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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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Overcast with scattered thunderstorms

06-Aug-11

Today is my 25th birthday. So far I’ve mostly done chores: grocery shopping, laundry, handing over the keys to my old apartment, odds and ends. And, by design, I don’t have any social plans for this afternoon or evening. I’m usually pretty pensive and melancholy around my birthday. This year continues the trend. Generally, when my birthday is coming up I think, “Okay. You’ve gotten this far and accomplished this much. Maybe it wasn’t all you wanted but at least you’re further than last year. What’s next?” Not the best party conversation. :)

In all fairness, it’s been a good year. I finally finished my undergrad degree, got my first job as a professional programmer (a damn good job at that), and moved into an apartment with one of my oldest and dearest friends. That said, I’ve been struggling a lot lately. A large part of that is because I don’t know what I want for myself anymore or what my goals are. Personal relationships both romantic and otherwise, career ambitions and hobbies all seem up in the air. It’s had me feeling pretty mixed up. I can’t say I’m terribly proud of where I am at 25. Oh, well. I’ll certainly enjoy taking some time off this winter to try and sort through things more. At least I’ve had fun hacking on Andy Hefner’s Shuffletron (a Common Lisp command line app, something I have *some* experience with…) music player lately. The main changes so far have been to add playlists and a long TODO file. It’s a fun diversion until I get ever so slightly more acclimated to my professional coding life and come up with a serious project that will push me more.

It’s been hard to post lately for two reasons. The first is that I’ve simply been busy. The second is that I haven’t had much to say. My thoughts are jumbled. The same thing happened last year and like last year I’m going to borrow some of the words of my favorite poet, Czeslaw Milosz. Wherever you are, thanks for reading this far and I hope the sun is bright and your world is well.

Conversations with Jeanne

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about distancing myself.
I’ve stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute
As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.
We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,
And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,
We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,
With little windmills of palms.
And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,
That I do not demand enough from myself,
As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,
That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

You are right, Jeanne, I don’t know how to care about the salvation of my soul.
Some are called, others manage as well as they can.
I accept it, what has befallen me is just.
I don’t pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.
Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,
In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:
Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts,
Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring
With my eyes, lips, tongue.
Guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythere,
Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids
In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

Death you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,
We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.
The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens
Will be here, either looked at or not.
The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.
Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.

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For Posterity

10-Jul-11

“Where does humility come from? From sitting down and putting little signs on paper with the hope of expressing something. I am able to spend whole days on the occupation, but as soon as I finish I see that I did not express anything. I would like to consider myself a genius; I do not manage it. To tell the truth, I don’t know where the geniuses of literature are whom I should envy. Those of the past are caught in the manners and style of their period; those of today move with difficulty in a transparent jam that is slowly coagulating. And I, always insatiable, just as in this moment when I come to the window, see a tower with a clock, snow underneath it on the lawns of the Ann Arbor campus, a girl walking on a pathway, and the very act of being here, by the window, in this moment similar to any other, i.e., unrepeatable, with the whiteness of the snow and the movement of legs observed from above, is sufficient to initiate my lament on the insufficiency of language.” – Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth, Pg. 40

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On Slow Processing

28-Jun-11

To paraphrase the writing of Matt Albie, “This is not the blog post we intended when the week began.” [1]
Ed. Note: This is 1000 words of self-indulgent drivel. Welcome to the World Wide Blogosphere.

Things have been moving wildly fast of late. It’s been pretty damn hard to know what to make of it, frankly. As a consequence of things moving so fast, I’ve been pretty far outside my normal routine for over a month…almost 2 months. In some ways, I view the divergence and my activities (vastly more drinking and socializing than normal) as a coping mechanism. You’ve got to try to either make sense of the new world or keep yourself from being freaked out or crippled by it. Evolve. Fast. Under the surface, I know that the real work is going on. The slow processing. I *hate* slow processing.

Slow processing is what happened after Dad died a little over 2 years ago. It’s what happened after I broke up with Teresa a little over 1 year ago. Thankfully, this year has been a brighter, less traumatic side of slow processing spurred on by graduation, an apartment with one of my dearest friends and a truly great job. Slow processing is important. It helps you figure out where you went wrong or what has changed about your circumstances and environment that necessitates new goals and outlooks.

I think in a lot of ways, I’m doing slow processing because I only had my life figured out this far. Survive to 20s, get a good job…blank space. That’s stressful. And terrifying. I know I want to be married at some point though I still have a lot of fears about having kids. In part because a) you have to take as a given that you’re going to make serious mistakes and b) there are enough people doing it that there’s no way to distinguish yourself or your kid. The amount of faith required is tremendous. It gives me respect for the people that do it in some ways…but I’m sort of wary and distrustful of the whole enterprise. Then again, you can’t fix the earth having too many of the “wrong kind” of people without trying to make some of the “right kind”. Some huge presumptions and judgments being made in that very sentence though, eh? Who has the right to reproduce? Unfair.

My bigger problem is that I don’t know what my personal goals are. I’m settling into a rhythm now, getting back into exercise, cooking, skateboarding and hobby hacking (though only on the weekends, weeknights I’m still drained from work). My boss and others seem to be satisfied with my performance at Cox so far and I’m thankful for that. I, however, am much less satisfied. I don’t want to say *unsatisfied* but I’m certainly not patting myself on the back and thinking I’m a bad ass when I get home. It’s more like, “Keep at it. You’ll get there.” … if not necessarily that gentle and kind. You have to push yourself, you can’t trust *anybody* else to know your limits or do it for you. I was thinking earlier that your 20s is all about being (almost) totally and consistently unsatisfied with your performance and position in life…but it makes more sense to me as a lifelong outlook really. That said, you *have* to find a way to do it that doesn’t tear down your efforts to improve and demotivate or it just destroys you. I’m still working on that…

So where does that leave us? It’s back to that very tiresome, age-old question of what matters. I’ve got limited time here, even less of which when my body is in peak physical condition and tonight I wanted to run until the whole thing turned to slag. I think marriage is important to me personally because I want to share and trust myself with someone. I don’t want to wonder who will provide a good sounding board for my thoughts at a given time…and the world moves too fast and life is too short to spend alone. As for life goals, I don’t have a good grasp on them at the moment. I read about some of the work done on Google+ today and have been following various compiler developments with a decent amount of interest of late. I doubt I’ll ever be quite that good a programmer. The sacrifices are significant.

So what can I do in my time that matters? I’m fine with the answer that “nothing really matters” and I do not say that with a heavy heart. There’s something very beautiful about the arbitrary right to sketch out and gradually stumble upon or decide the meaning of your existence. Sure, only a handful of people will notice your absence a year after your death and only a handful more will really hinge on your existence while you’re alive. So what? That’s plenty to live for. But I don’t think it answers the question of real, higher-level goals and objectives. So do you strive to be the best in the world at something you care about? Or love people near to you and have a content, maybe average, life? I don’t know. I’m a little disgusted by too much self-indulgence and taking it easy. It seems like settling too much, though that word and my mental approach to the question is condescending, pre-judgmental and full of bias. Then again, I’m not motivated enough by a particular cause to forgo consideration of the self and forsake all else whether the cause be civil liberties, IP law, art or optimizing compilers. I guess I’m just in an awkward middle period again. As my good friend Max would say, “C’est la vie.” As the office IRCbot olga has said, “What we do in life… / Is there a step I’m missing? / Inexorably.”

[1] Watch more Studio 60. It’s good for you.
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Two Years

19-May-11

Yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of my father’s death. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Appropriately, I had a dream the night before where I couldn’t find him and didn’t know his cell number or address. Luckily, I wound up spending most of the day relaxing, enjoying the weather and seeing people then had dinner with Mom and drinks with a friend after. There was a minimum of sulking and what memories Mom and I shared were, of course, fond ones. I think dad would be pretty proud of Mom and I. That might have been hard to say 6-12 months ago but it’s a little easier now. I made myself go back to school and get a degree, I’ve got my first job lined up and it’s a great one, Mom and I are closer than we’ve ever been and so on. All told, I’m pretty happy and maybe somewhere he is too. There’s probably not a strong argument for this post but I feel compelled to make note of this day somewhere and if your own blog isn’t the place, what is?

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Faster than sense

14-May-11

Things have been moving really rapidly of late. 11 days ago I was taking my last exam, 5 days ago I had my 3rd interview with Cox, 4 days ago I got the job offer and accepted, today I applied for a 12-month lease on a 2 bedroom 12th story apartment in Midtown with one of my oldest and dearest friends. It all feels like a surreal, ridiculous, out-of-body experience. I’m not altogether sure how to cope with or interpret the change at the speed it’s happening. I’ve been trying to just relax and give myself time off. Soon it will be time to start familiarizing myself with Django and Python though. And there’s no end of work to do on Coleslaw.

I’ve set up a Windows box to pursue two things I haven’t in a *long* time. Some light PC gaming and Music Production. I’ve played with Ableton some but haven’t really dug in yet. Here’s hoping I actually spend some time learning about making music this Summer and Fall.

I am genuinely excited about the job and also the new apartment. Cox honestly seems like a fantastic place to work filled with smart and cool folks. I’m slightly intimidated simply by virtue of the fact that it will be my first full-time programming position and I expect the learning curve to be substantial but I’ll overcome. And having a budget for real food so I can try new recipes again will be fantastic.

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