Mike Wilson

*snicker*

Rabbit Rabbit!

(Really? It’s friggin JULY! Damn.)

Yeah I just realized at 2 am as I started to post that there was nothing good about posting at 2 am.

Having seen this link, I decided on Saturday night that the right thing to do the next day was make candied ginger. So I spent a few hours on Sunday doing that. It’s excellent. I undertook the escapade with a “well how bad could it possibly be?” But it came out far better than that.

Far FAR better than the candied ginger itself is the resulting ginger syrup. I went to Cook’s Companion on Atlantic Avenue and bought a few bottles. But I only had enough for one of them.

Thinking about it I realized I was definitely going to need more. So yesterday I went through the whole process again. Unfortunately I wasn’t thinking and put the stuff on the stove at a little before 10 last night. Now, the stuff takes three hours to boil down. But it’s worth it.

Now I have three bottles of

Plus more than a couple fluttering eyelashes over twitter. Figures. Bitches man… they all want me for my candy.

Still got some cleanup to do (boiling sugar does tend to get around.)

In 48 hours I’ve gone from “ooh ginger!” to “if I never see another damn piece of that vile root again it will be too soon.”

S’ok. It always happens with stuff I make. By January I’m saying the same thing about oatmeal cookies and egg nog. (ooh, that reminds me. It’s a few weeks away from time to start the nog.)

So yeah. That’s what I’ve been up to on THAT front.

(I figure I’ll do these one at a time. It’s the only way they’re gonna get done.)

- It’s 2:00 in the morning. You don’t get any updates. I need to go to sleep.

Today I’m focusing on cleaning up the code and documentation to my C++ Unit Testing Library with the goal of blasting the 0.1 up to sourceforge tonight sometime.

I think what I’m going to do is give myself a 18:00 deadline and put up whatever I’ve got and call it 0.1. Otherwise I’ll padiddle with it for six more months, all the while bitching that it’s not ready for public consumption.

The stuff I’ve decided to agonize over:

- Licensing.
- Name.

The stuff that decided it was going to be agonized over whether I liked it or not:

- graphviz & dot, as usual.

UPDATE: Alright. Done fighting with graphviz and dot. Conclusion: doxygen docs, as much as I love them, will have to wait for a subsequent release. I can’t yak shave myself into paralysis on this.

UPDATE: Ok, or maybe what I’ll do is spend all night cleaning up the damn code.

Yesterday I started EvE to noodle around with my skill queue and after a few seconds it flickered a bit then the machine shut down.

I turned the box back on and just didn’t go in to EvE. Everything was mostly fine and I ended up leaving for the evening to go knock a couple back anyway so I didn’t think too much of it.

This morning I turned on the box and started farting around before settling down to get busy and I noticed a youtube video exhibited the exact same symptoms; weird graphics artifacts then shutdown.

Now I’m in full geek panic mode and I start several processes backing up files across as many different hardware data channels as I can think of (maximize throughput, etc.) and the box just kept crashing.

Then it started booting up in 640×480x4bit color. v. bad. Couldn’t get it out. I figured well… at the very least it’s time to reformat.

While it copied I went to Barnes & Noble and got a “Linux Pro” magazine because they usually have a live boot CD. I figured, if it’s a software issue then the live cd will run fine.

Put the puppy in, bounced the box… ruh roh.

Off to tom’s hardware. I thought about it and realized the initial symptoms were always video card related. Something had to be wonky with the card. It was the only thing that made sense.

Off to J&R to pick up a vid card (an expense I can ill fucking afford right now let me tell you.) Fortunately the price of “better than median” video cards are about 1/3 what they used to be (and what I expected them to be.) So I got out of there with a $130 PNY nvidia 9500 with half a gig of ram on it. Gotta be better than my 2-3 year old 8800GTS that came with the box.

I get home, check Tom’s (from my laptop) and I’ve got a response…

“Sounds like it’s just overheating. When’s the last time you blew the dust out of that puppy?”

…

…

hmmpf.

I cursed my foolishness all over the twitterverse and started disassembling the rig. (NOT an easy task. I’ve got this thing nestled into a pretty tight spot.) Took about 15 minutes cleaning out dust from fan intakes and blades, inside the chassis, etc. I let it cool off a bit with some direct cold air. Did all the right stuff donchaknow.

I plugged everything back in, turned it on and…

TADA!

It all worked. I was a moron. I spent $130 I didn’t really have on a video card I didn’t really need.

I was mid-way through typing the “I’m such a tard, thanks for the great advice. I’m really NOT that much of a noob.” response on Tom’s when the screen went black and the box shut down.

I felt strangely triumphant as I ripped the thing open and replaced the huge honkin “oh so 2007″ video card with the svelte little better in every way card.

Bolted it all back together (it doesn’t fit together unless everything’s sewn back up. I can’t do the old “leave it open on the desk and test it out” trick any more.)

And now, NOW I’m back up and running. I’ve played a little EvE, a little Crysis, etc. (Just to test it all, ya know.)

So it turns out, yeah. I probably overheated the video card by not blowing the fluff out of there and ended up doing permanent damage to the thing.

NOW I’m going to hit post, then open Eclipse & PyDev (or perhaps Komodo Edit, dunno) and I’m going to write the automated backup python scripts that I’m “no really going to get to some day.”

I almost lost a tremendous amount of data. Sure, most of it is backed up. But far FAR too much of it still wasn’t. I’d fallen very far behind.

I’m also looking in to automated online backup services (moby.com, carbonite.com, there’s an amazon one, etc.) and I’ll letcha know what I find.

Also, let me know if you know anything about them.

Save your data kids.

What would happen if someone put a bullet through your hard drive right now?

They are.

Well I suppose THIS was only a matter of time:

“Don’t Like AT&T’s Hold On The iPhone? Tell Your Senator”

AT&T and Apple are perfectly in their rights to make such an arrangement. If enough people don’t like it then it will become economically feasible for Apple NOT to enter in to such agreements… then they will stop.

But this “I don’t wanna! It needs to be legislated to my liking!” shit has got to go.

WTF people? Really. The foot stomping has to stop. Unfortunately it won’t.

A tyrant is never satisfied.

“Mike, the whole world is a circus if you look at it the right way. Every time you pick up a handful of dust, and see not the dust, but a mystery, a marvel, there in your hand - every time you stop and think, ‘I’m alive, and being alive is fantastic!’ - every time such a thing happens, Mike, you are part of the Circus of Dr. Lao.”

Another movie I guess I have to go and buy.

There’s a post over at Brazen Careerist featuring a 20 minute TED talk video by Barry Schwartz about his book The Paradox of Choice. The post (essentially about unplugging for a bit and seeing what hurts) doesn’t have so much to do with the talk, and it’s the talk that I commented on, a bit windily. It might not make a lot of sense if you don’t watch the video, but then it might be just obvious. I’ve added to it and cross posted it below…

Frequently pairing down stuff and stimuli is revealing, interesting and healthy. It can (and usually does) reveal to us many of the little strings that pull us back and forth through our lives.

Yes, the paralysis of indecision is frustrating (whether it’s 14 million kinds of chips or two kinds of toothpaste.). Take any aspiring writer with infinite choice every time they see a blinking cursor and ask them about that freedom. It’s why “forms” of art have evolved, but that’s a discussion for another time.

He’s right in that it IS our fault if we choose wrong by having chosen hastily. It is also our fault if we stand there at the salad dressing isle and say “duh” for 15 minutes.

The solution to this is simple: Educate yourself and make a choice. If it’s important to you, choose. And this is the idea that ruins his point. You CAN know, you CAN choose.

If your jean selection is important to you (as mine most assuredly is to me), you need only do the research once. You don’t have to do it every time you walk into a store. THEN you actually HAVE the best. You’re in the best of both worlds. The only reason “opportunity cost” dilutes the value of a choice made is if you were unable to avail yourself of the opposing opportunities. I contend that having walked out of the store with perfect fitting jeans was a triumph. But the fact that it ruins utterly the point, so he fabricated the canard of dissatisfaction and misnamed it ‘opportunity cost’.

Opportunity cost is only a cost if the missed opportunity could have been a better choice. If you have 10 pairs of jeans and you try them all on, select the best then leave the store with them, there is no “missed opportunity.” If you only try on 5, select one of those, then leave the store with that pair then yes, you will look over your shoulder wondering whether or not one of the other five would have been better. THAT is “opportunity cost.” In this, Mr. Schwartz flat out lies to make his point, because it’s the only way he can.

I was actually surprised that he came out and declared flatly what he’d spent 20 minutes implying: “Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people.”

So…

He wants the government to intervene and take money from those who earn it, FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.

This implies, among other more obvious points that no doubt leap immediately to the mind of any reasonable thinking person, that it is someone else’s duty to decide what will make you happy, that they know, and that they should and will make those choices for you, insuring that you are unfettered by the burden of having too much choice.

And guess what happens when you remove choices. The best jeans? Yeah, they go away. This would apparently be a tremendous relief for herr Schwartz, who seems to find the selection process cripplingly cumbersome. The salad dressing you like? Well… it wasn’t the salad dressing MOST people like so we pulled it off the shelves. The car you wanted? Well… they don’t make it any more because studies show that most people liked this one instead (or, as is already the case, “you can’t have that one because this one is better for you.”)

The reason there are 187 kinds of salad dressing on the shelves is that there are 187 kinds of people who like them. (Frankly I suspect there is room for 250 varieties of salad dressing, if not more. Do you want to try your hand at adding one? You can.) Believe me, if a profit motivated entity put out a flavor of salad dressing that nobody bought… it wouldn’t live on the shelf for a month. The minute sales data came back saying “nobody buys it” it would disappear. (Remember purple ketchup? New Coke?)

Yes. It’s our fault if we choose poorly or hastily. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter to us, sometimes it does. Where we are allowed to decide, we win. Personally I couldn’t possibly care less about salad dressing, olive oil variety or pasta brand. Try to take my favorite pizza and I will nail your hand to the table with my fork.

What we are missing is a little bit of discipline. Habits of organizing thought and decisions. We have unprecedented freedom and as a culture we’re still growing in to what that means. Shouldering the responsibility of freedom is no easier than obtaining it was in the first place. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

Mr. Schwartz is wrong. If we have few choices and are left with “well… the best there is” then it IS our fault. It’s our fault because we’ve chosen to give up freedoms and liberties in favor of an oppressive, intrusive government that will choose for us, which he seems to want.

Mr. Schwartz didn’t write his book to answer a question. He didn’t write it for the public good. He wrote it to make money, so that he’d have more choices.

And I applaud him for that.

UPDATE: Well, I was going to expand it. But I think the additional points are better served in a subsequent post.

Despite the title, I’m not going to talk much about Penelope Trunk. I’m going to talk about me because this is my blog and that’s what I do here. It’s why I get the cookie and why I only have 6 readers after 7 years of blogging and one of them is my Mom (hi Mom.) The repercussions of that are not lost on me even a little. Frankly I think it’s funny. So will at least 3 of my 6 readers.

First of all, Penelope Trunk is an interesting person (how many times have you heard/read me say that) who writes a stellar blog called Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist and you should all read it. Frankly you should read it despite the title. Not that the title is bad really, it’s just that it implies a more limited focus than I find there. Her writing is solid and well suited to the form. The information is useful and the commenting community tends to be far ahead of the curve. I may pick up her book later today or tomorrow. I’ll letcha know. (Hmm… Amazon reviewers butchered it. But then, if I listened to them I’d be reading star wars fan fiction, applying eye-liner and listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall in the dark, so there’s that.)

What strikes me about it is what strikes me about several sites and blogs: They get me going about a topic. I usually start off writing some minuscule little comment. Then I look at it, before I hit post and say to myself… “self? Nobody’s gonna know what the hell that means.” Or some such thought and I end up getting a bit winded.  Now, it’s not necessarily to spectacular effect, that’s not my point.

So take the whole ADD distracto-mania thing about having attention misfires as someone tickles the gooey bits in my brain, impelling me to thought. Add that to this bizarre disease I have where I can only think efficiently while expressing what I’m thinking, then watching/listening to what comes out and you end up with exhaustive comments on other people’s blogs.

… and little else.

It’s the nature of things that I don’t seem to be able to find the spark of inspiration on my own. It’s something that comes at odd times and in bizarre otherly circumstances, effervescing from my head before I get to a pen.

But that’s all a lie of course. It’s blaming a lack of productivity on “Writer’s Block” as though writer’s block were anything other than “well… I don’t really wanna” which is all it is, wrapped up in that panicky tightness of breath and mood.

Truth is I really do NOT write well, and as such I don’t enjoy it very much. (Odd thing about being good at something, it makes other things distasteful quite out of proportion.) Now I know three or four people who will come down on me like the hammer of fucking Thor for saying so, and yes, I can compose the odd thought into words and string a couple sentences together. Sometimes I even do so with some efficacy. But I’m utterly lost when it comes to writing anything with any heft (read: cohesion) to it.

And twitter… Twitter doesn’t help at all. 140 character snippets of spleen venting goodness all set for relieving any pressure I happen to build up.

Q: Why don’t girls fart?
A: Because they’d have to stop talking long enough for the pressure to build up.

Twitter’s like that. The slightest impulse to blurt gets expressed, so rants never even get a chance to build up. So that’s another thing working against me.

The funny thing about all this is that if I can sneak up on myself I’m pretty good ad hoc.   If I get on a tear I tend to go pretty well, at least until I realize I’m going pretty well at which point I’m screwed.  So I thought about recording spoken-word rants then transcribing them to see if the pressure of being in front of a keyboard was helpful.  Fortunately no copies exist and the less said about THOSE efforts the better.

What I really need is practice. A teacher? I’ve thought about that, taking classes and such. But for me to take a writing class I’d have to want to learn from the teacher (in particular.) The process of vetting writing teachers is utterly distasteful. I wouldn’t know where to start and my utter disdain for people I don’t respect would, well… It would get in the way. (Don’t worry, I respect more people than you think.)

In short (heh) I’m really most productive when I’m productive and lately I’ve been remarkably unproductive, so nothing’s been getting done.

But yeah, go read Penelope Trunk’s site.  Your head won’t hurt as much afterward.

As I’ve mentioned a couple times before, user interface programming is absolutely my Achilles heel.

I’m noodling around with an application that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for quite a long time, and a part of it requires that diagram building interface with drag and drop geometrics (with text), organic looking lines connecting things (in real time while dragging) etc.

But most of the 2d graphic stuff I see (for instance in books on Java’s 2d library) are just about getting pixels on a canvas. That’s cute and all, but I need a higher level of functionality than that.

I’m going to spend some time working with it to see what I come up with, but I figure it’s got to be a solved problem. Somewhere there’s a diagram in a patterns book that I’m going to end up looking at and V8 smacking my head.

But I’ll be damned if I can find it in the dozen or so that I have.

And no, I don’t care what the language of implementation is, I can port anything if I need to. I just need to see and grok the structures involved.

So as I sit here putting together my minimal plans for the twoscore anniversary of what, from my seat, is the single greatest thing to happen, I catch myself humming:

Hmm hmm-hmm hmm hMM hmm,
Hmm hmm-hmm hmm HMM hmm,
Hmm hmm-HMM hmm hmm hmm hmm,
HMM HMM-hmm hmm hmm me.

But then, I’m pretty silly.

Haven’t felt much like writing anything.

I’m over on twitter most of the time anyway lately.

We’ll see.

I made the mistake of thinking a job prospect was a “Sure Thing” and as a result, during the 3 week process, I relaxed my efforts on the search process. I’ll get in to why this was bad later on.

In the meantime I thought it might be useful to pen some advice and what insight I have into the process in a series of daily(ish) pieces. I may end up posting multiple a day, but I’m going to try and resist the temptation. My hope is that other people will at least gain some utility out of this.

Over time I will probably add formatting and updates directly to these posts.

Feel free to drop a comment if you found something useful or inaccurate.

Jumping right in…

This being the first day back at it, today I went through my resume, looking for edits, imperfections and other tweaks. I found a bunch.

A couple words about resumes:

Your resume is the top priority. It needs to be in shape, solid, accurate and compelling. I’m not going to talk about content here. People have that covered elsewhere. Plus, I’m not all that confident I’ve nailed it well enough to be telling other people how to do it.

What I AM going to talk about here is formatting.

First, create it in Microsoft Word. This will save you an incredible amount of headache. It’s the format people want, almost exclusively. You can use something like OpenOffice, which will save as MSWord. But be SURE to view it in Word to make sure all the formatting translates exactly as you expect. You don’t want people to enthusiastically pull up your resume then wince as the bulleting is wonky.

Yes aesthetics matters. It should be neat, clean, and consistent. BUT it should not WOW people with watermark images, clever (or ‘cute’) bullet icons, horizontal rule section delimiters, borders, or multiple fonts. None of it. Unless you’re a graphic designer, the design isn’t something that should even be seen. People should look at your resume and see what it says, not what color it is.

Now that you have your Microsoft Word resume… Create a “plain text” one. In Word, use “save as” to save your resume as “TextResume.txt” using the “plain text” format. (A word of advice here, if you’re original word resume filename is “resume.doc” do NOT save the plain text version as just “resume.txt.” I promise you WILL get them confused and send the wrong one. Just add “Text” to the beginning of the filename and you’ll never have to wonder. While the Word version will always be the definitive edition, you’re going to need the plain text version.

Reload the text version and clean it up. Put blank lines in where other formatting tricks were being used in word. Align the dates and headings. It’s monkeywork, but it’s easy. Blur your eyes a bit and see what looks out of place then fix it. Rince, repeat.

Now you’re ready to go.

As I see it the first task is to become available.

You’re going to have to slog through job recs, recruiters and help wanted ads. But it’s imperative that you are as visible as you can be while you do this. Don’t forget that your future employer is actively looking for you as well. Make it as easy for him to find you as you can.

So my first order of business is posting my resume on various online job sites. It’s the fastest way to get the massive employee search machines of the world working for you.

As a programmer I’ve started off with: monster.com, hotjobs.com, dice.com and a couple others. There are great reviews of these sites that are pretty easy to find. Google is your friend. A simple search for “job search sites” will turn up a gold mine.

Aside: I don’t like recruiters having my real email address, so I don’t give it out. Fortunately services like gmail allow you to create more email addresses than you can shake a stick at. So I’ve created one just for job searching. It’s innocuously named and used only for that purpose. This is important, you don’t want prospective employers responding to “furryleatherlovemuffin@xtreemfetish.com”

So you have your pair of resumes and your email account. Time to start filling out a mind-numbing number of web forms.

Which is where I’ll pick up next time.

This is exceptional:

Weirich manages the bizarre distinction of leaving me wishing he’d have kept talking for another couple hours on this.

UPDATE: Wow, that wonked up the front page. Uhm… Don’t care. It’s good enough to keep it there.

How can the lefty goon squad justify going after Miss California for having the exact same position on Gay Marriage that the President has?

Now i appreciate that to have a leftist view point you’ve really got to have an incredible ability to ignore your own cognative dissonance (or at least avoid facts with a passion.)

But this is outrageous even for them.

The irony is compounded when you think of the cardinal sin to the leftist:  Hypocracy.

I have what Bryon and I refer to as Self Improvement Psychosis, SIP for short. It’s this bizarre obsession with products and services in vaguely bordered realms of self-help and personal effectiveness.

It means that if I go to levengers.com I start drooling with all the notebooks, pens, 3×5 card systems, circa notebooks, desk organizers, instantpocketcardwalletpad things. I love it. I love it all. Stationary, pens, notebooks, folders, file cards, whiteboards and markers. More more more more more.

It means that if Tony Robbins comes out with another book, I’ll buy it (on the kindle if possible so I can read it in public without baiting someone to ask me about it) and eyerollingly, I’ll read it. After hundreds of these things I can wade through the patronizing tone of a lot of it (Tony’s less bad than most actually) and sift through the “Meet Grady, a 29 year old construction worker…” bullshit to find the actual juice in the book. I even have a little routine where I read the thing full through once, then go back and extract the “do this” bits.

It turns out that I have a limited threshold for the rah rah “You’re a great you!” nonsense. It’s just so bloody insincere and frankly, if “being a great me” was the goal why would I be picking up the fucking self help book there squeevis? Frankly being a better me would mean living my life in a strangely hollow stagnation for my second 40 years or so. But I digress ;-) (relax, this isn’t going to be one of THOSE posts.)

I got a recommendation for a book by Sean Stephenson called ‘Get Off your “But”‘ from… damned if I know where. The Amazon page has a half dozen 5-star reviews and I recall that they seemed to indicate it was “different.”

I glompfed it a couple nights ago for the first time through in a little less than two hours. I’ve got to say, while it fits the template of self-help book a little too well (massive proliferation of “Meet Jenny, she was stuck on her ‘but’ until she learned…”, numbered list of “steps”, big type & narrow columns for maximizing page count, etc.) In fact there really was a lot of fluff in here.

If you’re someone who hasn’t spent TOO much time in this genre (or frankly, if you’re insufficiently metacognitive) than these may all be useful devices to help get someone in the right headspace, associate with the problem that this or that technique is addressing. So I can’t ride it down too much. It does get a bit hackneyed though.

This coming week I’m going to go through and tear out the meat of it, digest it and then pick what I find useful and nonthreatening about it (which if you’ve been paying attention is why I still feel compelled to consume these things, SOME progress is fun but let’s not get crazy now.)

The actual meat in here is solid. It’s different than a lot of what I’ve read and while very little of it is news, the telling of it is quite well done.

The 6 “Lesson” chapters are:

1. Start Connecting
2. Watch What You Say To Yourself
3. Master Your Physical Confidence
4. Focus Your Focus
5. Choose Your Friends Wisely
6. Take Full Responsibility

Far better than most in this category.  Simple, practical, sometimes tough to hear advice on how to deal with self sabotage.  Yes, it’s peppered in cliche’ and deep-fried in schlock.  But the good of it is accessible and exceptionally insightful.

Yep.  4/5.  Highly recommended.

It’ll take ya 10 minutes to read it.  Good stuff.

But congratulations are NOT in order.

I STILL haven’t heard anything.

Shamelessly pilfered from Leeann