Professionally? Keep working remotely, and try to master a Functional Programming language, I think. I'd really like an FP job, and they're not common. I figure if I spend the next couple years mastering one, if I see an opening, I can apply and get it.
My advisor is pushing me to get a doctorate. I'd like one, but I'm worried about overqualification. Lot of jobs list "Master's preferred;" not a lot list "PhD." I'm afraid they'll see it and think "eh, we don't want to pay for that." In a few years, I might go for a Graduate Certificate in Software Engineering from Texas Tech or something.
Non-professionally, I need to get involved in stuff. I don't know anyone here, all my friends are in Texas, heh. My life the last two years has been school and work. Makerspace, martial arts, ACM, something.
You can always still write functionally within most languages. More and more languages are adopting things like lambdas / closures / map / filter / reduce in some form or another. My advice on the PhD is take your time in industry to work on if it's worth it to you. It's definitely useful for computing-heavy research, but for the vast majority of jobs it's overkill.
- Texas Tech
- Lubbock
Noooo...
Oh, and P.S. 'grats on the Master's!
It wasn't so much the water or the bland color palette, for me. The literal smell of shit that envelopes the place when the wind blows in juuuuuust the right direction is a deal breaker. Such are the penalties of a town rooted in the livestock industry. I put up there for one single night before I knew that I couldn't cope with Lubbock livin'.
Online education scares me. The lack of a personal, human connection with your professor just doesn't cement relationships that last long enough to be beneficial. Hell, I only formed a true relationship of mutual respect with one of my upper-level undergraduate coursework professors. None of this is applicable if you're looking to just get certified/qualified/etc. for the next career tier, and I'm not familiar enough with the software industry to know what you want to shoot for, especially with your focus in functional languages.
Regardless, much respect, software engineering is a noble pursuit. I can't imagine writing the inner workings of a 3D-CAD software kernel or whatever. Lately, my pathetic attempts to use IDL for relatively simple data processing have humbled me. To functional programming languages I say... "I'm busy that day, sorry".
- strong accents
When I was a freshman, I attended a semester's worth of Calculus 2 (typically series/summation) lectures wherein my professor never ONCE made eye contact with a single member of the students in attendance. His english was also only 80% interpretable, so you were left writing down what you thought were polysyllabic, technical words and then "internet searching" them later, with mixed results. Smartphones were not a thing, and Google had not rose to total dominance yet ('06). Edit: This experience is one unfortunate product of the "tenure track" university model.
Long story short, I ended up paying $20 to a third-party tutoring organization with "classrooms" in a strip center mall, where a presumably coked-up "tutor" explained to us exactly what each professor of the attendees would have on their exams, based upon previous known exam samples. One tutor was named "Arf" (no, seriously), and I wrote a poem about him, something titled like "I'm an onomatopoeia!", written from the perspective of a dog, I think. Everything about this paragraph is kind of fucked up, in retrospect.
So that's how I got B's in my intro classes. Attending lectures held at/by the actual university were often useless, and you could just cram everything in during one or two nights via a third party. Major downside: you load much of this knowledge into the human analog of RAM, and then the files are mostly deleted after the exam. Only upside was course credit, which, if it wasn't obvious by now, can sometimes mean practically nothing. Still, with higher education (graduate degrees and beyond), this isn't the case, and you're thinking at a high enough level to stimulate neurogenesis or whatever. Instilling a thirst for knowledge or some other purpose can motivate the body to make it through some fucked up shit.
Cheers. :)
I went to the first couple of weeks of my first intro to calculus class, then just stayed home and read the book except on exam days for the rest of that semester and the other 3 classes in the sequence. The guy who taught them was great, but there were a lot of majors that required those classes, including all those offered by the business and finance schools, and so he had to cover the material very, very slowly and I was bored to tears. I found out when I had him for complex analysis years later that he gave graded homework and I probably should have failed his classes, but he had given me credit for it in my absence because he understood. Best professor ever.
That is certainly an optimized story of understanding.
It's almost like taking a class from yourself; You know you haven't been to all the lectures, but your mastery of the exams was sufficient enough to elicit an "A". Then confirmed in a more engaging class years later.
I've only had a few classes that bored me to tears, and the majority of the rest put me in my place proper.
This fall, it's grad school for me, and I cannot WAIT to feel belittled on a regular basis once again.
I'm doing an online CS masters' program. I was in a traditional math PhD program for a few years. I miss hanging with fellow grad students, just because there aren't many opportunities to talk to people who care about the kinds of things you go to graduate school because you care about outside of a university, but I interact with my professors about as much as I did when I was going to physical classes. I don't think it would work as well as it does for anything but computer science, because a good chunk of what you learn in computing you learn from the machine itself -- you don't need nearly as much human feedback for a program as you do for a proof or a paper, but it works pretty well for computer science. About the only complaint I have is that online proctoring services are horrible.
I look forward to checking out the link, though it will certainly be beyond my technical comprehension.
Congrats on your achievements though, that's something! Well done
Encounter with the Universe: Medical Report
steve is right. We've been out here in the pouring rain waiting. I came right over after my visit to a walk-in clinic. All we have to do in Canada is show our gold-plated Health Card.
Weirdly, there was no one lined up in the waiting room. I told the doctor that I couldn't stop coughing. She gave me a face mask. She checked all my vitals and said my chest sounded clear, but I was suffering from reactive airways.
That sounded like a low-budget airline: Fly Reactive Airways.
She said she could give me a cortisone inhaler which after several weeks may or may not help or I could do nothing and after several weeks it may or may not get better.
I'll have a hot water, rum, lemon, and honey. Don't worry, I'll just sit here in the corner in my face mask.
THIS DAY HAS BEEN FUCKING STELLAR.
Even though it started like this:
And ended with:
- Basically you're a piece of fucking shit, fuck you and have a nice life
But we'll get to that! Awesome stuff first.
The Weather is nice! I get to listen to 90's music and wear shorts and shit. It's awesome.
Peanut Butter Cookies! Fucking delicious. My coworker hooked me up with some of those AND a Philly cheese-steak, which I've been craving like God-knows-how.
And the best one:
INTERNSHIP OFFER! It straight up fell into my lap. Shit's just gotta be finalized first, but my professor's hooking me up with the National Center for Women and Minorities in Technology. These people work with Google and Intel and Microsoft and woah nelly. Which is like 100% up my alley! Get hyped!
I started my Let's Play Channel back up! I got a bomb-ass mic and an external hard-drive that let me do actually relatively mid-to-high quality videos! I won't link the channel 'cause no one here would be interested, but it's nice to have a creative outlet that's pretty easy to dive into!
I have like NO homework, holy shit what!?
10/10 BEST DAY BEST DAY.
Anyways, back to the one (almost) sour note:
That's from my coworker. She's a freshman so I didn't take it very seriously. Really it's funny more than anything else. What I'm worried about is one of two scenarios:
1. She looks back on this and clenches her butt-cheeks so hard from the hindsight-cringe that it opens a hole into a parallel universe.
2. She looks back on this and still thinks she's in the right.
Both are scary in their own ways. Regardless: Boulder is SERIOUS BUSINESS, don't fuck around, ya'll.
All I would need is the Passion Pit album to leak today and I would probably go into a hype-induced coma.
Edit: And my stuff from _refugee_ shipped! Maximum hype reached.
Congrats on the internship, that's awesome news! Make the most of any and all networking opportunities!
As for your coworker, she may end up having a completely different experience than you have. Maybe you should hope that she looks back and still feels good about where she lives. Maybe this will mean things have improved there? I have no frame of reference because I live in Chapel Hill, NC which as everyone knows is the greatest place on earth.
But yeah, let her figure it out either way. She likely sees you as a negative presence and not a foreshadowing one.
Damn, now I really wanna eat a Philly Cheese Steak.
You get your drivers license yet?
Enjoy no homework!
Your moniker is modeled after the phrase "often been". Except, you're always Ben.
I finally realized this obvious fact a few days ago, and the pub's the only place I could catch you without defiling a Hubski post. Ermmm... am I wrong?
Happy birthday! Your phrase "better living through chemistry" is something that I enjoy debating in my own thought bubbles. Framing this argument in different scenarios yields variable results, and it's an excellent mental exercise.
Keep on keeping on, amigo.
Thanks! It was quite the day, and the parade of awesome continues.
- Your phrase "better living through chemistry" is something that I enjoy debating in my own thought bubbles. Framing this argument in different scenarios yields variable results, and it's an excellent mental exercise.
I'd love to hear the arguments, for and against.
Happy late birthday, Ben, I am sorry to have missed it.
"Better living through chemistry" wasn't one of the taglines/blurbs in the Veridian Dynamics ads from Better Off Ted by any chance, was it? I could see it being one. If you aren't familiar the Veridian Dynamics commercials were tongue in cheek riffs on megacorporation commercials/slogans.
"Veridian Dynamics: We Make Everything Better. Sometimes."
- I'd love to hear the arguments, for and against.
That's just the thing, it's totally dependent on situation. The heroin addict who shoots up and says "better living through chemistry" isn't making the same argument as someone about to go under anesthetics for life-saving surgery.
It's much more fun to play in the morally grey areas: 'roids, psychedelic drugs, the social appeal of a few drinks... those things spring to mind. Every now and then, you'll come across a newspiece that trailblazes new moral questions in the area of "chemically-assisted living". I wish I had a bigger mental RAM so that I could remember specific examples. Don't you? Well NOW YOU CAN!! FOR THE PRICE OF JUST $29.95 PER MONTH, WE GIVE YOU AN-..."
Macs are pretty intuitive and user-friendly so I think you'll manage. If not, most of the basic stuff is just a Google search away.
I don't know if it's still a thing with new iMacs, but you might need to manually enable right-clicking in your settings.
A couple of amazing Mac OSX apps I always recommend: Clear (todo list), OmniFocus, Pixelmator, Mailbox, Sublime for programming. If you work with MS Office files a lot, save yourself the trouble of exporting files and just get Office for Mac.
Get a harddrive and partition it with Windows so you can have the nice hardware and slick OS of a Mac and all the shit you can do on a PC and not a Mac.
App Recommendations:
f.lux, as wonton says.
Mailbox, if you have a relatively simple email situation and want to simple it up even more.
Bartender is AMAZING for keeping your menu bar from getting crazy.
Doubling wonton's question about what tasks you might want to optimize.
Spent most of the week studying for my finals. Monday, however, I spent the entire day in the garden, building a nice new wooden fence with my father. Always nice to get outside and do create something out of nothing, especially after a week mostly reading and studying.
It definitely is nice to be outside, I agree. I'm about to have a picnic dinner at [Duke Gardens]( https://gardens.duke.edu) with my family. I told my daughter we would watch the sun set together.
Is today Wednesday? Today is Wednesday.
I have been handing out books since Monday and it is fantastic! I have officially shipped out all Etsy orders. Next is Hubski orders. I got a few more orders than I expected but I am trying to send out a few each day and so everyone should be shipped their books by Friday. I will PM you as I go. I need your addresses, btw, so a few shout outs - thenewgreen and I'm afraid I can't recall off the top of my head who else - if you see this and I don't have your address and you ordered a book please get it to me.
Work is actually not going to be a shitting hellhole for the next two weeks which is nice. It in fact may not be a shitting hellhole for a couple of months. I really needed that to happen.
I'm trying to write a different sort of thing. lil got a sneak preview. I'm tired of the same old shit. I needed a change. To me it feels like a change.
I'm seeing a person and I'm cherishing it by not talking about it with you.
- I'm seeing a person and I'm cherishing it by not talking about it with you.
I PM'd you my address the day I paid you.
Been looking for an internship for a while not and applied a bunch. So far, nothing :( Also applied yet again to all sorts of school clubs and they want nothing to do with me either. Mostly because I was not so involved in school stuff before...
Exams and due dates for projects are coming fast and i'm stuck with a general sense of apathy right now. Maybe it's just the weather.
I have a couple projects lined up for the summer, I hope it works out. It's mostly money-making projects:
1. Make a bunch of monies on airBNB and save up (and maybe get a job on the side?)
2. Set up a company with 1k/month passive income by the end of summer
If i get that done, I can finish school next December and GTFO to travel for as long as I want. This whole looking for an internship thing really bummed me out and if there's a chance I can just be self-employed i gotta try and go for it now.
So far invested about 300$ in that business and expect to invest another 200 when we launch. I hope it works out, it's really nothing unrealistic.
I applaud you for taking the steps to be self-sufficient and setting up your own business. Regarding "clubs," I have always liked Woody Allens quote:
- I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member.
Thanks :) I just figured that if I can't get a job that I will enjoy and/or look good on my CV this summer, I might as well just make up that job myself. Worst case, i get a crazy valuable experience and lots of fun for only a couple hundred bucks. Best case, I make a bunch of money. I might still get a job as a waitress or something on the side if I've got some free time tho.
Waiting on the shipment from China and setting up the brand registry with Amazon in the meantime. Honestly, the Chinese product is not really want I want to sell but the best way to get rankings are sales and reviews and for that you need to give away a bunch in promotions. Giving away products worth 1$ is something I can afford so i'll start with that and go from there.
Anyone want some cheap wooden combs? :P
I sent you a postcard today pal. insomniasexx I sent you a big ole stack of stickers. forwardslash, I didn't send you any stickers because I only have your address at the ole blueberry farm.
ha ha - I guess my aggressive "have a nice day" text did it! Did you send it to Kanada or Flanada?
Anyway, I know what it's like to carry around unmailed postcards. BLOB_CASTLE it's on its way. Really. (well soon, it got a little wet and the ink ran).
Welcome back! I'm with elizabeth, there's no timeline on trip reports. I'd love to see and hear about it. I have a good friend that goes to Varanasi every year, it sounds wonderful. It's on a short list of places I plan to visit.
The final parts for my planned (entry-level) kickass desktop are arriving tomorrow! Should be able to put them together this weekend. Also, I finally got a new lens for my Canon -- the Chinese really do know how to reverse-engineer shit.
On the upswing, for anyone who remembers my freakout in IRC (doubtful) I finally landed an internship. Gonna be working remote with the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. So that'll be fun :)
Loving life and coercing other people into enjoying the ride along with me. Week's been good.
That's a great lens; a friend suggested it and found me a deal in 2012, $92 for the Canon lens with free shipping. I am no pro, nor a big spender, so I can't complain about the kit lens. But when he let me borrow his nifty fifty on a visit to Cars & Coffee, I got my best shot of the day.
There's a Canon sale going on at B&H now, with some lenses going for far less than a new car.
I'll post pictures once I actually build the thing :P
Intel Core i3-4160
EVGA Nvidia GTX 750 Ti 2gb Superclocked
G.SKILL Ares ram 2x4gb
Samsung 850 EVO 120gb
Seagate 1tb platter
ASRock B85M-ITX
all in a Cooler Master Elite 110 powered by a Corsair CS450M so I can take it on planes.
I was very bored today. I give you: Simple English! The spelling version of English designed to be.. more simple? It only works with the right accent/inflection whatever. Sample text copy-paste:
Sympel Yŋglyʃ ålfebät yz a wa üv spälyŋ Yŋglyʃ wrds yn a kensystänt wa. Mäni Yŋglyʃ wrds ar späld yn kenfîuzyŋ was, wyþ symelr kömbynaʃens üv lätrs îuzd fr väri dyfrent sounds. Kömbynaʃens süč ez "ough" yn Yŋglyʃ hev ovr syx prenünsiaʃens, fr ygzåmpel.
Yŋglyʃ spälyŋ:
"though, through, rough, cough, thought, bough"
Sympel Yŋglyʃ spälyŋ:
"ðo, þru, rüf, kohf, þaht, bou"
EDIT: Simple in a "one thing only has 1 pronunciation" way, not a "small number of letters" way. It's not good at that.
RE:Þ, because I like the look of it more. There is no advantage over IPA. It's just easier for me to read than IPA, and English once you get used to it. Hard to type though.
I love the Thorn. I think we need to bring it back into standard usage, personally.
Isn't that what the phonetics thing on every wikipeadia article for? English spelling really is the worst, as a not-really-native speaker words like "wednesday" and "business" always baffled me.
An easy way to spot tourists in London is how they pronounce "Leicester Square" ;)
Yeah, it's for the exact same purpose as IPA symbols. All I did was associate IPA symbols with letters already in the English alphabet and a few other ones thrown in. On the surface it's just a phonetic alphabet (for Ontario-accented English) that makes more personal sense than the IPA, but it's really only the product of a lot of time-wasting. Oh well.
Raised by Ontario parents.
EDIT: while I've got you here, would you want to get on IRC? I'm bored.
ha ha I was just on IRC (I was also looking for distraction)
Put out a call for 11:00 p.m. (??!!)
But don't say "You're bored". We're not on the planet to amuse you. (well, we are a little)
say "I have a problem and need some help" or say "I am working on a poem and want help" or say "I just read rob05c's thesis and wanna talk about it."
Just kidding of course. Will you be up later?
I'll be up all night, in a non-literal sort of way. I'll be up for another 5-7 hours.
The A/C went out at school today. This turned out to be a blessing and a curse-- it was ridiculously hot during half of my classes, but for the other half we went outside and just dicked around. I hit a mid-air Frisbee with a football! Anyway by the end of lunch everything was back on, and all rejoiced.
Speaking of not going to my classes, field trip tomorrow! We're going to Texas State's neurology dept., which should be really cool. Finally, a field trip I'm legitimately excited for!
On the personal side: I'm taking insomniasexx's advice and taking a break from the love interest. Going pretty well, so far; I have lots more time to focus on reading, and music production, which I've taken up since acquiring FL studio. If it was my choice, I probably would've bought Reaper, but this was a gift. On a totally unrelated note, my Amazon wish list is now entirely populated with synths and MIDI controllers :P
My life has been spent debugging.
iammyownrushmore: Been going through girl with curious hair, I like the stories in it!
fucking fuck on a fuck I hope college is better than being 17
Through the help of one really awesome new homie of mine, I've been thrust into a new group of friends in the grade above me and they're the nicest and most fun people to chill with. Unfortunately, I'm literally sick of weed at this point yet it remains a big part of the time we all spend together. I feel like I have to either have a joint or a cigarette in my mouth to hang with them. Oh my god my life is a storybook. On the bright side I've tried some amazing strains through the help of the dark web, which is an exciting process in itself.
I'm thinking about selling bottled angst to UrbanOutfitters for an easy profit on a homemade and renewable product. I'll put 'em in Mason jars, of course.
I'm gonna tell you something that I want you to truly take to heart and try as much as possible to comprehend at every level, despite its simplicity.
Literally almost everything in this world is better than being 17. Everything.
I spent my 17 y.o. year fucking four of my best friends constantly doing all the freaky shit I always wanted, going to concerts whenever I wanted, and getting a chance to spend two weeks in Playa del Carmen on a rich assholes dime. Meanwhile, I've spent the last two years of my life in abject poverty and debt and non-stop working my ass off. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that I would rather live the last two years over and over rather than be 17 again.
One of my good friends is moving west on Friday and we celebrated tonight. I'm looking forward to being two hours away from her and another friend as of July.
Yesterday I saw a person in a common area on campus sitting alone watching Parks and Rec. I was reading Blue Highways (thanks flagamuffin), and a thought crossed my mind. I had the sudden desire to ask her (complete stranger) of if, in this moment, she was happy. I've been thinking a lot lately about happiness and what it means to be happy and don't have a good answer. Maybe one day I will.
I didn't ask her if she was happy.
swedishbadgergirl WHERE ARE YOU I'M WORRIED.
If I have to get a wayfinder to keep track of your ass I swear I will!
Sorry! I am super bad at being consistent with internet use.
Today, someone tried to threaten me by threatening to tell people (I'm not sure who; I generally am not friends with people who are friends with this person) all about - gasp - the THINGS I DID IN COLLEGE.
Kids, have fun in school. Enjoy it to the utmost. After five years, you'll find that either: a) nothing was really that embarrassing or b) anything 'bad' that happened, you'll have taken, overcome, and fully own at this point in your life.
It helps a lot if you embrace honesty and are very open about past mistakes. That way it's hard for anyone to even disclose something SHOCKING! to anyone you care about - because you're already told them (assuming it either came up or you felt it was important). But to be honest, while I encourage you to do those things, it probably won't even be necessary.
Everyone has been in college or similar environments before and made varying-sized mistakes. People should be more likely to understand that, than judge you for yours.
Never let someone crooked try to scare you into knuckling under.
Don't be afraid to say what you think should be said, and is important. (However, any serious allegations should be backed up.) Stand up. Don't allow yourself to be antagonized, get in front of any potential shit-talking, let the haters hate hate hate hate (because damn, you ARE fabulous) and shake it off with fabulous people who love you.
The situation: one of my friends has kinda become a dick. A couple of us have confronted him about it, and he agrees that he's a dick. He also just doesn't care. Sometimes I'll forget and we'll be good friends like before, but then he'll say something like "Your music is shit" (referring to the stuff I'm producing) for no reason, which is, if not inaccurate, at least unnecessary. And then it sucks.
Advice?
Embrace the shit and make noise!
Alternately, ask demure how to get to Carnegie Hall.
<shill>Everybody, if you have nothing to do and you're desperately bored (or a shut-in), make a Wikipedia account and start editing. It's the best decision I've made so far in 2015. It's an easy way of making you feel like you're doing some good in the world. Try it today.</shill>
No really. It's good.
It would be better if we were using SQL. What we have is less efficient. Hubski data is stored in files, and much of the search functionality accesses only those that are currently loaded. (If you want to go deep, you have to filter by a user or a tag. i.e. https://hubski.com/query?id=tag:space%20mars)To make things a bit faster, text is processed upon submission/editing to remove dupes and to cut out conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, and that modified text is searched.
It's very interesting. There are a number of ways that we could make search faster and better, and improving our search.arc would be a fun project. If we didn't have a working plan to replace it, I would.
You might have noticed that the rewrite is taking a long time. Our initial approach was problematic. A complete frontend/backend rewrite was a lot to chew upon, and it was becoming an enormous energy sink with a finish line that wouldn't stay in one place. As a result, we decided to take a different approach. We are now getting hubski.arc to read/write to a relational database (PostgreSQL). That accomplished, step one is to put a proper search app in place that is well matched for it (Elasticsearch). The Hubski app will benefit as well, as some functionality will be able to take advantage of the new data structure. We are then building out an API for that database, and finally, we will replace hubski.arc, mostly likely with the node.js app that forwardslash has largely built. That's the general plan. It's one where we can see the finish lines, and all of us will feel incremental improvements as we cross them. Also, we should never have to roll out a less-functional Hubski at any point, which our original approach most certainly would have.
I thought today was Tuesday and missed a few of my appointments at work. On a brighter note...IT'S WEDNESDAY!!!