Wed Jan 25 21:05:16 PST crash landed:

i'm not sure how i got here but i'm in some kind of strange new land... i think it's earth, late 20th century or possibly early 21st century. the locals are humanoid but I have not been able to determine if they are actually humans or if they just undergo surgery in order to appear that way. only dna testing will show for certain. i also can't quite make out the geography or geology... it is an arid land, but close to an immense ocean. i'll do some recon and report my findings to this journal. one thing's for sure... i'm definitely not in kansas anymore.

(1) Fri Jan 27 21:33:31 PST stolen bandage:

I found a used bandage in the street today so I should be able to do some dna testing once I can cobble together a suitable testing kit.

The terraforming these creatures have undertaken is ambitious. it appears that there are no substantial fresh water sources nearby, yet i would imagine the metropolis holds nearly 10 million of the indigenous species... and fresh "water" (that's what they call the yellow liquid that comes from the tap) flows freely. they must be piping it in from somewhere. i can only imagine the "reverse terraforming" that's happening in those areas... i'll have to try to gain access to some of the drainage and waterworks and see what i can find...

Sun Jan 29 22:23:39 PST atmosphorming:

I went hiking in the large, sedimentary/morphic mountains near the metropolis today. Because they are obviously the ocean floor of a bygone era it's clear that there have been some cataclysmic earthquakes in this area. It boggles the mind that this civilization would choose to build in such a desolate, dangerous area. What's more mind-boggling is that they appear to dislike the natural proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere and have undertaken great pains to increase the carbon monoxide and particulate content of the local air to great success. From the mountains a you can see a kind of great pall floating over the city. I imagine that through millions of years the natives have grown to require this specialized atmosphere much like certain cockroaches require the electromagnetic fields of breaker boxes for effective reproduction...

Mon Jan 30 20:55:03 PST religion:

I am still trying to determine the natives religious beliefs. It all seems very pagan to me; some worshipping their transport vehicles, others pretending to be the undead. but I think that the most uniform religious pillar in this community is the worship of youth. It is clear that almost everyone in this place is obsessed with beauty and strength; many people have personal attendants (witch doctors) who try to help them stay "in shape" (the desired shape is not clear). some people even go so far as to drink elixirs made of crushed plants and fruits; these are supposed to alternatively cleanse or fortify, depending on their construction. visions of youth are everywhere; by contrast, the elderly are locked away in shabby towers where they won't be seen on the street.

certain elites in the community are well known for their youthful looks and good breeding; they are the paragons to which the locals must aspire. these paragons are so influential that the news of their comings and goings are front page fodder; they are clearly the royalty of this community. seeing them in person is apparently understood to be some kind of good luck charm; any time anyone enters a public place, all heads turn to see if the newcomer is one of these paragons -- and the expression of disappointment at the sight of a normal citizen is slight but consistent. Fascinating.

I've ordered some parts from a chemical supply company... hopefully my DNA testing kit will be complete soon.

Thu Apr 06 10:07:48 PST animal worship:

I think the natives here must be animal worshipers. In other, more primitive cultures, animal worship is often expressed by the wearing of animal skins and performing ritual acts as the animals in question. Not only do these beings wear animal skins, but with their advanced (yet medieval) technology, they actually perform sugery on themselves in order to emulate the features of some of their most revered gods. For example, the teeth of a horse, the beak of a bird, and the mammaries of a gurnsey cow. Fascinating.

Wed May 17 09:17:30 PST the dna kit is complete...:

... and they are human.

No time to explain.

(5) Fri Jun 02 08:06:46 PST leaving las vegas:

I informed my workplace today that I will be leaving, effective August 4th. I was really nervous about the reaction because so far I have been a fairly integral part of a lot of our new projects, but everyone handled it very well (which was nice for me because I was afraid of major drama about it). I hate disappointing people, and I certainly didn't want people to feel like I have been ungenuine, but there was no way to not deliver the bad news, and delivering it now is better than later from the perspective of the company.

The good news is that I got in to UCLA for a masters in Computer Science -- I am so excited to be doing that instead of this, although both of us being in grad school is going to really put us in the hole for a long time.

A friend pointed it out that it is almost a year since I left NPU.

One of the things that has been really frustrating about this job is that I spend so much time doing things that we would have student workers do at NPU. I'm doing some cool things (we run Linux servers instead of Windows, for example) but most of the time I can't really work on cool stuff for those systems because I'm too busy helping people with email (non-)problems and the like. It's not that I think I'm "too good for it" or something, but my time would really be better spent working on challenging projects.

It has been a struggle to get an assistant/partner in here to help take some of the workload, but even then, we both spend most of our time working on fluff issues. What we really need is a 19 year old kid to work here to do all the grunt work.

Sat Jun 03 10:03:37 PST working on the new server:

alh has a saturday class for a few weeks, so I am home working on the new server. It's the first time that I have built a new server out of mostly top-shelf components. It's an SMP system with two dual-core Opteron 265s, and 4 GB of RAM in a NUMA layout. The motherboard is an ASUS K8N-DL and it fits in most normal ATX cases (most NUMA boards don't).

It's a little crazy, but I'm hoping to get Xen running on here so I can offload some of my poorly managed domains to a virtual server. I'm also hoping to run MythTV on this box and use it as a home media server. And as my web, shell, and network router. Kind of a tall order.

Wed Aug 30 11:25:15 PST i made seitan!:

As many of you know, gluten is the protein of wheat flour. Many of you also know that it is often eaten as a meat substitute called seitan, other names, or my personal favorite "wheatmeat". What you may not know is that it's super easy to make. We aren't vegetarians, but we also don't eat a lot of meat just because it is expensive, etc. However, we really like wheatmeat.

I followed these instructions only I used whole wheat flour and I did let it sit and cook fully (the author says she normally doesn't wait). I had to wash out a lot of the bran, etc. because after the starch was washed out there was a surprising amount of bran. Still, I left in a lot of the bran for texture and just because.

I highly recommend using a mesh strainer over a bowl with running water as it starts to get gooey and slippery in your hands. Let the running water fill up the bowl, then dip the strainer in so it rests in the water (don't let the faucet water hit the dough directly). I twirled the strainer around and flipped the dough, or pushed up through the screen to stretch the dough, etc. YMMV. With the strainer I was able to rinse much faster and with impunity; just keep flipping the gluten ball so that it doesn't start to go through the screen.

Then I followed her instructions for cooking slicing, etc. I am planning to do this more often because I like it and it's really fun, so maybe I'll put up a page about it later.

Bon Apetit!

Wed Sep 06 16:29:34 PST great horny toads!:

I never thought that natural, wild creatures and beauty would be my favorite thing about Los Angeles, but I really think it is. The plants here are fabulous (although most of them couldn't survive without our help and associated environmental cost), but more specifically the hummingbirds that have been to my feeder -- lately it has been a non-stop drivethrough -- mcdonalds eat your heart out. And unlike mcdonalds, even though I purvey sugary water to young creatures, I don't have to suffer with the guilt of creating a generation of diabetics.

Anyway, today in Temescal Gateway Park I saw a huge (12 inches nose to tail) horned lizard (aka horny toad on my run. It scared the crap out of me because it was just laying in the middle of the trail and usually you don't expect anything to be there. He seemed almost completely unconcerned by my presence. He just turned his head (never moved his body) and stared at me with one big eye. A dragonfly or somesuch landed on his nose; he looked at that and then back at me. I kept expecting him to dispatch the dragonfly, but he pretty much ignored it and just stared me down until I left. I tried to spook him into leaving the trail but he wasn't having any of it.

I have spent more time than I should have trying to ID the species of this guy online, but nothing seems to look right given what I've read about their ranges... and I didn't know enough to memorize his horn configuration. Seriously though, this guy was gigantic.

Sun Sep 24 22:04:11 PST grad school begins:

I start grad school at UCLA tomorrow. I'm going to try and use this space as a place to comment on school and Computer Science related issues.

Here goes...

Mon Sep 25 11:45:26 PST first day:

Well, I missed the campus tour I was going to go on -- the bus took a lot longer than expected. No big deal... I can go tomorrow, or if it doesn't work out, that's fine.

I have been thinking a lot about school, obviously, and my reasons for going, how likely I am to find success (or enjoyment) in it, what it will mean for the future, and also what my greatest obstacles will be.

First of all, I hope that I haven't taken too many classes at once.

Anyway, the biggest reason I am here is to "fill in the gaps" of knowledge I have because I never formally studied CS, and even in my work/projects I have usually taken an OSPF (Open Shortest Path First... nerd joke) towards completing that activity, rather than actually learning the "right way" to do it. And that brings me to my first self-realization: I'm really good at getting something done, but not necessarily good at learning all the details along the way.

And that ties into another thought -- I am very good at memorizing trivia and factoids -- I do it almost effortlessly. I can read an article about some piece of history or some Andean Butterfly and tell you all about it -- But if I am trying to memorize, let's say, fundamental properties of Boolean algebra, it suddenly becomes very difficult for me, and I don't know why. Specifically, I think I have difficult translating symbolic representations of abstract concepts into mental models that I completely understand. (Learing directly from a math textbook is very difficult for me.) Instead, I'm fairly good at recalling and synthesizing concrete bits of information. Unfortunately, math, logic, programming languages, interactions of command-line switches... are symbolic representations of abstract concepts. I'm not sure if it's an attention span problem or just one area that I'm not particularly "good" at.

And that ties into the next thought, which is that I am one of the kind of people who usually does well enough at things without having to try particularly hard (but not necessarily finding excellence at anything). As my piano teacher said, "Jack of all trades, master of none." I had friends who had to work hard for their grades -- and in the end, regardless of who may have had more or less raw talent -- the friends of mine who had to work hard generally had a better grasp and intuition than people like me who just floated through.

The consequence of this is that I am not very good at confronting a problem when it is truly difficult for me. I look for a way around it rather than a way through it... and in a subject like Computer Science especially, that is absolutely not the point, and thus I can't allow myself to just fall back into that mode of finding success, because it will not help me find the kind of understanding I am here for. I hope that I can find new mental models and ways of learning to leverage the talents I do have against my deficiencies.

Speaking of abstract concepts, it's time for Computation and Automata!

Tue Sep 26 15:00:57 PST first day of quarter... not of classes:

Whoops again. Apparently it was the first day of the quarter, not of actual instruction, which starts on Thursday. All right.

So instead I wandered around campus, wandered around the SEAS (School of Engineering / Applied Science) complex, found all my classes, and then went back to the coffee shop I posted from yesterday and worked on some code I've been working on for a new website.

Since I'm using this to reflect on CS topics and my own self-education in general, I did have an interesting experience yesterday, although it is a fairly elementary observation to most experienced programmers who use multiple languages.

Anyway, somehow, in the course of people talking about coding, and which language is better for x or y (x, obviously), or which language is awful (usually Perl) or wonderful (often Python), and in trying to think more abstractly about what programming languages do and why, somehow I had gotten on the path of thinking that different languages are just different ways to approach the same problem and, at least in well-developed general purpose languages the process of coding in those languages is roughly equivalent.

But then I tried to convert a shell script into a python program (but I could as well have been converting to Perl). While it was possible to make it work, it got much more complicated to "say" the same thing in python than in bash. I realize this is not because what the computer does is actually simpler (ignoring different methods of run-time compiling scripts between bash and python) but because of what bash (by necessity as a shell scripting language) hides from the user or provides because of its design (i.e. using mixed types, scoping, easy access to the output of a command, etc.).

I am sure there are a multitude of examples of this kind of thing, but it was enlightening for me because I had never thought concretely about how language design choices very directly affect the suitability of that language for different applications.

(1) Tue Oct 31 16:26:45 PST update:

Well, hi there. Long time no post.

School is great, but I'm very busy. Apparently I've developed a serious kind of perfectionism since I was last in school full-time, because I've been kicking my own butt trying to absorb and produce as much as possible in the last few weeks. I really want to learn this stuff, and do well.

My schedule is pretty cool -- I'm taking a course in Programming Languages, where we will do projects in OCaml, Java, Scheme, Python, Ruby, and Prolog, and an Intro to AI course which involves Lisp and a bunch of theory stuff. Then I'm in a TA Training Seminar which is great and involves Adam Kaplan of the Leonardsphere. That's pretty cool too. I did a presentation on the card game SET because I think that two things that any geek ought to do at least once in their life is play a few games of SET and write a few simple programs in Lisp. The presentation went OK, but frankly, it is intimidating to be in a classroom packed with full-on brainiacs and my Music degree does put me at a certain academic disadvantage to most of them (and a huge rock and roll advantage, so, when the Battle of the Nerd Bands happens, my team will win! Runner up! At least!)

I'm also in the standard grad student seminar, where we go to presentations and write summaries of them. The shine of being in a community of brilliant people hasn't worn off yet, so I really enjoy that kind of stuff.

I was also in a Complexity and Automata class, but I dropped that because my schedule was just too full, which is great considering what happened this week.

I got behind because of a wedding in Chicago last weekend, which put all my homework off. When I got back, I busted my butt to finish an assignment for Programming Languages, but after spending a few days willingly losing points (2^n per n days late), I finally solved the problem, only to realize that I had been spending all this time solving a related, but not quite the same problem. Oh well. Turn it in and move on, because the next assignment is crazy complicated, or sounds that way, anyway.

Wed Nov 22 08:32:18 PST java not random:

Java util.random not actually random!, from clickolinko.

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