[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindump of the Mel. Seek coherency and relevance at your own risk.

Braindump du jour

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.

November 6, 2008 – 9:20 pm | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Blog posts from friends

The last picture from Sa’am’s post on career ideographs made me laugh.

Nagle wrote about transparent projects today, and I thought a piece of that was well worth posting here.

[talking about Tornado Tubes, a green piece of plastic that connects two soda bottles together] As a child, I figured that there was something special in the connector piece that was making all this happen. I never really explored this belief — it seemed quite apparent that that was how it worked… [when doing the project years later, teaching camp as an adult, Nagle] discovered that all you have to do to get this is to happen is to connect the two bottles. Duct tape worked well enough.

I was shocked! I’d really thought that there was going to be something tricky in the connector piece… that in the heart of that green connector there was some mechanism at work responsible for the really cool tornado effect… There was something about it being made by someone else, purchased and having come out of a package, that put it beyond my curiosity, beyond my sense that this was an object that I could understand.

He goes on to describe how he’s designing his electronics kit for kids to try to avoid that problem. It’s made of foam core and alligator clips and is pretty spiffy and in any case far better than my earlier “let’s laser cut  EVERYTHING! and make this really expensive to produce!” ideas. Go Nagle!

November 6, 2008 – 9:20 pm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Bassoons

I have heard that bassoons have a weird property: when they play a note, their fundamental frequency is nearly absent. The ear-brain system fills in this frequency, making the bassoon sound very low pitched without actually containing much of the very low frequencies.

How can I verify this? (Google is failing me here.) How can I find whether it’s possible to have the reverse - a sound that seems high-pitch without actually containing high frequencies? This seems pretty impossible to me right now, but then again, so does the bassoon thing. There’s probably some weird perception stuff going on in the brain that I don’t understand. If there is such a thing, I wonder if I can find a way to put that as an “instrument” on my digital piano so I can actually hear my right hand play.

November 6, 2008 – 9:06 pm | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

I fail at microwaving parsnips.

I fail at microwaving parsnips.

After peeling the parsnips and removing their woody cores (the cookbook claimed this should be neither tedious nor time-consuming; I want to know where they’re getting their parnips), I put them in a bowl with a few tablespoons of water, as the recipe indicated, and then covered with plastic wrap, as the recipe indicated, and then put them in the microwave for 12 minutes (the recipe said 15, but I figured I should be safe).

About 8 minutes in, Chris turned to me and said “you know, the microwave is… smoking.” I turned around. Clouds of white smoke were billowing around the tiny black appliance. I hit the STOP! STOP! STOP NOW! button* and was introduced to the deliciously earthy smell of… burning parsnip. Also the not-as-pleasantly-earthy smell of melting plastic wrap.

*due to space constraints, the actual button label was abbreviated to “STOP”.

What happened: parsnips are absorbent. Water went away. Waterlogged parsnips went OH! Energy! Let’s get it and then MELT THINGS! And… and… BURN OURSELVES!

A bowl of charred parsnips is now soaking in hot water in the sink.

November 6, 2008 – 9:55 am | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

SWEBOK

In between Tai Chi and Sanda classes last night, I read the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge document, a 204-page IEEE pdf from 2004. It’s a good way to pick up vocabulary from and a rough terrain map of a field you’re trying to learn, and I wish I’d done that when my pick-a-major dartboard hit electrical engineering 4 years back. The only problems is that the document itself is written in drowsiness-inducing academic form. Observe:

7. Practical Considerations
The first level of decomposition of subareas presented in this KA may seem to describe a linear sequence of activities. This is a simplified view of the process. [Dav93]

In other words, “It looks like we’re going through these topics in order. We’re making it easy for you.” Oh well. The loud thuds of the more advanced students rapidly kicking pads was stimuli enough to keep me conscious, and if I ever want to study “Software Engineering” proper, as it was delineated 4 years ago, I have plenty of bibliographies to track down. And this is the language that I need to absorb and learn to speak to understand some conversations in the office that only dimly make sense to me now (oh, that I could overhear more conversations!)

Another thing I learned last night: turnips and dijon mustard do go well together.

November 6, 2008 – 9:03 am | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Lunchtime: a good time to go through notes

Ah, geekhood. There is no better way to spend a lunch break than with cheddar scrambled eggs, apple-plum smoothies, Ben Folds playing, and chuckling ironically over recognizing big balls of mud in your life. (To anybody who ever sees my old robotics code again: I’m very, very sorry. I actually put in docstrings now, I swear.)*

*Although that code was better than the infamous schoolbus algorithm simulator I wrote in high school for a math modeling competition. I had not yet learned about objects. It was 17 double-sided tiny-font printout pages of one giant while loop that tunneled through multiply-nested arrays declared in Hungarian notation. After we placed in the competition, I deleted the files in disgust and decided to learn about OOP. (The sad thing was that I was the team’s sole coder because they needed one for the girl’s group - there were no mixed-gender teams - and there was literally nobody else.)

Found a veritable bonanza of reading materials about Information and Communication technologies for development (as in “the developing world,” though I… have my reservations about that term).

Also, you can use vim as a wiki. (Translation: Do you also like keeping your notes in plaintext files? Now you can link them together without making them non-plaintext files.)

Just ran across my notes from when Henry taught me about the trinity rescue kit, which you can use to recover severely borked systems. Of course, I had to ask how one would prevent malicious use of the TRK to grab data from a hard drive without authorization, so then he showed me truecrypt. The tradeoff: if your encrypted data’s borked, it’s borked. It’s kind of scary how much of “security” is just a thin shiny layer that makes us feel good. (Also helping with this mental shift: my further adventures in learning lock-picking.)

I’m drowning in emails. I think I will section off some time to attack that after a meeting this afternoon.

November 5, 2008 – 12:07 pm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Cumin is my friend.

Mmmmmmmmmmm. Large broccoli and two carrots steamed with a glass of white wine, then blended with a handful of cheddar. A little garlic powder (probably better with fresh/roasted garlic, but none on hand) and then some cumin (which is getting to be one of my favorite seasonings ever). It turns out this gorgeous bright green soup that’s further improved with a splash of olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top. Kinda like drinking a cheddar-laced sweet green emerald in creamy liquid form, except it’s better than that awkward description makes it out to sound.

Fun old things cropping up again: last spring’s Story Jam at UNICEF from last spring got picked up by the Communication Initiative Network.

I feel sort of guilty not spending 40 hours a week Making Things, but as DJ pointed out some time back, a  substantial portion of an engineer’s job is really to figure out (through talking with people) what things should be made and how, and whether they were made properly, and how to interface them… I think I need to schedule “Learn How To Make Things” and “Make Things” sprints, though, because it’s too easy for me to get distracted and forget about sitting down to Do Stuff.

Okay. Enough. I’ve gotten my happy intellectual stimulation out of the way early this morning by reading about software testing; it’s time to Do Stuff.

November 5, 2008 – 10:48 am | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Making “someday” more concrete

Someday I will be free to do what I think I can best do, at any given point in time, to solve the problems that I want to solve. Someday I’ll have the resources, the time, the skills and knowledge, contacts, energy, and courage to do what should be done.

There is never any reason why that someday can’t be now.

I realized a few days ago that my constant usage of the phrase “when I grow up” was, in part, a not-so-subtle way of deferring the responsibility of making my dreams actually happen. One of those “can’t fail if you haven’t started” things. Also just plain ol’ laziness, because working on dreams is hard. And painful. Because they never quite turn out the way you see them at first. And if they do, you realize that’s not quite what you really wanted.

But begin anyway. If the journey is a thousand miles, you’re probably already at least on step 5. And yeah, you fell over on step 2 and sprained your ankle which has since almost healed up. Isn’t it better, though, to be on step 5 and proceeding onwards than it is to keep on saying “whoop! I have a perfect record - I haven’t taken step 1 yet”? Either way, you fell, and either way, you need to watch your ankle for the next 10 steps. Might as well count those steps towards your thousand.

Now, just because you start now! doesn’t mean you’re going to fix it now. Sometimes the best thing you can do to work towards something is to not do anything towards at it at the moment. You take the action item of “have patience” and keep completing it every single time you remember (or better yet, you can set a “you don’t have to be patient about this any more! Go do stuff!” reminder-timer to pop up at you in the future). It looks the same on the outside, but this is different from saying “someday” - maybe you’ll get that thing to happen someday. Maybe. We don’t know. If you’re saying “yes, I’m going to make this happen; right now, the way I’m doing this is through waiting it out strategically,” that’s called taking responsibility.

I think I’ll do that now.

Oh god, it’s hard. There are so many things to do… and “be patient and wait” is what I have to do for the vast, vast majority of them. I’m not particularly good at this “be patient” thing. When it looks like I’ve been patient, it only appears as if I’ve been biding my time; in all probable reality, the truth is I that forgot and had only just remembered the old item and am now madly improvising to tie it in somehow with the new. I’m hoping patience is the kind of thing that will improve with practice.

I’m… getting a lot of practice now.

November 4, 2008 – 10:41 pm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

My train of thought hops rails like a manic iron bunny

Wow. Sleeping with a good pillow makes a tremendous difference to how well you can stay asleep. I may have found the cause of my mysterious “why have I needed 7-8 hours of sleep the last few weeks?” puzzle. Will wait a few more days before passing final judgment on this one, but wow.

Sometimes, when I’m reading the blogs of my friends, they’ll write something that’s just so… much… them - there’s a brief flash of their presence as I read, and then it goes poof! and I go on with life a little happier for having had that.

I went home to Chicago this weekend for my dad’s 50th birthday. It’s nice to briefly stay in a huge house with a big kitchen with a dishwasher. (It’s almost like living in a restaurant! You don’t have to scrub your plates, you just put them there and then they’re clean!*) Also, even after 22 years, my parents happily surprise me sometimes.

*I am easily excited.

Someday I will have to sew up this big hole in my backpack. Someday I will have to learn to sew. Someday I will borrow a needle and thread from someone else to do so. In the meantime, nothing’s fallen out yet.

Fried spinach is delicious. Retro kitchen appliances can be extraordinarily ugly (also, pink bathrooms from the 60’s? Eugh). Clothes irons are more expensive than anticipated. I miss the piano in my parents’ house. Leaky gel pens make interesting - what is the handwriting equivalent of a typo? Ooh, clock radio. Why is there a drawing of a watermelon here? I’m thirsty. The potentiometer controlling this ceiling fan has a crooked plate behind it. I wonder if my brother actually needs two saxophones. What happened to my toothpaste?

Oh god, my mind is turning into the Random Article link on Wikipedia. I really really need to go to bed.

November 2, 2008 – 10:54 pm | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

One Velociraptor Per Child

One Velociraptor Per Child’s mission is to increase the Darwinian fitness of the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-energy, internet-enabled velociraptor with content designed for collaborative, practical, self-empowered survival.

“It’s an education project, not a genetic engineering project.” — Dr. Ian Malcolm

You can show your support for global paleontology here, and then join the effort to change the world… here.

(update: Digg it!)

November 2, 2008 – 8:08 am | olpc | 5 Comments »