Archive for January, 2010
There are different types of tiredness, like different types of fine wine. I’m in a comfortable-tired spot right now, the kind I like. The kind that stops my brain from buzzing and lets me think a little bit more calmly and more clearly than I usually do. (The kind that’s quickly recoverable from with a 1-3 hour nap, too. Bonus!)
From Yaakov, via Adam’s blog: if I were settling down, I’d love to make a LackRack coffee table. Or perhaps a sofa-side table, saving the actual coffee table for some other fun thing.
Today has been a blur. I’m starting to realize that the past couple days of “but I didn’t do anything!” have actually been filled with madcap whirls of utterly unrecorded activity. Here’s some of what I did today. A very, very small portion – these are the chunks large enough to put into sentences.
Admissions: Finished my duties as an application reader for the Olin class of 2014. This was a difficult job – I expected it to be – but I had a good time, and learned a little more about the workings of undergraduate education behind the scenes. It’s fascinating, especially since it doesn’t feel like all that long ago that I was 16 and on the flip side of the process, surreptitiously sneaking away from my grandparents’ New Years party in the Philippines to frantically type application essays right before the deadline. (It was exquisitely timed. I will never do that again.) Seeing things from multiple perspectives simultaneously is one of the most fantastic parts of this “accumulating experiences” deal that comes with getting older. (Also, good luck to all the applicants!)
FADs: Housing! Budget! Equipment! Logistics! Event planning was never something I thought I’d ever do, but it turns out that I’m actually pretty good at it. I am excited by sprints. Also, being able to tell other people to figure out how to spend $900 on shiny equipment is one of the coolest feelings ever.
Fedora Insight: The “get Insight up!” baton seems to be back in motion and passing around again, thanks to Max. This is the first thing I’ve actually ever gotten into production, which has been… well, I’m reminded of last year when I tried to attack a Mingus piece as a total jazz piano beginner. “This can’t be all that bad,” I thought in the beginning. Then: “Ok, I hadn’t seen that coming. But this part won’t be all that bad.” Then: “Well, that was hard too. But, y’know, this part, how bad can it be…” (and so forth). It’s a bit like counting to 100 when you only know your numbers up to 7 and aren’t initially told that numbers 8-99 exist; previously I’d counted to 6 and then gone “wait, my list says we are essentially done but we can’t be done yet,” then stalled in confusionland ’till that realization hit. Mm, learningness.
I’m literally forming my first notions of How To Get A Project Up And Going right now. It’s a good experience, and I’m not displeased with the results so far, but I know that someone who did have that experience could have done a way better job than my best attempt as a first-time through something like this. Long-term investment in my future usefulness, though; this is a good sandbox for me to play in. (Now I just need to keep telling myself that, and keep moving this forward.)
Travel planning! So many emails sent out today about my travel this quarter – I’m starting to get the sense that the way I operate is to designate SPRINT TIMES! in my life and then spend the rest of my time making sure those sprints are going to be insanely intense and productive for as many people as possible. My Rochester/Toronto trip schedule is beginning to look like my college schedule, which will probably make any former classmates of mine gasp in horror, and makes me grin maniacally. I make sure I get proper rest before, after, and during sprints, so no worries about burnout there.
SLOBs are prepping (exhaustively) for Friday’s meeting in the hopes that we can finally, finally get through the “we need a trademark usage policy” issue. I realize that every step of the journey has been necessary to get to where we are, I’m just trying to get us to walk faster. As part of this “walk-faster”ing, I started writing pseudocode for our trademark policy, whereupon Chris Ball completely made my day by responding with a patch. I wrote a longer post on this for Planet Sugar Labs, cribbed from my shout-out to iaep.
Lots of emails. Lots and lots of emails.
While taking a break tonight after dinner, I got called in for advice on tech deployment for a disaster relief medical station for the Haiti earthquake victims and going “your specs almost exactly match these open source projects (Sahana, RapidSMS, etc), here’s how you get in touch with them” and generally laying the groundwork so that the route to having them interface well with open source communities can be at least potentially open. Potentially. I tend to place lots of tiny long-term bets down where I can.
After the dust cleared and I breathed a bit, I was a somewhat stunned; I usually associate that ability for madcap improv at that level, with that fluency, with… older people. Older, more experienced people who Know Stuff and feel comfortable just kinda reaching out into the world – little twitches and flicks of the fingers, placed just right, and the whole freakin’ universe shifts and changes. Dunno if any portion of the universe is going to shift and change because of tonight, but I felt like I just should reach out in that way, tweak this, say that… I don’t understand where this instinct comes from, or what turns it on. And I always worry I’ll get cocky if it comes too frequently or lasts too long. It isn’t me – it works through me.
I feel like that right now, but in a weird way – a slow way, not a clear blasting sprint like I’m used to; a slow, trickling, hidden-in-fog way. I’m doing what I should be doing, mostly, but… I can’t… figure out why, and why it still feels… more… stuck. Or maybe I’m just used to moving fast and anything other than warp speed feels like stuckness, even if it’s just my lack of patience talking.
…and when I start writing like that, it’s really time to go to bed.
Thursday, January 21st, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
From a thread on iaep some of you may have already seen – administrative stuff below. I’m trying to make it as interesting as possible, believe me.
In an attempt to line things up so that we can get efficiently through Friday morning’s meeting (and, I hope, nail those Trademark notions through), Walter, Bernie, and I started a meeting prep page.
It’s got handy-dandy background information references, discussion points, budget proposals with rationale, draft motions to be proposed after discussion points have been worked through, probable follow-up actions for if a motion passes, and the like. There are some missing bits we could use to improve this document so we can really CRUSH THINGS! on Friday.
- Walter uploaded a quick status update on finances so we don’t need to spend a lot of time coming up to speed on the state of things at the beginning of the meeting. Where do our finances stand? Do we need to worry about taxes, etc? Any impending invoices? Who’s responsible for keeping track of this, where are they filing things, and when are we regularly checking in on financial matters? That’s all set for now. What we need is a volunteer to step up to continue keeping track of these things for the next 9 months. We’re in need of an interim treasurer until the next election cycle; if you’re interested, please inquire on iaep, in a response to this post, or somewhere that will give us the ability to contact you about this. If you know accountants who’ve been interested in open source but thought they couldn’t contribute if they didn’t know how to code, here’s a good opportunity. *wink*
- Are we missing any discussion points for the trademark issue? Chris has already found a bug, which has resulted in a proposed code commit and a subsequent patch. Help us find more!
That’s all – thanks for your patience, everyone! Thoughts/comments/patches/flames extremely welcome.
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | sugar | 1 Comment »
For reference. I think I’m 3 in this photo.
…long story.
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I love this post by Lucy and the comments by Sumana and Sanders. Not necessarily because I agree or disagree or have particular thoughts on the matter, but because I love watching this sort of discussion – watching teaches me how to potentially participate in those discussions, down the road, should I choose to say something I have to say. (Right now, I don’t have much to say.) I like picking up skills as I need them, and I also like picking up awareness that I can pick up these skills – and a notion of how I could learn them and who could teach me – well in advance of needing them, or starting to learn.
Via Karsten: there’s a Center for Non-Violent Communication, and they have books and classes. The definition according to Wikipedia:
Language, thoughts, communication skills and means of influence that serve my desire to do three things:
- to liberate myself from cultural learning that is in conflict with how I want to live my life.
- to empower myself to connect with myself and others in a way that makes compassionate giving natural.
- to empower myself to create structures that support compassionate giving.
Sounds about right – particularly the first bullet point. I’m interested in how they put these concepts together into a teachable framework – how do you get something to the point where you can say “if I do $this_thing, then X% of the people present will $understand in a $short_period_of_time”? And sometimes $this_thing is improvise – sometimes it’s “send one of these people because no two classes are the same but they can adapt to anything” – and sometimes what it means to $understand can shift and change from person to person, time to time, place to place – but it’s teachable. Deployable. Spreadable.
I’m having some trouble with “release early, release often” right now – my fingers don’t want to sit down and type my messy handwritten grad school application notes (whiteboards, notebooks… dating back months! of continuous revisions) into digital form. Wait, Mel, I say. Aren’t you supposed to be able to do this stuff? Isn’t RERO a cornerstone of open source practice? It is. And it’s sometimes really, really hard for me to do, too. And I’m working on it – these have to be typed and uploaded, and the deadline I’ve set for myself is 8.5 hours from now. Self-imposed last-minute-panic (I always think of this Calvin and Hobbes strip when I say that) occasionally works wonders.
I spent the weekend resting – my variant of it, anyway. A lot of reading, thinking, music (sightreading a lot of Mozart on demand from curious Audrey), cooking, a little working, library run with Melanie, reading through a 2-foot stack of books after dinner tonight (well, okay, more like 1 ft 10 in, but still – felt great). Coffee, of course. And yes, the next day I did get joking “…is the caffeine still in your system?” comments because I’m still hyper and excited, even when I’m resting – but I’m resting. No dancing; no MIT Mystery Hunt, no Sunday bar hangout, nothing requiring extroversion. I needed an emotional battery recharge, and I got it. It’s good. I know how to run hard. I’m learning how to run sustainably.
I’m off to sleep, perchance to dream, perchance to see some friends. (I love Calvin and Hobbes.)
Monday, January 18th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
All right, I think I’ve figured out what bothers me about Clay Shirky’s rant about women. It’s because I read it as saying this:
- The world can be sucky and unfair to women who don’t use aggressive male-like strategies to promote themselves.
- So women should use more aggressive male-like strategies to promote themselves.
- Yep, it’s sucky and unfair that the burden should fall on women to do this sort of thing. Tough.
It isn’t that I disagree with any of these points – but there’s a missing part. Compare:
- Hey, this $cool_technology I use has $inconvenience for folks who have a certain $preference.
- So folks with $preference should use $alternative_action to do $thing_they_wanted_to_do, even if it’s difficult and bothersome for them.
- Yep, it’s sucky and unfair that the burden should fall on people with said $preference. Tough.
To which my immediate reaction – to both – is “HEY! Aren’t we hackers? Isn’t the point not that the world may not be what we want it to be, but that even if it is, we can change that?“
This doesn’t mean the world is not sucky and unfair in the ways described. This doesn’t mean short-term coping solutions need to be deployed to cope with that immediate reality. It does mean that those coping solutions should be just that – short-term. That what we should do, if we’re truly troubled with this situation, is to find our own ways – little ways – to contribute to making that solution as short-term as possible for as many people as possible.
Here’s the patch I would have liked to apply.
“It may be possible for the world to someday be less sucky and unfair about this sort of thing. Here is what that may look like and how we – of any gender – can help get us there, and how people have already been doing this for quite some time.”
Thinking and writing about this is a start. A great start. The next step is to be actively conscious of not using “learned helpnessness” as a reason to not proactively do something about the situation (which, ironically, is criticizing a group for being disadvantaged due to socially-inculcated “learned helpnessness”). And yes, actively looking for opportunities to help is, in itself, a way and opportunity to help.
As Meme commented on the original post (thanks to tigtog for highlighting this comment):
“It can be called a second-wave chauvinistic approach: assuming women are flawed because they don’t deal well with the system, instead of assuming the system is flawed because it doesn’t work for women.”
Ok, yes, there are ways in which the system sucks. But look – we’re hackers. Let’s go fix it.
Sunday, January 17th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Please don’t automatically say that I do $thing despite $situation.
I do $thing. And $situation exists. Those are the only facts we have. Please don’t assume that there is a “despite” or a “because” or any other sort of causal link involved. There may be; there may not be – please try to find out if there is instead of jumping to conclusions.
Thank you.
Note: I don’t expect people to read or know or adhere to this or even remember all the time if they happen to read this or something like it – just noting a preference that, for now, I will continue to assume I have to bear the burden of adapting to the world for, instead of the other way around.
Sunday, January 17th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Chris Carrick took me on a tour of his favorite Boston coffeeshops today in an attempt to persuade me that coffee does not suck. I went and researched the effects of caffeine beforehand and estimate that I have had somewhere between 500-600 mg of caffeine in the span of 2 hours today; despite hydrating and eating before the journey and afterwards to try and slow the absorption-into-bloodstream, I’m still as jittery as hell, but probably not as much as if I hadn’t done that. The trip was timed so any effects would wear off in a few hours, long before sleep-time. Drinking lots of water now as well to forestall (or at least slow) any headache-potential.
Round 1: Taste (Newton)
- expresso (“wow, it… doesn’t suck!”)
- cappuccino (“fern!”)
Round 2: Barismo (Arlington)
- expresso (much brighter and sweeter than the first, regaled with tales of coffee travels, roasting, etc. as it brewed; they roast their own beans here and hacked their roasters to give them even more control)
- drip coffee (the taste changes as the temperature does – fascinating)
They did not have this today, but according to Chris, the best coffee in the shop is any of their Kenyan roasts, syphon-brewed.
Round 3: Simon’s (Cambridge)
- cappuccino (nom!)
- mexican hot chocolate (spicy!)
It was great! I learned about the different things that affect the flavor of coffee, the physics of how the funny-looking machines of various types worked. I can certainly see why people would enjoy the taste of coffee.
I am, however, still a tea person.
Saturday, January 16th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Heidi submitted a panel proposal on Teaching Open Source for FIE 2010, one of the major engineering education conferences. It’s good to watch folks who know what they’re doing do what they know – now I’ve seen the revision process and the back-and-forth for an academic conference submission, and have a bit more of an ear for that for next time. It’s not that these things are hard, it’s that you don’t know how they’re easy.
They’re holding a Pseudo[0] in memory of Scott this weekend; I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fly in and out of Chicago for it, but I’d like to. I’ve got to run the numbers and my calendar. It’d mean I would be doing the MIT Mystery Hunt mostly remotely again, but you know what? I can Hunt any year.
It turns out that cooking is an excellent way to kick yourself out of a mild funk and get moving again. My keyboard breaks today were spent buying cheese, chopping carrots, steaming broccoli, and the like, and at the end of the day I have produced…
- Cream of broccoli soup
- Macaroni and cheese (from scratch)
- Garlic vegetable noodle stirfry
- Pasta bake
- Grilled asparagus
- Leek and potato soup, redolent with fresh dill
- Chopped pizza toppings for tomorrow night
- Ziploc bags of peeled and chopped carrots and peppers for future recipe use
At this point I ran out of containers to put food in, or I’d have kept on going with the eggplant and the shrimp and the salad greens and such. My ability to focus mentally without a physical activity to ground me came back around midnight; I think sometimes I need to have people around that I’m not interacting with so I get a low level of activity that my brain can filter out and ignore while still staying stimulated enough to not go rocketing around the place. In college, I could walk into a hallway nook and plonk down and a friend would probably be studying there; it’s a little harder now.
Audrey likes me bringing her to school, and so I was declared at least partially Ready To Be A Mommy. “NO, I am NOT,” I declared. “Sit down. Eat your soup.”
[0] For those who didn’t go to IMSA: Club Pseudo is our open-mic/improv-theater night, held approximately monthly. Scott was a big Pseudo fan when he was at IMSA – he’s one of the backup singers in Steve Blunt’s classic “IMSA Diddy-Wah” music video, something I only realized today upon seeing it again, despite having been a fan of the (inside-joke) song for nearly a decade. It may have something to do with the extremely long hair.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’ll miss you, Scott. I’d hoped to see you one last time, but I guess you don’t always know when you say goodbye that it’s going to be the last time. You and Arjun, Katie, Jason, and Yifan being in Boston this time last year was one of the things that kept me going then, and I’m glad we had the chance to have the conversations we did. You, sir, inspire me.
Enjoy the gourmet food up there. I hear it’s great. I’ll see you in about 80 years or so.
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Great, now “Geile Zeit” (English translation) is stuck in my head which I have attempted to render in guitar. (“Attempted” would be the right word there; I’m strumming pretty violently and also figured out the chords as I went along, so my hand is awkwardly muting strings it’s not supposed to mute, etc. I do not actually play guitar.)
It’s nice to be able to comfortably sightread most non-classical piano pieces I come across. A more accurate term might be “fake sightreading” – I don’t actually play all the notes (sometimes I play more than all the notes), I look at the sheet music, make an invisible fake-book in my head, and play from that, scaling the difficulty up or down as I need to. So I can leave off notes on chords that stretch my hands too much, or add a few turns of ornamentation during a boring section, in realtime, on music I’ve never seen or heard before. It… is… awesome. And I am totally on a plateau, but I’ll enjoy this coasting while it lasts – just settling back and enjoying the chord changes on “The Nearness Of You” and “Round Midnight” and various Elton John / Stevie Wonder / Billy Joel transcriptions (what? I like their music). I’ll often take a section mid-song and plunge it into the lower registers where I can hear everything, and then it just sounds (and feels) terrific. Mmm.
Today wasn’t particularly productive – I was tired and sort of scattered-distracted, and music was the only thing that could hold my attention for any length of time. So I worked in short spurts broken into small tasks, and got into a longer sprint just now – started around 10pm, and it’s now half-past midnight, and that’s the first time I sat still not-at-the-piano-bench for more than 20 minutes at a time all day. (Tiredness helps; I just had to get worn-out enough to sit.) ADHD brain management is aggravating sometimes, but it’s also an entertaining and grand adventure – and something you just deal with.
Time to clean the kitchen, look for my floor (I’m rediscovering it slowly as the piles of stuff begin to clear) and then sleep for a couple hours.
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
