day, Pinky. *cue theme music*
- Photograph and send NECC receipts
- File (and photograph and send) this trip’s receipts so far
- Go on my traditional “I’m In A New City! Let’s Take A Bookstores Tour!” tour
- …ending at Duke’s campus
- …and possibly a jazz club if I can actually find one tonight.
And then the second shift of “Mel stays awake extra as long as the majority of people sleep”:
- Back up my laptop (mostly done)
- Wipe out my laptop and install Sebastian’s F11-based POSSE spin instead. Yep, I’m going to be using the POSSE spin as my OS until F12 comes out – if we’re going to be giving this to students, I’d better know what you can do with our default set of cool things, so we can come up with a cooler v.1.1 with a better default set of cool things.
- Reconfigure my laptop.
I have some thoughts on the latter that I should actually ask the Fedora community about. Posting there in a moment.
Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I have this soft spot for decidedly non-sappy love songs. This totally counts as AWESOME.
Friday, July 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
