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3 Years In

18-May-12

It’s been 3 years since Dad died, 2 years since I’ve been single. It’s hard to believe, really. And wouldn’t you know, I had a dream about Dad for the first time in a while. He had cancer but was still alive. We’d all moved back to Cross Creek where I’d spent the first decade of my life or so. I had my job at CMG, I think, and I was talking to Dad who confided in me that he and Mom were having serious financial trouble. I remember being shocked that something hadn’t been mentioned to me sooner and feeling guilty for somehow missing that I could have helped for so long. I’d just been enjoying life as I am these days, a good job, good friends, etc. I was talking to Mom or Dad about how I could support them when I woke up. In the dream, Dad still had all his hair. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about him post-hair and post-chemo. I’m thankful for that. He wasn’t the same person once his hair was gone.

I’d been a bit depressed the first half of this week and I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t until talking to mom Tuesday night that she reminded me we were coming up on the 3-year anniversary. I’d thought about it when someone asked about dad a few weeks back but it slipped my mind. I’m thankful for my job and coworkers, I love them dearly and even on my grumpiest, most “Office Space-y” days I’m happy to be in the office. I’m thankful for my friends who keep Atlanta fun and keep life interesting even when we all just want to have a drink and be together at the end of a long day. I’m thankful for my mother, who’s weathered plenty and still figuring out how to have fun. Mostly, of course, I’m thankful for dad. I still don’t know how he did it all. But thanks to him, I can too.

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April Adventures

15-Apr-12

I’ve been working on some of the depression issues mentioned a few posts back, making progress. Been making a concerted effort to have fun. Lots of weekend trips to Athens, socializing, concerts, that sort of thing.  Starting to create things again too! I’ve made a mixtape for the first time….like a proper mixtape. Did it in Audacity. Didn’t try to do tempo/beat-shifting or anything fancy, just 29 minutes of cutting and fading. I still think it turned out quite well for a first effort. It leans strongly in the electronic/dance direction so if that’s a big turn off for you steer clear. Anyway, onwards and upwards. And to steal from Milosz and Neruda: “Yes, this is my gift to you. Above ashes on a bitter, bitter earth. To you, to the one who unknowingly has awaited me, I belong and acknowledge and sing.”

Here’s the mix and the tracklist. (EDIT: Here’s a vastly improved version of the mix, the associated tracklist, and where you can listen online.)

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A Quiet Saturday

17-Mar-12

I need another dose of Milosz. Perhaps you do too. Here we go…

Guardian Angel

In my dreams my guardian angel takes the form of a woman,
Not always the same one. He knows that I, a fleshly creature,
Need a lover’s touch. We don’t make love,
But there is a closeness between us, and understanding.

I never believed in the presence of angels, but my dreams have changed,
And when, recently, I found an underground grotto filled with treasure,
And we were moving the sacks together, I asked him
For one more moment of the dream, which gave me peace.

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Cool Waters Ahead

08-Mar-12

Disclaimer: This is going to be a much more personal entry than normal. Just to get down some recent thoughts and revelations that I’ve had. I’ve read people talking about blogs as subject-focused, about building them almost like products. But this thing is a record, a mosaic, and a journal. So here we go.

On and off depression is the one thing I still really feel like is holding me back and don’t like about myself. Part of the reason I stayed single (even became single in the first place) was to address this issue. I’ve resisted taking medication since I went cold turkey in February of 2005. For the seven years prior to that, I had been on a daily cocktail of Tegretol (a mood stabilizer), Risperdal (an anti-psychotic), Effexor XR (an anti-depressant) and Adderall (ADHD med/legalized extended release cocaine). It was a non-trivial cocktail. I may take up a light antidepressant until I can learn to keep myself in the upswing without it. But this post is less about that and more about celebrating continuing to become mentally and emotionally healthier and making it as far as I have.

Let’s start with that last part. The meds I used to be on were *not* an accident and though I didn’t love the experience they had their use. I demonstrated many of the precursors for Bipolar Disorder and the primary reason I was on the meds was to curb the likelihood of my brain ingraining the sort of patterns that can only be fought by regular Lithium intake later. I have a close blood relative who has suffered from Schizophrenia and another who received 33 shock treatments over the course of a bad episode. I think we can safely say that things have panned out so far. I’ve been medication free for 7 years and all indications are that the meds steered me away from forming some pretty deep canyons for the chemicals in my brain to run through.

In addition to that, and please believe this still sounds slightly ridiculous to me, I’m a survivor. I’ve actually been through a lot of shit and even when I acknowledge that I don’t really tend to give myself credit for pushing beyond it. Granted, I had a lot of help. I’ve been surrounded by a lot of tolerant, patient people that saw through the problems and helped buy me time to work through them. One thing in particular that I’ve forgotten about is just how much my biological father fucked with me when I was younger. (Not my Dad, John, whom I regularly miss and dearly love.) Here are some examples:
* When I was 2, my father left me on the sidewalk outside our condo and went to work for the day. A neighbor found me at or on my way to the Bohler Road MARTA bus stop and brought me home. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, prompted a divorce.
* When I was 3, he told me that Mom wanted a girl, not a boy. I was rather passive aggressive when I got home.
* When I was 5, I said to Mom, “Terry is emotionally unavailable to me, isn’t he?”. Frankly, I still find this a little hard to believe, precocious though I was.
* When I was ~8, I remember riding back from the liquor store in his Toyota Celica with some wine and him opening it and having me pour some into a cup for him. Classy.

I was also molested by a step-brother (Terry was unaware of this), suffered through a bit of military school in Boonville, Missouri where I was one of the smallest and youngest children, and probably some other stuff. So it wasn’t easy. I spent the first 18 or 19 years of my life not feeling safe, not trusting myself to connect with society or the world. When you get burned so much, why bother? But I came around. I’m remarkably functional, even warm. I *like* people. That’s kind of a fucking miracle. And there is some strength in me to get to where I am today. It’s something worth respecting and I’d do well to remind myself of that once in a while.

Tonight, I’m taking the opportunity to remember that with my blend of genetics and chemistry I could’ve wound up a total sociopath or just a non-functional, drug dependent nutter. I want to get healthier still and become an even more fully realized version of myself that isn’t as prone to bouts of low energy that I coast through. So I’ll figure it out and fix it. And I’ll achieve.

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Still alive!

29-Feb-12

Should start hacking more. Or posting about hacks? Haven’t been writing anything terribly interesting lately though. Lots of config updates, work stuff, odds and ends. Little of substance. So in lieu of that, some soul nourishing poetry. Been reading more Milosz lately; Second Space, in particular. There are several really lovely pieces, here’s one:

A Stay
My stay in that city was like a dream
And the dream lasted for years.

I was, in fact, not interested in anything
So long as I heard a voice dictating verses.

And in that way I invented a life,
And thus my destiny was being fulfilled.

Some people believed I was theirs,
So they put trust in my disguises.

I reproach myself for that,
For I wanted to be different,
Trustworthy, brave, noble-minded.

Later on I would only say: why reach so high?
I am and will be lame,
Which is no one’s concern.

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Decompression

29-Jan-12

It’s time to spend an afternoon at the High Museum of Art. But first, I’ve found a new poet: Wislawa Szymborska.

I’m Working On The World
I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there”,
when traded with a fish,
makes both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoots of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they’re sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.

Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.

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2011 in Review

31-Dec-11

‘I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.’ – Veni Creator, Czeslaw Milosz

So…I haven’t written here in a while. I actually have a half-written post about how I’m disappointed with this administration and we’re on a slippery slope towards throwing away some of our fundamental freedoms, like …oh I don’t know, habeas corpus…but since I started writing it the situation has deteriorated further. So great. I figured a year in review might be a little easier to write.

I’m exhausted. 2010 was a tough year but 2011 was a lot harder. On the other hand, the rewards have been greater. I’ve graduated, gotten a great first job, a lovely 12th story midtown apartment, written about twice as much code on personal projects as last year, and done some solid financial planning. Burke is moving to Indiana for a new job and I think he’ll be much happier there. Luckily I found somebody to take his spot so we won’t have to break lease.

Last year, Xach started a reddit thread on /r/lisp called ‘Your Year in Lisp’ which I replied to with some positive thoughts. This year has been even better. I wrote *a lot* more code. By comparison, last year I worked on 2 open source lisp projects and about 4 personal projects. This year I worked on about 8 personal projects and 2 open source projects.

What’s really nuts is my realization that I’ve only been hacking real code for two years. I’d been reading SICP(starting in January ’08) and hacking little snippets under 100 lines previously but never worked on a substantive piece of code. My first commit on a real codebase was this nasty diff to paktahn which I wrote about in this blog so long ago.

That was in October 2009. Before that, the most interesting and largest scale code I’d written was a script to process my ATT csv call logs. October 2010, I was still mostly hacking Paktahn though I did some minor work on Weblocks and also did some part-time PHP hacking. That was the first code I got paid to write. This October, I was putting the finishing touches on cl-scrobbler, a Lisp library for scrobbling to last.fm, and integrating it with Shuffletron.

I’ve been talking to Andy Hefner, the original author of Shuffletron, about merging my changes upstream and hope to find time to make that happen in 2011. I’ve started work on a MOS 6502 emulator in Lisp. The 6502 is the CPU that powered the original Nintendo. Also, I’m professionally hacking on a scary big Python CMS. There’s also work I’m doing to get Paktahn to a state where I can pass off my role as maintainer to some interested guys that have been helping me with it. This decision is partly motivated by the fact that I switched to Debian recently and Paktahn is an archlinux specific tool.

I don’t know what will come in the new year. I mostly hope to survive. Aside from continuing to improve my performance at work, I’d really like to increase my knowledge of Systems Programming in the coming year. That’s going to mean a lot of C hacking. The last few months I’ve lost a lot of motivation and fire when it comes to personal hacking and studies. That will honestly be my biggest struggle going into the new year. Thank God I’ve got two more days to catch my breath.

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On Data Loss

27-Oct-11

I’ve been meaning to blog more and have a more long-form, personal post in the works. Hopefully I’ll get that out tonight. I don’t reflect as much through writing as I used to and I miss that. Anyway, something interesting just happened at work. We have a beloved IRC bot at my office named olga. One of our favorite features of olga is that she’ll write a haiku for us on demand. More precisely, we can give her a phrase that is five or seven syllables and she’ll remember it. When we ask her to construct a haiku she picks two random 5-syllable phrases and a random 7-syllable phrase. The most impressive invocation of olga haiku I’ve seen to date is: “What we do in life / Is there a step I’m missing? / Inexorably”. I wish *I’d* fucking written that. It’s gorgeous.

So…I inadvertently deleted all of olga’s sevens. Someone was asking for an example of how to *remove* an entry and I posted an example that apparently matched a perl regex to nuke the universe. So I trust perl even less now and I’ve never even actually used it. The fiasco resulted in this delightful github commit fixing the vulnerability. We modify olga’s haiku database a few dozen times a day conservatively. It’s like a collective cultural store for our exceedingly delightful and nerdy hackers. After the chaos and laughter subsided, a coworker and I grepped through our irc logs of the past few months searching for matches to the “haiku add.*sevens” pattern. We’ll probably be able to restore things decently enough. There are server admins with still more extensive logs we may be able to get access to…but that’s not what’s interesting about this to me. What’s interesting about this to me…is the emotional response we had to the whole event which made me think that data loss with computers in modern times can be somewhat akin to a phantom limb sensation.

Think about it. You have *no* idea how much data you have and, if you’re a quirky statistical outlier archivist-type like me, only a vague idea of what the most important and recent elements in that dataset are. You probably don’t even know *where* your data is. It’s on Google’s servers, Amazon’s servers, your phone, your PC (possibly several) and maybe even your personal server. Even if you’re not a hacker/computer type, you’ve got data coming out of your ears. In modern society, effectively *EVERYONE* is an information packrat. And the question is, what cognitive and emotional burden does that sort of behavior result in?

The most interesting part to me is that I suspect many cases of data loss aren’t troublesome unless you’re aware of them. We have *so much* data that unless you’re sure an operation accidentally deleted data you didn’t intend to lose, you might never miss it. How big is olga’s 7-phrase dataset? I have no idea. But I honestly expect it’s in the high hundreds if not thousands of phrases. If we lost 100 of them…would we ever notice? Doubtful. But *knowing* that a bunch of data was accidentally lost feels like losing property except for the fact that it’s hard to assess just what value that property had, what measures can or should be taken to ameliorate the event, what meaning the loss really has.

This has funny implications for SciFi authors as well. The idea of memory diamond or some sort of storage medium for someone to record their entire life (lifelogging) is predicated on the fact that no data would ever be lost…because at that scale, you simply don’t know what is important and what can be lost because the *value* of the data is context-sensitive, especially temporally. Moments of nostalgia make it impossible to say, “Scrap this, lose that”, and if you don’t know what data has been lost then the whole thing is suspect. And don’t laugh *too* hard, between Steve Mann, the MIT Media Lab and folks at Yale and elsewhere there’s a decent amount of research towards making lifelogging possible. Anyway, I just wanted to get some of these thoughts down. It’s definitely been another fun day at the office. :)

Editor’s Note: Discussions with a coworker have reminded me of two things:
1) We really are likely statistical outliers much more than this post suggests. I tried to hint at this possibility with the archivist bit but it’s never the less important to reinforce.
2) People obviously know the difference between important data and unimportant data. This interesting phantom limb-like effect really seems to come out with tons of miscellaneous, less important data (IRC logs, browsing history, etc) that you keep because you can rather than essential information or emotionally substantive data (photos, videos, MP3s, certain emails, etc).

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Self-Improving Means…

05-Sep-11

Per Vognsen, whom I greatly admire, recently tweeted the following: “Least favorite type of blog: Unaccomplished 20-somethings writing self-improvement ‘how to be awesome like me’ articles.” I would put myself in the category of unaccomplished 20-somethings but, happily, I’m not trying to tell you guys how to be awesome like me. …cause I’m just some dude. And here’s what’s going on in ma domepiece (i.e. “head”)…

My writing on this blog has flitted back and forth between being for an audience and being for myself. Of late, I think it’s definitely swung back towards just for myself though I hope to blog some about hacking or other techno rants again in the near future. Of late, the only way I’ve been able to get anything down is to try and transcribe the massive looming smorgasborg of coagulating nonsense in my head. Which rather mirrors my life. Things have been good lately. I’m quite busy but I’ve been putting investment strategies and student loan payoff plans into place, moving, adjusting to my first “real” job, learning to be an adult (which itself is a loosely defined collection of things) and so on. I also just signed up for an AI course at Stanford that they’re offering free online this Fall. My CS and programming skills are nowhere near as broad or deep as I’d like them to be. And let’s not even discuss my math chops!

I’ve finally gotten back into a rhythm of hobby hacking again which I’m quite thankful for. My latest project has been Shuffletron, a command line music player I use daily but am not the original author of. So far I have added playlists and now…scrobbling! I’m a big fan of last.fm, simply because I listen to tons of music and enjoy tracking those habits via graphs and a few simple statistics. A lot of other people enjoy using it and so I thought I’d add scrobbling support to shuffletron. It was involved enough that it deserved its own library and that has given birth to the unimaginatively named cl-scrobbler which I’ve been working on for about 3 weeks now to my surprise and chagrin. Also unexpected was the ~575 lines of code (counting whitespace and tons of docstrings) it has taken to produce said library. Granted, it would be 130 lines of code less if I just added a dependency on Arnesi for plain old FIFO Queues. Anyway, I’m hoping to get it into Quicklisp in the near future and then package up shuffletron as a new potential piece of silly software for Archlinux hipsters to consume from the AUR.

Tonight I hope to start writing a study buddy that will help me get through a large directory of academic papers and code I’d like to read by picking different bite sized, daily portions for me to get through. There are things I’d like to do every day to try and continue improving my skills and I would appreciate having some automation help me do them. More on that in the near future…

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A New Poem

11-Aug-11

I haven’t posted poetry in almost a year. I’ve been trying to write a little more lately and managed something tonight. As always, it would be better to leave it on the disk, rewrite, rewrite…but here it is.

Natural Forces

How do birds die, I wonder?
Does it feel unnatural to them without
the flutter of wings? Death is not gentle.
No one dies gliding down on soft currents.
It will not take you in your home,
you shall be removed from it. Hence birds,
only sensing weight, levity forgotten.

I think of this too much and lose my stomach.
I should be capturing my youth enjoying
music, all our souls singing out,
streams of gorgeous women, glittering smiles
and brave eyes ready to dance and forget,
cauliflower with parmesan, the smell of magnolias,
the succulent crimson juice torn
from beneath the skin of a plum.

But I arrive home and recognize only weariness in myself.
I seek a long drink and some place to rest my head,
tired of these huge thoughts which so clearly will not fit.
And I remember days my heart ran with the wind,
crashed with the waves, set with the sun.

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