Dreams and a pocketful of gold

Housing considerations

2009-07-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

So my father and I checked out a lot of property in the new area. He liked the looks of the town area at first, but after driving around and seeing a lot of the surroundings, thinks that part of it is depressing and small townish. He's right, this area is definitely a small town, with lots of rural areas and roads. There are a lot of dilapidated areas, and not many options when it comes to shopping. The hilly terrain is gorgeous.

The first place we looked at was the house I've been interested in for awhile. His first reaction was that the drive was long. It's a longer drive than to any other property. We weren't able to get in touch with the realtor, but he was also concerned about insulation on the roof. He thinks that the owner, with this being a vacation property for him, is winterized in some way to keep the pipes from freezing. Without insulation, the heating cost could be very high to keep the pipes from freezing (if they are not insulated). He also thinks there could be maintenance related problems, with the house being nearly 30 years old. The roof is in good shape, the siding might need work in a couple years (but there is not a lot of it), and the porches are unfinished pressure treated lumber. His main concern though seems to be the drive. It's 25-30 minutes to work (not that bad, it's only 5-10 more minutes than I'm used to) in good weather. It's about 19 miles though. The roads aren't in great shape and it passes through a relatively run-down town. I don't think there are towns around here that aren't really run-down though. There isn't a lot of elevation on the drive to this place either. Other concerns are that the only known high speed internet available is satellite, which is never really great service. Verizon has the area on its coverage map for wireless, but it's uncertain. The local wireless company also is unsure if that area could get a signal. I get a cellphone signal there, but since I don't have T-Mobile internet I don't know if that's an option there. It is also a mile away from a state park/lake, and the only neighbors are at the bottom of the hill and seem to have decent houses (one even has a pool) in good shape. It's secluded and I could work on projects and make noises without anyone bothering me. Winter might be some kind of an issue, but I'm not entirely sure how much of an issue.

We also looked at a property with a large amount of acreage(12-14, mostly woods on a steep hill). There was a trailer-style manufactured home that was 15+ years old and looked very dingy. It had two permanent structures and a large propane tank outside the trailer. Lots of grass. The workshop was large, but was covered with glass and so wouldn't be that private if I was working on something (maybe something expensive, like a kit airplane) and wanted to keep people from nosing around it or stealing tools. The neighbors also all seemed to be related and lived in trailers, most of them pretty messy and some dilapidated looking. They seemed to be the kind of folks that would be friendly to you unless you did something that they didn't approve of, then they might be in your business. I'd be surrounded by a family that I don't know.

There was another property that was on the extreme side of what I was qualified for, loan wise. Nice looking house with a decent backyard and detached garage. I liked the looks of it and the drive was probably 15-20 minutes to work, but directly next door there was a building which puts the sh(it) in shanty. Rusted up, falling apart, couple of shirtless guys sitting around drinking beer around noon on a Monday in a building that looked like it was going to fall down on their heads. The rest of the surrounding area looked decent, but the immediate vicinity was bad.

We also checked out a couple other properties last night, but the access was pretty bad and so was the condition of the houses, not worth reporting.

There was a property in a nearby town (15-20 minutes from work) that looked in good condition but the detached garage wouldn't be big enough for doing what I want with it. Turns out it's like twice what i want to spend anyway.

Then there are rental properties. There are several in the 500-600 a month range, with most having lease requirements of a year. Not all of them have onsite laundry either.

I don't think the drive is a dealbreaker for me on the house I really like. The winter issues with heating costs could be a dealbreaker though. What do I like about the house?

-It's isolated. No close neighbors to poke around in my business and complain if I throw a noisy party with lots of dancers and music
-It's a mile away from a state park and lake
-It has a detached 2 car garage with a workshop extension
-It looks to be in mostly great shape
-It is the right price
-I like the setup and looks of it all

The things I don't like
-The drive could be bad in less than perfect weather
-The surrounding town is dilapidated, but the immediate area being home to a golf course and a state park are nice
-Possibly no roof insulation. It could get really cold, but I don't really know how bad it could be
-It's isolated, people I want to come around might be turned off by the location

I'm trying to hold out until I have more time to think everything through and consider my options. Don't want to rush if I don't have to.

Cross country movin'

2009-07-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

About one and a half years ago, I moved from Florida, with much help and with a broken leg, to Las Vegas for what seemed like a dream job. It has been anything but. I could go through the details about why it has been an epic failure, but instead I'll stick to what I've personally had to cope with.

This past year has been a lesson in proving to myself that I cannot work for something I don't believe in. If I want something to happen so desperately that I would move across country and leave all my friends behind to do it, it takes more than a whim for me to come a realization that I must leave. In fact, so many others that I have worked with have come to this realization and managed to get out before I did, and I have never lost so many friends to moving out of town in my life. If I were to stay any longer, I don't think my work ethic would ever recover, and my work ethic has in the past been extremely strong, which is why I did so well when I had internships and also in college.

So now, here I am, leaving again. Just when I'm starting to get to know and enjoy the company of certain people, I'm moving 2000+ miles away. But we can probably stay in contact. It just sucks. I tried hard to get a job in California (and Washington state) for months, but the economy and political situation seems to be scaring employers from hiring anyone. So, I'll be moving to a state that isn't attractive to many because it's in the midwest, and it actually snows there, and it's small townish, etc etc. However, the scenery is beautiful. The cost of living is low. There aren't as many obstructions to getting work done as there would be in California, and I could actually be a property owner soon instead of paying thousands a year in rent towards nothing at all. And where I'm going will pay for me to finish my masters.

I'm also concerned a great deal about where this country is headed, and everything I know is pointing toward massive inflation in the future. It would be nice to spend my saved money on things that won't depreciate over time before my saving's value gets destroyed. Owning a small plot of land and a house I could maintain myself and work on small projects would be fantastic. I am also completely enthused about designing engines, there is so much to learn. And there are new people to meet, and new dances to be made. Just as I'm starting to understand the basics of blues dancing, I'll be headed to a place where I'll probably have to bring a lot to the scene myself. That's a funny thought, and honestly I think that I'll need help because I don't have it all figured out yet...actually just beginning. I'm looking forward greatly to what I can experience in a new place.

My life in a couple of weeks will be very different compared to what it's been for the past year.

Current State of Affairs

2009-05-31T21:46:00.000-07:00

Wow, I can't believe it's June already! Next weekend I'll be headed on a ~~Mexican~~ Canadian cruise (Swine Flu hysterics) with the parents as the main celebration of my father's 60th birthday.

I have to find a new, cheaper place to rent out by the end of June as my current lease is up and I can rent for less than half the price I am currently paying. It'll be great to save all that money every month.

Last weekend I hit someone's taillight with my sideview mirror while backing out of a driveway. I took out the lens on the turn signal and cracked the brake light, but the lightbulbs were intact. I talked to the owner and told them to call me and I'll reimburse the cost. I got a call earlier this week saying that the estimates were 1000-1200 dollars. No f-ing way, I barely scratched my sideview mirror and I looked at the damage I did. All plastic on the taillight. I found the entire tail piece for less than 200 and it requires 2 screws to remove/install and playing around with the lightbulb mounts. 30 minute job max. I sent them the install directions and a link to the part, and I haven't heard back since. I'm going to have to take care of that before I'm incommunicado on the cruise.

I've come to the realization that I sit crooked in chairs, and have been doing so for years, especially in front of computers. I think it started when I got a room my sophomore year that was incredibly tiny with barely room for a twin bed. I put my computer on a shelf that was adjacent to the bed, and I had to sit crooked to use it. Since I spent a lot of time on the computer, I ended up spending a lot of time twisted sideways...so yeah I sit sideways a lot now. I also can't stand my ghetto computer stand right now. I've got a CRT monitor on a tall barstool with one of those small fold-up plastic teevee dinner tables in front of it to hold my keyboard. I use one of the wooden dinner table chairs. It is so incredibly uncomfortable, and I'm realizing that one of the main reasons that I sit so crooked is I am on the computer so much and I have to sit crooked with this arrangement. The fold-up table has crossed legs that don't allow me to have my legs directly in front of me, nor does the barstool that the CRT is on. I think I can afford to splurge on a decent desk, a decent chair, and maybe a flatscreen. That way, I might actually start getting some work done at home (my crazy side projects) instead of spending lots of time uncomfortably clicking away.

I need to get a storage facility for the move out of this apartment because I have so many books. Chances are I will be rooming with someone else, so there won't be room for my 200 or so books that I have here. Maybe I'll stop buying books if I don't see my bookshelf anymore and force myself to only have the books I am currently reading/referring available. I'd also really like to cut down on how much crap I'm lugging around.

A lot of people have moved away from Vegas recently, including some (very) close friends, with more to come. This town isn't horrible, a lot of the people I have met here are interesting and I have fun spending time with them, and I wish I had an idea of what was going on with this job. Layoffs, paycuts, tight wallets, I don't want to be frustrated about it any more. Things could be so much better here. The economy could also be improved in many ways but it won't be, and I have nothing to expect but more of the same for at least another year.

I don't want to end this post on a down note, so I'll go over a few of my accomplishments over the past year.

Last year about this time I was having difficulty walking from my broken leg...now I'm doing 200lb deadlifts and not having much more than the occasional pain from rock climbing and dancing.

I started last year with 45lb kettlebell chest presses and am doing 110 pounds now. I also recently did 60lb turkish get ups. Those were scary.

I traversed the entire rock climbing gym last week. I've been getting really good help from one of my friends who is an amazingly patient teacher when it comes to dealing with my whiny and complaining self about the difficulty of grabbing onto small handholds. I've progressed faster than I thought, even though I've been going at max once every two weeks.

I've been bouncing around 13-14% bodyfat, and have plateaued there. I think the reason that I have plateaued is from abusing all the junk food at work, along with eating a large amount of fruits. I noticed that I eat quite a bit of fruit, but not that many vegetables in comparison. I'm trying to gradually change this up to get my carb count down. The difficulty for me is finding fats to replace them in a way that I want to eat them. 10% bodyfat is my big goal with this.

Something I designed at work is getting made right now, finally, after over 8 months of back and forth that includes 3-4 months of total neglect. I still think it's very cool to make engineered drawings of something and then see the end product after it's been produced at our machine shop.

There's a lot going on this week, time to watch a TED video and pass out.

Self improvement

2009-05-01T11:48:00.001-07:00

As I am continuing to progress through Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, I continue to ask myself what I could change about my life, what exactly I could be a specialist in, and what my long term goals are.

First, I've been thinking greatly about what I spend most of my time doing, and honestly at the moment I can say that I spend most of it reading, mainly on the internet. I would guess that over 90% of that is non-productive reading of blogs or websites that have content that doesn't improve my life. In fact, outside of work and the few projects that I do work on, and discounting any time spent reading books, my internet surfing hasn't done a whole lot for me other than to reduce my focus and scatter my interests all over the map. It's hard for me to sit down and accept that I will not be able to know everything in the world, and do everything that there is to do. I must concentrate so that I can achieve great things and make lots of money, not achieve a whole assortment of insignificant things which nobody, not even me will remember.

Second, I need to accept that most of the technical books are tools, not friends. I have a wide assortment of physics, engineering, mathematics, programming, etc. books that I will most likely never work all the way through. I think I would greatly enjoy being able to use all of the content in each and every one of them, but I don't think that it's a realistic goal. They will be there for me when I need them as tools, but they are highly specialized and powerful tools. For example, I have a graduate level Electrodynamics book that I purchased because it was supposedly the most definitive and also most difficult book on the subject, and I wanted to learn it all just to say that I did. Now, that book represents something else to me. It is there if I need it, but right now if I were a machinist drilling holes in an aluminum plate, that book represents a precision computerized cutting machine that can make cuts accurately down to .0001 of an inch in only a specific Beryllium Copper alloy but requires a lot of time, training, and complicated controls to get any use out of it. I'm not cutting Beryllium Copper, and I certainly don't need that accuracy on my hole drilling, so why am I spending all this time drooling and obsessing about an expensive machine that I will likely never use? I have several books that I can think of in that way.

Third, I think that continuing to teach myself programming by creating a real website and adding tools that I would use on it, along with writing interesting things, will be the best use of my time. I know I could make money on a website if I put my mind to it. I would love to have passive income so that I would have time to accomplish other goals in life that are not career related, like building an airplane, travelling, and other goals. Certainly, reading books that I don't have to work problems in can be done quickly enough that I learn and broaden my knowledge without losing massive amounts of time on material I won't use.

Fourth, I must start coming up with ideas for different tools. They need to be fleshed out and thought through in enough depth that I could reasonably estimate the time requirements for them and also understand what I have to teach myself along the way. I have thought of several things, like web-based composite analysis tools, a mini FEM tool, and other such things, but I need to conceptually break those ideas down so that I can get them working on a website. The putting such tools on a website issue is the largest one for me right now.

Fifth, I realized that I psyche myself out of doing things. I tell myself that someone else will have to do something, because I am incapable. Why do I think that? Why am I incapable of doing something? I don't see any reason why I can't accomplish what I really want. I see no reason why I can't make money on the side through entrepreneurial endeavours. I can do it, and I can stop psyching myself out.

The last thing I would like to do is analyze the 30 major causes of failure that Hill listed and their application to me. I will mention only those that I think are relevant to my own life.

2. Lack of well defined purpose in life- I have for a long time wanted to build aircraft, spacecraft, etc. and also get off this planet if that is ever possible. My career is currently fulfilling the first part of that, but getting off this rock would require a massive amount of capital that I do not have. So, I need to define goals that will enable me to create that capital.

3. Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity- I don't think that what I do is mediocre by any means, but on some projects I know that I can put in a great deal more effort to make the outcomes excellent. It will require more creativity on my part, and also some outside opinions to reveal my weaknesses.

5. Lack of self discipline- I am constantly working on this, the main issue seems to be concentrating at my current employer, which I will mention later. I would also like to stop eating junk food on random occassions, stop drinking beer (stick to non-grain and wine alcohol), and keep my physical improvements going full steam.

8. Procrastination- I will put off small, irritating tasks for far too long, even if I do feel a heavy relief when I do finish them. I notice that if I am busy, I can get myself to do things that I otherwise would hold off on mainly beause I only have time to get those small things done. So, I must keep myself busy.

9. Lack of persistence- I let myself get afraid of keeping things going, I am only just now realizing it

10. Negative personality- For the most part, I do not have a negative personality, but I do not like it when it does come out. I should spend much more time on the positives so that I can create instead of destroy with negative moods.

13. Lack of well-defined power of decision- I think this comes mainly from not having clear goals. If I am able to keep my goals in mind, so that they are always in the forefront of my mind, this will be less of an issue.

15. Wrong selection of a mate in marriage- I'm not married and I honestly don't like the idea of having a contract with some random "official" so that I could be "officially" married to someone. But I have had several long term relationships and I have learned greatly from them. I do not want to let myself slip into an apathetic relationship with someone, or suffer abuses like I have before. A lot of this is self control and surrounding myself with people that are good for me.

17. Wrong selection of associates- I made a huge mistake with my current employer, where almost all of my enthusiastic ideas go to die. Persistence will not pay off here, and it has affected my ability to practice persistence. Ongoing solutions.

20. Lack of concentration of effort- Already mentioned

21. Lack of enthusiasm- This will definitely take some practice for me. I can get enthusiastic, but it comes out in small bursts over the wrong things, I believe. I will have to consciously hype myself up over what I need to get done.

The rest I think I have a good handle on, and that's all I've got to post for now.

Goals

2009-04-27T21:19:00.000-07:00

I currently have two books out that I am seriously reading:

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises

Von Mises' book requires a lot of mental attention, but the philosophy presented in the book is mostly sound. I've been trying to keep track of important sections by annotating the pages myself, but there are a few questions I will have to get back to during my reading. This book seems to be going places, but I am less than an eighth of the way through it, and it is rather large.

The other book I picked up after seeing it referenced by Steve Pavlina. Steve writes an interesting self-motivation blog, and I find some of his tangents to be rather odd, but the core of what he tries to say comes across as sound. I have a strong kneejerk reaction when he mentions that his wife is a psychic reader, but you can grab noncrazy information out of his blog, as the crazy doesn't seem to be an overriding theme.

But Think and Grow Rich is giving me a much-needed boost. I've been wallowing a bit in self pity over not taking the Scaled Composites interview over a year ago because I had accepted a job somewhere else, which to my judgment was a career mistake. I'm beginning to see something else in it though. I'm having to think much more about what I really want. I'm also realizing that I have to take a much more active role in pushing for what I want, without letting stupid shit get me depressed, down, and demotivated. The main goals I can think of at this moment are:

-Get a perfect body. I mean, perfect for me. I've been working on this for awhile, and I have never been this strong before. The problem is I keep slipping up at work and eating total shit that I know is bad for me. Time to stop. I would like to hit 10% body fat. I would also like to force myself to take extremely cold showers and swims in order to toughen myself up.

-Write a book. I KNOW I am capable of writing a book and I think that I might even be able to have an audience for it. I almost wrote a small book one time in the past that was dealing with the growing relationship I was experiencing at the time. The relationship didn't work out, and I ended up getting rid of it, but because I had written so much in so short a time I know that I am capable of writing a book about my life experiences.

-Make more money. Some of this is cutting down my expenses, which is mostly governed by my rent. I can get a much better deal on rent if I'm willing to sacrifice my independence some by getting a roommate and putting a lot of my stuff in storage. I would love to save an extra 500 a month this way. I would also like to generate secondary income. I REALLY want to generate secondary income. The book is one way which that could work. It might fail, but there's a chance it will succeed as well. I also have a few ideas for creating website programs to generate income.

-Determine what I want to devote my life to. I've thought of many things, like the study of physics, pure generation of income, teaching, etc. but I haven't narrowed it down entirely. I will often drift back toward space travel, and I think that it's possible I do that. It will be a rough road ahead.

A Meandering essay I wrote 5 years ago

2009-04-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Escapism

My escapes from reality, in the form of electronic games, served as a mirror to what happens in modern American culture. Sometimes I regret the massive amount of time that I spent playing Ultima Online, Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, and a cabinet full of console games I’m sure. This regret, however, turns into a realization that I was only trying to find what was lacking in my own life at the time.

Video games entered my life when I was somewhere around the age of four or five, with the first Nintendo system ever made. Duck hunt, Mario Brothers, and Adventure Island were simple games that I never played for more than an hour at the time. My parents would not let me sit in front of the TV all day and allow my mind to become completely absorbed into the game. Because of this, I spent a much larger fraction of my time doing things. I built my own world in legos. I played sports with the neighborhood kids. There was an empty lot in our neighborhood that we often used to play around in to do whatever we wanted.

Eventually, we wanted to build wooden forts, and my backyard held the little triangular platform that we built from scrap wood. We used saws, nails, and hammers, and struggled to piece it together. We had plenty of time to do all of this because elementary school let out a lot earlier in the day than school would later on. The drawback, however, was that our father’s were all at work. Because of this, we did not have much guidance on basic carpentry, and our work was for the most part shoddy. Some time later, we would dig huge pits in the ground of the empty lot and cover it with plywood so that we had our own underground caves.

Around, and a little before that time, my father bought a sailboat. I still remember the day I only went to school to turn in my plaster of paris map of the Mississippi river that I had made for my fifth grade class when I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—I was leaving on a weekend trip with my father on the sailboat. I relished the time spent on that boat, and loathed time spent in class. Of all things that my father did, my father let me, a young fifth grader, steer a 33’ sailboat for hours at a time. He taught me the basics of sailing: how to raise and trim the sails, cleaning the boat, and a small amount of navigation. Only now do I realize that he could have easily taught me enough geometry at that age to navigate the entire world, but he didn’t. I can only assume that I resisted too much because he wasn’t my “official” teacher, or that he didn’t feel it was his place with me going to school and all.

Regardless, I still crewed on the boat for races, and I have a great deal of memories from that. I had a huge responsibility on that boat compared to what school forced me into during the week. For instance, before the official start of races, the sailboats circle behind the start line in what looks like a chaotic, dangerous mess to someone who isn’t comfortable on the water. The problem is, the jib sail tends to entirely block a side of the view in front of the boat, depending on which tack the boat was on. In such tight, fast quarters before the race begins (everyone wants to cross the line or be as close as possible when the horn to begin blows, so every boat is going in a different direction and constantly turning) the helmsman needs to know what is in that blind spot at all times. This was the perfect job for me, because I was pretty small at the time, so there I was, plunging up and down the waves, riding the teak bowsprit of the boat, keeping an eye out for potential collisions.

There was also another very important thing that I learned while on the sailboat: adults are people too. This idea, though obvious to anyone that has held a job, is entirely new to a kid who rarely spends much constructive time with adults during a normal school day. A race on our boat usually meant a crew of 6 or more, so there were four or five adults present that I would not have met otherwise. I was amazed at first, but after awhile it came natural, that I was treated just like another person on the boat. I wasn’t just some annoying little person like I was to my teachers, and I certainly wasn’t incapable of responsibility like my teachers led me to believe in elementary school. I wasn’t spied on by the class helper like I was in fifth grade to make sure I behaved. I didn’t have to put my head down or not talk or be punished like I was in elementary school when my teacher wasn’t around. Her spy, I still remember her name, Lindsey, would ensure that I would not talk with my friends when the teacher wasn’t around. I freely talked with whoever I wanted to, and learned a great deal just by discussing things with the people my father worked with. I began to dislike spending school even more, because all other kids cared about was the next cool thing in school; like music, clothes, or the popular people. Everything got worse in middle school.

I went to Philip Shore, in the ghetto of Tampa, for sixth grade. There was a closer school, Eisenhower, but because of “districting” which I can only imagine being based on the color of the average person’s skin in the area, I rode a bus 45 minutes to this hell hole. Nearly all of the people that were from my area, and there didn’t seem that many, were considered “gifted” and placed in separate classes than the local children. The school was in the process of being rebuilt as a magnet elementary school. I was scared to death of going to the school in the morning.

One thing in particular seemed to bother me more than anything else. In middle school, I started getting stomach aches almost every morning. I learned very quickly that not all of the bathroom stalls in our school had locks, or toilet paper, or would flush. I also learned that if you used a stall and someone was around, they would harass you, bang on the door, or whatever gave them pleasure. Because of this, I was very careful that nobody else was around when I went to the bathroom, or I went across the campus to a lesser used one.

I also went from conversing normally with adults on the weekends to being ordered around, shouted at, and controlled by the administrators in the cafeteria. In fact, one person was specifically hired to shout at kids and make sure that nobody sat more than 4 or 5 to the table. If you sat more to a table, they would make a kid get up and sit with someone else, probably someone that they hadn’t seen before in their life. Food fights were also fairly common, with lots of shouting by the same administrators. I was lucky that I wasn’t bullied in sixth grade. For the rest of middle school, however, I would not be so lucky.
In seventh grade and eighth grade, in order to keep from being picked on, you had to be one of two people. You had to either pick on someone else, or you had to act like a class clown. I remember being picked on for wearing Vans shoes and not being a skateboarder. I didn’t even know that Vans were “skaters” shoes, but I was being called a “poser” and bullied over it by people I didn’t even know. Other kids didn’t usually like the art I made in art class, so I was also made fun of for that. Eventually, I got on someone’s bad side. I don’t remember how, but it had something to do with who could ollie higher on a skateboard. It ended up with me being forced to fight someone else’s younger brother when I didn’t want to, and after dodging fists being thrust into my face, I finally pushed the little kid away. The kid’s older brother, however, had ingeniously shattered a stray beer bottle on the ground beforehand, and his little brother fell into a broken shard, getting glass in his arm. His older brother immediately began shoving my chest, more like a punch with his palms than a shove. I went home, outnumbered, and considered myself lucky that the other kid’s buddy didn’t start hitting me as well. After that day, I began to get hit almost every day at school. The kid that started it was the one that made me fight his younger brother.

The thing about Progress Village Middle School is students are not allowed to go to class if they arrive before the official bell. So, every student was made to go into a fenced in basketball court and couldn’t leave for fifteen to twenty minutes. There were hardly any adults around, and I was scared to death of a few specific people, so I tried my best to avoid them. However, they always seemed to find me, and when I walked to class after the bell, they would punch me in the back or grab my backpack and try to pull me around or whatever they thought was funny. This caught on, and sometimes I would even be punched in class when a particularly lenient burnout of a teacher had her back turned. I was too scared to tell anybody about the bullying, because there were about five people that did it, and I’m sure they would retaliate if I ever got them in detention or anything like it. They would have found me at school; an easy target without any protection.

During this time of torment, three big things happened. One, I had less time in the day to do what I wanted to because of an hour and a half total of bussing a day. Two, my father began working longer hours and had less and less time for the boat. Three, I discovered the online game Ultima Online. Ultima Online was a social experiment for other people my age and older, which caught the vast majority of my time from then on. It was a game where thousands--at one point I think two hundred thousand--of people interacted together in an online graphical virtual world. It would have been similar to just about any other online game except for one big difference: death mattered. Normally, when you are playing a video game and you die, you go back to the save point and start again immediately. Not so in this game. A character death in Ultima Online could mean that a person lost what it took hours, days, or months to accumulate, without being able to get everything back. This in itself made the game an experiment in human psychology, which is the main reason I spent so much time playing it, though I didn’t particularly grasp everything at the time, and I still do not.

Every online game, especially since Diablo, which preceded Ultima Online, had a large group of people, completely unorganized, that logged on just to harass and torment other people. In Diablo, there was an easy way around this, just by logging out of the game, but the cost of death wasn’t really that much except for it just being annoying. However, in Ultima Online, everything in the game decayed in about 15 minutes or so unless it was in a building or a town. So if you died and didn’t make it back in time to your corpse, you lost everything on your body, which meant a lot. Traveling with friendly and helpful people was very important, and a lot of the game was spent socializing with people, creating a community. There was an in-game aid to choosing who was trustworthy, but it was a general guide and not a rule by any sort: it was a karma system. If someone died, you could walk up and start taking items off of their corpse. You could then do anything you wanted with the items, including running away and selling them or waiting for the unfortunate person to return and hand them over. However, you had to take a risk when you did this, your character was flagged grey as “neutral” when you started taking items off a corpse. What this meant was anyone could attack you without suffering a loss in karma (normal people that were not attackable were blue). So, people could definitely rob your corpse, but if someone else happened to walk by and see a grey flagged person standing over it, chances are the thief better put up a good fight or explain that he is merely waiting for the owner to be resurrected.

So, by this system, a lot of trust of your fellow man was necessary to keep from being too scared to venture out of town with a house deed (a very expensive object enabling you to place a player built house), your house keys, or expensive magic items. Actually, that armor you were wearing was probably extremely expensive, so almost any person was a target for corpse theft. There was a third karma group as well, the reds. People turned red for killing too many blue people. Normally, attacking a blue person turns the attacker grey (if the attacker was blue). If the person attacked then dies within an amount of time, they are given a toggle box upon death to report the murder. Enough counts, and the person turned red. The game also automatically reported the murder to an in-game bulletin board that anybody could read, that listed rewards for killing the murderer. Reds were also unable to venture into town, so as a red you had to work together in order to survive. Blues were overzealous in attacking any reds that they saw.

This karma system lead to a very complex contract, making the entire game community self-policing. If word got around that a person was robbing corpses and then sneaking away without getting caught (long enough to flag back to blue instead of red), groups of blues would assassinate the nuisance. Another interesting catch was that there was a stealing skill in the game. If someone stood directly next to you, they could look into your belongings and make an attempt to steal from you. If they botched the operation, everyone in sight range would get a warning “XXX is stealing from ZZZ!” and the thief would flag grey. If this was in town, computer guards could be called and the thief almost immediately died. Outside of town, however, it was up to you to protect yourself. So, people got in the habit of not standing next to each other until they knew the other person, in fear of losing their house keys or something important. Hiding was also a skill, allowing reds to stay undetected in a group, exactly like highwaymen, waiting for an unsuspecting person to walk by and get pounced upon. Travel wasn’t really instantaneous however, and word traveled fast, so swarms of blues would come to attack the highwaymen if people reported what had happened. This was all very intriguing to me, as I spent 7-8 hours a day unable to defend myself against the torment of my peers. Ultima Online was an escape from my justice deprived school, an online community with complete strangers that would gladly aid you in putting and end to those that wronged you.

I just want to reflect upon how trusting the community was of each other in the game. Almost everything that was usable in the game had to be repaired or it would fall apart. There were magic weapons in the game that you came across so rarely that they were worth as much as houses. These items, however, needed to be repaired by another character played by another person (unless you also had a character capable of blacksmithing and a house to transfer items with, but this was rare). In order to get the item repaired, you had to give it to the other person, wait for them to repair it, and then they would hand it back to you and you would provide a tip. Sometimes, people would stand at the forge and pretend to be repairing items, when they were really just taking the items from people. Since this particular action couldn’t easily be programmed as flagging a person grey, people would literally shout for half an hour or longer about how that particular person had screwed them over. Deaths of the faux blacksmith would then ensue if he happened to step outside of town. Trustworthy blacksmiths then earned a reputation, and there service needed would warrant a hefty tip. If you were a blacksmith that people knew was a good guy, you could make a pile of money from tips and making armor, because people would go to you first thing.

This complex social interaction was what really excited me. Diablo and other games were bland in that you hardly ever had a lasting relationship or friendship more complex than “wow you’re a good player” or “wow you suck!” because the game just isn’t made for it. Friendships in Ultima Online lasted years, sometimes into real life. Because it hurt so much to die, if someone saved your life in that game you made friends with them forever.

When I was in school, normalcy and obedience was enforced. I was making online friends that were 30 years old when I was 13, outside of school, and they were not abusive in the least. School almost reinforced the idea that abusive relationships were the norm, and the idea continues into college now. Schooling by age reinforces the Lord of the Flies syndrome, that children are ruthless tormentors when left on their own without adults. Children socializing and interacting with people only their own age--making friends by proximity--lose all bearing on how reinforcing and beautiful friendships can be. I certainly have older friends that I did not go to school with that I met while working, but having a relationship with someone outside of your age group while you go to school is socially damaging there. You aren’t “supposed” to hang out with people that aren’t the same grade as you, and adults are “supposed’ to be uncool or boring. This is regardless of the fact that someone over twice your age probably has much more valuable experience and more valuable lessons than you will ever learn in school. This doesn’t apply to teachers, who have become babysitters in a compulsory daycare facility. This compulsion forces students to be with others that given a choice, they would not take. It also forces them out of the eyesight of those that would truly appreciate the company and forge a true friendship.
It took an online game, and time on my father’s boat, to show me that people naturally form bonds and friendships with people that are not their own age. Thus, by its nature, the forcing of younger children into school denies them the ability to choose their own companions, and regiments their view into what is “normal” even though there is no such thing. Ultima Online seemed to be my ideal at the time as to how a community should work. However, there was a problem: Ultima Online had failed as an online community.

In order to increase the mass appeal to Ultima Online and to ultimately sell more copies of the game, the powers above decided that character’s shouldn’t lose items when they die, and other player’s shouldn’t be allowed to remove items from their corpses. They also decided that a 20% skill deduction would be appropriate for red players when they die. Finally, they segmented the game world into a place where nobody could attack you and into another one where people could. To someone who just glances at the surface of the “problem,” this sounded like a good idea. To those with a deeper understanding of what problems this would cause, this was horrible.
Another problem was the game designers decided that magic was too hard to learn as a skill in the game, and too expensive, and the supplies to buy for it too unpredictable (these were all measures to keep magic as a rare element in the game). So, they decreased the difficulty of raising the skill, lowered the price of the materials for the mages, and made the availability of reagents constant.
Then, suddenly, everyone wanted to be a mage. This wouldn’t be too bad except for one pesky problem, the recall spell. Before the drastic measures to eliminate the pain of death in the game, Ultima Online was a successful game with a steadily increasing subscriber rate. However, when the difficulty of being a mage lessened, the recall spell came into prevalent use. Why is one spell capable of causing irreparable damage? Accountability and justice. Recall is a spell that allowed instantaneous transportation to anywhere else in the game, and it was a low level spell so almost anyone could then cast it with almost no skill in magery. If you have been paying attention while reading this, you might understand the problems it caused.
Reds could now teleport into a hotspot for blues, slaughter a group of them (the reds, of course, outnumbering the blues), and continue until they tired or resistance showed. If resistance showed, and the reds were outnumbered; they could recall away instantly. Players could no longer defend themselves. You could no longer trust anyone that you met, because they were liable to recall away as soon as you handed over your favorite weapon to get repaired. Players could accomplish all sorts of what victims called “griefing,” or just making life hell for casual players. All of that community which was forged in danger, excitement, and cooperation was destroyed. There was no use in forming a posse because the people that just killed your friends could be on the other side of the world, and you have no idea where they went.
One thing lead to another, and this grief killing became so prevalent that players complained. The solution that the company put in place is outlined above. The game became completely different. Players no longer ventured in groups of friends or got to know their local weapon and armor suppliers, because the trust had been broken. Players began recalling from place to place, doing everything on their own and ignoring every other player, effectively turning the game into a modified hack and slash Diablo. If a lone player was being attacked by only two reds and he was surrounded by a large group of blues, the blues would in fact recall away in fear the majority of the time. And if the blues had stuck around and fought, the reds would have recalled away. Hence, the title of escapism. I believe that a similar situation exists in real-life society today. In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons that this became such a problem in Ultima Online—the attitude of escaping pervades our culture.

Children cannot choose to spend their time with older people any more, and are required by law to sit in rooms with dozens of other people their own age. They spend so much time with each other that they form their own catch phrases, clichés, and dialects, further isolating them from the adult world. When they enter work or begin dealing with their elders, a culture shock ensues. Both sides feel awkward in simple conversations because of the nature of the way they communicate. If children are to communicate with adults, they need practice doing so. However, if children are to be doomed to communicate only with other children…
Children are also forced into subjects so brutally that they forget they are their own best teachers. Our school structure is set up with a lecturer and listeners, and this is the same model for schooling across the country, internationally, for all grades. Is this the absolute best system for learning for everyone? If not, then why is it the only system given any credence? And if so, then why is it that every single taxpayer must support this system regardless of their views on its merits?

I lay the general claim that all children, at one point or another, saw something grossly wrong with what happened to them during school. I obviously thought that my middle school experience was a horrible one. The suicide murders of Columbine were just a reflection of what a lot of teenagers had stewing in them at the time. I hated my school, hated life, hated the teachers and administration, and hated many of my “peers,” whatever that means. I was not shy in announcing this on the bus rides to school, or to my friends. In fact, after the pain of Columbine I remember the sentiments of several of my closest friends that they wouldn’t mind going through and gunning the whole place down.

Do not misunderstand me. I personally couldn’t think of anything else but Columbine for about a week after I saw the live stream of a bleeding kid trying to get out of a classroom window to the SWAT team below. This incident could have happened anywhere. Locking up all the guns in sight would not have done a damn thing to prevent this. I was scared to death, however, that something like this would happen again. Something changed, however. Fear began to be a huge tool to administrations, at least around all of Hillsborough County. I am sure the same thing happened nationwide as well.

Bomb threats supposedly were called in almost once a week, sometimes twice a week. Every single time this happened, the entire school had to be evacuated and all of the students had to stand outside in the grass, not 100 feet away from the building itself. Searches of all the lockers and rooms would then ensure that there was indeed no bomb. I do not remember a single instance of there being a bomb, but I lost track of the amount of times a “bomb threat’ was called in. In fact, at Hillsborough county there was a code that was something like “Attention all teachers, there will be a 313 meeting today” declared over the intercom. It took hearing this once for every single student in the entire school to understand that meant a bomb threat, but still the code was used. I wonder why.

The high school I went to, it was rumored, was designed after a prison of some sort. That seemed to agree with what I observed. For instance, the cafeteria was cordoned off from the rest of the classrooms by a 10 foot iron gate that remained closed until an administrator (usually an Assistant Principle) opened the gate to let the students out. In situations like these, you cannot help but think of yourself as cattle awaiting the slaughter.

There was often a zero-tolerance policy for fighting in school as well. Apparently if someone ends up punching you, you’re supposed to just take it like a punching bag and not fight back. A lot of kids were suspended or put in detention for fights when they were merely trying to defend themselves. There was also a lot of talk like “Don’t take the law into your own hands,” which is synonymous to “leave your life in someone else’s hands.” We grow up unable to teach ourselves, unable to choose who to spend our time with, unable to leave a particular building for 7 hours a day, and unable to protect ourselves. Only at the age of 16 (legal age of dropout) or later, at the age of 18, are we allowed to do what we want to do. However, by then, the damage has already been done. Eleven years (at least) had been spent in a forced institution.

FUCK ROBERT SKIDELSKY, NYTIMES, KEYNES, GREENSPAN

2008-12-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

...and all the other robbers running the show.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

" he [Greenspan] had overestimated the ability of a free market to self-correct and had missed the self-destructive power of deregulated mortgage lending. The “whole intellectual edifice,” he said, “collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Emphasis mine

What exactly was deregulated about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, wait, let me call them their real names: Federal National Mortgage Association and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation? They both seem to have roots in FDRs New Deal, 1938 to be exact. Combined, according to Wikipedia "owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.'s $12 trillion mortgage market."

The creation of the Fed during the Wilson administration along with the criminalization of gold as currency during the second Roosevelt administration gave the federal government, wait, no, a pseudo-private but government enforced entity complete control over the national currency. It wouldn't have been so bad if it was legal to create your own currency so that there wasn't a government-enforced monopoly, but now the government can print bills at a whim, leeching value from greenbacks to finance whatever the hell they want.

In this document [credit to Billy Beck and Bill Brown for pointing this out for me] by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the monetary base has increased from 860 billion dollars to over 1500 billion dollars, from September of this year to November. That means there are nearly double the amount of dollars in circulation due to the bailouts.

No wealth was conjured up out of thin air by printing this money. We suddenly don't have more raw materials, more industrial capital equipment like presses, mills, or forges, more cars, or more houses. What happened was nearly half of the wealth of the nation was just robbed from those who earned it and placed in the hands of those that had government cronies and government coddled media behind them. That is what is called inflation. Any savings out there that were kept in banks, inside mattresses, or hidden elsewhere will now be worth much less.

The EXACT SAME FUCKING THING happened under FDR and served to prolong the bank crash of the late '20s into a prolonged depression. Why bother saving money at all when it will be worth less a year from now? If it hurts people to save, it will be nearly impossible to get money for loans or to just plain save money for houses, cars, business, technology, science, education, ANYTHING AT ALL without the help of the government.

This is not to mention the complete utter loss of retirement accounts for everyone that bought into the 401k scam. Everything these days seems to be geared toward making you more dependent on the government for your basic needs, and every crook out there is trying to cash in while they still can. Just look at the "American" automakers pleading at capital hill for a bail out.

All you suckers that didn't pay attention in history when this same shit happened under FDR better go back and read it again. My best guess is it will be worse. But, dammit, I want to be proven wrong.

Quick revision

2008-10-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

I don't think that going for all the math, engineering, and programming all at once is tenable.

I think that I will start with programming and getting my laptop running linux. I've got a c++ book to get through and a python book on order. I also got a few books on just plain working instead of slacking, one of them being called It's Called Work for a Reason by Larry Winget.

A long time coming

2008-10-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

These past several months have been emotionally difficult, for many different reasons including my job situation, a long distance relationship, and physical recovery that is still ongoing.

My willpower is gradually improving in the midst of it all.

However, I strongly want to move toward more ambitious, creative activities.

I think of it this way:

When I was in late middle school and high school, I spent hours upon hours mining virtual ore to increase the skills of my online character. I'd also run around obsessing over my character's stats. A similar thing happened when I broke my ankle and played World of Warcraft for 2 months while I was bedridden. I would spend upwards of 8 hours a day doing this, more when I had a broken leg. In highschool not only was I attending classes for nearly 8 hours a day, but most of my free time until mid freshman year was spent playing online games.

For years I've looked back on this as a very negative thing, having wasted so much time. Now, I'm beginning to look at it differently. I had such strong goals for improvement in these games, and a very dedicated drive to work on it. Most of it was self motivated. I would love to refocus this energy into something that will actually be useful to me.

The problem I've been having, like I've had throughout college, is how to direct this energy. Side projects here, side projects there, I've found that the ones that I stick to longest involve computers, physics/engineering and mathematics. My library reflects this, I counted over 150 books that I have locally, the vast majority (90%+, no exaggeration) are of a technical nature. I'd guess I've read or worked on at most 10-20% of the content there, and I will bank on the lower number being most accurate. There are some books that I've finished almost in entirely that are highly technical. In fact, I think I nearly finished John D. Anderson's book, Computational Fluid Dynamics, along with many programmed examples to go with it. It only took me ~2 months in fall of last year while I was trying to get a job with XCOR.

I've spent some time playing with electronics. In fact I bought 100 LEDs and enough drivers to make a neat audiovisual display. The problem was connecting everything. A month or so back I was trying to solder up the driver to the source and 10 LEDs along with the filter and realized how difficult/expensive it will be to bring everything together. Since then, I've shelved that project.

I've mostly been wandering aimlessly around the 'net since then, not doing much productive. Every time I come up with a project it usually has something to do with learning more physics or math, but no specific goal. It's so much different than with online games where I can say that I want the maximum possible value for a given character skill and I can do everything possible to get there. I'm not a value in a database somewhere with numerical values for my skills. It'd be impossible to quantify things in that way.

Another problem is the vast amount of things I'd love to keep learning. Differential Equations, PDEs, Aerodynamics, Electromagnetics, Heat Transfer, Vibrations, Solid Mechanics, Fracture Mechanics, Relativity, Controls. Learning everything would be a real bastard. And then there's other things I'd like to learn as well, like how to get Slackware running on my laptop, how to actually use slackware effectively as a primary operating system without having to run back to Windows whenever I can't get DVDs to play or some other difficulty. I'd also like to learn to program things with some kind of GUI, which with c++ seems like a daunting task.

What is my goal here, and why are my interests so broad? Mathematics is the unifying concept here, and I have a feeling that I can have a much better grasp of things if I keep everything organized. The best way I can think of doing this is by documenting all my work online, maybe with a program. I think that learning to program, and being able to understand difficult theoretical concepts and potential applications could allow me to make useful programs for other people. While I'm learning I'd like to publish my code online at the odd chance that a random person would be interested, as I doubt anyone even reads this blog at the moment.

I still have a lot of ground to cover, and it bothers me becuase I feel all of it is necessary to have the skillset that I really want. Similar thoughts came to me a couple years ago when I realized the path I could go. If I do it properly, I could be self employed. There are just so many pieces to pick up.

The skillset I envisioned:

Programming (Mainly c++ and Python, maybe something more web friendly as well)
Knowledge in Linux OS
Knowledge of Encryption
Knowledge of Algorithms (I found an excellent .pdf textbook on Algorithms by Jorg Arndt online)
Differential Equations (analytical)
Partial Differential Equations (analytical)
Numerical Techniques for the above
Knowledge of physical subjects that use these mathematical skillsets
Ability to program software for these subjects
Ability to create GUIs to use said software

Yes, its an enormous list and I think it is overly ambitious to attempt such a thing. Dammit though, I keep coming back to this skillset as making sense to me for some reason.

I have a plan of attack, however.
Because vibrations are mostly learned in 1D situations and because it is of particular importance to me right now, I'd like to start working on that right away. It'll also refresh my memory on differential equations.

After I get through a book on vibes, I'd like to attempt heat transfer. I never took a heat transfer class and I'd like to have more knowledge on the subject This should really help my PDE knowledge and I can learn more about PDEs in this area.

Aero and E&M can follow here, as they use similar basic equations but wow the physics are wildly different.

I think what I'm really approaching here is some kind of all-encompassing physical simulator. Something with an easy to use interface that can scale to different problem sizes with a way to limit size by creating assumptions. Also, a way to approximmate the required processing time on the fly. If it could eventually move to a distributed network that'd be great.

Wow, I'm getting really ambitious here. The fun is in the journey though, right? If I never get there, will I be disappointed in the time I spent and consider it wasted? Not if it's reproduceable and useful to someone else. The better if I could get compensation for it.

It's just that I think something is really missing from current analysis products. Yes, the concept behind FEM is relatively simple yet difficult to do accurately, but to me it doesn't seem like the correct approach. To me, it's too much like giving an idiot savant a problem without being able to ask it for feedback. That and it takes so long and so much processing power to do it. There's got to be a better way to approximate physical system behavior without those methods. Something closer to closed form solutions but different. Sooner or later the idea will gel or give up the ghost.

Eh, it's getting to be that sleepy time.

The real world

2008-06-05T21:14:00.001-07:00

After strong uncertainty and near constant worrying, I think I've finally come to terms with this new part of my life, at least in the beginning of things. Some things I helped design got quoted, and are actually buildable. I'm running some analysis on ground based structure and building up my chops, slowly building confidence in my abilities.

Work is volatile. There is a constant flux of people that don't fit in the situation, and people that make the wrong mistakes. Its enough to keep me on my toes, and I wonder how its all going to turn out a week, a month, a year from now. There's a whole package of negativity coming from some areas, but every now and then there's a breath of optimism coming in from decisions that I was told, erroneously, wouldn't be made. Plenty of stupid and brilliant things happen every day, the point is to make the best of it, make mistakes, correct others, and keep moving. A good sense of humor is mandatory. Either that, or a desperate numbness that comes with age and disappointment. I don't want to become that. I want to bring the positive out and build something that a few years back, and even now, some people will say could never be done. There are enormous obstacles, including hard science, engineering, emotions, and what appears to be extreme politics. Every single one of these must be overcome, and understanding that while in college is impossible. I've learned more in the two and a half months so far than I did during my year and a half of gradschool, in difficult lessons. Bring it.

Finished my first fast

2008-05-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to try out a fast since I heard Arthur de Vany and Richard Nikoley talk about them. The problem was willpower: being at work with a rigid schedule. Finally, I stuck to the goal and managed to skip both breakfast and lunch, ending up with a 24 hour fast and steak dinner. I feel great, and did not get tired when I got home from work like I usually did. In fact, I grabbed my new kettlebell and did some tough exercises, including kettlebell swings. The thought of swinging and 45 pound weight between my legs scared me at first, but it works my legs and everything else out like crazy. I also bought a pullup bar and installed it this weekend.

The only ill effects from the fast was the mild feeling that I was going to have a headache soon, sometime around 3pm today. It subsided after I got home and started moving cast iron around.

On a more intellectual note, I'm almost done reading the first volume of Feynman's lectures on physics. At the same time, I've been working problems out of Serwey's physics book along with Spivak's calculus book. I don't want to lose my ability in physics and math in case I decide to go for a PhD in physics, being much more interesting than that for engineering.

Started my career in the private space industry, finally

2008-03-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

So far I've seen some pretty cool things that I can't really talk about. My general impression is that there are (hopefully) enough intelligent people taking the idea of a privately funded human space presence seriously for it to actually work. That being said, I've just started my journey into the eccentricities of said people.

Already, the change from Academic life to the Professional world is apparent. Two days in and I'm already doing productive things. Making plenty of mistakes, yes, but I can't help but contrast it with what happened two summers ago. I was sitting in a lab with absolutely nothing that needed doing, for over 3 months. Out of desperation I convinced my professor to order a simple practice composites kit and created a few of the example parts. I even clumsily put together a homemade solenoid and embedded it in some fiberglass to test a concept. But that's all I accomplished then. Most of my time was spent reading research papers, which were horribly boring. I picked up a very bad habit of sleeping during the day because every day, it would put me to sleep. I'm finally away from that sluggish phase.

As for now, I managed to get a nice apartment here in Vegas for a little more than I expected, but I don't think I could find a better place or location. I have a brand new place, the first tenant. I also have granite countertops, a tile floor, and gas stove. Cooking with a gas stove is such an improvement over the resistance based electrical ones I don't think I could comfortably go back. I've been cooking eggs and bacon these first few mornings, and am getting a hang of the heat I need. I also whipped up some very good chicken with onions and mushrooms with some red pepper/artichoke chutney I picked up from Trader Joe's.

Unfortunately, aside from the nice place, I'm still fairly reliant on crutches. I can walk a bit without them, but I'm slow and jerky. My apartment is also fairly bare. The only furniture I have in it is a nice queen sized mattress, another inflatable air mattress, and a barstool. As soon as I can take care of my bank account by hopefully opening up a Wells Fargo account, I'll grab a kitchen table set. Bank of America has caused me so many frustrations lately I just want to be rid of them. Twice they have sent me a debit card with some old guy's face on it (so old, I swear it was taken of a cadaver), which makes me doubt the security of my account and the competency of their organization. I've also been refused some services over the phone that I needed at the time. To top it off, today I was trying to cash a check and couldn't because their computers were down.

I've been missing my speakers for my desktop, and I can't listen to the audio files I have on it. However, my laptop has decent speakers and I just recently started using http://www.pandora.com/ and it's great. I've found a couple of new artists that I've never heard of before, and I really like their music.

I start PT tomorrow, and homefully from that I'll have some idea of how much longer I'll be in my gimpy state.

Progress tracking

2008-03-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

I have created a google spreadsheet to keep tack of my body measurements as I recover from my broken ankle. The main thing to notice is that my left calf is 2" smaller in circumference than the right calf. I am planning on sticking to the evolutionary fitness style of nutrition during recovery, staying away from breads, corn syrup and other corn products, and eating a lot of fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat of all kinds.

The Spreadsheet

The broken ankle

2008-02-28T21:45:00.000-08:00

So, the delay in starting the dream job which I hope to be everything I expect is my ankle. Actually, the very bottom of my Tibia/Fibula. I managed to have a freak swing dancing accident and dislocated and broke the tips of both bones. My foot looked something like this, facing well over 45 degrees in the wrong direction:

I had surgery the following day to install hardware that looks like this:

Roughly 10 days later I had a follow up visit with an orthopedic surgeon and he told me that I would have to have an additional surgery because my Tibia/Fibula were not holding the ankle joint properly and I would need either a screw (and a final surgery and recovery to remove the screw once the original fractures had healed) or suture to hold the joint together so my damaged ligament(s) had time to heal. I ended up getting some kind of hole drilled across the area with a suture and two metal buttons holding everything in place. The great thing is I won't need any more surgery unless the hardware causes me problems (hopefully not!).

I've still got about 3 more weeks of recovery before I get my current cast off and can then go start my post-phd dropout career. I'm still a little bitter about having to have a second surgery because the first one wasn't done entirely right, but most of the recovery is over. My injury isn't swelling that much any more and I can leave my foot in a non-elevated position for some time without it throbbing, which is great.

I've been staying in shape doing the exercises the physical therapist at the hospital showed me, along with ab workouts and pushups. My diet has been as close to paleo/evolutionary fitness as I can make it, though no fasts at the moment. I feel great, and my upper body is in better shape than it was before the injury because I have to get around on crutches so much. I'd like to give intermittent fasting a try after this injury heals. I can't really measure my weight accurately at the moment, but it looks like the current diet scheme has maintained my weight (except for atrophied muscles in my injured leg) but switched the body fat and muscle content in my upper body around. I was never really "fat" (haha, I laugh at even suggesting that since I've been more skinny or skinnyfat than anything) but I was starting to get some weight around the midsection. That's slowly going away, and with the ab work outs I'm seeing more of my ab muscles there than I have before. Maybe a six pack in the near future?

It's been fun trying to keep busy here, away from almost everyone I know except family. I've been playing my guitar some, fooling around with a practice drumming pad, reading, doing a little physics, and playing computer games. Quite a variety of things, but that's normal for me.

I also finished Climbing Free by Lynn Hill today, which was an excellent account of her experience with rock climbing. I figure, if I broke my ankle doing something that seemed so harmless as swing dancing (not even doing any crazy moves or routines), I might as well try something scary so that if I break another bone, at least I'll have a better reason....or at least that's what I tell myself.

Otherwise, I can't wait to start work. I would've crawled up the stairs to my desk if they had let me (which I'm sure is a liability/OSHA/PC/BSgovernment related reason) and I think I expressed that notion, but they seem to be okay with me healing up and being weight bearing on that leg before I start.

Private space employee

2008-01-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

It looks like I'll be working in the private space industry very shortly. I however won't be able to discuss the details either online or offline, for intellectual property/security reasons. I'm stoked, however. I totally bypassed working for NASA, and that makes me smile.

Laptop update

2008-01-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

After a few days of use and more time to use the laptop, I have a better idea of its overall design.

The screen is a lot more firmly attached than my previous laptop, a nearly 6 year old dell inspiron, and overall the fit of the plastic case is much better. The only exception to this seems to be on the front left, right above the wireless on/off switch. The touch-sensor volume switch is very cool, along with the lit mute button that changes from blue to red just by tapping it. The screen is of very good quality, and I was also surprised with the quality of the built-in camera.

The touchpad though, is a bit quirky. Sometimes I can tap to click, othertimes it won't click when I tap my finger. It might be a setting, but I haven't checked into it yet.

Vista, after I downloaded and installed the first update, had a 25% drop in ram wastage and a very noticeable increase in speed. There are still small delays here and there, but it isn't as bad as before. The sleep mode works very well. I was so disgusted by the first sleep modes with laptops that I was always reluctant to try them out. The computer would seem to be in a drunken slumber that was impossible to wake from. Now, it goes into sleep quickly and comes out just as quickly, which is very nice.

I've got a dual boot setup, and have tried ubuntu and slackware, but I have yet to find the appropriate drivers for the wireless card. Once I have that set up, I think I'll be moving over to slackware because I find it easier to set up than ubuntu.

New laptop

2008-01-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

My currently crippled state (more on that later, prolly) makes it more convenient for me to own a more functional laptop. So, I did some window shopping until I finally went to best buy and got an HP dv2000 for only about 650 plus tax. It weighs just a little bit more than 5 pounds, significantly lighter than my previous laptop. I'm completely unimpressed, and in fact hugely disturbed by how slow vista is. It also uses 1/2 of the available ram for...NOTHING. That's 1 GIGABYTE of ram unavailable for anything I want to do at the moment.

So, one of the first things I did was download firefox, then bittorrent. Now I just need to finish up the two slackware cds and gparted, and I'll be on the way to trying to get linux to run on this puppy. I hope I can get wireless to work. Then, perfection.

I was going to make a vista backup cd, but then after the computer diddled around for 45 minutes, I found out it would take 3 DVD's just to make a backup before I had installed any real software. That's ridiculous. I'll worry about that when it becomes an issue, hopefully it won't.

Status

2008-01-10T22:27:00.000-08:00

Right now I have one scheduled phone interview with a consulting firm for a aerospace/power structural position. I'm not entirely sure what that entails, but I think it could be plenty exciting. So far I have 2 positions in Boeing that I believe I should get a phone call from soon, I just don't know when.

Yesterday I found out I was given a U (unsatisfactory, not passing) for my research credits last semester, which I'm sure is a result of my declaring my intention to resign from my phd student position. I'm frustrated with the situation, and still considering taking action to have this changed so that I can get a nonthesis masters, but there's a high probability that I will not be successful. I don't think that I'll be too heartbroken if I don't get it. I just want to get a job, more than anything, right now, in the engineering field.

Function pointers: A very important concept

2007-12-18T15:15:00.001-08:00

...that I wasn't taught in college.

Today I discovered that I wasn't taught something extremely important to developing software code when I learned C++ as a college student. Currently being away from Gainesville, I am doing what I can to keep myself busy. I have already read a 300 page book by Donald Trump called "Think Big and Kick Ass" which inspired me to try harder in my pursuit of a meaningful career after dropping out of the PhD program. Another thing is I stumbled across a book called "Optimal Control and Estimation" by Robert F. Stengel. I recognized a lot of the optimization theory in it, having recently taken a course on structural optimization, and being only $8 I decided to purchase it. I'm 100 pages in, and working on solving some practice problems. The difficulty is that I do not have my obsolete laptop that has Matlab installed, so I had to scrounge around for other coding options. I downloaded the Bloodshed Dev-C++ compiler and started to go to work on writing a Runge-Kutta code to solve a differential equations problem when I realized that I missed one of the nice features of Matlab, which was being able to call functions within a function.

For instance, say I have a Runge-Kutta function, which is simply an algorithm for approximating the answer to a differential equation. The Runge-Kutta algorithm, if you follow the basics of the first set of equations in the linked wikipedia article, requires you to evaluate the differential equation at certain values. The input for these evaluations are determined inside the runge-kutta algorithm, they are not known beforehand. Matlab has a provision for passing an existing function into a new function. For instance, in Matlab, I can do the following:

rungekutta('vanderpol',timestep) {...}

where rungekutta is my approximation code and vanderpol is my function representing Van der Pol's equation, which I am currently trying to solve. Now, any time I want in the runge-kutta algorithm I can call my existing vanderpol function and not have to re-write it for every step in the code. Very convenient.

I had forgotten how spoiled I was with Matlab until I tried to code this in C. I couldn't do it, or at least I didn't think I could do it. Then I remembered someone mentioning something called function pointers in a programming article and I didn't know what they were. Bingo, a quick search on google netted me instructions on how to use such things in C. Function pointers let me do exactly the same thing that I did in Matlab, but with a different syntax, of course.

The thing is, I did not learn this in C++. Why? This is such a powerful concept that I cannot imagine someone leaving it out of a beginner programming class.

Anyway, when I get the code functioning, I'll probably put it up for fun. Right now I'm also reading Tough Choices by Carly Fiorina, a Law School drop out that was the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company (Hewlett-Packard). I also am planning to read Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson of Virgin, one of the people I truly admire for their effort in space privatization.

Note: I said I'd stop fooling around with this refreshing my memory on controls business, I believe, in my last post. Well, I am refreshing my memory here, but also reinforcing my recent optimization experience, picking up some new programming skills (in C of all things!), and keeping myself occupied over what would be a normally rather TV-filled holiday. I'm enjoying the challenge of keeping myself off the television where it is so easy here.

Going about it all wrong

2007-12-10T15:52:00.000-08:00

I think I've been looking at my idea of side projects in the wrong fashion. In my last post, I listed the things that I'd like to finish soon:

1 - Wrap up the rest of the CFD programming from Anderson's book in Matlab
2 - Refresh my memory on vibrations and do some programming in Matlab
3 - Fool around in Lisp

I was looking at these things mainly because I thought that the first two would help me get a better job. I realized something, it's too late for that, and I think my efforts are misguided.

I started studying CFD in October because I wanted desperately to get a job with XCOR. I was rusty on aerodynamics and I wanted to prove that I was still competent in that area, or able to learn the basics of a new skill in that area. Well, I'm not going to get that job with
XCOR, regardless of my ability to quickly start coding CFD code in Matlab. I also wanted to study vibrations, because I remember a potential employer two years ago asking me if I'd be willing to take a class on the subject so that I could handle those types of problems,
should they occur.

Now, having sent out dozens of resumes, still tweaking my sales pitch, I've been distracted long enough to be able to go back and re-evaluate the decision to study those first two things. I was studying those because I thought I needed to prove my value to someone else. I
didn't doubt my own ability, but I thought that I needed those projects in order to sell myself. I went back and thought of all the skills that I DO have, which won't require brushing up on material that has a slim chance of actually being useful in my profession. I
could always pick up that specific skill later, when it becomes necessary, but to spend time doing it now is silly. I should flesh out those things that actually interest me, that light a fire under my ass, so that I can make myself actually stick out when I am
interviewing.

That said, I'm going to limit my side projects to what actually interests and challenges me. I do not think that studying CFD and vibrations on the side will make a difference, nor really motivate me to do much. It might actually be harmful, by distracting me from what I think is important, not my future employer.

So, the only thing on that list that I actually wanted to do completely of my own volition was to fool around with lisp, because I thought it would be interesting. However, my new list is going to
look something like:

1 Research more space technology and history
2 Look into stories of space manufacturing/design issues
3 Fool around with lisp, when the desire strikes

I want, without a doubt, to work in the private space industry. I have no idea how I'm going to do it. All of the companies that I have seen that work in the private space industry (except one) require skill sets that I do not have, and could not possibly have for at least several years. A PhD would not do much to help this, at all. I've applied to the remaining company (SpaceX), having been turned down by XCOR, ignored by Scaled Composites, and gracefully let down by
Blue Origin with the note that my resume is still floating around in their files in case something comes up. I haven't heard from SpaceX at all, so I have no idea if the thought of working for them is even tenable. Blue Origin, however, was very nice and straightforward with
their response, and took less than 24 hours at that. XCOR, however, dragged things out for months, which puts a bad taste in my mouth in regards to working there.

So what do I do in the meantime? I've applied to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Pratt and Whitney, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, for any position that I think I'm qualified for. This includes both aircraft and spacecraft related technology and engineering. I think I have a good shot of being hired by any one of them because I have a ridiculous GPA (3.9+) and leadership experience both inside and outside of school, and some engineering experience (though it was
transportation/civil, not mechanical/aerospace). The problem with these organizations, however, is I have no idea what I'll really be working on, and also no idea when I'm going to hear back. It took Boeing months to get back to me, but I actually got two phone calls
from them my senior year of college. Some of my applications have been under consideration for nearly 3 months now, with nary a response. I need to keep in mind where I want to be, if in fact I get a good job offer for something that isn't entirely space related. I saw a really good manufacturing engineering position which I think I'm qualified for, but it's working with airplanes and not with space vehicles. However, I think that the experience would be enjoyable and could eventually lead to spacecraft if I do pursue my hobby of learning what I can about space systems.

Time to stay positive and confident, and ready myself for the unknown.

Evening anxiety

2007-12-02T23:06:00.001-08:00

As of now, it is 2am Sunday morning, I feel no hint of drowsiness, and I have a final tomorrow morning. I spent roughly 6 hours today and probably the same amount yesterday fiddling with Pro/Engineer, attempting to get the idea in my head into the ones and zeros that would make the 3d picture come to life. I'd been working on this particular model for three weeks I believe, and progress was slow coming because I was learning specific features in Pro/Engineer while I was designing a flying bird model.

After all that work, I was becoming intensely frustrated with the program after simple commands or clicks would crash Pro/Engineer, sending me straight back to the desktop with the last unsaved features destroyed. This was complicated by the fact that the nature of my model made it very difficult to change. Unfortunately, I could not edit the model to my satisfaction, because I could not find the tool that I wanted (that either I couldn't locate out of ignorance or doesn't exist in Pro/Engineer) to sufficiently manipulate surfaces. I was instead made to suffer with the crutch of manipulating splines and surfaces generated in two separate ways that couldn't interact with each other properly. I was ultimately disturbed when I saw a video of someone doing a similar process in rival software (either Solidworks or Catia, I'm not sure), much more efficiently than I could in Pro/Engineer. I felt like I was trying to cut cheesecake with a chainsaw, it was all brute force and pretty messy. That and the user interface was united, which in Wildfire 2.0 (not the most recent software, but it's what I have access to), is not the case. There are two separate interfaces, and there seems to be a random chance for each tool as to which interface will be used. I despise the menu driven interface, which is their old interface, and can cope much better with the dashboard, as I'm told is integrated in Wildfire 3.0).

Finally I started looking around for anything that would let me accomplish what I wanted in Pro/Engineer without the frustration of what I was doing before. Because I wasn't stuck on a specific cross section on my model, and only the general shape really mattered, I designed to just hand manipulate some surfaces instead of generating cross sections and passing surfaces through them. I was able to recreate, in a much prettier way, the work of the past few weeks in only 3 hours, with the added benefit of actually being able to go back and change previous features. If I had tried to change something I did in the past with the older model, I would reach a point where I couldn't figure out a way to fix the part regeneration. I would be stuck in a place where there was a failure, and the only way to fix it was in a previous step that the menu-driven system wouldn't let me navigate to (or I just didn't figure it out yet). Anyway, I ended up buying myself a lot of time, and creating something much prettier to boot.

That aside, I'm anxious. I have a suspicion that I've been given the shaft in regards to the job opportunity that I really wanted, and have proceeded to inundate the aerospace world with resumes and applications. I stuck to what I am really interested in, but that still ended up in quite a few resumes (though only to a select few companies thus far). I would really like to start work in January, but I'm unsure if that is a realistic goal because I ended up applying for jobs so late. If only I had decided a few months earlier that I didn't want to do the PhD, before I aced the qualifier.

I'm not going to be horribly crushed if I do not get an offer to start in January though, as I have some savings from working my previous years and also some residue from my stipend, but it'll only stretch a few more months with the expense of rent. In the meantime, I'll take one more class and hopefully make a run for it with a non-thesis Masters. I've also lined up a few things that I want to do in my spare time as well, with orders of importance:

1 - Wrap up the rest of the CFD programming from Anderson's book in Matlab
2 - Refresh my memory on vibrations and do some programming in Matlab
3 - Fool around in Lisp

From the looks of it, I'll have the choice between two online courses related to controls. One is more theory, the other is actual machine control with programming. I'll probably go for the more practical one, as I'll probably remember the detail better. Personally, I can always brush up on theory if I need to, with all the math courses I have had in the past.

Another thing I'd like to start doing is get back into the gym regularly (it's been a couple of months, ever since my graduate student crisis in early October), and also drill my math skills for about 30 minutes every night. I'll start with arithmetic, and work my way up. I like being able to get quick answers in my head without resorting to an artificial brain (calculator).

An interesting article

2007-11-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon this article today. The premise is that telling your children that they are intelligent has a detrimental effect on their performance.

On the fear of failure and the absurdities that develop

2007-11-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

Getting the last blog post out of my system freed up my mind for even more introspection. Believe me though, what actually spurred this on taunts me with its silliness.

Have you ever seen someone spin a pen? You know, they hold it up between their index/middle finger and their thumb, flick their thumb, and the pen rotates quickly around in a way that a rock drummer might spin his sticks or similarly to how a baton twirler spins the baton? Well, one of my friends had a habit of doing this repeatedly in class,and I would always sit there and get mesmerized, attempting to analyze what was going on and how to do it myself. I attempted, over and over, trying to do it. Every time the pen rotated slightly and fell down my hand. I thought that he must have some kind of trick, a way of balancing the pen so that it spun perfectly on his finger, and I was just too uncoordinated to do it.

Seem silly? It gets better.

For some unknown reason today I remembered his habit (he's now in graduate school across the country, so I haven't seen him or anyone else do it in a while), and tried to figure out why I couldn't do it. Then, a small epiphany developed, which then led to a much greater epiphany. The minor epiphany was that I was simply afraid that the pen would fall on the floor (OH NO! can't possibly let THAT happen! /melodrama). Really, how silly is that? It's a pen, no big deal, if it falls, it makes a small noise. But I was afraid of actually just flicking my thumb with meaning because I was afraid of the tiny little noise it would make if it fell and the stares I would get if it happened (honestly, such a thing would be annoying in a classroom, but before class starts, who really cares?). This absurd worry about a minor detail kept me from doing the one thing that would make such a small thing successful, and that is going at it with gusto.

I noticed a similar thing about my note taking in class. I always hated the difficulty I had reading them, and always blamed my handwriting for the problem. I tried slowing down and being more meticulous with my writing, but that didn't do much good. I then realized I had an absurd concern to conserve paper. This concern is completely unwarranted when I have a stack of clean and unused paper available, but I always worried about using too much so I would try to compress as much writing as possible onto each sheet. This process of scrutinizing the dimensions of what I was taking down on paper in order to conserve one sheet of nearly worthless paper caused so much concern and such a distraction that it made me lose track of what was being taught in class. I didn't always take notes in class, but I did notice that when I was free of note-taking, I understood everything better. However, I didn't have the equations or everything written down, so I had to guess or look up the results somewhere else, which is wasteful. So, right there in class, I told myself to stop sweating it and just write huge and clearly (which isn't that hard compared to what I was doing) and bingo, I found class relaxing again.

I must be more obsessive that I previously admitted to, and I'm sure all of this sounds weird to whoever is reading this (does anyone read this?). Those were the small epiphanies though. The big epiphany is that I need to press forward with things that are uncertain or have minor side effects, and not be afraid of potential failure. Sure, constant failure is horrible, but failure here and there can be a useful and fertilizing experience. Instead of being an armchair engineer and speculating on the possibilities of things, actually attempting difficult things (or at least things that seem difficult) teaches me a lot. In fact, letting fears overwhelm the thought process can make a process impossible (in the silly example of spinning a pen).

Move on, remember those failures in your life as the best lessons you'll ever get. My simplistic examples aside, I've made plenty of other, bigger mistakes. The biggest one I can think of now relates to school, and I think all this realization is finally getting me out of my slump. Time to move on, make more mistakes, and be that more knowledgeable and wise.

On left brain dominance, laziness, perfection, school, alcohol, and dancing

2007-11-27T16:21:00.001-08:00

A disclaimer: I am no neuroscientist and haven't had a class on biology in almost a decade (wow, hard to believe it's been that long), so take my ideas in the correct perspective.

While neurotically attempting to minimize my difficulties with interviewing, I found several sets of potential questions that required succinct explanations. One question caught me in such a way that I couldn't answer well, and sent me off into deep self-analysis that finally produced results nearly a month later. The question was simply: "Did you do the best that you could in school? Why not?"

The answer that I immediately thought to myself was simply "I realize that school isn't the real world, and I don't want to waste time on simplified models of reality". This answer struck something so discordant with me that I couldn't figure out why. Looking back at my undergraduate experience, I found it difficult to provide examples of my competence. I know that I am capable of much more than I achieved in all of my schooling, but there are very few tangible results. Why? I can think of a few examples to the contrary where I did succeed in providing tangible results, but they are more the exception than the rule. My grades are excellent, but honestly I could have easily had a 4.0 if I had tried a little harder (GPA was 3.93 in undergrad). Seeing the resume's of a few other students weighed even greater on my empty-handedness. They had projects, undegraduate research, clubs, more leadership experience, and even more than that, with proof! I scraped the bottom of my memory's barrel for everything I could, and I realized I was the most effective when I was employed for my internships during the summers. Why? I kept asking myself this question, over and over, until it all came together today.

Last week, I finished reading The Fountainhead for the second time. I had first read it in high school as part of a potential scholarship essay (which I never did complete) and also simultaneously fulfilling a classroom reading assignment. At the end of reading it the second
time, I realized that I had focused on vastly different things when I read it the first time around. The Fountainhead was my first introduction to Ayn Rand's philosophy, and it made me think it many ways that I just hadn't allowed myself to before, or in ways that I had been programmed not to think. But there was much that I wasn't getting out of it. My interpretation at the time was that everything Howard Roark did was bare and scientific, almost as if he were a machine. I now cannot imagine why I saw the book that way, but I realize that my previous interpretation was incredibly wrong. There was an aesthetic beauty to everything Roark made, but these designs were also physically possible. It was the perfect union of aesthetics, raw physics, design, and human ergonomics that made his engineering feats unique and precious.

Why does this matter though? It's a fictional story, so why does my interpretation of it really make a difference? Honestly, my interpretation of the book doesn't make much of a difference unless I am discussing the novel with someone else, but why I made the interpretation that I did says a lot about my personality.

The analytical part of my brain was plateauing some time in mid high school. I think it peaked in 8th grade, when I finally understood algebra and manipulated equations in my head so quickly that I actually placed in mathematics competitions at other schools. My teacher was Mr. Garcia, an excellent teacher that was of the type to make a student meet his potential, and not simply coast through the course. He drilled those of us that were grasping the material quicker than others, and challenged us with questions that we couldn't just apply formulas to. I think he, more than anyone else in my education, aided me in my enjoyment and success in mathematics and engineering studies.

So what? In high school I began to sleep during classes. I could sleep during most of the math classes, wake up during class long enough to see where we were and figure out how to get there, and then fall back asleep. I even taught the class one time when my teacher was explaining polynomial division or finding roots. I don't particularly remember, but she was having a hard time getting the idea across. I came up with my own method to do something that was slightly different, and explained it so that the other students could understand. I joined the high school Mu Alpha Theta team, even became president for one year, but I don't think we even placed or had a competitive team. Our teacher hardly drilled us and we spent most of our time tutoring other students that didn't even grasp negative numbers, and were sometimes combative or completely uninterested in learning. From that point on, I always knew how to try just hard enough to get an A in almost every class, but didn't take the extra step. What was the extra step? Why didn't I take it? Was it simply laziness?

Another fact was that my artwork (I took several art classes starting around 3rd grade, and enjoyed them until 7th-8th grade, but I took them until around 10th grade) seemed to be getting more and more uninspired and honestly, just plain bad. Also, as I mentioned before, I had suddenly started falling asleep in my classes. Why didn't I correct these things, having learned the lessons of my algebra teacher to challenge myself and always do my best? I honestly think that the left (analytical) side of my brain began to severely dominate the more emotionally driven half (and this is where I question whether such a thing is actually possible, but I think I can use this framework of understanding to explain why I think the things happened the way they did). I'm fairly certain that the main reason that my artwork began to suffer was what happened during my more difficult middle school art classes. I was at the point in art that I had to overcome my creative inhibitions and start trying new ideas until I figured out what I liked. In the midst of that, there were a couple of people in my class that teamed up against me on some issue (wasn't related to art, was pop music or something silly like that), and I made what they thought was a stupid or ignorant comment. They immediately began punching me and tormenting me, and that would last the rest of middle school. The thing is, I let them do it. Why? This tormenting turned into constant criticism of what I did that was visible, which was mainly my art. I had a similar experience (though not the same) in my 9th & 10th grade art classes, where I would constantly get non-constructive criticism of my work. I began to lose interest in getting better at art. Why did I let it continue?

I think the answers to most of these why questions is that I let my analytical side take precedence over the emotional side. I don't recall often asking myself the question, "Why am I not happy with this?" or "What would make me happy about this?" I talked myself out of these more difficult questions, which couldn't be handled in my regular, analytical way. I'd dream up all kinds of weird scenarios of what could happen, which I'm pretty sure was a sort of neurosis or obsessive behavior, because I hardly ever did anything about my problems. This led to a situation where I had an elaborate idea of the worst case scenario of just about anything in my normal life, and I would pretty much coast on autopilot after that. In most cases (the exceptions really being some academic areas where my view was so wrong I had to come up with new ideas to handle it), I would ignore the minor discrepancies between my expectations and reality. This sounds like a very dangerous situation, and I think that it is, in the long run, but I had made such a system of it that it actually worked fairly well for me. I would throw my brute force analytics at a problem in a quick sprint, instead of thinking efficiently or sometimes even effectively, and come up with an answer. I hardly ever re-evaluated my first solution to a particular situation (the main exception being tests when I would find the major issue, remember the difference, and go back on autopilot). This worked so amazingly well in school that I got the grades that I did with minimal effort. The truth is also that college grades are also inflated to the point that teachers expect nearly everyone to get A's in their classes. Instead of A's being the mark of excellence, they are watered down into the average. To me, A's stand for average. I know I'm capable of more, and over time a GPA as high as mine probably means more than just average. Everything in my experience though still points to my idea that an A is average, unless it is a particularly challenging class (exception, not the rule).

But, if I was doing this in school, how come I was successful when I had internships? When I worked, I knew that the answers I gave had to be correct, or I would look foolish or excessive amounts of other peoples' money would be wasted, when in school if I was wrong 5-10% of the time, it didn't matter, I still got the A. I would go back after I finished something, and make sure that I was completely satisfied with the results afterward. This included not only plain numerical correctness, but also presentation as well. If something was difficult to understand but 100% analytically correct, it was still wrong because it couldn't be communicated. I was vigilant over details that I just ignored in school. I was performing excellently in this way every summer I worked, but as soon as school started again, I lost that work ethic and went back to minimal effort. I would perform a project until it was mostly technical correct, and then submit it. I would usually feel like there was something missing from a project, but I never figured out what it was. What I should have been asking myself was, "What could I do to make this project really satisfy me?" I didn't ask that question very often. I remember a few times that it did happen. One was during the short stint that I had in the composite laboratory my freshman year, when the entire project for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) was being delayed until the last minute, mainly by procrastination on the part of everyone involved. It got to where finals were approaching and I was frustrated from not being productive, and stopped showing up at meetings. I could have done much better, but I did ask a few people what I could do to help, but they didn't provide much. I could've kept on asking, finding out what needed to be done, but I talked myself out of continuing on a project where so many people were procrastinating. (This is my perception of things, it's a 4 year old memory so don't read too much into it.) Another instance was when I was working on the cubesat team. A few things turned me off to that project, I could have fixed it, but I talked myself out of it again. But before I left, there was a problem with the solar panels. We had a whole bunch of tiny solar panels for the cubesat that nobody had any idea how to connect or use. I looked for information on it, butcouldn't find it. Eventually I had enough, and decided to go and test them in the sunlight with a multimeter, which would tell me where the positive/negative terminals were. I then jury rigged a cardboard device that had several panels in series and then later in parallel to test the requirements for different hardware components. I injected a little bit of momentum into the project that way, but I still felt something massively lacking in that project as well.

And yet this didn't happen when I was employed. It sure seemed to me like I was very strong with extrinsic motivation (provided by a work environment), but heavily lacking in intrinsic motivation. I didn't want to believe that was true, however, and after thinking about it for a little bit, I know it's not. I am very intrinsically motivated when I want to be. I remember staying up all night one time in high school after buying a remote controlled car kit (a kit, not something that you put a few pieces together and assemble, I actually put together the two differentials, power transfer components, suspension, installed the electronics, etc.). I didn't let anything slow me down, my mother was telling me to call it quits, but I think I stayed up until 4am in the morning, when I finished it and just passed out on the floor. I remember the severe pain I was in when waking up because the floor was tile, and every joint in my body screamed when it moved after that.

More recently, I remember when I crashed my trainer airplane, and going to the hobby shop to find the necessary components to repair it, bought yet another airplane and stayed up all night until 6am the next morning not only assembling the new airplane but repairing the broken one as well. So, I know that I can be nearly unstoppable when I am intrinsically motivated.

But what the hell am I getting at?

Today, I figured out what was missing in just about EVERY situation mentioned above that I found something missing. It makes a lot more sense now. It was the lack of my ASSUMPTION OF OWNERSHIP. I was finding myself in situations that I could handle by thinking to myself (and I did) "Most people would take this course of action, and that will solve this problem" and go through the motions. When I told myself, "This project is MINE" I did everything in my power to shape and sculpt it into what I was proud of doing. I had told myself in college that the motions would result in the grades needed and I went through the motions. Meanwhile the more emotional half of my brain was screaming that something was wrong, that I wasn't happy. But I talked myself out of worrying about it. It took both the emotions of confidence and ownership along with the knowledge of analysis to accomplish projects in a way that satisfied me. Now, I think these thoughts are coming across as me being too hard on myself, but honestly I have come to realize that I have higher standards of perfection than others, and my analytical side was able to handle most of those standards. It's the unfulfilled emotional side that could've pushed what I worked on into a zone where honestly, it wouldn't have been measured on a grade scale. To be satisfied with the projects that I did for classes in college, I would've had to go way beyond the normal requirements. For instance, in astrodynamics I made a Matlab program that could determine orbits from various initial data. All of this was handled in a very textual way. For me to be satisfied (and I actually realized this at the time), I would've had to make a graphical representation of what was going on. I thought about it for a little bit, but again talked myself out of it, and my creative side screamed.

A similar thing happened in aerodynamics and propulsion. I wanted to analyze real problems, not the silly ones we were given, and that would've required teaching myself Computational Fluid Dynamics. I didn't do that then, but now, 2.5 years later, I am doing that. Why? What happened in the past year or so that made me start taking these steps, not limiting myself to what was going on in school?

You might laugh, but I think it was swing dancing. I picked up the basics of dancing quickly, because the analytical side of my brain could just understand what was going on. "My feet need to be here on this beat, my hand needs to be doing this..." along with the idea of how to carry on moving along with the music. The problem was my dancing was stalling and not getting anywhere. I went to workshops, and picked up a few moves here and there, but I always felt something was missing in my dancing. Then I started going out more, after the actual dances, and having dancing parties in my apartment. Something started happening. When I had people at my apartment to dance, I could also imbibe a little bit of alcohol. Something happened, and my dancing started getting better, faster. Was alcohol making me a better dancer? The answer really is yes and no. Consuming a little bit of alcohol started the process of loosing the finer skill of coordination. However, it did something else as well. After just a little bit, I stopped analyzing and planning every little move I made. I would make more mistakes. However, I would also try things that my analytical side just didn't have the equipment for, and suddenly I got more creative with my dancing. I figure it has to be the suppressing of that analytical side that keeps it from overwhelming my more creative parts. That, in turn, lets the creative parts have more control of the situation.

That's all fine and dandy, but I can't very well go about drinking alcohol constantly to keep my self-suppression in check, can I? I realized something today. All it took was watching someone in my lab explain how to use a CAD program to another student. It was the way he was doing it. He was very happily explaining every single feature. It seemed (it could just be my perception), that every little tool he used was amazing in his eyes, and gave him the power to create things that lingered just inside of his skull, giving his ideas traction and pulling them into reality. I can do that too, and it started happening. I can get jazzed up for dancing now and start doing some interesting things, without having anything to drink. It's all because I saw the other side, and I made the connection that something was wrong in my own noggin'. I must take ownership, and be determined to enjoy myself and create, regardless of how ugly and nasty the procrastination or negativity of others seems to prevail.

It's all happening at once now, thanks to my decision two months ago to drop the PhD program instead of ignoring the fact that I was not happy in graduate school, and was dreading 2 and a half more years of it. I feel like a weight has been lifted, and I am free to do whatever I set my mind to, whether or not I get accepted for an employee for a particular company or not. If I get accepted, great, if not, I can still entertain and create projects for myself, because I know the mechanism now.

Mostly up and running on Linux

2007-11-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

After a whole bunch of trial and error, I have finally set up Slackware as a second boot on my desktop pc. I tried and failed about a month ago, but couldn't get wireless internet working (which is necessary because the router is not in my room and I don't have a cable long enough to reach it). What ended up happening was I got an unused wireless router, downloaded a hack for it, and set it up as a repeater. That way it would connect to our pre-existing wireless network and let me hardwire my desktop to the second router. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

After that, I was finally able to get enough usability out of the KDE desktop to find and download the nVidia driver I needed and also set up the scroll wheel with my mouse (I couldn't believe how painful it was to navigate without a scroll wheel).

I'm happy as of now, though I still have to figure out the audio set-up.

Hopefully I'll get to playing around with open source CFD code soon.

Why the move

2007-11-14T09:20:00.001-08:00

I didn't like the name of my previous blog, In Search of Concentration, because of it's vagueness and the situation that produced my desire to create such a blog in the first place. I was listening to Led Zeppelin one day when I was driving down to the lake here in Gainesville to unwind and think about the journey I'm about to embark on. "Over the hill and far away" came on the player and instantly an overwhelming elation hit. I jabbed the repeat button twice, focusing on the lyrics that form the name of this blog.

I've got at most a month before my obligation to this graduate program ends, and my optimism reigns supreme. I have one potential job in the private space industry, and two others that I am preparing to fire off a resume to. I also found a few aviation related jobs that I will apply to if for some reason none of the space jobs pay off after all. But I'm not going to overly concern myself with that right now.

Earlier, in October, a mild depression had set in because of my perceived lack of opportunities. However, re-evaluating my previous observations has led to the realization that: fears be damned, I'm not trying hard enough and I need to continue forging ahead. I think I began to realize this after reading some essays by Paul Graham on software design, startups, and business. I found his Undergraduation essay important, in particular. I'm not trying hard enough unless I feel like I'm getting into a difficult project that challenges me.

Graham's essays on software startups are also very important for the field I am looking into. The private space industry is almost all small start ups right now. The founders of Paypal, Amazon, ID Software, etc. have spent a very large sum of money getting independent space hardware and software developed and tested. The largest ones are in the sub 500 employee range, and those largest ones have mostly working space vehicles (Scaled Composites, SpaceX). Other startups have small, working components such as engines. The main differences between private space startups and software startups is the risk and investment involved. Software startups are extremely cheap when compared to the investment required to secure mechanical, electrical, and other engineers along with testing facilities and manufacturing hardware and technicians. That's why multi-millionaires (if not billionaires) are involved in such things.

Another important thing that I realized about my current situation was the severe lack of peer or internal interaction. The only other person working on the project I was designated for in graduate school is my professor, but I am doing the majority of the work. I'm somewhat envious of others in different programs that have teams of intelligent students developing new technology, questions, and solutions. I miss very much my most intelligent friends that were around in my undergraduate classes. We would talk about problems together and discuss possibilities and have intellectual conversation. My intellectual conversations while in grad school, because of the isolation I have been in, have been nearly nonexistent. I cannot wait to be involved in something where a group is working on a common goal and we can communicate and speculate on the opportunities of the present.

I've found that I have been limiting myself by not trying difficult projects on my own. In particular, I think I should've started my search into understanding Computational Fluid Dynamics much sooner. I'm getting along in Anderson's introductory book on the subject while programming in Matlab. I've also discovered I have a curiosity about peculiar technologies, like Lisp, of which Paul Graham has spent a lot of time writing. I would also like to further develop my own writing skills.

Ultimately, this blog is about me pursing my dreams and not holding myself back from what I really want out of life.

On another note, I'm still very much reading both Billy, Rich, and Warren, who have helped greatly to develop my philosophical and political understanding.