I am typing this post in Colemak. Very slowly.

A weird thing: in Firefox, text fields are working with Colemak, but keyboard shortcuts are still QWERTY. I'm effectively hitting cmd-G to open new tabs, instead of cmd-T. I wonder why that is.

Old school hackers do it in the 'more magic' position.

It's hard for me to code (or do anything that requires concentration) while listening to wonderful awesome distracting music. Especially if both the music and the activity use language (I can listen to singing and play solitaire, or I can listen to instrumental and write stuff; I cannot listen to singing and write stuff (and I get bored if I listen to instrumental and play solitaire)).

Some people in the XKCD forum put me on to the streaming music at Blue Mars. I like what I've heard so far, though I know basically nothing about lyricless/ambient music (recommend stuff!).

They have three streams, "Blue Mars", "Cryosleep", and "Voices From Within". I've been listening to Cryosleep. Voices From Within seems to be in a lot of random languages (good glossolalia stuff perhaps??).

It's nice to have some music going on in the background. Whee pretty sounds, and it's calming. And somewhat surprisingly, very focusing as well. Not just because it keeps me from hearing every little random thing in the house -- it puts me in some kind of zone.

Good debugging music, on the other hand, is apparently all the happymaking energetic fast stuff that I totally can't listen to while producing the code in the first place. Will see how that goes when I actually have something frustrating to debug.

I've been reading the O'Reilly Learning Python book online. (I love institutional subscriptions!) It's an excellent book, but it can't seem to decide whether to be aimed at programmers or non-programmers. It goes into detail about really basic general-programming things like how a while loop works and where you might want to use one. Then it throws a bunch of jargon at you. The exercises are easy, but there are awfully few of them. I'm digging up lots of random exercises on the internet. (Perhaps the author assumes the reader is an expert, and has their own exercises/problems/projects in mind already??)

Maybe this weirdness is just a product of me being in a weird place: I sort of remember how to program from HS classes, but not very well, and I certainly don't remember language specifics. So "rank beginner" tutorials are too easy, and "expert" tutorials are way too hard.

Oddly enough, I find that studying Python whets my appetite for Scheme and SICP. Not that Python is ugly or anything -- but Scheme/SICP is beautiful. Mm, rigor and abstraction and such things.

So I finally did get sick of just sitting around reading all day every day, and started learning Scheme. I didn't remember everything from the Scheme class I took in high school, but I thought I remembered enough to use a tutorial that didn't hold my hand. On Raffi's recommendation, I started with Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days. It's pretty concise and explains things clearly, but it's not for someone who doesn't know how to program.

While writing random code snippets, I ran into things I didn't remember how to do (as opposed to syntax I couldn't understand; the tutorial was excellent). So now I'm rereading Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs, aka the blue wizard book. And this time I'm actually reading almost everything, and doing the exercises. (It's the same book we used in high school, but that was senior year, and the class was experimental, and Mr. Thibodeaux was amazingly easygoing, so after a while we all stopped doing the reading. *shame shame*)

It's fun to be doing things and learning things. Though of course I'm still reading as much as I can.

I got Firefox 3 a while ago, and while I haven't really used the most-hyped features yet, there are a lot of little things I like.

Right-click on a tab and you get a couple menu options I've really been missing: move the tab to a new window, copy the tab to a new window, and move the tab to [choose an other existing window]. Sweet! ETA: Whoops, this isn't a native feature, it's an add-on called Tab To Window that I forgot I had. It's very much worth getting.

They fixed it so that ctrl-W and ctrl-T do the Right Things. With no windows open, ctrl-T opens a new window, instead of doing nothing. And if you have it set so the tab bar is always open, you don't need shift-ctrl-W to close a window that has only one tab in it.

Unfortunately, if you have a Mac you still have to jump through hoops to get favicons (those little website icons) in your bookmarks toolbar. Blahhh.

I haven't really gotten around to using the awesomebar (smart location bar) to its maximum, but what I've seen so far is pretty shiny. I'm hardcore into keywords and keyword searches, so I don't really need the awesomebar. Nothing beats typing "l" for my LJ friends page, or typing "w shakespeare" and getting the Wikipedia page for Shakespeare. Well, nothing except typing "e to the i pi" and getting the Wikipedia page for Euler's Identity.

(1) I tried these about:config edits to make Firefox run faster, and they seem to have worked splendidly. I can't tell if the application opens faster, which was my original intent, but it certainly opens pages a hell of a lot faster -- LJ in particular is much faster, and even Gmail is a bit faster.

(2) Gmail is highly featureful but kind of slow to load. Does anyone know of a fast text-based email client that does the organizing-messages-into-conversations thing, or has tags, or supports "owning" several addresses and sending mail from each?

(3) Woo keystroke navigation! Woo QuickSilver, which apparently makes it way easier to navigate Macs by keystroke -- I haven't learned to use it for anything but opening applications and the occasional URL, but I can already tell it's good because it does an excellent job of learning what you mean. I type `f' and hit enter, and it opens Firefox. Speaking of which, woo keywords for bookmarks and searches! Seriously. So much better than bookmarks-toolbar buttons for frequently-visited sites.

I have picked up a broken external hard drive. It is no longer intact, although it doesn't look like any parts are physically cracked or fried -- it's just been partly taken apart. I do not have the expertise to restore it to working order.

What should I do with it?

>> beg and plead for someone knowledgeable to invest time and effort in teaching me on this thing
>> drop it off a roof
>> take the components apart and make shiny things out of them
>> your more specific suggestion here

Barring I take the first option, I do want to take the magnets out because magnets are fun. But what about everything else?

In-case link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

I just ran across this really neat video of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor. [8:34]



What I find fascinating about it is not so much the actual technique used, although that's cool too. What I love is that this lets you see all those neat patterns that Bach was so good with -- inversions of the theme, in particular, are a lot easier to notice. Plus, you can see chord changes getting ready to happen, at the same time as your Western-music-trained auditory cortex can hear them getting ready to happen. Woo cognitive consonance.
(I don't know enough about organs to know what the different colors stand for -- different stops?)

EDIT: Oh, and, after you watch it, it looks like your screen is shifting to the right. Hee.

The audio for the above is a MIDI -- admittedly a good one -- but I guess that's an unfortunate requirement of the software that makes the visualization. A more traditional rendition: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_FyFw

Some things have changed.

Version: 3.1
GS/SS d- s:+>: a--- C++ U? P L E? W++ N o? K? w- O? M+ V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP- t 5? X? R !tv b+>+++ DI+ D? G e>++++ h- r x+

Poem, currently untitled. If you can think of something better than "Ode to the Tunnels", leave it in the comments and I'll give you a cookie. Footnotes for people not familiar with MIT.

( Cut for length. )


(...Wow, that's a hell of a lot more footnotes than I expected to have to put.) What do y'all think? I've been rereading Hofstadter's translation of Eugene Onegin, and I also got Falen's superb translation from out the library. Quite apart from those being some excellent reading, I've hit that point where you practically start *thinking* in a poetic form after reading a lot of it. Which is fun.

I saw this posted a while ago, and finally got around to implementing it. Ukelele, which I used to make the layout, was misbehaving. I still can't get the remapping of the delete key to work, but the rest of it seems to work fine. And now that Ukelele seems to be behaving properly, fixing shouldn't be much of a problem.

I'm using it right now, and it's slow because I'm not used to it, but that's a matter of time. It's not really designed for prolonged typing, but for brief short typing interspersed with mouse use.

Now to get back in Ukelele and add scientific symbols. Whee.

(I'm also tempted to switch to Dvorak, but I'm not going to do that while I have to switch a lot between my own comp and other people's.)

"Crufting", at MIT, basically means getting things from other people's trash and putting them to good use. Doesn't really matter where you get the items, as long as it doesn't involve theft. Strategies range from dumpster-diving to reading the Reuse mailing list to just being observant in the less-trafficked hallways, and having a habit of glancing into large piles of junk. Sarah (yay friendly, nice, compatible new roommate) and I are both into this -- in fact, when I proposed that we room together, it was by sending a note in an anonymous-note game we played: "Room w/ me, fellow crufter?" It's not just a habit, it's a way of life, and it brings people together! </clicheness>

In the past several days, on top of the 'mainstream' free junk we get from people trying to get us to join clubs, we've acquired many very fine pieces of cruft, some decorative, some useful. Here's a sampling of what we accumulated before this evening:

> A giant jigsaw puzzle piece made of plywood and beautifully painted -- we're going to try and make this into a billboard, by attaching cork strips and/or magnetic surfaces
> An old room sign from 8-205 in main campus (that means building 8, second floor, room 05). Nice little piece of MIT history, and by coincidence, our room number is 205.
> An EXIT sign (currently indicating a completely non-exitable window)
> Half a brick, which makes a great doorstop
> A longish metal pole with a bend at the end -- attached vertically to the wall, this will make a great place to hang my cloak(s)
> Quite a bit of caution tape

Earlier today, while walking back from dinner, I finally stopped by a frat-house dumpster we've been eyeing for quite some time. I got a biggish plastic storage bin (sans lid), a very nice bucket, and some kind of plastic tray thing that used to hold a flat of soda but now holds our paper recycling. All sort of dirty, but none damaged at all, and perfectly usable. Eris, the things people just throw out *shakes head* In the same dumpster there was one of those octopus lamps, the ones with several lightbulbs on flexible tentacles. Damaged beyond working order, perhaps not beyond repair, but I'm not competent to fix that. May someone find use for it.


We've been wanting some kind of small filing cabinet or file box. And what should I see advertised on the reuse list but a two-drawer filing cabinet. I went out to get it. On the way, I stopped by a large janitor's-mini-dumpster-on-wheels, and found some sheets of foam, which will end up being padding on the bunk-bed frame so Sarah's feet don't get bruised first thing in the morning. Then I found the pile of free stuff, including the filing cabinet, but the cabinet was about 3x as deep as we wanted/needed/had room for. So I got something else from the pile: a very nice wire/plastic paper tray for my desk. After that, since I was over in main campus anyway, I went to the classroom where I took the physics placement test, because I remembered seeing a brick with holes drilled in it, which would be good for holding toothbrushes. The classroom was unlocked, but alas, the brick was gone. Some lucky person must have picked it up in the meantime. So I took a slightly circuitous route back homeward, and at the last I ran across a pile marked "Free Stuff" -- yay! -- and picked up these two things that may once have been part of a coherent piece of furniture, but will serve us well as shelves if we can figure out how to mount them without doing undue harm to the walls.

This is ridiculously fun, and it's very nice to get things for free without having to steal them -- hooray for a recycling culture here.

The other night I went on the Orange Tour, with Jack Florey and associates, who you can look up. This involved a lot of trying to move quietly, be constantly aware/observant, keep a sharp eye out for any possible hazards...things like that.

I found myself practicing a completely new way of moving. I'd try to be constantly aware of where all my body parts were, keep proprioception a foreground rather than background process. That was kind of hard. Every few minutes, I'd "send a pulse of awareness" from my head downward through all my extremities, and that would keep proprioception fronted briefly, but it'd fade fairly soon. (I wonder whether it's possible to do that continuously, or whether it's just a matter of remembering to send enough pulses that it's de facto continuous.)
And there was the trying to move quickly and quietly. I tried to make all my movements deliberate, to "hold myself like a dancer", to step silently and walk without my pants making that swish-swish noise, to move like a cat. And it sort of worked -- I know I was a hell of a lot quieter than the majority of the other frosh, and I saw some of the Jacks doing the same sorts of movements I was doing.

It felt wonderful -- very martial, very...hmm...'competent'? not quite. Very in control.

It's harder in daylight, partly because it looks funny and partly because the mindstate isn't quite right (or isn't made right for me, I have to make it right myself).

Hooray roof and tunnel hacking.

This little Java project for the cogsci data is coming along nicely.

It's really cool to write a program that actually does stuff, and has consequences in the real world, instead of a bunch of class exercises.

Of course, one could argue that a cogsci department is not really "the real world". And all my program does is pull text out of a file, rearrange it in complicated ways, and write that to a new file. Nothing fancy.

But still.

It is very important for me to earn money this summer, because I am about to become a starving student, and because MIT expects people on financial aid to earn so-and-so much during the summer and during the school year. Money is a good thing. It is good for continued existence.

I am volunteering as a research assistant for two postdocs in the cogsci department at Stanford. The work, so far, is appetizingly challenging, and the project is very interesting. Sadly, they don't have the funds to pay research assistants. I thought this was because I'm only just out of high school, until I found out that they couldn't pay saizai either.

Because of the above, I am also going to be back at the Barres Lab, which luckily has got the funds to pay temp workers. This work, too, should be interesting and appetizingly challenging. Yay for studying glia, and yay for doing mammalian cell culture, which I actually really missed doing. Oh hey, and, I get a pay rise from last year! This is all cool. Problem is, I'm going to have to devote most of my hours to the Barres Lab. If I didn't have two worthy projects going on, I'd be happy to devote all my time to either. But ah, practicalities. The real world dictates that cogsci take a back seat to Barres Lab. Meh. It's better this way than the other way around, because Barres Lab stuff has to be done in the lab, but I can do cogsci stuff at home, at night, on the weekend, at the library...

Right now, I'm working on plugging the lamentable gaps in my Java knowledge from AP Comp Sci. (Java is a lousy language for a fair theoretical course!) Because I didn't take Intro, I never learned the mechanics of things like I/O, graphics, dealing with files, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But for the cogsci research I'm processing a whole lot of transcripts from the CHILDES database. There's a tool called CLAN that comes with CHILDES, and I understand it is powerful and has many features of great utility to linguists. As luck would have it, it doesn't quiiiiiite have the feature we need. It can do the certain type of searching we need, but not the certain type of parsing/formatting of the search results. So I'm going to try to do that in Java, to avoid the copy-paste-fest of a lifetime. (I get to learn regular expressions!)

These apparently "demonstrate the power of manipulating the palette of a gif image on the fly." I think that's fair shiny, and worthy of whelk_of_doom's favorite adjectives: savage and righteous. I'd like to add "legitimate" to that list.



...weak. Looks less weak because USA, Canada and China are disproportionately big.
Create your own visited countries map.



...slightly less weak.
Create your own visited states map.


Also, some Google Hacks. This link came with the template for the visited states, and I thought they would be fun to play with (haven't actually tried any).

In other news, AP Physics C is the crucible of doom.