Posts that are Uncategorized-ish
Staying with friends is a good idea. Bonnie and Matt (it still feels weird to call them “The Teschs,” though I’m starting to get used to the idea that they’re married) are wonderful and tolerant of Melness and ask good questions even if they’re hard ones, and have the most comfortable air mattress I’ve ever slept on. And a guitar.
One of the nice things about staying with friends over staying in a hotel is that they keep me looped into a more-like-normal-person rhythm. “Mel, the glass of water in front of you that you just filled, you should… drink it.” “Mel, have you had dinner?” “Mel, sleep is good for you.” Should I stop reading and/or staring out the window? Go outside? Eat? As long as I follow Matt and Bonnie around, I can be confident that I’m adhering to some kind of reasonably humanoid life-script. Matt also has a tendency to occasionally look up 47 hours after starting work and go “oh, um… wait, have I had food yet?” – we worked together on projects in college and… well, the sleeping didn’t happen quite as much as it perhaps should have – but Bonnie is quite good at countering that.
One of the things that Bonnie and I were talking about over dinner last night (as noted previously) were the books we liked as kids. I actually didn’t fully get into my textbook (well, good textbook) phase until high school, though I’d occasionally ask for them for Christmas in middle school. Around 12 or 13 or so I went through a classic lit stage where I read – largely out of obligation – pretty much everything by Dickens and the Bronte sisters and Austen and et al, all the while going “these books would all be so much shorter if people in them just talked to each other.”
Afterwards, I decided that I didn’t really care to read them much again now that my “you should read these books” obligation had been discharged. Instead, I beelined for Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Heinlein, Ellison, Gibson – and went into my sci-fi/fantasy phase. I was also something of a Shakespeare nut in 6th grade, thanks to Mr. Panitch. And I went through a renaissance when I discovered good science and tech writing – Lewis Thomas, Alan Lightman, Richard Feynman, Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning was the Command Line – I still have not read Cryptonomicon.) I walked rapt through the hallways reading Darwin, unwilling to put down The Origin of Species, because my 12-year-old mind was floored by the concept that people could think this way, people could see this way, that all the aching beauty that I felt in numbers, figures, gizmos, textbooks, all that sense of play – was something that these people had also experienced, and more acutely and maturely than myself, and written down. Somehow they caught that feeling in their words, and when I read, I realized, comfortingly, that I was not alone.
I also went through this phase in my life, starting around the age of 11, where I read a lot of screenplays. To back up, for context: I grew up with a hearing loss. I rely largely upon lipreading. Television and film… do not work so well. (Except for foreign films, the one exception – those came with built-in subtitles.) It was around the time I was 10 or 11 or so that closed-captioning arrived in my neighborhood. Or more precisely, the next-door neighbors got a new TV that had it, and I would sometimes go and stand in their backyard just to watch the captions through their sliding glass porch door – hey, wow, these talking heads, they say things!
Once I caught onto the notion that films and TV shows could have interesting dialogue, and that this could be a factor in choosing them for entertainment (over visuals/special-effects/explosions, which was my previous criteria – Power Rangers, etc) I started to discover scripts for plays. And movies. I think it may have been a “screenplays” section in a bookstore or… I’m not sure exactly how or when I made the connection that Movies Have Scripts, and that Sometimes These Scripts Are Available, and that reading them beforehand gives me a pretty good idea of what the film is about and enables me to understand that film when I go watch it later (without captions, usually), but once it clicked, BAM.
I started reading screenplays – words that made you think in pictures (because I do think in pictures). I started writing them, and they were awful; instead of writing essays for my 6th grade English class, I opted whenever possible to make a film instead. I had no editing software or equipment other than a cheap tape camera… so these movies featured such advanced technologies as “rolling credits over background” == plastic wrap + sharpie being pulled up in front of the lens, and “in-scene music” == off-screen radio. One film – they were usually co-authored and co-filmed with my friend Becky – cast my brother Jason and her sister Molly as the villains (and then we wondered why they were reluctant to play their parts). Another was a fake documentary about a day in the life of my sign language interpreter. Another was a remake of The Three Little Pigs shot with stuffed animals instead. I also used Microsoft Paint to make an animated movie about… I think it may have been Malaysia. Or Singapore. Not sure exactly.
I was also rabid about special effects and props. If there was a “making-of” book for a movie I’d enjoyed, I would go to the bookstore and stand by the shelf and read it right there; I read about rendering the unique specular qualities of skin for Final Fantasy (bad movie, nifty tech) and how the Death Star battle sequences were filmed for Star Wars; I learned about stop-motion and body doubles and different sorts of shots and clever editing that could make things look real. How lightsabers were made and actors trained to fight and the “light” part of the lightsaber inserted in postproduction; how CG Treebeard was composited with mechatronic-hand-holding-hobbit-actors, how virtual hairdryers were attached to the feet of Shrek and Donkey so that the grass would part before their feet as they walked through a field. Even to this day I’ll watch, say, Surf’s Up with Audrey and then proceed to gawk over the handheld “camera” rig they made to give the film a documentary-style feel. It’s storytelling-supporting magic, and I love storytelling.
I followed up on this in high school by doing A/V tech workstudy, successfully applying for that at a time when most of my classmates were doing things like wiping down cafeteria tables or whatnot. Learned the names of lots of plugs and cameras and interfaces (which I’ve since forgotten), lighting (which I’m decent at) and mics (which I’m really bad at, for obvious reasons – I have no basis on which to gauge the quality of my setup), did more editing in Adobe Premiere than I really care to remember, playing with the green screen. Didn’t really have time to keep up with it, though, so it faded. I did 48-Hour Film Competition in college (with the Somervillains team – mostly as a storyboarder) but otherwise, that was… about it.
In terms of making, anyway. I will still read scripts and screenplays – sometimes because I’m in a bookstore and I’m bored, sometimes just for fun, sometimes because I’m going to a movie with friends without captioning and need to get the dialogue in my short-term memory first. It also works for plays. In fact, this is what I do before each summer’s showing of Shakespeare on the Commons – I head to Project Gutenberg, print out the script in the tiniest font I’m able to read, read the script on the train on the way in, watch the play with friends, re-read the script on the way back… the three memories (two text, one show) overlap to produce a pretty good approximation. I’d also sit reading a movie script in the background when my friends were watching something in the lounge and I didn’t want to bother them with subtitles.
It’s also faster that way – I read faster than movies play. So sometimes I’ll read a screenplay instead of watching a movie I’m not sure I will like. If I like the screenplay and can’t imagine certain parts of the movie, then I’ll watch the movie.
Away from Her is a great script. Now I just have to find the movie.
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Today, I…
- rediscovered that I’m really bad at sleeping (big surprise, I know)
- went down to Hollywood Video to try and find a movie (also, Bonnie wanted to watch the new Star Trek one, which I haven’t seen yet) and discovered that the location nearest their apartment was closed
- climbed a hill and watched the sunset instead
- …then discovered that they lock the gates at sunset, so instead of walking all the way around to find the open gate, I shrugged and scaled the fence
- (but climbed carefully down instead of leaping like I normally would have because I’m trying to be less extraordinarily stupid at the moment, and also because I didn’t want to accidentally rip my brand-new Olin sweater)
- also on the “be less extraordinarily stupid” front, got back to Bonnie’s apartment as night fell instead of walking through the (unfamiliar) streets of Pittsburgh in the dark, which is my usual (although very idiotic) habit when I first meet a new city
- played Matt’s guitar, which is standard-size and therefore too big for me (I have tiny hands)
- ate Filipino food, which was both comforting and tasty
- talked with Bonnie about books we’d liked when we were kids
- generally speaking, took a breather and (I think) regained some functionality (will find out tomorrow whether this is the case).
Life is pretty good. Pittsburgh is a noisy city – it’s got a lot of hills and a lot of little houses, and it used to have a lot of snow but it got warm and the snow melted, so I was slushing up and down through snow today, and it felt good to run and my socks didn’t get soaked through enough to start being uncomfortable. There’s sunshine here, and when the sun went down the whole sky lit up like it had caught on fire and someone had thrown a red blanket over it to smother out the flames, and the blanket had gotten snagged up in the trees – just lovely, especially with the traffic streaking past under the bridge. I dunno; there’s just something about cities that I like, and it’s good to just stand outside and breathe in the pulse of them. Granted, that probably means breathing in a lot of traffic exhaust too, but… y’know, it’s a city. (And less smog-tastic equipment is getting installed/used/driven every day, so that’s a good trend.)
Taking time to rest is an extremely good idea – I’m going to go and try to do the sleeping thing again now, because I’ve been extraordinarily bad about it for the past week or so, and I am really tired. If there is one ability that I’ve come to appreciate over the years, it’s that no matter what the rest of my brain may be doing, I can always look around at things and go “ooh, shiny!” and be easily amused.
To that end, it’s easy to cook a perfect egg atop a bowl of chili when you invert a second bowl almost perfectly over it (leave it a bit off-center so the steam can escape) – it makes a little pocket of hot steam that circles back around and cooks the egg just right. Mm, thermodynamics.
Okeydokey. Bedtime.
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday: bit of breakfast at home, then picked up the guys from the Babson hotel (which has free jellybeans) and ran through the supermarket grabbing hot pot ingredients (and shrimp chips), followed by (what else?) hot pot at the house after a chopping-vegetables-to-swing-music fest. I am not a particularly good teacher of chopstick usage; Greg is a better one. He and Lynne May ended up talking about literacy remediation while Sebastian taught Melanie how to fix the broken Record activity and I served as furniture for Audrey, who was rather insistent about sitting on my lap. Sugar Labs was discussed, guitar and piano played.
Then we did a Newbury Comics (Sebastian) and New England Mobile Book Fair (me) trip followed by an airport drop-off (Greg, who looked pretty tired by this point). I’d been waiting to get both Greg and Sebastian to Olin for some time now, so having them both around for the same weekend was nothing short of wonderful. This left a lazy Sunday afternoon/evening to stash the car at Kendall, walk down Mass Ave (popping out for coffee and dinner along the way, and just missing blues at Johnny D’s) and take the T from Davis back to Kendall.
I showed off my three favorite Boston skylines (Longfellow Bridge, East Boston Piers Park, and Mass Ave) and we made it back to the house just in time to watch the Academy Awards. (Which, I hadn’t realized before, was the first time Sebastian had gotten to see them despite being a film geek – they always air too late for German time. Actually, I hadn’t realized it was the night of the awards until we got back to the house and the TV was on. In the meantime, I served as the victim subject of Melanie’s photography assignment, which was a portrait; we arranged most of the available laptops in the house on the floor in a semicircle, and I proceeded to use them all simultaneously (fun, but uncomfortable when you’re lying on your stomach on a wooden floor; would much prefer a table). Eventually the photographs changed from “Mel using the computers” to “Mel falling asleep on the floor in front of the computers” and I grabbed a glass of water and went to bed.
For about three hours. I was basically unable to sleep last night, waking up every 30-60 minutes to stare at the ceiling starting at 3am until I finally gave up just before 6am and decided to work for a bit. This mostly involved crawling (at agonizingly slow speed) through my email backlog from the weekend, since I’d last really checked email on Friday morning – I was far from my most efficient, and I didn’t cleanly finish any of the other stuff I was supposed to do. Sigh. Had about half the day to get stuff done (I’ve got my OSDC article outlined in slide form, just not turned into prose) before Sebastian and I both had to lug our bags out to the train, then the airport, then part ways, whereupon my plane sat stuck upon the tarmac for an extended delay during which I decided I was incapable of being productive and would read about tourist attractions in Austin, TX instead.
Finally ended up at La Casa de Tesch close to 1am – Matt and Bonnie are being kind enough to host me during CSEET. Whacking this post out so I don’t forget, and so I can clear my mind and actually, y’know, do work tomorrow morning before the 8am conference start.
Up In The Air is a good movie. Very, very good movie.
Bedtime now. I hope I’ll actually be able to remain unconscious tonight.
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Via Kim Bruning: Mel the Programmer was a real person.
I was feeling pretty good about my guitar sightreading/playing abilities (despite my obvious lack of knowledge of many basic chords, which I figured I would Patch Later) until I picked up a transcription of Miles Davis pieces arranged for fingerstyle. Now I have new challenges… and a desire for longer and more flexible fingers. Mmm. This is coming with me during my next month o’ nonstop travelage.
Decompressing briefly from last night: in short, Candidates’ Weekend was fantastic (as they always are). I woke up early and chilled with the family for a bit before driving out to Olin just in time to catch the tail end of Design Build spilling water all over the AC. The exercises are designed for high rates of epic failure – I remember coming up with earlier Design Build exercises and conversations like “oh, we were able to build too many working ones,” or “not triumphantly disastrous enough” or “need bigger explosions.”
I watched a bit, then ran around catching people I needed to have quick conversations with – questions here, nudging there, meetings set for later… I was reminded of how much of what I’m able to do within open source communities was stuff I learned here, without knowing I was learning it. Scuttling around campus, watching and reading and becoming bold enough to ask the stupid questions, learning how to tie disparate conversation threads together so a something emerged (sometimes), how to quickly drop by someone else’s project (not necessarily code, not necessarily even technical) with a patch, how to structure my own so they were quickly patchable, how to run up and down the court passing and shooting. One deeply ingrained part of Olin’s culture (and my favorite part of our Honor Code) is the Do Something clause, which, basically stated: it’s an obligation. Something bothers you? Fix it. Think it could be better? Do it. Be proactive. Often, the harder part to learn is how to not do things. (And Nikki, if you’re reading this, please go back to sleep.)
Matt Burke and Nick Hobbs and I were an interview team. It’s hard, interviewing people – even if I’ve done it for a couple years now – I’m profoundly uncomfortable with judging and knowing that I have someone’s future in my hands, but it’s something I want to understand, and vital to Olin, so I keep trying to learn how to do it better. (When I feel like I’ve learned it and passed it on sufficiently, I will happily stop doing it.) Interviewing did mean that we missed all the fun club fair festival type stuff, like unicycling on the O, but Nick made a call down to the Meat Club booth and we were rewarded mid-interview process with a delivery of two of the biggest, tastiest, sloppiest chili-bacon burgers ever.
More conversations (Matt Ritter: how is the interview process like being a venture capitalist?), more watching, more hellos and sync-ups and I-haven’t-seen-you-in-so-longs, more hugs and laughing and the wonderfully gratifying feeling of being around friends who were also good-kind-of-tired – exhausted, but for something good. After talking with Rick (and Chris and Susan) I walked over to stand behind Greg and Sebastian for the fire arts performance for a little while, before Matt told me Jeffrey was trying to find me and Colin texted me to ask if we could talk about Fedora for a bit – so I wrapped up the evening talking through Summer Coding SIG stuff with him until loud music started from the frosh-hosted dance party in the lounge next door (Ian Daniher + Large Amp = Oh My God) and I threaded my way out and to the car, walking out to lot C through the soccer field and admiring the scattering of stars.
Monday, March 8th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I find myself in a mode where lots of thoughts are bottled up inside my brain and I’ve cut off (voluntarily – I said I would, so now I have to stick to it) two of my main outlets, email and IRC. But in the meantime, I can still think and write here.
My heart feels like it’s going to come bursting through my chest right now. Couple reasons for this:
- I drank a fair amount of caffeine today, which I’m pretty sensitive to, which lasts a long time in my system, and which (among other things) makes my heart beat fast and loudly – and then I kept forgetting that and running (because I’m hyper and I’m happy) until – “what’s that loud LUB-DUP-LUB-DUP noise and… OH! Um, walking!”
- I love Olin. Like, love Olin. Love the people there. Love the community. The vision and the fight. And it hurts to be torn and it hurts to care, because stuff is broken – but that hurt and that pain and the staying despite that is also what drives us to do things, to make things happen.
- I am so proud of my underclassmen right now. They have surpassed me.
Backing up a bit. Rewind to the beginning of the day for a quick recap:
Crashed hard and got nearly 7h of sleep this morning. Might have something to do with not sleeping for about 2 weeks – it was sometime around midnight when I was sitting on the sofa with my laptop open and my eyes (mostly) closed mumbling something about how I was perfectly fine that I abruptly realized that I was being an idiot and was, in fact, exhausted. “Fine, fine, I’m going to sleep after I finish this email, stop looking at me so skeptically, I just… email almost… done… finishing… I’m going to bed soon, really…”
Sleep, wake up, play Beethoven on the piano.
Sebastian and I read “Oh The Places You’ll Go!” to Lynne May’s (extremely excited) 1st grade class. We were visiting, it was reading time, it was the only Dr. Seuss book I had (my favorite, actually) and he’d never heard of Dr. Seuss before, so that was fun. They told us their Sugar names (their nicks for participation in the Sugar community – we’ve got everyone from “L” to “Ron Weasley” to “Amethyst”), we fielded questions… the funniest part was in the beginning, when we slipped quietly into the back of the classroom while all the kids were playing with Legos. They kept furtively looking up at us and then continuing to build things – and then finally one kid came up and poked us and announced that we were, in fact, real. (Good to know.)
Simon’s coffeeshop on Mass Ave: cappuccino (aforementioned caffeine) and Mexican hot chocolate (I had to keep being reminded to stop working and drink it) and grad school apps (which I have promised I will finish before I try packaging a few Sugar activities) and the SLOBs meeting and as much work email as I could stay on top of, which was not much. And I think “oh boy, I’m going to have a lot to do early on Sunday morning to catch up on things I should have done today.” But that’s cool – it feels like the right rhythm for right now. Worked there ’till Greg came, worked some more, ran out exactly as the parking meter expired. Sweet.
Hit Cabots and Blue Ribbon on the way to Olin, getting a Pru Frappe at the first and a bunch of BBQ sandwiches at the second. For those unfamiliar with a Pru, it’s a shake with 12 scoops of ice cream, and when purchased to-go, comes in a bucket. The reaction of the guys was priceless. So we sat in my car in the Olin parking lot eating BBQ and slurping “death by chocolate” from a bucket. (Some things are priceless; for everything else, there’s 24-hours-of-Le-Noms.)
Meeting with Joanne Kossuth and David Carver, which was off to a slow start but ended up being pretty cool (as hoped) and now we’ve basically got a blessing and are setting a date to check in and get feedback on any alumni-created collaboration infrastructure we can cook up. We chip in the resources and time and set it up so we can do it any way we want – but then they’ll take a look and tell us what we’re doing wrong and what we’re doing right and figure out what points of Olin’s IT Infrastructure, if any, can overlap with what we’ve made.
We need alumni help on this… right now I’m tired enough that I can’t even write a coherent call-to-action and put it in more useful places, but if you’re interested, please comment or email me or otherwise start spamming me with questions, because that’s what’s going to draw those notes and thoughts out of my brain and into the world where we can all work on them. That was a relatively smallish portion of the meeting, though. Mostly it was Greg rockin’ the house (by doing a lot of listening) and Sebastian and myself watching and learning.
At this point I said goodbye to the guys and proceeded to spend the remainder of the evening in Alumni Mode.
- Talked with Leslie Gerhat about her gap year teaching inner city math, and how hard it is to learn how to think the way some kids think so you can teach them – but that’s also how hard it is for them to learn the way we think – and also about the Grand Challenge Scholars program and how it’s tough to find out much about it and how it needs to be even more transparent, more more more transparent. That was pretty awesome.
- Got my Susan hug. Always gotta have a Susan hug when I visit Olin.
- Watched Nikki Lee utterly kick ass. Because that’s just what she does.
- Multiple conversations with Jeffrey Atkinson. Good ones, too. Yay Jeffrey! He’s the student making GCSP externally participatable-in right now. I’m trying to back him up as much as possible.
- Acquisition of new Olin swag – my car now has a rear window decal, I have a t-shirt and a sweater… I used to have all these things but I wore all my Olin shirts and my Olin hoodie to (literal) rags, and my car was totalled right before I graduated, so now I am once again properly equipped.
- Extended convo with Christine Kelly about Olin and Life. I love Christine; she cares so much – she’s like the heart of Olin – and every time I talk with her, she helps me grow up a little bit.
- Watched Matt, Chester, and Ben rock the Entrepreneurship room, followed by listening to Tank and the OCO play Mozart and Handel and I think Beethoven (lovely!) and then more conversations (Colin!) and then the FWOP play (Blood Brothers – excellent).
- Me + 5 Olin students pile into my car for the (500-feet) drive back to Olin, whereupon I spend the remainder of the evening in Man Hall at “Ye Olde Storytyme” (listening to upperclassmen tell freshmen about Olin’s old days, and occasionally chiming in with details myself – it was a deliberate spontaneous oral-history-passing-down gathering) and then talking with Jeffrey and Nikki (and Zach, who passed by in the end) about… hm. The shortest way to summarize it would be “change.”
Saw a lot more people, too – did a lot more things – not writing down right now because I finally do feel like passing out. So much thinking spinning in brain right now but also so very, very tired. Must sleep for a few hours, then get up tomorrow and… and then see what I do from there, I suppose.
*thonk*
Saturday, March 6th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sacha… is awesome. (And engaged! Yay!) Most of my closest friends are guys, but the geek women I watch and admire (sometimes from comparatively afar – I am still shy) show me glimpses of something special – alternative futures. People sort-of-like-me living the sorts of lives and having the sorts of relationships I can maybe, maybe, maybe see for myself someday. Of course, there’s grad school first; I don’t expect to have (or want!) bandwidth for much other than work and school for quite a while.
When my mom visited Boston last month (it was a great visit, actually!) one of the things she brought up was this “psych test” (of the silly doesn’t-count-for-anything variety) that one of… my dad’s coworkers, I think… had asked them. You have 4 animals, a tiger, a lamb, a monkey, and a horse – what order do you get rid of them in (keeping one at the end)? You can’t ask questions about context (I did). My rationale and order:
- Nix the monkey. What am I going to do with a monkey? I also have opposable thumbs. Just let the monkey go wander on its own.
- Shear the lamb, have wool. Next, rather than maintain the lamb another year until its wool grows back, BBQ lamb. Yummy. Or, if not in survival context, just let the lamb out to wander around its own pasture.
- Set the horse loose. It’s useful for traveling for when I want to see interesting places and/or get somewhere fast, but if it’s too much to maintain, let it go find its own grass.
- Keep the tiger. I’m assuming it’s my tiger, trained well enough to do my will as necessary – in that case, it serves triple duty as companionship, protection, and hunter-of-food.
My mom started laughing. The way you’re supposed to “interpret” this one is that the monkey stands for friends/acquaintances, the lamb is your kids (“you would eat your children?” “wha-NO! I… but a lamb doesn’t do anything!”), the horse is your significant other, the tiger is your work. Apparently my dad kept the lamb for last, releasing the other animals in the order he thought they could fend for themselves. (“Poor little lamb. Someone has to take care of it.”) Whereas I… systematically proceeded to try to divest myself of all responsibilities.
She also asked me the one about “draw a picture with a forest, a house, you, a tiger, and a rabbit.” Again, no questions about additional context allowed. I was driving, so I just described it verbally – as best as I can remember, I said something like this:
Daytime, deciduous forest in currently-temperate climate, nestling a little house on 3 sides, facing front towards the picture, trees in front of it cleared for visibility. Tiger’s on the left, hanging out… bunny on the right, also hanging out… me standing outside by the house, watching them with great amusement. “Oh, it’s a tiger – fascinating!” (My mom: Won’t the tiger eat you?) Ahh, it’s not doing that in this picture. But if it did, it’d get to the rabbit first, and I’d go “Oh, the tiger is eating the rabbit – fascinating!” and if it started towards me, I’d just step inside the house and close the tiger-proof door and go “Oh, it’s trying to kill me – fascinating!”
“….iiiiinteresting,” said my mom.
The Olin OLPC chapter got interviewed (Spokeswoman Elsa Culler ;-) and profiled on Planet Sugar Labs. Here’s part 1, part 2, and part 3. Thanks, Polyachka! I’m looking forward to more of these.
Had an extremely educational day at the office (Max and Greg are here this week, yay!) I think it was far more important that I was present at what I was present at, learning what I learned, doing what I did… but I still have my deliverables to do between now and when I show up at the office tomorrow morning (summer coding, talking points, nailing down details on final POSSE list for this summer). So I’ve got… I reckon about 6 hours to do all that, plus sleep. Plenty of time.
This is all self-imposed, mind you. I want to get these done. I am driving myself through a brutal schedule right now. It feels like what I should be doing, for some reason. Tomorrow’s going to be about my OSDC article, filming some stuff for FI, finishing the RIT co-op evaluations, and a whole bunch of convos with Max about various items on my plate.
Sebastian also flew in for Candidates’ Weekend – it starts on Friday, but tomorrow is Jetlag Recovery Day, so today was Airport Arrival Day, Late Afternoon Version. I therefore left the Westford office early for the first time ever since I started working at Red Hat – last night was also pretty good on account of Greg and Max deciding it was time for the three of us to leave for dinner.
We executed Operation Stay Up Until A Reasonable Boston-Sleeping Hour, which involved stopping by Microcenter to get thumbdrives for Andrew to stress-test, coffee acquisition (tea for me) at 1369 and watching Avatar in 3D IMAX; the film was the major portion of Operation Stay Up, on the theory that Blue Aliens Making Things Explode is sufficiently entertaining as to combat sleepiness in anyone. This particular theater had subwoofers built into its seats. Mmmmm EXPLOSIONS. This was followed by a negotiation on tomorrow morning’s wake-up-alarm-setting-time. (“Sleep in.” “No.” “Really, it’s the only day you’re going to get to.” “I’m not going to keep you from going to the office.” “You’re not – it’s fine! Sleep!” “8am.” “Give me your cell phone (which is serving as the alarm-clock).” “8am.” “9am.” “8:30.” “8:30.”) On a somewhat related note, I’ve got Norah Jones sheet music for the piano and guitar right now, which delights me to no end because I’d been trying to pick out a bunch of her arrangements by ear, and now have an oracle for checking my work.
I do believe that Lynne May has gotten into the blogging habit about her SoaS desployment. This is WONDERFUL. If I’d known Scribefire would help with that earlier, I would have installed that Firefox extension for her years ago. I’ll write a better post on this for Planet Sugar Labs later on.
POSSEs are looking good for this summer in terms of “whoa, these will be great learning experiences for all those involved” – POSSE metrics-gathering, not so much. Marketing I need to spend more time on, but it has some nice momentum going (w00t team!) and Summer Coding needs a sprint, needs a sprint, needs a sprint. I lined up my script for tomorrow morning on all my deliverables stuff, so I’m going to sleep a couple hours and then wake up and crank through that script. But first… start laundry.
I’ve been spending a lot of time the past week or two just staying up extremely late at night with my laptop, reading, writing, and thinking – supposedly not getting much done during that time, for a couple hours a night. But things are happening, and this enables me to be much more productive for the remainder of the day; this is my decompression time, the way I chill out and think, the way I take some time alone, because the rest of the day is just so full with cool things and cool people that I don’t want to miss. Catching your breath is time well spent. I will run hard again in the morning.
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Between work stuff, Sugar stuff, Olin stuff, and life, I think it’s safe to say that I am:
- running on all cylinders right now
- gleefully overclocked (and being very careful about cooling systems so that I don’t overheat and flame out)
- tired – and I’m trying to stay aware of this; I’m so happy and excited with all that’s going on this week
I’m going to bed early tonight; it’s barely 1am. Pacing myself. I’m going to start tomorrow morning with the talking points and the summer coding sig. And maybe during lunch – or right after it – I can take a break from work and release the alpha of a little something that’s long overdue. (I’m doing it as an open content project. I am not yet sure if this will work, but we will all learn things and it will be fun.)
Mind-exercising dinner tonight with Max and Greg and eventually Todd Warner… old stories are great to hear, even if I can’t understand most of them. I’ve never heard conversations like that before. I want to hear more; my brain had to scramble in places just to keep up in trying to make sense of what was being said, and it was fun. I want to grok this yet-another-universe-I’ve-just-discovered. I’m so looking forward to spending the summer in Raleigh – I want this to be normal. I think it will be, eventually – I mean, Fedora utterly bewildered me back in July, and I felt comfortable being productively lost in it by September. Same at TOPP. Same at OLPC, and Sugar… IMSA, Olin, just about anywhere I’ve voluntarily been. I just need immersion, exposure, some help reflecting… and my brain adjusts fast.
I’m lucky to be around the people I get to be around – I will learn what I can while I can, and appreciate the moment. My biggest goal this week is to be constantly present – really present – with the people that I’m with, because… you never know when you won’t get the chance to learn from them any more. The equilibria we find ourselves in are so fragile sometimes that I hold my breath in wonder, afraid to make them tremble and fall, but I have to keep on breathing, let it go. Where will we all be, 5 years from now?
Also, from the things-you-learn-during-longish-drives-with-Greg: apparently you’re supposed to remove the stems from collard greens before you cook them. This may explain my earlier failure to render collards edible.
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Most of this post was inspired by Sumana.
I was explaining to someone last week why I have such a manic documentation twitch. It teaches other people, shows them that the magic isn’t really magic (it’s hard work), and it prevents me from ever becoming a legend. Egotistical for me to think that way, I know. But if there’s a nonzero chance, I’m going to squelch it as hard as I can. See the messiness. See the headdesking and the non-triumphant FAIL and the times I was a wimp and caved. See the utter lack of manifest destiny. See the freaking-out and the stumbling-along.
“These days, I just keep trying to expose the work under the beauty…. I cheated and used a pre-made sauce for the base — let me show it to you. Exposing the hard labor (or the clever workarounds) that are necessary to trying to do it all…” — Mary Anne Mohanraj
If I say “if I can do it, you can too” and get told “but you’re Mel,” along with a look of admiration, then I’ve failed. I don’t want to stand up on a pedestal – maybe I’ll top-rope there to drop a ladder if absolutely nobody else can climb, but then I’m rappelling down and pushing other people up that ladder – not because I’m selfless or anything, but because I’m very, very selfish in in Not Wanting To Be Up There, and if other people are up there, then I’m not. View Source: The Myth Repellent.
And that feeling I get sometimes of “oh, I’m not a real engineer, never really was”?
Yeine is a warrior who never makes war. Or at least, she doesn’t do it in any conventional sense. That’s the point. Yeine comes from a warrior culture. In her land, serious disputes are resolved in a straightforward and efficient manner: with a knife-fight. She’s pretty good at it, though we never see this… this must be intensely frustrating to most fantasy readers, who are used to warriors making war, magicians making magic, thieves being all thievey, and so on…. in future novels, if I force a character to act against her habits/background, I’m going to give her at least one chance to use the old habits before she has to stifle herself. That, I think, will make it clearer that she’s choosing to play by new rules — that she could kick ass if she needed to, using the methods with which she’s most familiar, but she’s purposefully chosen a different path. –“Warriors who don’t make war”
I could, I think, have been a pretty decent engineer, in the conventional sense of the word. Not just “have been.” “Could be.” Coder, roboticist, embedded ninja… there are some things (abstract math research, anything involving bio or chem) I see my ceiling for, things I could plod along on but would never be great at, things I just would never love enough to pursue long enough and hard enough to master. Other things… maybe. Things that may not come naturally (for instance, signal processing), but which I love regardless of how hard they are, and stand a chance of being able to do ‘em long enough to truly grok enough to do something with it.
And then there’s what I do now, which is what I love. Love love love. Would not trade for anything. Glad I’m getting to learn this and do this as early in my life as I am. Still, sometimes I wish I could “prove” better than I am and can be a damn good engineer (conventional definition). And I know I did get some engineering experience and that I did rather well when I was doing it, and I know that even if I’d worked “as an engineer” for a decade before switching to “community stuff” I would still not be satisfied because the field just changes so fast (“so you did that, but it was 2 years ago, so now you’re clueless”) so this isn’t an unrequited burning something that’ll rankle in me ’till I go back and fix it, taking a sabbatical to Hack Things Directly for a year or two wouldn’t make me feel better about it. There will likely always be this tension. That’s okay.
Finally, from this post – worth reading in its entirety, along with the comment thread:
“Diversity is the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy.”
Best phrasing of that sentiment I’ve ever seen.
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Between large amounts of excellent Mexican food and BBQ in Texas (ironically, I like the Texas-style beef brisket in Boston – Blue Ribbon BBQ – better than the brisket in Texas – but the ribs are lovely), staying up ’till 4 or 5am every night talking, sparring (I’ve forgotten much of my Aikido), or playing Rock Band with Mark, and a surprising visit to his lab (the ability to curse is sometimes useful in getting people to debate tech and business with me as if I were not a delicate flower, heh)… it was a good trip. Didn’t do my financial end-of-month reckoning yet on account of being in Texas; have to do that later tonight and catch up. Note to self.
Mark is one of my favorite sparring partners – intellectually, martially, just about everything. That’s actually what I call him, what I tell him – my sparring partner. We pull each other along as we argue; he never holds back his punches when we’re sparring intellectually, and won’t let me get away with anything when sparring physically; when I get a technique right on Mark, I know I’ve got it right, because he won’t go down unless I really nail it.
It’s actually what I’m most afraid of losing, with him. I don’t want my sparring partner to go away – but the fact that he’s a guy and I’m a girl makes it more likely that this may happen some day. It’s not that there’s any romantic tension between us – there never will be, because that’s just not the way we work together. I couldn’t have a crush on him if I tried; I’ve wished I could in the past, because it would be quite convenient – we’re good friends and compatible in a lot of other ways, but that sort of chemistry just isn’t there, never has been, never will be.
But Mark wants to get married someday, and the someday is going to be relatively soon. Couple of years, before the thirties hit (sooner for him than for me – like most of my friends, he’s older). And girlfriends and wives may not like it so much when Mark and I drink beer and talk ’till 5am while practicing wrist locks and throws. It’s happened a few times before when friends of mine have paired up with women who don’t know me, don’t understand that I’m not a threat and never will be. (Usually this happens when they haven’t actually met me. I think it becomes relatively obvious once they do.) Often it’s not really a conscious thing, nor an order, it just… happens. Fades.
I’ve never really worried about the reverse problem. Part of the package deal is being fine with the fact that most of my best friends are guys, and that yes, I’m going to hang out with them and work with them and wrestle with them and occasionally crash on their couches and air mattresses during trips. These are my comrades; why should being female make me any different? Oftentimes it doesn’t, but sometimes it does, and it (b)others me. Not so much because it’s unfair – the reverse effect happens as well for guys, I’m sure – but it bothers me because these people are my friends, and I don’t want to lose them, and I may someday.
So when Mark drops me off at the airport and crushes me in a bear hug before I walk into the terminal, I wonder: will you hug me like that next time? Will we pummel each other in debates all through the night next time? Or are things going to be different? I never know. I trust and hope, but I never actually know.
Sparring partners. My best friends are my sparring partners. I’m pretty sure I’m going to cry during their bachelor parties (crying being something that I basically never do) because I won’t know if I’ll get them back afterwards. But their lives are their lives, and their happiness makes me happy, so… sometimes you just let go.
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I have noticed that a good number of my favorite poems evoke a certain sense of… not quite wanderlust, but the quiet little lifting of your soul that happens when you soar free through a wide, wide, ever-widening universe, somehow happy to be lonely at that moment. Some pieces of this stick so deeply in me that I’ve memorized them (unintentionally).
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
– from “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death,” by William Butler Yeats
This is the sort of stuff that comes to mind when I find myself watching the sun come up from an air mattress next to a luggage of spilled clothes. It’s a good life – one that can’t last forever, but… well, I’ll love it while I can.
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
– from “Sea Fever,” by John Masefield
All right. I gotta sleep – I get to go see Mark’s lab today, which I am quite excited about. It’s been so long since I was around active mechanical prototypes. As much as I love software, sometimes I do itch to get my hands on something solid.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
