Posts that are Uncategorized-ish
One of my uncles sent me this blog post. According to the okcupid test, I am a “pure nerd” (85% nerd, in any case; in the mid-thirties for Geek and Dork.) “A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.” Sounds about right.
Happiness is two artichokes dripping with melted butter, fresh cranberries blended with orange juice, and chardonnay cauliflower soup sweetened with carrots and spiked with garam masala. This was the lunch I cooked today, and it took 20 minutes (ok, 21 if you count melting the butter in the microwave). I would like to learn to blend my own garam masala - it would be gorgeous, when I have a bigger kitchen, to have a mortar and pestle, and whole spices, and fresh herbs. I love the aromatic oils of basil and mint leaves when you crush them (separately - actually, I have no idea how they go together; I don’t think they do.)
I’ve been jittery as of late, but able to calm myself down into focus - it is good to be more aware and in control of this now, instead of letting {hyper, hypo}focus just happen and surprise me later when I realize I’ve wasted N minutes (hours, days). I started doing a million things at once after lunch, and went past my “happily busy” point, and my mind started to splinter too much - but I caught it, and I sent myself to take a shower, and then I went to wash the dishes, and said “Mel, when you wash the dishes, wash the dishes,” and so I… washed the dishes. Just washed the dishes. Hot water, soap, a brush, a bowl.
Then I could do stuff.
I think that’s why I like small, powerful toolsets. They’re eigenvectors. I can keep them in my brain without getting all antsy from the clutter that results from when I feel like I have to keep looking for more; I know they span the basis, so I can relax and solve the problem.
Tomorrow before leaving for work, I need to do the following (far overdue):
- buy groceries (we have no cumin, eggs, or juice of any sort, are low on frozen veggies, and have neither soy nor coconut milk, etc.)
- deep-clean Yavin IV before our first guest for Sugarcamp arrives (hurrah, Dave Farning!)
- purvey a new comforter (my old one is past its useful life, and it is getting cold at night.)
Forced rest is exhausting. It’s more work to rest than it is to work - but it does let me refill (and therefore enable me to empty out) my various reservoirs, so I am going to continue. Preparing and enjoying good food (preferably with friends) also helps. Music helps. Walking helps. Running, I think, helps. (I have long legs! It’s like running with wings! I just can’t do it for very long. Yet.) Kicking things also helps.
Oh yes - kicking things! (Yep, I’m somewhere in there.)
Also, a friend of mine might go into audiology. They have been forewarned that if this happens, they shall be peppered with constant questions about everything.
Finally, I am almost happy with this poem. Happy enough to let it go and call it done at last. Edit: Poem now actually displays. Bloody HTML.
Orpheus
-------------
A needled snake, red sirens keening.
There she went. You found her,
and you let her gently down.
Drinking cheap sorrow
in the weeks that followed, you learned
that only grief-stricken songs still held your gaze.
Once before, you would obey their sound;
now your heart is as a bruised white flower,
folded within itself. Had she returned,
you would still wear her waking shroud.
Friday, November 14th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Working at OLPC (especially during G1G1 season) occasionally means that celebrities come in to film endorsements in the conference room 20 feet away from where you’re sitting, newspapers stand by your desk to snap pictures and interview famous people, and stuff of that nature.
Coworker: “You were oblivious to a tall, beautiful man floating through the office?”
Me: “…Yes? I mean, I looked him up on Wikipedia when you said that he was coming, but…”
Me: <enthusiastic burble about the shiny cameras, lights, and microphones following Tom Brady around the office>
Coworker: <sigh><something about this not being a surprise>
Also, nifty new toy: xclock. (Call it from a Linux command line. It’s probably installed by default on your distro.)
Edit: Tim Brady != Tom Brady. Right. I can type. Moving on, now…
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
This list is a tiny subset out of necessity.
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Two words:
The people.
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
It was a partial success. I got the first thing done, but the second was blocked by things outside my control. I guess I should have a backup thing-to-do in case that happens again. In any case, I’ll do that second thing tomorrow.
The problem I have with leaving things undone is that they are uncaught exceptions. I feel like I should have some sort of publicly posted if statement that says something like “I may take some time to respond, so you may want to try A, B, or C first; if you don’t hear back from me in N days, you will probably not hear back at all, feel free to resend at that point.” And then I feel lousy for ignoring things. I feel like I should have capacity to deal with this, but as has been pointed out to me many times, I can’t do everything. (I forget this frequently and try anyway.)
Tired, stressed, and not thinking straight. I am at least doing well in forcing myself to sleep (at least 5 hours a night - upped this to 6 during this week and next because I need to force myself to rest and step back) and forcing time-out to physically exhaust myself, mostly through kicking things. (Yay martial arts! Also, total failure to keep up with jumping squats today. However, I’m pleasantly surprised at the tiny bit of pushup-fu I’ve gained in just 2 weeks.
Forcing myself to rest is very hard. It takes more energy to try to rest than it does to not-rest sometimes. (Yes, this defeats the point of resting, and does not count as actual resting time. I’m learning.)
My heart is starting to get used to the idea that moving blood != time to panic. I ran a half-mile down the street with a full backpack today, with long-legged effortless strides - it was like flying. I do not often run like this; it felt great. (Well, for half a mile. And then the “wait, you’re running - time for pain! you need more oxygen!” reaction triggered, and things were slightly less pleasant.)
So many tiny things and people are keeping me going right now.
Ok. Forced rest. Try not to think or care for 6 hours - well, I mean, think, and care, but - don’t stress. Eh, I think I know what I mean by this, and that is good enough. Bed.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Note: I can tell before I start writing tonight that this will be a long and over-fancy worded post. Ignore as wanted.
I am thankful to my mentors and my teachers because they give me glimpses of parts of what I am working on becoming. More accurately, they give me glimpses of things I can want to become. Most of them probably don’t realize how much I look up to them.
Strong, heartfelt writers and eloquent speakers that inspire not just emotion, but initiative-assuming actions. Steady shadows by the sides of public figures who work, often without recognition, to enable those they serve to be more recognized, to help the cause that they and those they shadow work in common for.
Quiet ones who whisper and message invisibly here and there, making their public messages scarce so that others can (and do) step forward and find their voice. And bold practitioners of radical transparency that use their voices not to drown out the speech of others, but to amplify it.
Those who know what’s important, and get it done.
People who are imperfect, but who try. Not because they are not perfect, or despite it. They just try. Sometimes it works.
Those who are project debuggers, earnest helpers, magic problem-fixing wizards. And those who have the wisdom to hold back and let you struggle on your own.
Listeners; patient observers who give you counsel to be calm, to take a step back, breathe, and see. Fire-lighters, risk-takers, who jump in with both feet, improvise, make others - if not completely comfortable with such spontaneity, unable to avoid it but also unable to avoid appreciating its effects.
Translators and bridgers-of-worlds. People who merge differences together and people who branch off and create the new. People who learn from history but are not bound by it. Those who can start a fight; those who can fight and win, those who can graciously lose and learn from it, those who can befriend the ones who they have conquered or who have conquered them - and as an equal. Those who can make peace, and those who can live in peace.
Those who can stop; those who can never stop. Those who accept that they love and embrace those whom they love, and those who are loved and accept that they are loved.
Those who trust and who are trusted.
People with grand U-shaped hardwood desks bristling with monitors, titles, tenure, secretaries, frequent first-class plane tickets for a myriad of work engagements, and still have time to sit with youngsters with ideas; people with soaring houses who open them up to friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and events. People who sleep on couches, have never owned a car, will never have money to donate to a cause because they give themselves instead. People who knew the choice that they were making would lead to a harder life, and chose it anyway because they thought it would do someone else more good.
Those who teach and share, and those who never cease to learn, and those who teach us through the way they learn themselves.
Those who lead well, and those who follow leaders well - and those who create leaders most of all (although I do not yet know what the word “leader” means).
People who enrich the world by being here. (Arguably, this should be everyone.) People who live paradoxes, people who are paradoxes, and people who resolve paradoxes in a weird way by just existing. (Or serve as proofs by contradiction.)
Those who are blessed; those who are happy. (I’d kind of prefer both, personally.)
I can’t think of a good conclusion to this post. Eh. That’s why this blog is for braindumps, and I post without censoring. Go.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
To use a Tank-ism, interesting instruments are interesting.
Learned several things yesterday:
- Sweeps use your hip flexors.
- I have hip flexors!
- Discovering new and previously underused muscle groups is usually done via noticing that said muscle groups are sore.
It is nice to be able to wear myself out in multiple ways each day. Physical exhaustion feels great (and is inevitable after spending 2 hours grappling against guys 1.5 times my weight - thankfully, the more experienced students continue to be mercifully patient with scrawny n00bs). I’ve been regularly reaching my saturation point on dealing with systems and structures of people and organizations I can’t change immediately. It stretches out my “patience” muscle well. Almost too well, actually; I’ve started learning how much capacity I have to deal with these sorts of situations, how to recognize when I’ve almost exhausted that capacity of patience, and how to gently bow out and replenish it. Slowly building that reservoir of capacity. It’ll get a little bigger each time it’s exercised. I hope.
I’ve also started reaching my academic saturation point again - textbooks are wonderful, but papers are bite-sized nuggets of knowledge and are even better. (Yeah, I’m a freak; grad school is going to rock.) Less so on “Making Stuff,” but this is getting a little better. I need to spend less time on overpreparing my mind and more time on preparing my environment and my tools; it should be the easiest thing in the world to sit down at my desk and have - WHAM! a nicely-configured IDE or a set of pliers at my fingertips, no excuses, no struggles to get Hello World out. I also haven’t been as good about reaching my musical saturation point on a regular basis lately; I need to practice piano more again, get the muscles of my fingers back, remember what scales go with which chords. Early morning practice? Evenings I have a hard time keeping myself from just falling into bed.
I think I need to learn how to empty all these different kinds of energy from myself every day - the (rare) days I manage to do that are wonderfully productive, and I can actually lie down and go to bed without knocking myself out with sleep deprivation or something. The trick is to do it all in 20 hours so I don’t stay up all night running around going “WHAAAA! Excess CAPAAAACITY!” (…Obviously, fewer hours of that and more hours of sleep would be a little better.) And then I have to learn how to recharge.
When did this become hard? I never needed to meter myself as a kid; I never needed to worry about concentrating, and I still did well. This may have been the problem. The things I had to do took so little of my capacity that it was just fine to waste and mismanage the rest; there was nothing else to use it for. Now (well, in growing amounts over the last… 8 years, especially in the last 2.5) that there is something else to use it for, I don’t know how to optimize to do it. Frustrating, to know your atrophied capabilities could do wonderful things, but can’t right now. Rewarding, to watch them slowly fill out and gain parts of the strength you know they should have. Painfully slow. Agonizing when you backslide. But generally speaking, max(You) is a fun problem to tackle.
I am going to try something today as an exercise in non-distraction (an exercise I’ve done before). I have a meeting and then lunch and then 2 things to do. What if I just sat down and got them done? No checking email, no chat, nothing unless it’s directly relevant to doing those two things. How long will it take?
I’m betting 2 hours. Total.
Let’s find out.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Read this (it has an interesting perspective on the events that it describes). Then read the links in that post. Then come back here.
So, conventional wisdom says that a nonprofit should never put all of its cards on the table - that showing your weaknesses is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. In order to be strong, you must appear strong, or so the saying goes. If you reveal your vulnerabilities, people won’t have faith in you and won’t want to invest in you. Well for FORGE, it’s time to send conventional wisdom to hell. –Forging Ahead
First of all, it’s brilliant marketing. Paraphrase: “We’re failing. Unless something happens, we will die. And maybe we should die.” The last bit is the kicker. And it worked for me; now I’m intrigued.
Second, it’s forced a strategy rethink. They’ve had to prove they do good work, justify that their existence is indispensable, and explain why $X means they won’t have to ask for a bailout again. It’s difficult to deal with lifeboat ethics when you’re deciding whether you should drown.
Their answers aren’t perfect; there are prefaces that run around the points they should be making, they’re very dramatic, and they use bold and italic text for emphasis everywhere. (Not that I never do any of these things.) I can’t help but watch with interest - and in a strange way, admiration - as they go through this experiment in radical transparency.
Sunday, November 9th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
mchua@bandersnatch:~$ man relaxation
No manual entry for relaxation
Tired and feeling oddly emptied-out. Dinner with Olin people stopped this temporarily, then talking with Chris did, then doing my BBST homework did, then writing an explanation of the design process, and then… now, tired and kinda emptied-out again.
Not a bad thing, necessarily. I need space and time to think and people to help me step through all of it a little slower, and I have not (as of late) shaped my environment to allow myself to get that, or to get into the state where I can take advantage of it. (Needed: more walks, more hitting things, more music, more conversations.) I mean, heck; I’ve found myself making phone calls to people, which is perhaps the extreme end of “boy, I feel like seeking people out today” for me. (I usually hate getting phone calls.)
In any case, this is a welcome contrast to the usual “Mel thinks of something? off! it goes… train of thought bounded? nobody knows!” state. Not because it’s nice in and of itself, but because it’s different, and I’ve been in several mildly destructive mental ruts lately (while still being happy, mind you - it’s possible to be happy but still have suboptimal thought patterns, something like dancing really well despite/but wearing lousy shoes). And it’s good to be kicked out of those into pretty much anything else; I readjust, learn things, do better, and the happiness remains. (Perhaps it always will. It seems to be one of the few really stable things about me.)
Not bad, not good. Just currently the way things are. My mind does not usually settle, especially on a fuzzy grey blank tiredness with mild overtones of anxiety (mostly because my brain’s confused as to why it’s not thinking of a zillion things at once today). This is typically an indication that I’m sick, but I think I got over most of that feeling by throwing up a couple times this morning (also, I’m pretty sure that was something I ate, and I feel reasonably decent now). In any case, a reasonable strategy seems to be to (1) let someone else do some of the talking for me - a.k.a. post a quote I came across today - and then (2) bed.
Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you cannot conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..
–Paul Bowles
I’m a little afraid of surrendering to the blankness; my mind’s trying to burble and fill up with a thousand things again, but I should let this go and be okay with having emptiness in here, and go to sleep.
Away.
Saturday, November 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Today is the first day since I started taking martial arts lessons that I skipped a lesson (not counting days when I was out of the state). Dumb reason, too; I forgot to bring pants (I was wearing jeans). Realized this when I got to the studio. Watched the other students go for a while (there is a lot I haven’t seen yet). Anyway, it’s probably good to give my muscles a rest once in a while. I have learned that it is possible to ache in places I was not previously aware were muscle locations. It feels great.
Yeah, I’m a masochist. But I like this! Can I be really enthusiastic about everything for a while? (Oh! Also, jazz piano! And also, cooking! And also also, lockpicking! And {break, swing} dancing, and… and…APIs, and the semantic web! Also, metal injection molding!)
(Okay, I’m done now.)
So instead of kicking things myself tonight (I practiced a little at home, though) I went off and got a negotiating lesson at a mattress store. Or rather, tried a negotiation experiment… it worked ok, I can do better, I’ll try again sometime. It’s amazing how being quiet and letting the other person talk will tend to bring the price down… and down… and down… and down. I’m trying to see if I can reach 50% off list price. Currently I’m at 66% of the list price for a mattress that isn’t supposed to ever go on sale. Not too bad for a first try.
Potato-leek soup: easy and gorgeous. Chop both vegetables, saute them for a couple minutes in olive oil ’till they’re no longer raw, then pour broth over and boil until tender; season, then blend if you want - you don’t have to do the blending, but I like it that way. Don’t overblend it, or the potato starch will turn it pasty - I think I overdid it just a bit this time. Rosemary goes well with this.
Tomorrow looks to be a busy day - the start to a busy weekend. This is putting it mildly. I’ll spare the mind-numbing schedule details here; full details available to those who inquire.
I’m trying to find ways to do less right now. Get rid of books!* Cut down on meetings! Unsubscribe from mailing lists! Pareto-ize my life! It’s part of my regular cyclic purge of “gaaaaaaahtoomanythingstodoooooo.” Recognizing it as a cyclic thing keeps me from stressing out about it too much. This was one of my great triumphs at college - learning to be okay with cycles like that. The cleanliness of my room follows a similar pattern. In fact, the cycles for those two things (room + hosedness) usually align. (When I’m hosed, I don’t have time to pick up stuff.)
*Would anybody like science-fiction books, popular-audience sociology/economics books, or books on acting/theatre or the social impact of technology?
Must do fewer things. Have fewer things. Be fewer things. Glory.
For the record, my room currently does not have a floor.
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »