(identity 'myron)

Mon, 10 Apr 2006

Night At The Symphony [/personal]

I landed some free tickets to the symphony tonight and took a friend from work to hear Schostakovich's 10th and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. I'd forgotten how much I like to hear live orchestras. We really got lucky too, since it was his first time and the selection gave a great cross-section of classical music that was bombastic, emotional, dramatic and then finally, grim and harsh—certainly none of it boring.

// posted at 23:13. permalink   comments

Sun, 09 Apr 2006

The Whirlwind Update [/personal]

Apparently people still use this thing to see what I'm up to. So here goes, the past six months in less than a hundred words.

October, I applied for, interviewed, then accepted a new job at Refractions Research.

November, I found an apartment, bought some furniture.

December, I moved to Victoria and started my new job. Halfway through the month I got put on a project I had no idea how to even begin—heh!

January, the New Year. 2006 by Western count, 4703 by the Chinese. I had no vacation days, so I stuck around town. In that weekend alone I got through two books.

February. Don't remember anything significant. It's frightening when that happens.

March, I turned 23. Me to my friend: "When did the numbers start getting so high?"

Today, I started writing here again.

// posted at 23:35. permalink   comments

Sun, 09 Oct 2005

Dvorak Progress Report [/personal]

Well it seems that my wrist pains are all but gone now, but since I'm taking a three-pronged approach of exercises, periodic breaks and using the Dvorak keyboard, I don't really know which has been the most successful remedy. I am sure of a few things, though: 1.) Dvorak is by far the more comfortable layout, 2.) I can still type in QWERTY just like before switching to Dvorak, and 3.) the previous point does not apply when I'm drunk.

I've discovered that in a drunken state, I'm actually hard-wired to Dvorak and have huge difficulties typing in QWERTY. This is really odd considering how many more years I've spent with it. Something else interesting is that I never made a conscious effort to memorize either layout while learning them, but I can tell you exactly where each key lies in Dvorak and which finger to use to hit them. The same is not true of QWERTY at all, which seems to have remained with me through muscle memory alone.

It's been one week of retraining and Mavis Beacon tells me I'm at 52 wpm. Mostly fast enough to avoid getting frustrated typing over IM. But now I'm really curious how far I can go and if I can surpass my older QWERTY speed of 80-90 wpm. Time will tell.

// posted at 10:34. permalink   comments

Sun, 02 Oct 2005

Wrist Pains [/personal]

Well, I can't say it's exactly surprising, but I've started experiencing wrist pains. Lazy wrist posture and no jiggly wrist rest probably contributed the most. Thankfully it's not so much painful as it is sore... for now. And I'm sure as hell not going to find out how bad these things can get.

I've switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout cold turkey. I tried to do this once before and got up to about 20-30 wpm, but the frustration of relearning the keys in Vi just totally turned me off. Now that I'm forced to switch for comfort reasons, it turns out it's not actually that bad. I just have to stop and think about the keys I'm hitting. It's also perfect timing since I've been going through Learning GNU Emacs, and I haven't internalized any of the key combinations yet.

That said, there are some really nice quirks about Dvorak, other than comfort:

• Along with remapping Ctrl to the Caps Lock key, Ctrl-p is now extremely easy to hit. And no this does not mean print in Unix and OS X. It's easily one of the most common key chords in the shell.
• Similarly, Ctrl-h is now as accessible as ever and is far less straining than its functional equivalent, the Backspace key. Heh, can you tell I grew up on Unix?
• For programming, the hyphen/underscore is now on the home row.

Now the list of downsides.

• The / key is now vertically opposite of where it used to be; very confusing.
• The [, ] and {, } keys are now very far which sucks for C-style syntax in programming. You could see that as a good thing though—it's another reason to avoid that class of languages.
• The h, j, k and l keys for cursor movement in Vi now make absolutely no sense at all.
• ls is now off home row, and it's even two hits with the same pinky. Booooo.

Oh well. I've always found it more comfortable, and in the end that will overrule any of its downsides.

// posted at 12:43. permalink   comments

Wed, 31 Aug 2005

Sen Zushi [/personal]

Been a bit of a dry spell for topics to write about, so what better topic to break it than food?

There's always been a little sushi restaurant on Fort street in Victoria, except it was under renovations for a while and I never got to try it out. By accident, I wound up there last night after another restaurant we were planning to eat at failed to open. It was a stroke of good luck, though, as it turned out Sen Zushi is easily one of the best sushi restaurants in Victoria.

It starts with their funky decor. Not traditional, more like a modern take on Japanese decor, which made it feel a bit like restaurants I'd been to in Japan. And even more Japanese was the attention to detail in the utensils used, the table setting and even right down to the little box for shichimi and the accompanying miniature spoon.

The food, of course, was top notch. Especially noticeable was the excellently selected cuts of fresh fish they used for their nigiri. After all the cheap sushi places that have popped up around town here in Vancouver, it's really easy to taste the difference in quality. It was so good, in fact, that I noticed my friend and I started using the soy sauce sparingly so that it wouldn't drown out the taste of the fish.

Bit of a splurge, but it's definitely money well spent. We didn't leave hungry, so it was a succces.

// posted at 23:24. permalink   comments

Mon, 15 Aug 2005

As of today... [/personal]

This 15th of August, 8 months after the end of my studies, I am officially debt-free. Yes, I have but a hundred left in cash for the next two weeks, but wtf cares, I'm debt-free!

Now, I have truly graduated.

// posted at 12:54. permalink   comments

Sun, 03 Jul 2005

Dissent [/personal]

By chance, I caught one of the most interesting interviews I've ever heard on PBS with American graphic designer, Milton Glaser (read the transcript). The man very articulately touches on everything from the balance of power in democracy to the effects of consumerism in America. I'm not going to bother lifting any quotes from it—the entire thing is a must-read... Ok, well maybe just one:

So, there's been a kind of shift, it seems to me in America, from an idea that truth is valuable to an idea that entertainment is more valuable. And as a result of that, it—lying in public no longer has any consequences, because you get crazy in thinking about all these public lies. You know with— They use the term spin, and of course spin is just a nice way to say lie. But everything is spun in order to achieve a certain result. The fascinating thing about it is that the public who has grown up conditioned by advertising perfectly accepts political misrepresentation this way.

// posted at 12:28. permalink   comments

Mon, 13 Jun 2005

Grad [/personal]

Put my site on hiatus for the last little while (read: I'm a lazy bastard) cause of all the things happening lately, the main one being convocation last Thursday. Quite anticlimactic given that I finished my courses way back in December, but it was pretty fun to see some familiar faces from the past. I can finally officially say I have a BSc now, so to quote my buddy Chipa, "hip hop hoolay".

Unfortunately, none of the pictures we took really turned out that great, much like when I was at Carmen's convocation. So here's the one semi-decent picture, one where I'm not even smiling (tells you how good the other ones are):

// posted at 22:27. permalink   comments

Tue, 12 Apr 2005

Implicit Association Test [/personal]

Saw this on Anderson Cooper 360 just a few hours ago, the Implicit Association Test. It's a test that tries to measure your prejudices in different areas like race, nationality and sexuality by flashing you images and measuring your response. I'm not sure how good this test works considering I got different answers depending on how many times I did them, but here are my results for the three I thought most interesting:

• Race: Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for White People relative to Black People
• Sexuality: Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for gay people relative to straight people
• Nationality: Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for United States relative to Canada

If it's true, I'm pretty proud of the second one since it's the one most deeply ingrained in most people. I couldn't believe the nationality result so I took the test again and got a neutral preference. Hmm, two out of three—I'm enlightened! Hah yeah right. I bet you at different times of the day I'll show up as a bigot on these tests and at others I'll rank as the next Dalai Lama.

// posted at 18:48. permalink   comments

Sun, 27 Mar 2005

Segmentation fault - core dumped [/personal]

Ideas are swirling around in my head again keeping me from sleeping, so here goes. No warning of controversy this time, though. At least I don't think it's needed.

the Internet

Or maybe better titled, the Internet Revolution. That's what we were promised, anyway. Has the revolution happened? The Internet is everywhere, but have our lives been fundamentally changed by it? Outwardly yes, but otherwise no. The Internet may be a very novel kind of technology, "connecting people together like never before", but there's one aspect in which it's no different than any other technology: it has little impact on human nature.

That we're more connected now than ever hasn't at all changed our tendency towards superficial distinctions and the Us and Them mentality that follows it. Bloggers might now have a new medium through which to make themselves heard, but people who don't agree with them are no more willing to meet them halfway in the digital world than in the real world. A prime example is the most vocal group of bloggers I know of, the left-wingers.

You might think this is all a no-brainer, but it's funny that "connecting" people together in greater numbers than ever doesn't really connect us in ways different than before. Despite its potential at initiating real change and the Global Village, the barriers between people still stand just as strong as before. And yet it's one of the most far-reaching techologies that we've created to date, which leads me to believe that technology, for all its power, really only effects superficial changes in its users... a depressing notion for someone who works in technology.

government and technology

Well if technology has no lasting effect on human nature, what does? Government? It's been years since I read books like Lord of the Flies and Blindness, but I think I finally understand what they both said with respect to this. We see both government and technology as marks of civilization but strip them both away and we're really not as civil as we think. At humanity's worst, the lack of a government or even the difference between two seemingly vastly different governments is just a change in the rules we play the same selfish game of ensuring survival and advancing self-interest. That we choose to see otherwise is self-deception or, in the language of Blindness, a way in which "we are blind, Blind but seeing".

maybe i'm in the wrong profession?

But then who in society are the ones that effect the most change in people? Writers and educators? I guess I'll sleep on that one....

// posted at 02:03. permalink   comments

Mon, 21 Mar 2005

The Seasoned Schemer [/personal]

It's taken over a year thanks to shifting priorities, but I finally finished The Seasoned Schemer tonight, sequel to The Little Schemer. It's amazingly humbling to have gotten so much out of two books at the end of which read, "You have reached the end of your introduction to computation." Well what was it I learned in the 4 years of my degree then? How to jump through hoops, maybe. Although a more positive way of seeing it is a prof's quote my friend is quite fond of that says one goes to university to learn how to learn.

In any case, I'm finally in a position to say what's so great about Scheme and by extension, Lisp in general. It's the only language I know of that can be understood starting with nothing but a tiny set of primitives. Like with axioms in a mathematical system, you can use these primitives to generate virtually everything else you know in the world of programming, whether it be a paradigm like object orientation or an interpreter for Scheme itself. What's empowering is not only that it's like a first principles approach to programming, but that it's also a limitless medium through which to confront the world you face in programming. The resounding lesson I get from Scheme is that you don't just solve problems, you invent your way towards the solution in whatever way you see fit to tame the problem at hand.

You might argue that the benefit is merely psychological. After all, Turing complete languages all have the same capabilities. But the difference in expressiveness and the high vantage point it gives you makes using it like cutting something with a sharp blade instead of a dull one; it's just that much easier to do a good job with the former.

Add to this the collective experience of decades of programmers and you arrive at something like Common Lisp. But I'll leave all the Common Lisp raving for another day when I know it better....

For now, I'm moving on to reading SICP. It just so happens there's a virtual study group being organized around the book right now, so it's great timing. I encourage whoever's out there to join....

// posted at 00:48. permalink   comments

Tue, 01 Mar 2005

The Bachelorette [/personal]

I admit it. For the past few months, I've been completely captivated by the TV show, The Bachelorette. They set up the perfect romance and it's almost impossible to look away, because it plays out the exact fantasy I'm sure we've all had at one time or another. Being the fantasy it is, we take what we can get, even if only as a vicarious experience an hour per week.

The thing is, watching this, it's all too obvious how low a level we've—or at least I've—allowed the desire for entertainment to sink us down to. Politics has its Nineteen-Eighty-Four, genetics has its Brave New World, and I always thought that entertainment had its extremes in something like The Truman Show. But lo and behold, we've made that extreme a reality, and we've probably taken it even further than anyone could've imagined when that movie came out in 1998.

So what? We've had reality TV for years now and I'm just now proclaiming how sad it is? What's sad is the line we've crossed, one that I didn't know we'd crossed until tonight. When the TV couple didn't give a straight answer about the choices they made, what happens? We reach for low blows like questioning their sexual lives. I mean, we no longer even question whether or not we should have cameras in such intimate moments between people or what business we have of watching them, it's now just about meeting our insatiable desire for entertainment.

So here it is, I quit reality TV cold turkey. I would continue watching if maybe I could keep a critical eye on what I'm seeing, but it's just too easy to shut my brain off while I watch a camera follow the lives of complete strangers. In some ways, I think reality TV is to our culture as gladiator combat was to Rome, only we can't be captivated by violence alone anymore because of how desensitized we are to it, so we came up with more inventive forms of competition in its stead. Maybe it's time to read up on Roman history.

// posted at 00:37. permalink   comments