Months ago, I went zero-caffeine for my beverages -- not even decaf coffee or hot cocoa.
My current winter beverage is Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice with honey and WestSoy Vanilla Rice Beverage.
Now to experiment with a blogging convention of referencing related earlier blog entries by quoting myself, rather than simply giving a handful of undescribed "See also" links. It's like a chronology of an epic struggle!
Some general suggestions that apply to many people: quit coffee (really!), create good work situations, try to get a solid sleep every night, regular exercise, healthy diet, the usual.
The best wintertime beverage now seems to be rice milk (Rice Dream Vanilla Enriched, or VitaSoy Vanilla Rice Beverage) nuked til it boils, with cocoa powder. The spice shop adjoining Christina's Homemade Ice Cream in Inman Square is one place to get good cocoa. The Bensdorp seems good, and I have to try the more expensive stuff.
Provisionally cutting sugar from my coffee. Down to decaf with rice/soy milk.
I've quit caffeinated coffee again. It's just too unhealthy.
Hurriedly caffeinating before a Saturday appointment, spilled the first coffee of winter into my new IBM keyboard.
I found a new wintertime beverage: small glass of V8 vegetable juice, nuked til it's warm. Please be advised that www.v8juice.com is the site for V8; www.v8.com appears to be a pornographic site that involves vegetables only peripherally.
Not a recovery my body could've pulled off so well when I had poison coffee pumping through my veins.
On the beverage front, I've taught myself to like herbal fruit and mint teas, and am currently working on reducing the amount of honey I was using to mask the taste of tea water.
Another weblog entry on kicking the coffee addiction. Two weeks after quitting, I'm happy to report that I have no regrets. [...] How did my "nightmarish descent into sex and drugs" begin? [...]
After sustaining a rate of five cups of coffee a day, abruptly decided to quit, cold-turkey, for awhile. Four coffee-free days later, I'm not really missing it.
Regarding V8-like vegetable juice, essential is finding one with low sodium.
I don't play computer games much. The only ones even installed on
my laptop in recent months come from the Debian sgt-puzzles
package, which is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection.
Most recently, I've been playing Net with wrapping, although it's gotten to the point of being mechanical, which means I'll soon have to find another one. Others I've liked til I got good at them include Bridges (with various numbers of max. bridges), Dominosa, Inertia, Loopy, Net (without wrapping), Rectangles, and Slant. I also occasionally play Light Up, Map, Netslide, and Same Game. Untangle seemed too easy from the start, and Solo (Sudoku) was just too trendy.
I've reminded myself many times that coding solvers for these is not worthwhile, when there's so many more useful things on my coding to-do list.
The now monthlong invasion carried out by more than 200,000 college students who bombarded this quiet, historic city, has forced native Bostonians to relinquish their rights as citizens and settle into a new life under occupation.
—"Native Bostonians Unable To Defend Land From Invading College Students," The Onion, 2006-09-29
Earlier this summer, while walking across the Longfellow Bridge towards Boston, a pair of birds swooped dramatically over the Charles River, with a small bird appearing to first ride on the back of a larger bird and then launch off to fly on its own. My naive guesses are that they were hawks or brown eagles, and that a parent was teaching its child to fly. I know almost nothing avianian; anyone know better?
I was reminded of this just today...
During a job search a while ago, a couple recruiters surprised me by asking what my GPAs from grad school were.
The first time it happened, I said something like, "In most CS grad programs, classes and grades aren't that important, and what people generally look at is your research and who your advisor is."
"I understand, but [prominent Internet company] wants to know whether you're smart."
(Gee.) "For what it's worth, I have a perfect GPA from MIT, and I think I had the same from Brown, but I'll have to double-check on Brown." [*]
"Oh, good!"
Not a big deal, although the importance the company allegedly put on GPAs from someone with a solid industry track record and original research experience in top grad programs-- might've contributed in a small part to me deciding I wasn't interested in that particular company.
Related, I think, is when job interviewers administer quizes, puzzles, and coding problems to highly experienced candidates with verifiable track records. Fortunately, at the level I'm at now, when I do get these, they're usually at least somewhat interesting, and come from people who know their own stuff. Still, I do made-up puzzles and write code for fun; I don't relish such things in an interview context.
The first coding problem in an interview I recall was ages ago, in a period of youthful arrogance, after I'd worked my way up to senior engineer at a respected company. The interviewer asked me to write down on a piece of paper the C code for a particular graph algorithm. It was a bit of trivia, and I happened to remember seeing it years earlier in Pascal or Modula-2, so I jotted down an implementation. He said "No one's ever done it that fast before!" Whereupon I, emboldened, proceeded to say that, when I interview people, I look at their resume for things they've worked on, get them talking about it, ask questions that suggests, and see how they respond. Despite my obnoxiousness, I got the job.
I should also mention a bad experience with coding problems in interview contexts. Microsoft was doing on-campus interviews, and I overheard students in class disclosing to other students what coding problems the interviewer had just given them. I thought, "those are trivial, and I'll give MS Research a chance to prove they're actually not evil, if they fly me out to the PNW so I can visit a friend there." So I wandered over to the interview, he gave me one of the problems the students had mentioned, I started jotting down a solution, and-- I suddenly found that I wanted to focus on this problem with my text editor, in my office, and with the interviewer not running a clock. (The interview went downhill from there, with the Microsoft guy, who I believe was a project leader for Internet Explorer, becoming overly interested in one of the smallest projects on my resume, to the exclusion of my real work. A lame variation on my little idea became an exciting new feature in the next release of IE.)
Despite the risks of puzzles and trivia coding problems in interview contexts, here's some reasons that you, as an interviewee, should cooperate:
There actually are quite a lot of people who can neither code nor solve problems. Prove you can.
You might argue that your industry track record and your open source code should be strong hints that you can code and solve problems, but this is some interviewers' standard method for "seeing how you think." There's even some merit to that method. (Although I still think that a generally superior method is asking questions that build on real-world work of the interviewee or interviewer.)
Sometimes, on the surface it's a dumb CS 101 (or first chapter of Teach Yourself Java) question, but they're hoping you'll give a more nuanced and insightful answer than the obvious.
Sometimes, the dumb trivia question is secretly an attitude test. If you went to MIT, you have a good chance of failing this test.
It's their party. If you're still traumatized a week later, you can get them back by peeing on their offer letter. Don't FedEx the result -- we are, after all, professionals.
[*] Turned out I got one B at Brown. In my defense, it was for an early-morning grad class that revolved around reviewing draft iterations of a noted professor's computational theory paper. I was working marathon hours as a senior software engineer at the time, and had not yet discovered caffeinated beverages. At one point, while reading the latest revisions to the professor's paper in class, I had to discreetly jab a pin into my finger to stay awake. The B suggests perhaps I wasn't discreet enough.
Krylon Fusion for Plastic might be just the thing for painting custom computer and camera gear.
Also potentially useful are "rubberizing" products like Grip Dip Rubberize-It Aerosol Spray and Performix Plasti Dip.
I've not yet tried any of these.
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. [...] The intelligence estimate [...] represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
—Mark Mazzetti, "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat," New York Times, 2006-09-24
I seem to recall quite a few people before the Iraq invasion, including US intel analysts, predicting this completely intuitive and obvious effect would occur.
This afternoon I shot the last two hours of the outdoor Boston Blues Festival. Performing were Finis Tasby, Enrico Crivellaro, Brian Templeton, and others I've not yet identified, including a few people called onstage.
I took approx. 650 shots, which'll take a while to cull and then pick a few for the blog. I have a bunch taken at (35mm equivalent) 320mm, from front row.
In the meantime, I'd like to share one of my favorite shots, which came from only a handful of crowd shots: little girl dancing with father (or with other older presumed relative; they have the same hair). I wish I'd thought to give him my card, so I could send the family a copy.
Yes, I noticed the chair in the frame, but it came with the serendipitous smile, and who am I to complain.
It was a fun event, but they appeared to be at only about 1/3 capacity for the lawn venue. I recommend attending next year.
Jeremy McCreary, "Using a polarizer effectively without TTL control."
The government audit is unsparing in its view that the [Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year] Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use. [...] In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, [according to an internal report]. "They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags," the program director [Chris Doherty] wrote, the report says.
—"Audit Finds Education Department Missteps," AP via New York Times, 2006-09-22
For other scandals in educational curricula, see 2006-07-14.
Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility studies on planting spies in news bureaus of two major publications as part of an investigation of leaks from its board, an individual briefed on the company's review of the operation said yesterday.
—Damon Darlin and Kurt Eichenwald, "H.P. Is Said to Study Infiltrating Newsrooms," New York Times, 2006-09-20
Although not generally true in practice, we're supposed to at least pretend that news outlets are sacred.
I wonder whether the scandal is a fluke, HP has a couple rogues, or there are systemic cultural issues at some level in HP that led to this. In any case, sounds like HP needs the ghosts of Bill and Dave to return and administer some ass-whoopin's.
See also 2006-09-08.
I've updated my Privoxy actions file. Currently approx. 7500 rules. The intent and methods have evolved a bit over the last year or so. I really need to do a clean rewrite of the documentation, but the gist'll remain essentially the same (i.e., "Truth, Justice, American Way, Good Guy Gets the Girl").
Remember to vote. (Chances are, if you're reading this blog, that I'd approve of how you vote, so it's in my interests that you do so!)
Don't know where to vote? wheredoivotema.com
A friend has umpteen boxed sets of Gilmore Girls DVDs, but misplaced one of the discs from one of the boxes. I decided this constituted a legitimate use of backup DVDs, so she Netflixed the missing disc, and I had to figure out how to clone it on one of my Linux boxes. (This is what happens when you leave your ex-girlfriend a queue on your Netflix account.)
I made two expensive dual-layer DVD+R coasters before I found the burn command that would make a playable DVD. If you already have coasters, you might want to know the effective procedure for my third attempt...
Ensure /tmp has at least 8 GB of free space.
Insert original disc in DVD+/-RW DL burner.
Extract a DVD filesystem image into /tmp, with the
commands:
mkdir /tmp/gg dvdbackup -M -i /dev/dvdrw -o /tmp/gg eject
Remove original disc from burner, and insert DVD+R DL blank.
Burn the DVD filesystem image from /tmp, with:
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -v -dvd-video /tmp/gg/GILMORE_GIRLS_S2_D3/ eject rm -rf /tmp/gg
Remove newly burned blank, label it, and test.
This was a one-off job, and there's at least one obvious opportunity
for improvement. I don't claim that this is the best way to do things, but it
was certainly better for my needs than what was in the Debian
README.
Instead of extracting the DVD filesystem and having
growisofs make a new image and burn it, I could've ripped the raw
image from the DVD and burned that verbatim. I wanted to try the former
approach first, not least of all because using the same proven method in the
future would let me make changes to the DVD content before burning.
The 9/11 attacks five years ago were terrible in many ways. Of course I feel badly for those most directly affected on that day. Separately, I looked back at some relevant blog entries...
Work stalled last Tuesday, even though I tried to resist my natural inclination to do armchair analysis of the media and social situation. Besides the obvious tragedy to those immediately affected by the WTC attack, the event is also tragic (yet entirely predictable) in that people are exploiting the event to further existing agendas -- good or bad. Our President's image is bolstered as we embrace his position as national pride figurehead, and public criticism will largely be limited to the "we urge him to show restraint" class. We can expect to see rapid legislative attacks on civil liberties, and some grave attacks will be successful. Some of the cries of "bomb [particular country or region] back to the stone age" are no doubt from racists who appreciate the newfound social acceptability of their positions. The event might also have modified public perception past a threshold that enables military actions that were already deemed necessary. The event might also prove another milestone in the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the US. As an American, I'm embarrassed by some of our collective actions, but the US remains my home, and I can only hope that those in power will not abuse their power too much in wake of this event.
Was near a common area TV on [the MIT] campus when G.W. Bush's war speech aired tonight. Roughly speaking, every third sentence out of his mouth seemed disingenuous, if not an outright lie. At the end, the majority of students burst into applause, with only one person booing.
So, my country attacked Iraq, under the direction of our current President. Any honest commentary seems trite, or likely to get me in trouble. I can only hope that the war ends quickly, with minimal casualties on both sides, and that Iraqis will soon have a better life. (Certainly there will be enormous political pressure to "rebuild" Iraq, since it is a showcase of the Bush Doctrine.) I also hope that history will be free enough that the Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush regimes can be judged harshly.
The people with whom I've talked tonight are responding to the attack against Iraq with excitement and frivolity, like a Super Bowl game, rather than with the gravity and horror that attended, say, the terrorist attack against the WTC on 9/11. Even after this disturbing observation is mentioned to them.
I continue to hope for a good resolution to the situation, for America and for Iraqis. We'll need a leadership of character and brilliance.
I was expecting a fluffy travel piece.
Critics of public diplomacy have been quick to disparage the American belief that international tensions can be eased by dispatching an official to proclaim that deep down we are all united by our love for, say, children -- a [Karen] Hughes staple -- when the animus, in fact, arises from real policy differences with the U.S. government. The pursuit of private diplomacy rests on the opposite innocent illusion: just tone down crass Americans' noisy cultural differences from others, and political and economic harmony can follow. But what if Americans have no monopoly on brashness and don't really rate any longer as the overweening cultural trendsetters our demonizers, and we, reflexively assume?
—Ann Hulbert, "The I'm-Not-Ugly American," New York Times Magazine, 2006-09-03
The White House said that Mr. Rove would consider an interview for this article if it were conducted off the record, with the provision that quotations could be put on the record with White House approval, a condition it said was set for other interviews with Mr. Rove. The New York Times declined.
—Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg, "Rove's Word Is No Longer G.O.P. Gospel," New York Times, 2006-09-03
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