Projects, accomplishing things.

Just do it.

I would like to accomplish more. Like writing more blog posts. Which is why I'm writing this one.

I want to read more books.

I want to write more programs.

Projects that I can finish in a few days will probably be easiest. And on my own.

Current projects:
Read Guns, Germs, and Steal.
Learn to play How Can You Face Me on the banjo.
Write my Burning Man blog post.

What measly little things to accomplish! I hardly feel like I'm making progress on those. (Nevermind that I haven't accomplished any of the tasks on my TODO list in several weeks.) The point of these projects isn't so much to finish them (though obviously I would like to eventually), but to be making progress. And it's slow. Very slow.

But I want more!

Maybe I should collect and analyze some data just for fun? Like http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/10/futuristic-physicists/. Or make something fun and interactive, like http://web.mit.edu/joshuah/www/projects/caltrain/?

I'm competent, right? I can do things? Probably I just don't have enough grit.

Well, tonight I want to finish something. ...but finishing any of my current projects is unlikely. So I'll make a collage. And go!

(Hey, and I wrote a blog post :))

Chat chat chat

On the subject of productivity, chatting (instant messaging) is almost definitively a waste of time. I've been saying that one has to go for a few years now. Why is it so hard? I feel like I'm addicted! Maybe I'll start that experiment tomorrow. In fact, I will. Yes.

Questioning the Value of Music

Is music just quieting my thoughts? Is listening to music a waste of time? Does it detract more from my focus and attention than I like to think it does? What do I get out of listening to music?

I've been trying to encourage myself to blog more often, and even as I thought to myself that I should write this blog post, I thought, "Maybe I should put on some music first?" And therein lies the problem. I must spend a lot of time dealing with playing music. It doesn't sound like a lot of time every time I want to put music on to select a music player (Rhythmbox, Google Play, Grooveshark, Turntable, last.fm), decide what type of music I'm in the mood for, what will satisfy that mood (a whole album, a playlist I've already created, the (internet) radio (which one?)), then put it on and listen to. Maybe that only takes five minutes or so each time I put on music, but do that 3 or 4 times a day (morning, after lunch, when I get home)? And how about every time my playlist runs out or I get bored of the mood? Heaven forbid I'm turntabling with a friend. That could easily be almost an hour of my day!

Even aside from the overhead it takes to put the music on, certainly it must take some of my brain to listen to the music. Surely it detracts some of my focus from the task at hand. It does depend on the task. For example, I think music goes great with cleaning, but any music with lyrics seriously distracts me if I'm trying to read.

Even if I'm not trying to focus on something specific, maybe music is just quieting my thoughts. Maybe I'd be a much more productive thinker if I didn't listen to so much music. I love singing along and dancing, but what else could I be doing if there weren't always a song playing in the background? At this point I feel like I'm listening to music even when I'm not. It seems that I've always got a song stuck in my head. Sometimes the same song for many days, even weeks. And though it feels good to scratch that itch of listening to the song, it doesn't seem to cure the earworm. It seems like I must be wasting precious brain cycles and neural energy!

So what to do. Part of me yearns to examine exactly how music affects my productivity, but I can't really think of a systematic way to do that. What would I measure? I think I'll just take some time not listening to music. Especially at work. We'll see if I notice anything. Buh! I'll start next week...

Diva Cup

I first heard about Diva Cups more than two years, and was intrigued by the idea, but never acted on getting one for myself. Finally a few weeks ago I ordered one! ....which was exciting, but not that exciting, because I couldn't use it immediately since I wasn't on my period. UNTIL FRIDAY! It was SUPER EXCITING. I didn't even anticipate being as excited as I was. But oh was I.

Firstly, it's super awesome that I will basically never have to buy tampons again. It's great for the environment, and for my bank account! And it's also just convenient. No matter how big a box I think I buy it always seems like I'm out of tampons again. Not anymore!

Secondly, insertion is just...fun :P You fold it in half twice (it's rubbery and silly), and stick it in part of the way. Then you twist it around a full 360 degrees to ensure that it unfolds completely, and then you push it all the way in! I'm still getting used to how it's supposed to feel, but most of the time it's super easy and comfortable. It's a much more intimate placement experience than the push/slip-inside action of tampons.

Lastly, removal. Who knew menstrual blood could be so beautiful?! I feel like I've been wasting it all this time by allowing it to get soaked up by tampons and pads. There's something incredibly satisfying about seeing it all pooled in its little cup and being able to say, "I made that!" Watching it diffuse into the toilet water is also very beautiful and interesting.

Diva cups. Fuck yes.

Dream Experience and Recollection

I don't usually dream in the first person. Well, not always. I don't even find that I dream a situation sometimes. Sometimes my dreams are just a hodge podge of images, sounds, concepts, and emotions. And even when I have a more experiential dream (that is, a dream where I am experiencing a scene taking place, or participating in that scene), there are many aspects of that scene that I do not believe that I fully experienced while dreaming.

But I love retelling my dreams. Even though I suspect that half of the narrative I tell is made up to connect the dots of the random elements I observed/felt in my non-waking experience. Connecting those dots is half the fun. It makes me realize how fallible my memory is. That I feel like I'm remembering the dream. But probably I'm just inventing it as I go along. Or maybe not.

Writing as Thought Crystallization

Grr, I'm falling again into old patterns of not writing things that I desperately want to write because the task of doing them justice is too daunting! My tactic right now is just to get things out. Get practice writing. Once the writing gets easier, maybe I'll start adding an editing phase. For now I'm still just trying to get things out. So here are a few thoughts on writing, language, and thinking.

In high school there was a point when i believed that anything could be "talked out." A few years ago I started witnessing what I considered a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of sorts, in the way that you often cannot talk about your feelings about something without changing how you feel about that thing. This gets even more complicated when two people are talking about their feelings about each other and each other's feelings.

I also used to believe that thinking and ideas were very separate from language. Well, obviously not entirely separate, but separate in that they could exist independently. That is, I could have a thought or belief that I had yet to put into words. Now, I still believe this, and there are obviously different types of thoughts. For example, I can think about the color blue. Or when you're searching for the right adjective to describe that exact quality in a person (I just had some fun playing the adjective game with R). Basically I was rejecting both the language of thought hypothesis and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

But I think I may have been taking it too far and believed that I had ideas or thoughts that were....not quite there. I am starting to recognize more how much putting my thoughts into words helps me crystallize my ideas and concepts. In analytical writing even more so than in verbal language.

Trying to write this post is so funny because I feel like I'm encountering now exactly the phenomenon that makes me want to write it! And that phenomenon is.....that I feel like I have an idea, a concept. Thoughts. It feels like they are concrete. Yet when I go to put them into words, I find not just that I have trouble articulating my idea, but that my idea really was not as concrete as I thought it was to begin with! But through writing I am able to distill my thoughts into clearer, more organized ideas, which I am then able to communicate.

Hence, my newly found enthusiasm for writing.

Sleeping problems

I had a very interesting and terrifying time falling asleep the other night, when we got back from Burning Man.

I would drift into a half-sleep state, which sort of felt like the swaying, pulsing of minimal oxygen deprivation. I would become aware that I was in this state, and that I was paralyzed. Sleep paralysis, I guess. I would try to scream, which would eventually wake me up fully, breathing hard, heart racing. The half-sleep state was scary; I did not want to be in it. I became afraid to fall asleep for fear that I would enter that state again. My paranoia extended to a (pretty irrational) fear of locked-in syndrome.

Eventually I willed myself to calm down by meditating, and then fell asleep.

It was a bit scary, but reassuring that I could calm myself down so easily.

Dome cover test run

Woops forgot to actually post this. The dome cover worked great at Burning Man too!

My friend and I went to the park to test out the dome cover. Since my last post I sewed all the quadrants together, and I also attached another 2ft wide skirt to the bottom.

Anticipation Horizon

I like making plans. As early as December I began planning my summer for after I finished my master's thesis and before I started work in September. I was very excited about all of my plans. My summer was going to go like this:

1. Finish my thesis
2. Relax in Cambridge for a month
3. Spend a week in LA
4. Go to Hawaii for a friend's sister's wedding
5. Spend a week in Seattle
6. Spend another few days in LA
7. Find an apartment in San Francisco while staying with my roommate's parents
8. Go to Burning Man
9. Move in
10. Start work

And that's basically what happened! I got to spend an extra few days in LA before Burning Man after finding our wonderful apartment, and I'm here again for a week because our lease doesn't start until the 15th.

It is intensely satisfying to me when my plans work out basically exactly as I plan. I get excited making the plans, sharing and anticipating the plans, and reveling in their execution when the time comes. It makes me feel in control.

So what was I going to say about "anticipation horizon?" Mostly just that it's a phrase that I like. It means to me the point in time beyond which I do not have strong emotions/predictions/feelings about what will happen. I may know approximately what is going to occur, but it does not actively occupy my thoughts, so I have few thoughts or feelings about it. For example, before Burning Man I couldn't think much about starting work. Now is the time!

Burning Man Outfits

I have no shame.

Floral culottes with a shirt made of a scarf.

 Fleitsuit, showing my true colors.

Pants that friends got me from Israel (probably from India).

 Furry vest, lace skort, and leather sandals.

 Better of the skort.

 My mom's old leg warmers and knit tube top.

 Leopard print dress with purple bra.

 Pink lace vest, green check bandeau. I have the vest in turquoise too.

 Green pants, peace vest, rainbow light up shoes!!!!

Rainbow lightning shirt my mom made, skirt my mom made, striped knee highs, neon Sketchers.

I got tired of taking photos, but some of the other things I'm excited to wear are....actually I'm too lazy to even list them. Guess it'll be a surprise!

Music Habits

I used to listen to CDs. Well, actually first it was Alanis Morissette and Celine Dion cassettes. But then it was Dixie Chicks, Norah Jones, Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, Play, Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and assorted mix CDs.

The end of my sophomore year of high school, 2005, I got my first iPod. After a few days straight of ripping all of the CDs I could find, it was iTunes, entire library on shuffle. For about 5 years. At some point I switched to Rhythmbox and would download my music instead of buying CDs.

In 2010, I joined last.fm. I discovered scrobbling. POINTS! I was also super curious about my listening habits. I was already watching playcounts in Rhythmbox, but this was way better. I started not wanting to listen to music that couldn't be scrobbled.

Around the same time, I became more interested in discovering new music. I was already hearing lots of new music from friends and other people I was living around. I started listening to Pandora. And last.fm radio. I had a good bout of "Your Mix Radio," for some full-library-shuffle nostalgia.

With all this new music, I wanted an easy way to listen to whatever I wanted, whenever (doesn't everybody?). Enter: Grooveshark. And recently(ish), they came out with their own version of internet radio. Which is just the best thing ever. Well, the best internet radio that I've encountered. In terms of recommending songs, learning playlists/stations, etc.

The best way that I've found to discover music that I like is turntable.fm, which I've already talked about a bit. My three favorite rooms are DJ Woo, ACTH, and Boomswing Cabaret. I also really enjoy sharing music with my friends in my own personal room (linked above).

Finally, there's thisismyjam.com, recommended by my cousin Nate. Would be kinda cool if it caught on. And sometimes I definitely have a "jam" for about 3-4 days. And occasionally I catch a good one from the few friends who do use it.

Scuba Diving in Kauai

On Saturday morning I took a dive with Fathom Five Ocean Quest in Kauai. I arrived at the dock with a woman I'd met the night before, Jody, who suggested the dive. Our dive master Charles was incredibly helpful and friendly, along with the captain Trout, and two other helpful crew members, who had come along just for fun because the dive was under-booked.

The first dive was pretty uneventful. On the way we did see a few dolphins swimming in our wake which I always find exciting. At the site, we went down about 60ft and stayed down for about 30 minutes. We saw mostly fish and a few eels and large urchins. I also saw a weird looking purple skirt-like thing, maybe a nudibranch? But I forgot to ask the dive master. We saw this dude, who is supposedly pretty rare, but I didn't think he was that exciting. At the end, I also saw a very large parrot fish poopin' some sand.

Our surface interval was very pleasant. The wind and waves were supposedly unseasonably calm so we got to ride closer to the shore and look at the pretty beaches. as we were approaching the second dive site I saw what looked like the back of a brown dolphin. I asked one of the crew who said it was probably a sea turtle. Lo and behold, it was indeed. I saw another three more as we were approaching the site, one of which was completely submerged 3 or 4ft, almost directly off the side of the boat.

This dive site was called Sheraton Caverns aka, the Turtle Airport, as the crew told us. As we were descending, I caught site of another sea turtle swimming about 50ft away. The topography of the site was pretty neat. It was made up of several partial lava tubes. It was basically like a canyon with 15ft walls and anywhere from 5-10ft wide. The top of the canyon walls were at about 30ft depth. There were lots of overhangs and even some arches. Here's a pic (that I didn't take) of one of the arches. The turtles liked to hang out and sleep under the overhangs and in little pockets along the canyon walls. We passed several as we went through the canyon.

At one point, I saw something that looked interesting, but the dive master showed me that it was just the old shell of a lobster. But as we were all focused on that, another of the crew members turned to me and her eyes got wide and she pointed over my shoulder. Less than two feet away was a sea turtle, right above my right shoulder! It was between 2 and 3ft long. As if this wasn't exciting enough, I looked ahead to the next arch in the canyon, toward which the dive master was already swimming, and there were two large (maybe 5-6ft) sea turtles looking as though they had been planning to go through on the other side. We all came under the arch to what turned out to be a cul de sac, where the turtles were all swimming around. There were another 3 or 4 turtles hanging out under ledges in the cul de sac that came out for a bit too. There were a few magical moments where it felt like the turtles and divers were all swirling together in this small (maybe 15ft wide?) space.

Best of all: the dive mast caught it on his underwater camera! I'm still waiting to hear from him, but hopefully I'll have the video to post soon!

Geodesic dome cover

I've spent the last week sewing a geodesic dome cover with my mom. It's been so fun and satisfying.  This is the progress I've made so far:

It's 13 triangular-ish "petals" that are 15' long and 5' wide at the base. Their sides are curved, each one is approximately 1/12 of a 60'-circumference semisphere. We added a 13th petal just so we have some wiggle room (better too big than too small). Even so, we may need to add a skirt, because it turns out the dome we're trying to cover isn't a perfect semisphere, but a little bit more, so it's actually 10'7" tall, even though it's a 18' diameter dome.

My mom and I bought the fabric in downtown LA at the Michael Levine Loft. We bought 70 yards for $51. We bought all woven fabrics, no stretch, very supple, some sheer. There were 8 pieces that were more than 5 yards long, 4 that were between 3 and 5, and half a dozen or so more that were less than 3. We sewed together some of the shorter pieces to make them longer than 5 yards, using this tape stuff to cover the rough seams and make them stronger. Then we cut out the 13 fifteen foot petals.

Right now we have sewn 4 panels with 3 petals each, leaving the 13th petal separate. The petals are sewn together using French seams because they're stronger (two seams) and prettier (no raw edges).

The next step is to add the thirty 4' straps for tying the cover onto the dome. These will be placed on the inner seams of the petals in 5 rows, the top two having 2 and 4, and the bottom 3 having 8 each.

We've also cut out some covers for the 30 vertices of the dome to make sure the cover doesn't snag on the bolts.

After we sew on the straps and sew together the panels, we'll leave one seam unsewn to act as a doorway, which we'll open and close with twine and some eyelets (...this is harder to describe than I imagined and I can't find a good image).

Basically, it's going to be (and sort of already is) friggin' rad. Hella wicked awesome.

turntable.fm party

I have an idea. And I'm going to make it happen. A turntable.fm party. Sort of like a DDP...well, more inspired by.

Basically, the next party I throw is going to be DJed by turntable.fm. I'll create a private room on turntable for the party, and have it hooked up to the speakers at the party. Then whoever's at the party, can DJ in the room and select songs they want to hear....well, just like you would in a regular tt.fm room...but we're all actually in the same room. :D This does presume that at least half a dozen or so people at the party will have the tt.fm app, but I think I can make it work.

Points

Zomg I love points. There are some points I keep track of:

turntable.fm: 511 DJ points (just 89 more for new avatar option!)
last.fm: 15,820 plays
first dates: 78
people met from the internet: 57

while I'm scoring, I'll also include some high scores:
bubble spinner: 32k (or so)
entanglement: 620
bouldered: V5
lead clean (outside!): 5.10b

...and probably some I'm forgetting, and some that I'm neglecting to mention (Like my weight, which is like inverse points anyway).

Anyway, one score that I'm itching to increase: my klout. But I won't do it! I refuse! I want to say that it represents everything I hate about Facebook and the direction that social media is taking our society and culture...That's actually probably false. It's probably mostly irrelevant. I guess the point for me is that I'd rather be increasing my influence IRL than exerting energy to inflate my Twitter/Facebook/G+ klout. But oh is it tempting!

Writing

I would really like to start writing. I think writing is a good exercise in and of itself, and also I feel like I have ideas that I'd like to remember...and maybe share. I still haven't decided how public I want to make this...but something tells me when I write a post I'm proud about, I'll tweet it, and that may be that. Or not, my klout ain't so strong, methinks. But I still want it to be public enough for those who are interested.

I've tried before to keep up writing regularly, but it never sticks. Usually the issue is that there's too much of a barrier for writing a post/entry/what have you. So this time, I'm making it easy. Short posts, no editing, not too far from stream of consciousness. I'll be shooting for 200 words or so, ideally at least three posts a week, if not every day. And today I have a feeling I'm going to post a few, just to get some momentum going. The posts will probably start out pretty rough, and maybe eventually I'll hit a groove, and maybe even move to slightly longer posts.

So, here goes!