Posts that are Uncategorized-ish

Lifehacking so far this semester


From Katie, regarding admissions – she’s talking specifically about our alma mater, Olin, but I think it applies to any school (or company) that wants to chart their own path.

I’m afraid that if we publicize ourselves as seeking to select the “best” students for admission, we will get… more box-tickers. Fewer lifelong learners. More obedient queuers. Fewer spontaneous beekeepers. More people aiming to graduate and be named “exceptional” for doing so. Fewer people aiming to shape the school that will (sometimes just barely) graduate them, and who actually do all the revolutionary rule-breaking that “exceptional” implies. (emphasis mine)

To this I say amen.

This weekend will be devoted to getting my life in order for the storm of travel that is to come between next week and the beginning of April. Once I get on my first plane, I believe there will be a grand total of 5 days where I’m not traveling. Amazingly enough, I managed to arrange my schedule so I’ll miss a grand total of one class – which is having an exam that day that I’ll simply take early.

Time management for this semester has not been perfect (it never will be), but it’s been amazingly good. The secret? Waking up early. Very, very, very early. And sleeping early – and adequately – and eating well, which sometimes for me means not guilting out over spending $3.50 on a large soup for lunch when I forget to pack the homemade meal I made the night before. Doing work at the office and being focused about it, and trying not to bring work home.

And that is how I juggle 4 graduate classes plus an independent study plus research on three days a week – I do that Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and freelance and do my own reading (and some of my own research) Thursday-Friday. I have breaks, I take walks, I hang out with classmates, I spend entire days doing things other than work; I sleep, I eat, I go to random movie showings and talks and other campus events, I audit German 201 when I can and work my way through my grammar book when I can’t, and I spend time doing things like “let’s explore the hearing thing!” (read: go see audiologist, drive back and forth across town figuring out how Vocational Rehabilitation state services work, etc.)

It helps a lot that grad school classes for me have been heavily reading-based so far, and I’m a fast reader; one professor dumps about 300 pages of dense developmental psychology on us every week, and I usually read it after dinner on the evening it’s assigned. In fact, I try to do all my work for a class on the day of that class – a week before it’s due, that is, not the morning-of. And I do all of my meeting/workgroup followup immediately after the meeting (if I can) or that same day (if I can’t). This means I have some very, very long Mondays – 3 of my 4 classes meet on Mondays – but I know that when I’m done, I’m really done. It’s amazing how wonderful it feels to know it’s not possible for you to be forgetting something.

Again, it’s not perfect. I slip. I slip a lot. But it feels like I’m using my time more effectively this semester than I have in… any other semester I have ever been at school, so something’s working. And I’m letting myself do that – I’m trying hard things, it’s ok if I fail, I recalibrate and get back on track and readjust the track instead of beating myself up… which takes a lot of willpower, because it’s the intellectual-rational part of my brain that needs to keep on shouting “IT’S OKAY DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP” when I… beat myself up. (Instinct! It’s hard to fight that habit!) But progress is being made!

It helps to have something you really want to do. And it helps to make yourself focus on several things you want to do, and to turn down stuff, or keep extra stuff optional, so you don’t end up with towering piles of obligation. I suppose I would summarize my strategy this term as “when you take on an obligation, do it immediately, thus acquiring no obligation backlog whatsoever.”

I’d like to get better at regular exercise, which is something I’m still experimenting with – none of my lifehack attempts so far have gotten me to exercise regularly this semester, so I’ve decided that I’ll take advantage of Purdue’s cheap ($45 for the semester!) group fitness classes. Sure, maybe I should be able to do pushups on the floor of my own apartment. But I’m still new enough to the whole “fitness” thing that having structure, company, and people to nag me about my form is not a bad idea – and then maybe I’ll do pushups at home to practice outside of class. Who knows?


And the braindumping’s done.


As you can tell from my posts today – my brain is overflowing, and I’m trying to get it out so I can process it all. It’s nearly 9pm and I should go home, eat dinner, work on a side project, sleep… but it feels good to have my mind clear, my plate clear, to not worry that I won’t remember something later. Clearly I need to balance out this tradeoff more, but… I’m not in a bad place right now. I’m actually in a pretty good one. The trick, as always, is to see what happens when the pace picks up.

Had one of those “wait, how did 4 hours pass, and is it really 3am now?” conversations with Mark last night; there’s something satisfying in the sort of friendship where you can go months without contact and still know you’ll be slugging it out, no-holds-barred, over your new ideas and directions within a few minutes of starting to talk again. I give him shit, he gives me shit, and we thereby keep each other honest.

Sebastian sent me “WAT,” a brilliant 5-minute lightning talk on programming languages that left me howling with laughter. Via Karl Wurst came an insightful blog post on defaulting to closed and  Macneil Shonle’s “Why I Will Randomly Assign Students in Group Projects.” Fellow Olin alum Katie Rivard pointed me to Up The Ivy, an old satire of academic culture.

And now it’s time for coffeehouse decompression with Velvet and Nikitha. Mmm… quiet time.


An engineer in the art department: disjointed moments


Shannon asked me to keep track of the “moments of disjointedness” I came across as an engineering (education) student in an art and design (research methods) class, so here’s the starter list:

  1. IRB. “Wait. Not only do you not do IRB, you don’t even know what it is?” (Not Shannon – she trained as a sociologist. I meant the art/design students.)
  2. How we describe ourselves. We had to write artist/designer statements for ourselves and for somebody else. An artist/designer statement by an artist or designer reads sort of like… philosophy. An engineer’s “artist/designer statement” reads like a resume parsed as a technical specification. (There’s another engineering education student in the class.)
  3. What we need to justify. I showed Shannon the abstract I was working on and braced for questions on my (fuzzy and emergent) methodology – but she took one look and nodded – “ah yes, grounded theory!” – and said it looked good. “Wait. You… didn’t ask me to justify this? It looks okay? But it-” …is much more normal to be things-other-than-positivist in social science research. Yes. Forgot about that.
  4. Thesis work. Art and engineering students tend to produce their Masters’ theses in two parts: a Thing and a Paper. In Engineering,the Paper is about the Thing. It describes the Thing, how made the Thing, how the thing Works. The Paper About The Thing is the Thesis. In contrast, art students are specifically not supposed to write their Paper about their Thing. They are not to explain their Thing. Instead, the Paper is a separate work that complements the Thing – I am not sure what that means yet – and the two together form the Thesis. I… am still trying to figure this one out. And don’t even ask me what a PhD in art looks like!

There are, I realize, huge differences between art and design – I’m not yet attuned to what those differences are (Shannon explained a few to me – department cultures, the objective/subjective balance in their work, individual vs collective shows, and so forth). So that’s something for more exploration later.


How to do food challenges: diet experiments with (some) rigor!


I went to see the University’s nutritionist today. I wanted to learn how to experiment more rigorously with my diet in order to increase cognitive function. Specifically, over the past few years I’ve noticed these foods have some effect on my ability to think clearly:

  1. Gluten.
  2. Lactose. (Yogurt/kefir/cheese seem to be fine as long as I don’t go nuts.)
  3. Meat. (Red meat more than white meat, white meat more than seafood.)

I’m not allergic to any of these, but I do appear to be sensitive – it’s almost as if those three substances each has a slowly-draining reservoir (for engineers: look, it’s an integrator! For Oliners: look, it’s a bathtub!) somewhere inside me, and if I “fill” the reservoir by eating that substance faster than it can drain, my brain starts doing funky things. Actually, it’s not “as if” there were a reservoir – there is. It’s called my bloodstream.

The usual procedure for an experiment goes something like this:

  1. Reset environment to known control state.
  2. Introduce the intervention.
  3. Record results.

The human body’s a funky thing, though. It depends on your mood, how much sleep you’re getting, how dehydrated (or not) you are, whether you had a big paper due that week, if you exercised, whether it’s cold outside… and there’s no reboot button. So finally we ended up with this little guide to food challenges – that’s what they’re called, “food challenges.” Sounds like a reality TV show! Anyway:

Reset environment to known control state. Have a “safe food diet” – a bunch of dishes that I like to eat, are nutritionally balanced (protein, carbs, fat, vegetables, fiber, all the stuff your mom told you when you were small), and don’t contain any of the stuff I’m trying to test for. So for me, a bowl of rice and black bean chili works – or curry over quinoa, or… you get the idea. Eat this for long enough that your system “clears out” whatever substances you’re testing; in allergy/immunization studies, this is usually 1-2 weeks. (Allergy and immunology journals, by the way, are nice sources of procedures for experimental setup; check out PubMed if you have access.) I’m going for 2 weeks, which lets me set approximately one food experiment up per month.

Introduce the intervention. In other words, “eat gluten, lactose, and/or meat,” while making sure my meals remain nutritionally balanced (so that any effects won’t be the results of, say, not eating fiber). In controlled doses, depending on what I want to test. Also, watch out for the placebo effect. Nutrition and food science journals are most useful as models for this segment of the study.

For instance, I think I have some gluten sensitivity; if I eat bread at every meal, my brain goes fuzzy. But if I’m on a gluten-free (or, since gluten is everywhere and I’m not vigilant enough about it, almost gluten-free) diet and have a slice of bread, I’m fine. So what’s the tipping point – how do I get a better model of that reservoir? How big is it (3 bread-slices?) and how fast does it drain (1 bread-slice per day, meaning that I could eat 2 slices of bread today and 1 tomorrow and be fine, but not 3 today?)

Record results. Since I’m looking at my brain state here – neurochemical changes, in other words -I want to look at how other researchers have measured “effects on thinking.” I tend to notice effects commonly associated with ADHD (yep, I have that too) – lack of focus, physical restlessness – so things like the Conner Scale or Hyperscheme (another scale) might be worth looking into; PubMed has plenty more that I don’t know about just yet. Again, watch for the placebo effect. Whenever possible, I’ll try to measure things somewhat less subjective than my opinion… but sometimes you just have to use your thoughts as an imperfect, messy instrument because that’s all you’ve got.

Neurochemical changes can happen fast. Stomach-brain communication is pretty quick – the “I’m full, stop being hungry!” signal takes maybe 20-30 minutes. So it’s possible I may be able to record these things during the meal – or at the very least, at the end of the day. Some food effects can take as long as 3 days to show up… but for mental-performance tracking, I’m likely looking at a shorter scale.

So that’s my lifehacking braindump for the day. Hopefully it’ll be useful to others experimenting with similar stuff (I’m looking at you, Matt Ritter). And many thanks to Dr. Annie Mahon for helping me geek out with her this morning!

Also, I need a lot more calcium than I’m getting. As a fairly skinny Asian woman who’s not big on lactose (milk), I’m at risk for osteoporosis; I eat yogurt on some days, but at best that gets me about 500mg of the stuff, and I need 1000. But you can only absorb 500mg at a time, and shouldn’t go over 2500mg in a day. No problem; I’ll just get a supplement in 500mg increments and pop one during lunch if I have yogurt for breakfast, and pop one during breakfast and one during lunch if I go yogurtless for the day. Must build strong bones! Do weight-bearing exercises! Mel smash!

I’ve decided to think of my life as a 125-year project. (Because I think medical science makes it feasible – and also because I like cube numbers.)  The plans you make for the future look way different when you think of it as “wow, 100 years to go.”


For equilibrium: publicity and Hobbes & Bacon


It’s been a weird day so far this morning. Trying to stay atop work, trying to breathe, trying not to drop things, trying to balance…

This morning, TuxRadar ran my piece on open source education in Europe (many thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers). I’m also now officially a piece of Purdue propaganda – my work with open source and education was featured in a “5 students who are example makers” profile by Sue Ferringer and also got picked up in the (Purdue) Presidents’ Newsletter. This was, to employ a generic and overused phrase, “really cool.” It also threw me off equilibrium a little bit (though in a positive way, I think) – I’m not used to that kind of attention.

I love how the photographer managed to capture me in can’t-sit-still mode. But it’s still a little weird to look at the website and go “wait, is that me?”  It’s fascinating to see how much gravitas a shiny website, good photos, and snappy text can add. I’m desperately learning how to combat impostor syndrome; I still get overwhelmed, confused, lost, tired – but I am doing awesome things, and I shouldn’t forget that side either. The challenge is to keep my eye on what’s important, following my own internal compass towards learning and doing excellent work, regardless of the circumstances. The more I charge forth into the world, the more important being grounded becomes; I’m trying to build a foundation of being centered and taking time to rest and renew and recalibrate.

And so I read, I stretch, I take the time to cook and eat good food. I’m about to do lunch in a moment, but before doing that, here’s something else that gave me pause today – some folks made a couple comic strips about Hobbes (from Calvin & Hobbes) and Bacon (daughter of Calvin and Susie, named after the philosopher). It’s a beautiful homage. This post has links to all four strips (use the alternate links), and NPR has commentary on them as well as a pointer to Gerry Canavan’s collection of Calvin-as-a-grownup drawings from multiple artists (one is PG-13 NSFW, though if you get depressed at the last strip do see the sequel halfway down the thread here).

I loved Calvin & Hobbes as a child. I still do. And found reading the Hobbes & Bacon strips to be a lovely, bittersweet moment; time moves on and life moves on, and we see others walk the paths we once trod. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately, and how perpetual adolescence is no longer such a central part of my identity – I’m no longer everyone’s kid sister, I’m taking on more complex roles. And that is strange and new, budding and unfamiliar – and wonderful. It’s amazing how much you can grow when you feel safe, and when you channel your energy towards learning (and the associated discomfort) instead of defense mechanisms. Crazy.

To the people, places, and communities who make me feel safe and grounded, and give me a solid place to fly from and to come back to: thank you.


Nature vs Nurture comic


From today’s “Engineering Thinking and Development” class on nature vs. nurture. I was nominated as my group’s scribe, where by “scribe” I mean “comic artist.”


Oven-baked fried chicken of AWESOME


Oh my good lord. Okay. The next time I find boneless skinless chicken thighs on sale, I’m doing this again – although I suspect it would work equally well with other chicken bits. Loosely adapted from America’s Test Kitchen. I say “loosely” because this is the didn’t-measure, don’t-have-most-of-the-equipment-you-suggested, wildly-substituting-and-omitting-ingredients grad student kitchen version. Here goes.

Get a big bowl. Mix together some plain yogurt (about 2 cups) with a few heaping spoons of mustard (spicy, with the big mustard seeds unbroken) and sriracha (or, I suppose, the hot sauce of your choice). Throw in some pepper and salt and whatever other random spices you like — I used some “southwestern spice blend” my mom had given me, but honestly I think the mustard and sriracha are already plenty. I also lopped in a heaping spoon of finely minced garlic, because I had it around.

It will smell fantastic. Get the chicken bits good and covered with the stuff, throw them in a bowl, wrap in plastic, set in the fridge overnight. Or if you’re me, get caught up by work and leave ‘em there for 2 whole days.

At this point you can take the chicken out and just throw it in a hot oiled skillet and you’ll get this amazing, tender, juicy pan-fried chicken. (I did that for two pieces of chicken because I’d run out of oven-safe containers and I was very, very hungry.) But if you want to go ridiculous, crank the oven to 400F and keep going.

Get some crumby-things. I used extra breadcrumbs from the freezer. The original recipe suggests crushed cornflakes. Maybe you could do cornmeal – not sure. Whatever it is, season it well — I put in some cayenne for heat, but you could probably just do salt and a lot of pepper, and then paprika or whatever you would like — and toss it with a spoon of oil (I used canola) just so it’s a bit moist. Then bread the chicken – the yogurt will make the breading stick beautifully – and put them in pans and put the pans in the oven.

35-40 minutes later, holy shit. Baked chicken, but exploding with flavor and crispy and brown on the outside as if it had been fried, except it’s healthy (sort of — healthier than fried chicken anyway) and with the cayenne giving it a little heat, the mustard seeds crunching satisfyingly, the spices exploding into the juices that flood your mouth when you bite…

Yes, the chicken would be crispier if I’d baked it on a rack instead of in a pan (where the juices made the breading slightly soggy on the bottom). I don’t have a rack. I don’t care. It’s great. I eat mostly vegetarian meals these days (although I’m not a vegetarian) but tonight’s dinner consisted of three giant pieces of chicken and some braised brussels sprouts,  and I couldn’t be more satisfied.

For the sprouts: heat a thin film of oil in a frying pan, cut the sprouts in half and brown them cut-side down over medium-high heat, then pour broth (chicken, vegetable, whatever) into the pan and cover it and let it braise until a fork goes straight through ‘em, then uncover and keep cooking until the liquid evaporates. Done. If you use milk instead of broth and throw some salt/pepper/random-spices in, it’s even better, but I had no milk tonight.

I would totally cook this for a crowd.


I think a lot of the things and behaviours that make an open source community work are also applicable to dating


From an email I wrote recently to a friend, who subsequently asked me to post these passages on my blog so she could share them with others.

I think a lot of the things and behaviours that make an open source community work are also applicable to dating, if that makes any sense at all.

Aspiring to radical realtime transparency but knowing you’ll fall short, having a rhythm, working to become a better hacker and help others become better hackers themselves, even if you’re different types of contributors or working through different processes or on different projects for a while. Clarification, getting things out on the table. The willingness to waste time experimenting because you know it’s not actually wasted time at all, just a process with long-term and unpredictable results.

My boyfriend uses the phrase “beautiful awkwardness” to describe the feeling you get sometimes when you’re sitting in the uncomfortable spot in the relationship domain specifically — but if you’re lucky, there’s someone you’re sitting with, together. And maybe that’s how you can tell. I dunno, I’ve never done this before. But if you’re comfortable enough with someone else that you can be uncomfortable together, then… that means something, I think.


Digital housekeeping


Today ended up being an input day, a reading day, a lazy trying-things-out day. I want to go outside and walk the town at some point, so I’m clearing house a little so I have that calm, scrapbooking bits I don’t want to forget so I can let go of them in my mind.

Found a lovely poem called “Mastery” by W. H. Auden.

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation.

You have only to watch his eyes;
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

Auden also once said this:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

Somehow related in the fragments of my mind: the Technium has some short pieces on wisdom for the digital age, the sorts of things I imagine great-grandchildren of today’s teenagers chuckling over the same way my generation read the “Little House on the Prairie” series with the fascination kids have of a bygone era.

Klaatu showed me ownCloud, and I am enthralled.

Trying to find copies of the International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes to read somewhere.

I started reading c-base materials written in German and can now make out fuzzy outlines of meaning without a dictionary. Yes, I’m working through grammar books and going through translation exercises in reading class where we do pull apart sentence structures with a fine-toothed comb and debate which vocabulary word maps to what phrase. Once in a while though, it’s fun to just read something normal at a normal pace and see how I’ve progressed; what looked like gibberish to me before is now a story painted in broad strokes, with blurs. No details yet, no exactness; I need to learn more words before that. But I’m learning.


I do not know what to call this.


I write again tonight to sort my brain out. Bear with me; it’ll take a little while to get past the facts and through into the thinking and maybe a little of the feeling.

Purdue has a kickass audiology department with a student clinic that does full hearing tests for $10 (if you’re a student). I’m at least 6 years overdue for mine, so I went in and got mine done this week. The people were great. The grad student and the audiologist were both cool, sharp, patient with my questions, appreciative of the detailed answers and feedback (“it’s nice to get someone who knows about this stuff, you’ve done your homework!”) and encouraging of my interest.

The test results were a little bit surprising; my residual hearing is in the low frequencies, and the mid-range of what I’m able to hear has apparently dropped about 30dB in the last decade, which is a nontrivial and unexpected shift.  I’d want to remeasure before freaking out, and I’m not freaking out about that drop (so I go from hard of hearing to… hard of hearing? big deal) but I don’t want to lose what I’ve got, and they said it wasn’t normal for hearing to just spontaneously drop in someone so young. But by and large, I’m in the same place I’ve been for the past 2 decades. Cool.

We talked about hearing aids. My hearing loss has always been one of the most difficult to amplify, and this is still the case. I’ve got high-frequency sensorineural, sweeping down through severe and into profound – “profound” is the step right next to “stone deaf.” Sensorineural means it’s the last step in the chain-o-hearing that’s broken, so we can’t bypass anything short of jacking directly into my brain (which is what cochlear implants do).

Things have come a long way, especially in the past 2 years, for people with my sort of loss. Amusingly, some of the things they’ve implemented in hearing aids recently are the same things my friends and I tried in SigSys when we were undergrads. (I can verify that frequency compression sounds terrible.) However, when you get down to it, hearing aids can’t isolate the sounds I can’t hear without bludgeoning the sounds I can hear to death — if we turn up the dial so I can get the high sounds, I’m already clawing at my ears in agony because the subwoofer is too damn loud.

But there’s a bit more. I’d noticed for years that hearing test were done with two types of sounds: pure tones and scrambled buzzing sounds that sound like very far-off beaver sneezes. So I asked why they used beaver sneezes in the hearing test – casually, expecting an answer like “oh, the two types of sounds help us distinguish between X and Y.” Instead:

“Beaver sneezes?”

“Yeah, the noisy ringing buzzer sound, the one that’s not a pure tone that you play…”

“Those are pure tones.”

So this is what the beaver-sneezes mean: my cochlea is crap. It’s rubble so far destroyed that even if hearing aids could isolate and amplify those frequencies to the point where I could hear them – which, by the way, is somewhere around 120dB, or the volume of a jet engine – I would, at best, get scrambled signals. The best I can hope for is the ability to hear beaver sneezes.

Well, shit. There goes my hope of someday working on a thing that’ll let me hear a Mozart flute concerto like a normal musician.

But – moving on! I’d decided to do the Hearing Thing this semester, and when I do something, I want to do it all-out – I want to do it right. So I’ve been taking my first trips to the Disability Resource Center to get set up for CART, to the Vocational Rehabilitation center for the state of Indiana so they can give Purdue money to get me CART, and going to the university’s counseling center (staffed by psychology grad students who are getting their clinical experience hours) because I was confused at how confused I felt about this now that I’m not pushing through everything I don’t understand by blocking it with overwork. Everyone has been very wonderful and kind.

“It sounds like you’ve worked very hard to let yourself appear as normal,” my counselor said at one of our most recent sessions.

“Because I like forgetting,” I replied. And then I stopped and did a double-take at what had just come out of my mouth.

I do. I like forgetting. For someone who advocates awareness at all times… I like forgetting. I like it when my family forgets. I like it when my classmates go “no, really? I couldn’t tell!” I like it when I can go hours – days, sometimes – without thinking about it, all my adjustments so automatic and unconscious that I’m only aware of them when I stop and analyze in retrospect. To me, that feels like success, to do something that’s really hard to do so well that nobody – not even me – notices that it’s happening at all. Bearing this cognitive load all the time and being able to ignore it? To me, that feels like strength.

On the other hand, wearing a weighted vest at all times certainly might make you (muscularly) stronger, but it’s also kinda dumb.

I don’t know why I should be scared of learning about this, but I think I am scared, a little. Finding out more details about my hearing that I didn’t know before, thinking about, okay, do I want to make changes to my life at some point trying to fix that, what’s the cost/benefit analysis here, do I want to do things that will visibly mark me as different, do I want to think about cochlear implants (ooh, geeking out about shiny technology!) or do I want to say screw it, I’ve got other things to do with my time, because that’s what I’ve done with nearly every decision about this that’s been mine to make…

I’ve always mainstreamed and tried to be a “normal” person, and I can pass — but maybe this isn’t as good a situation as I could be in, and there’s no way to find out whether something else is better without trying it, which means an upheaval of equilibrium, a gambling of resources. Now that I’m doing bigger and harder and more awesome things, I’m starting to run into my hearing as a limiting factor. Maybe not a hard blocker, but as something that saps me, slows me down, to a degree I notice now in a way I haven’t before, with my tiny little schools and the text-based world of my career in open source. My world is huge and open right now – I feel unlimited, I can go anywhere without help… but maybe I can’t go some places as easily as I could otherwise. I’m not sure what “otherwise” is.

Sit in the fear, Mel. Sit in the weirdness and the questions and the things that aren’t resolved. Sit in the discomfort, and keep moving, but don’t run away because you’re scared, and don’t forget the other things you have to do.

Why is the balancing so hard?