[ Posted by kevin
Sat, 16 Jul 2005 17:19:25 GMT ]
I didn’t wake up until my Sophomore year in college. At that point, I was rather surprised I did what my parents expected, and was in College. But it was fun, so I stuck with it.
I am a programmer. I’ve taught myself nearly everything I know. But I think college is still worthwhile, and that everyone should still go to it.
One of my first realizations upon ‘waiting up’ to my adult life, was that College was a ‘camp’ for people my age. Everyone was beautiful! For me, college is about staying up until 4 am, talking philosophy with dorm neighbors, and deciding what the zeitgeist of your generation is about.
College is where I learned passion. The Creating Passionate Users blog I reference here (excellent, by the way), cites many studies about declining education, etc, etc, but to me, that’s not the point.
She mocks the ‘learning how to be a lifetime learner’, and says that ‘no grad ever actually says that’, but I’m saying it :) College made me a smarter, more capable, more independent person, and I would spend the $100k or more to do it again if I had the chance.
Some of my favorite classes were with the most boring teachers, and I’d doodle on my pad and decide what I wanted to do to make the world a better place. Sure, I could have done that elsewhere, but if it’s not broken…
The real kicker is: by far most people meet their future spouse in College. I did. She’s worth the $100k alone :)
3 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:58:17 GMT ]
I, like all true nerds, got into Dungeons and Dragons in high school.
It’s this great game where you make up a ‘character’, and ‘pretend’ to go wandering around in dungeons killing things and saving people. There’s this whole world of rules, even more complex than the real world!
Sometimes I wonder if i should have spent more time learning the rules of the real world, and less of this fictitious one. Because I keep switching systems that makes me re-learn the (rather arbitrary) rules.
Anyways, you sit around for an amazing length of time, like 6 hours, longer than I’ve ever been able to sit still before, but I guess this involves wrestling and drinking lots of coke.
Most of my life I spent trying to be more efficient, to pack getting more things done into less time. Adventuring seems like the opposite. I leave in a vaguely social state knowing I had fun but that it took us 6 hours to decide what color each other’s hair was.e
Still, I think there’s promise to worlds where we can escape reality. Religion always bothered me on that level, since I’m fairly happy with my ‘real world’ existence, but something about Adventuring allows me to express creativity in a way that the real world limits.
Technorati Tags: d&d, nerds, puppy
Posted in Society | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:53:01 GMT ]
Last year I decided it was time to ‘get professional’.
For me, that meant buying a bunch of books on usability and studying ‘experts’ and the big web sites like amazon, etc.
Short rant: I hate amazon’s design. It’s always been hideous. The new one is a bit better, at least they realized having 300 tabs was confusing. But now there’s none! And they advertise movies + free shipping on their front page instead of books, talk about losing your perspective.
So I read ‘don’t make me think’, and several other good books. I’ve learned a lot. I think I’m pretty good at it.
Except now, when I design something, it seems like there’s one ‘right way’. I’ve gotten used to this using a programming language ‘ruby’, where we refer to it as the ‘Ruby way’. But design is supposed to be a creative and artistic process. Now making things simple enough seems to lead to one specific design that I like, but I don’t think is flashy or pretty enough. But I can’t change anything, because that would break my usability guidelines.
I’m looking forward to hopefully hiring someone in Pittsburgh to help with the design process. Except now that I’ve read all these books, I’m going to know way more than them. Hopefully it will work out, I really need someone to bounce ideas off, and to come up with creative color schemes and layouts themselves.
I’ve never been an amazing programmer, but now I’m not a good designer either! Uggh, this is progress?
Technorati Tags: design, usability, puppy
Posted in Ambitions, Art, Coding | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 13 Jun 2005 16:35:10 GMT ]
When I first wrote allpoetry, I optimized it so that no query was not fully indexed. This makes for big indexes, and very fast performance. But I’m starting to realize that other’s instead add database servers instead to distribute out the ‘slow’ load.
Part of the whole problem is that disks are very slow. Since ram is cheap these days, I’m more interested in a in-memory database, especially if that can cut down on the index size.
Allpoetry is about 4 GB of database now, a little over half indexes.
Mysql Cluster is one option, but requires 2*Database size+ some memory, and at least two servers. But it scales nicely. But it isn’t that fast. I think it’s lame to need so much memory. An object-oriented database like madeline (based off a similar java system), doesn’t have any need of doubling the data storage? But perhaps mysql’s statistics includes the indexes?
Another option I’ve been obsessing about lately is the idea of running mysql on a ramdrive. It should be pretty straigtforward:
- Create a ramdisk on startup
- Copy the mysql database from /db/allpoetry to the ramdrive
- Symlink a directory under /lib/mysql to the new area
- Make the binary update log on the HD still
- Have a cron job to apply the update log to the disk-version of the database every 30 minutes or whatever.
- Replicate and repeat as normal.
A device like this could help make this much easier:
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050601_115506.html
Any ideas or suggestions?
Technorati Tags: databases, mysql
Posted in Coding | 2 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 13 Jun 2005 16:26:19 GMT ]
Friday was another string concert, part of the same series as the last one. Once again, the performers were excellent. I noticed this time that they switch chairs every song, so someone else is 1st violin, for example. They’re all 1st violin worthy!
Felix Mendelssohn, String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13*
Rather slow, with some sweet places.
Georges Bizet, A Suite for Carmen (arr. Chase)
Very rousing – definitely woke up everyone who fell asleep during the Mendelssohn piece :) I’ve heard this before and not liked it as much, but it was great here. Not as ‘together’ as the other pieces, but nicely written and the perfect virtuoso flair appropriate to the performers.
Robert Schumann, String quartet No.1 in A minor, Op. 41/1
The later the movement, the better this was. I wonder if Schumann perhaps needed an editor, the same way J.K. Rawling (and every popularized author) becomes so trapped. The last movement was beautiful, and had a great spot that could break your heart. But then it went on for another 5 minutes instead of ending.
Posted in Concerts | 1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:14:44 GMT ]
Wednesday (June 8th) was my 26th Birthday.
I had a fun day… Tara had said she had a romantic evening planned for us on the 8th, so we did the family party on Tuesday. It was nice, went out for a great dinner with the whole crowd: Mom, Dad, Katie, Jeremy (her boyfriend), Tara, and I. Going out to dinner starts to look like a big gift when there’s that many people :)
The ‘romantic dinner’ ended up being in seattle and we were late so we were rushing there, Tara got out to hold our reservation, while I went to park the car. It was at the EMP, a beautiful but wierd blobby thing at Seattle Center. She met me outside and led me in, up a big flight of stairs, and …
There were 10 of my friends sitting around a table, yelling ‘surprise!’ :)
They really got me, I’ve never had a surprise party, and I was totally expecting something else (the romantic dinner). It was fun. Trivia night, so we got beat by a bunch of germans sitting across the way, but had a good time, then sang a few Karaoke songs and waited forever to have our last few songs come up. It was wierd karaoke because most people were really good singers. I always crave the voice breaks and two-notes-off kind of karaoke, but this was fun too :)
no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:05:54 GMT ]
RealRhapsody is something of an interesting case to me. I’ve been using it for a good year now, and looking at previous reviews, it’s obvious that their design hasn’t been updated in 3 years.
They have a great selection, but the user interface was written by a programmer who hadn’t seen the light of day in years. It’s not terrible, it’s just not usable. Which should be important.
I’m more and more frustrated when I see things like this, that seem like an obvious ‘free money’ situation to the business eye. Given their popularity among the top-something subscription music services, staying ‘cool’ and being usable need to be top priorities, or they’ll fall by the wayside.
I fail to see how a company that sells and makes several million (or hundred million, whatever) can’t even do a good enough job to keep their lead. Is anyone being creative in corporate America?
I’m also frustrated by the lack of releases for other systems besides windows. Given that NONE of the subscription services work on mac, whichever one releases for mac will enjoy fairly good ‘forced’ subscription numbers. It couldn’t take them more than a week or two (which becomes a month with testing) to port it to another system. It’s written mostly in flash, for crying out loud (I think). Shoddy.
Technorati Tags: music
Posted in Ambitions, Society | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:00:25 GMT ]
Bach – Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080
Peteris Vasks – String Quartet No. 4
Brahms – Quintet in G major, Op 111
I enjoy going to concerts, but find I often forget what I’ve seen.
The Bach was very ‘bachy’, but listening to him always makes me feel smarter (listening to it again this morning, lets see how much work I can get done today!)
The Vasks was the real treat of the evening. Lots of classical style feelings, but it was written more recently (the author is still alive). It had beautiful climaxes and everyone jumped to their feet to give a standing ovation at the end. It was quite long. I look forward to hearing more of him… there are few songs on Rhapsody, which I’ll check out now.
no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 07 Jun 2005 05:20:00 GMT ]
With a small worry of being scary, I'm going to share my birthday list. I think it might be an interesting way to know me better ;)
- $16 Creative Whack Pack (@ Barnes and noble too) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0880793589/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-4625205-6627234?v=glance&s=books
- These creativity cards look cool too, but they're $100, hmmph: $100 http://www.solutionpeople.com/kbtool.htm Mini usb keyboard for garageband. Prob. nearly any fairly small usb midi keyboard would work, but this one looks goodtoo:
http://store.yahoo.com/macyummies/maga.html ($129)
http://thinkdifferentstore.com/product_info.php/products_id/963
These give you a good idea of the small size + style.
- A new book holder, like I stole from mom years ago (ergonomic thingy)
- Money Clip
- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=money+clip
- Subscription to 2600 magazine. It's a fun hacker magazine.
- Plaster & Board for art experimentation. I don't know much about it, but look forward to picking it up sometime.
- VR glove
$25 + $2 shipping- http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PRODUCT&PROD_ID=703652&cid=25608&fp=F
My birthday is Wednesday! :) I'll keep you posted on what I get...
Posted in Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 07 Jun 2005 04:25:58 GMT ]
You ever notice, how some days, you sit down and work and work, but at the end of the day, can’t say what you did? But you really were working hard!
I’ve been reading the wildly popular “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” (David Allen) lately, and while I’m a pretty organized person, some of it makes sense to me. I definitely plan to try having more folders to put things. Mostly I’ve solved that problem already though by just having a ‘todo’ list (yes, on paper gasp) in front of me, and whenever something comes up while I’m in the middle of something, I add it to the end instead of doing it right then. I get distracted a lot, I was A-D-D as a child.
I think the more important realization, though, is there is just a bunch of junk in life that you really have to do before you can get work done. And on a new computer, that’s at least a few days work. For me, a whole day was more time than I could imagine, so I was really frustrated that it took me longer than that. Plus playing with all the new changes in OS X, etc. Getting accustomed to the environment, and staying a fairly up-to-date in computerisms takes a lot of time.
So relax, stop trying to hard, and know that forward progress is more important than manic fits of seems-like-productivity.
Technorati Tags: getting things done
Posted in Coding | 1 comment
