my truly important business

Boris complains that I haven’t been writing in this blog lately. It’s true: these past couple of months I’ve only gotten married, worked full-time, and taken a graduate-level class — how could I let these trivialities distract me from my truly important business of writing on the internet?

Tips for life

When you read a really good book but think that the author must be nuts, don’t wikipedia her to confirm it. You might find out that the book you thought was brilliant and one-of-a-kind is actually her 50th (lucky, this time) attempt at getting published, and that she took a train to Buffalo, NY to kill herself. (Not that choosing Buffalo as a setting doesn’t make sense…)

peaches

me: I don’t like peaches because they’re furry…

boy [offended]: I’m furry! Does that mean you don’t like me, either?

love

Our wedding invitation had a little spot for a poem or a quote, presumably something meaningful to us about love (or maybe god? right.) We ended up leaving it blank, because no one knew what to put there, and the only two quotes about love/marriage that I like somehow didn’t seem very… wedding-y.

Love is not two people gazing at each other, but two people looking ahead together in the same direction.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

-Tom Robbins

such is life

On AIM, about the Atheist Complaint Box:

my friend H: some are stale and the rest are good
me: such is life
H: nah, that’s: the whole thing is stale but some parts are still edible

The curious social habits of CS students

From now on, whenever I start thinking to myself that “school was so much better than work,” I vow to relive and remember the wisdom of this list of the habits of computer science students, including:

“5. Personal hygiene is not necessary. In fact a musty odor, pasty white complexion, and hair that looks lice ridden requires very little upkeep and allows you to spend time on more important things such as camping outside the Gray Rock Ogre’s cave with your guild mates in World of Warcraft.”

Seriously, what person could want to go back here:

My university’s CS building/prison-torture-chamber

You must be this tall to join the conference

“…when choosing a job, members of Gen-Y are likely to look at how open the potential boss is to new ideas and change, and whether years of paying dues are required before your ideas can get heard. One of the things I really like about my job is that my manager made a point of telling me how much the energy and fresh outlook of a recent graduate could do for the team, and meant it. He listens to my thoughts on new technology, methods, tools, recruiting, web design, and so forth: the things that someone fresh out of college is more likely to be up-to-date on than a 20-year company veteran. Of course experience is important, but naiveté, ambition and sheer curiosity have a place at work as well.”

Read the rest of my self-congratulatory rant* on Employee Evolution…

*A meta-rant about my rant: I was totally, completely, 100% joking when I called myself “mature and professional in every respect,” but in the way the post was edited, that seems to have fallen out. Damnit.

How I really feel:

How it sounds like I feel:

profound, gap-jawed stupidity

This week I’m reading The Best Software Writing I, a book of essays selected by Joel Spolsky (whose company rejected me brutally when I applied for a job there.)

This paragraph from Processing Processing, an essay by Paul Ford (of ftrain.com) strikes a chord:

“Obviously it is late, and we are all tired. There are many people much smarter than I will ever, ever be … They use equations, and seek the truth. I’m looking for a way to tell a story that works within the boundaries established by these machines. I seek to entertain, amuse, and evoke. I’m too gullible to believe in the idea of truth. Which means that I look on, in profound, gap-jawed stupidity, at the artificial intelligence community, the specialists in linguistics, the algorithm experts, the standard-writers, the algorithm specialists, the set theory specialists, the textual critics and other hermenauts, and the statisticians, but I don’t look on in jealousy, but in a kind of depression, like being a three-chord guitarist missing a few fingers, trying to play a cover of Le Sacre du Printemps. As much as I want to fathom it all, any sort of understanding that might be complete eludes me. I’ve met the people who can think in thoughts longer than a few pages: and I am not of them.”

Probabilistic machine learning, to me

On Blogging

Blogging is too hard, I complained to my English-major friend Boris, who used to have a hilarious but rarely-updated blog. I have plenty of ideas, I said, but they all suck! Bor didn’t disagree, having known me for years. It’s like your new blog, I pointed out: of every ten entries, only one is insightful and funny; the rest are boring! I waited for him to be offended, because that brings me joy in life. You flatter me, he said instead. The ratio is 1 in 20 at best.

Bor explained to me, while trying to be gentle with my most precious dreams, that I’m unlikely to capture the hearts of millions of Americans with my witty and urbane writings, and so if I blog, it should be only for myself. I could use the blog to capture my memories, to try to justify my opinions, or to work on improving my writing, but I shouldn’t try to please anyone else.

This seems like a good approach to blogging, and probably to everything else in life, too.

a change will do you good

Sometimes we just need to do something different. And I don’t mean “different” in a wearing-purple-socks or eating-scary-foreign-foods way.

Two stories:

At work, I complained to my boss that our group’s demo website was “horrifically ugly, outdated, and badly organized” (smart and tactful, I know), and he predictably said, “true, why don’t you fix it!” I’m not a web person. But no one cared, so for the past few days I’ve been completely updating and reworking the site.

Of course, the last time I did anything even remotely involving web design was 1999, so things have changed. A lot. I was completely clueless when I first looked at the site. But because of that, it’s been a challenge and a rush: I’ve had to put myself through an intense crash course in web technologies, design, and standards; the sort of learning I would never do on my own. Today I had to finally admit it to myself: I’m loving every minute! The thought flickered that maybe web design/development is the long-awaited and all-consuming hobby and future career I’ve been waiting to find, but then I got real. It’s fun precisely it’s new and because I haven’t done it before (and probably won’t do it again.)

—

Last summer, I lived in NYC, and got a chance to spend some time with my fashion designer cousin. Yep, she actually studied art and fashion design — at one of the best schools in the field, no less– and now works successfully in the industry. Now, if there’s anything I don’t care about in this life, it’s fashion design. I don’t really understand clothing or art, so the combination normally leaves me mostly… confused. But when she talked about it, I was fascinated. She’s intelligent and passionate; completely full of herself, but one of the most honest people I know. She seemed convinced that fashion design is the most interesting and important topic out there, and for a while, I was convinced too.

Would I enjoy being in a circle of friends throughly obsessed with and knowledgeable about fashion design? Definitely not. But the 180-degree turn from my usual routines of technology and people, books and politics, was marvelous.

I need to start stifling my skepticism about new things that “just aren’t me.”

The vertical garden: just not me.