Hello, comrades - it's been some time! My first year of teaching at an actual school is officially over, having trained the summer teacher yesterday. Despite some helicopter parents and challenging kids, it was a really rewarding (if unbelievably exhausting year). My summer break starts today, and boy oh boy do I have some stuff to take care of - a preposterous amount of music has been on the back-burner all year, hopefully going to put out at least an EP of some kind by the end of the summer, with any luck there'll be more. Anyone interested in a collaboration? :D Also have a lot of work to get ready for my wedding, which is in just over a month (August 10th!). I am going to a fabric store today to find something (preferably in charcoal grey) to make a suit out of. I have silver coming in the mail soon to make the wedding rings out of. A harpist friend of mine is playing during the ceremony, and I am working on finishing writing some pieces for her to play throughout. Some things I have been enjoying: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Jerusalem by Alan Moore The Black Hack Second Edition The Quiet Year My ongoing music backlog After finally fixing some issues my 3d printer has been having for the past few months, I am hoping to possibly get production on little art pieces to sell underway sometime this summer too. I'm finishing up writing a simple code in p5.js to make generative designs, and am working on some original designs as well. Things are good, and it's nice to have some time to breathe before getting back into the school year. I hope everyone here is doing well, you should be seeing more of me (until september, at least!)
Congrats! That sounds like a really personalized and awesome wedding. Handmade rings and suits. Very cool. Also, Harps are awesome at weddings. You’ll have to share some pics. You should write your own wedding march or theme song :-) !! You’re such a brilliant writer.
Sweet! I was thinking we could maybe exchange tracks that we're stuck on/have given up on, and see what the other comes up with to add to it, although I am certainly open to starting some tracks from scratch. I teach mostly preschool, 2-4 years. I also do some music things, and am going to teach a bit of computer science next year as well.
Recap of the past few months. Went on a cruise, lamented being 20-something, nearly hurled myself off the boat in a moment of drunken sadness, returned to the disco and boogied down with some forty year old woman from South Korea (she looked way younger on the dance floor), saw a bunch of pictures of her kids, heard her say something extremely racist, friend smuggled weed on to the boat (only CBD), friend accidentally ordered porn on the TV box and had to call room service to get it to work, was terrified I was going to blink my eyes and be an elderly man who specializes in mortgages and be on that exact same ship, returned to Canada, returned to my $1 over minimum wage working grind where I'm a low level manager of high school students taking shit from everyone and never seeming able to work hard enough. Got transferred stores and am subjected to mysterious schedule changes the day my shift starts and am written up for not knowing), feeling jealous of my high school peers who are in med school (why?), or just majored in whatever would get them middle class quick, worked like a dog, developed a paranoid attitude that everyone hates me and thinks I'm a failure, did vector calculus for fun despite school not being in session, put many more songs on soundcloud despite it being immature. Concluded that the reason I was bored as an adult is because I no longer have sex, drugs, and rock and roll in my life like when I was a teen. Decided to do that again and cried at what a waste of time and money it was. Did shitty ecstasy alone for the first time and read Hubski while turning up the phase shifter on a guitar track. Felt like a boulder the next day. Moved out of parents house (finally), learned how to cook (spaghetti), was berated only once by roommates for not cleaning up, picking classes for next year (5th year, because I majored in econ like a dummy). Discrete structures, algorithms, advanced calc, differential equations, I really want a fucking physics major but I feel like it's a really stupid road to go down despite my brain saying do it and I need to graduate asap. Worried I'm going to get too old for college stuff. Glad I didn't go to law school like I originally intended because my classmates were dumb. Debating whether "follow your heart" is ever a good idea or if pragmatism should reign supreme. Realizing that being bat shit crazy seems to be a common theme in my life and being an artist means one can't avoid following their heart if they fucking tried. Hearing parents non ironically mention us getting married and realizing I'm not a kid anymore. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you all.
All good courses, goes double for differential equations (perhaps the most universal thing in STEM), but why exactly do you want to major in physics? What makes it so appealing/alluring? What does physics mean to you? It's been on your mind for some time, that's clear, but I can't recall you going into concrete reasons.Discrete structures, algorithms, advanced calc, differential equations, I really want a fucking physics major but I feel like it's a really stupid road to go down despite my brain saying do it and I need to graduate asap.
Was going to chime in only to voice these exactly. Beat me to the punch. Those are really rewarding classes to throw down in. To the end of universality, in taking these math courses, they will absolutely enrich any physics courses you take since the formulae will show up in fun, sometime (un/)expected correlations. Building on the why is a key answer. Where ever you find the magic in physics. Honing in on the math itself may well be a fine solution to cutting through to graduation, and applying the skills in those math courses to the physics of your fancy afterward.
Regarding my interest in physics, I am obsessed by abstract math but am really obsessed with the dream of somehow materializing my dreams into hardware. When I first encountered the Schrodinger equation in 11th grade chemistry class I literally lost my shit. I love the condensed matter field, I would want to do what much more so than astronomy or string theory. I don't really give a hoot about whatever the origin of the universe was. I have a bit of masculine energy but not enough to make me want to be a mechanical engineer or something like that. I was studying economics for 2.5 years because like I said somewhere else on this site, I wanted to solve all the world's problems when I was 17. I'm a lot more cynical towards political processes now and am not sure what is good for people. I figure a good song or work of art can lift people up more than abstract social plans, and the community organizations I was a part of felt fake. I kind of hate political ideologies and law school now. I took my shitty BA and split because a lot of my classmates hated the gays and I don't want to die pegging the inflation rate at 1.75%. People in the physics department are chill as hell and joke about Karl Marx and hallucinogens. I'm like 21 now so I'm too old for both those things, but still beats hating the gays. What am I going to do, move to America and solve their political problems? Other countries aren't really as concentrated in wealth and power as that place. If I do decide to pursue physics, I'm going to double or minor in computer science because writing software is my fall-back plan, because academic careers seem like the 9th circle of hell. I've never really given a shit about money. I ate bread for dinner one day when I was at work because I'm broke as shit. I suppose a true aristocrat owns nothing. Much more important than money is time. That being said, I find coding to be a bit too easy though. I taught myself how to code when I was 10 (sorry about the flex.... that's #middleclass). I had a domain name, blog I coded myself in PHP/mysql with content management system, apache server, validated login, hashing, input validation guard against SQL injection, pagination, whatever). Of course there are way harder things you can do in computer science and math, but I'm not sure if I'd get there unless I'm in the A.I. department of Google or academia. Also I don't find a lot of tech culture to be aesthetically pleasing.
I resigned from my chemistry internship after another day of being assigned anything deemed as slightly too tedious for seemingly anyone else to do. When raising that point, I was told that's how things are done here, so I should deal with it. They hand-picked me because I'm a theorist with strong maths skills and programming chops, so what the fuck was I even doing in a lab, adding concentrated HCl dropwise for six straight hours? I don't care if it makes me look like a total primadonna, that's a willful misuse of my time, and I'm beyond fed up with it being a constant theme in my life. In less soul-sucking news, I got a whopping 96% from my first-pick PhD programme. Interview dates are to be announced, and I'd probably have to go on a week-long kerosene binge to flunk that one. Dunno what I'm gonna do for the rest of the summer, but I'll probably just relax this and next week. It's nice to have free time without being bedridden, and I should finally use it.
There is a Google map of Portland that shows pianos that can be played by the public. There is also a group that reconditions old pianos and places them in public areas for people to play, they have a map as well but I don't think all their pianos are on the Google map because they get moved around often. Quite a few cites have the wandering public piano thing happening now a days. Who knows, maybe you have such a service in your area.
Honestly, good for you. If wasting valuable resources (i.e. your time and expertise) is "Just how things are done here," it doesn't sound like an organization your need to be a part of. Any plans for all that free time? Hobbies you want to pick back up, trips you've been wanting to take, movies you missed out on?
Fortunately, after getting paid for a few freelance jobs, money isn't as tight as it used to be. Going on a hiking trip doesn't sound like a bad idea. It's been a while since I painted anything, and would love to play on an actual piano for a change, unfortunately, that one is unlikely to happen. One of my short stories been on a backburner for the better part of a year, but I'm not in a headspace for it. Not much of a movie goer/watcher, though I won't say no to recommendations. That entire Marvel thing went completely past me, but the one I saw (Guardians of the Galaxy) was a lot of fun. I'm kinda behind on my "obtain 1st category in two years" plan, so if there's a chess tournament nearby, I'm in. It's only completing one norm (finishing the tournament with 2000+ Elo IIRC) away for me, so it's worth a try. Let's put it under 'undecided' for now. :P EDIT/BTW: That internship is with my old uni, which is even more infuriating.
Any ideas on where you want to go hike? I've been looking at a trip on the Appalachian Trail, myself. I have a cousin who's been out there for a few months, would like to join him for a few weeks potentially. I'm not a huge fan of the Marvel movies myself, but I really enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok for what it's worth. It's directed by Taika Waititi, and has a different vibe than the majority of them - more in line with Guardians, from what I remember! And 'undecided' can be freeing. World's your oyster, take some time to yourself and then get after it :)
Probably the Polish side of Bieszczady Mountains and their associated national park, since I wasn't there in four years. It's a great low-effort trail, with negligible light pollution and most of the time you're in a forest, which is exactly my jam.
Just wanted to let you know about an amazing FREE Summer Business Program for anyone in grades 5-12 in the US that you can use to build up your resume! It is an elevator pitch contest run by TYE Boston, who will teach you everything you need to know about elevator pitches, before you branch off and work on creating your own idea and pitch, which you will submit for various prizes! It's only a few weeks as well. Want to participate? Go to the insta page @tye.boston for the link to sign up for a webinar on July 29th, 2020.
Sometime tomorrow, on my way home from work, the bike and I will cross 10,000 miles. I've spent the past couple days trying on others. I ride a Specialized Sirrus from 2015; I've tried three Cannondale Topstones, a couple Treks, a Specialized Sequoia, two of this year's Specialized SIrrus and about five Specialized Diverges, from the basic bitch $1100 model to an S-works DI2, marked down to $3800 from $8800. Meanwhile Ye Olde Steede has been acting up a bit. I think maybe it got dropped while I was away; the front derailleur was off-kilter a bit. And I can't get the front crank anymore so if I rebuild that I gotta swap out the groupset. And I mean hell. I've done 10k miles on an $800 bike. Everyone's telling me to upgrade. But an upgrade means committing to being here some more, and I can't do it. I like to pretend there's an ephemerality to my Los Angeles life and buying another bike would mean I anticipate putting another 10k miles on it. On the plus side, the bike shop decided that what I ride now is in cherry shape. And on the plus side, I much prefer a 2015 Sirrus to a 2019 Sirrus. And really, when I drove a 911 for the first time my Dodge felt like a jellyfish in comparison. It was clearly time. But while riding an $8500 carbon fiber nightmare (the shifters have an operating system) was certainly nice, it sure as shit wasn't $8500 nicer than what I ride now. It wasn't $3800 nicer than what I ride now. Really, it was maybe $500 nicer than what I ride now and that, to me, means I'm gonna try and get that Specialized to 20k. 'cuz I know my life down here isn't ephemeral, no matter how hard I pretend. But maybe in another 3 years it'll be done.
Research Wondering how many paper deadlines I can miss before my advisor drops me as a student. I'm supposed to be on grant funding which isn't a great fit for me (meant for new PhD students, which I am not) soon, but it'll have expectations about research productivity that I don't know if I can meet. I'm considering telling my advisor to take me off the grant and going back to teaching instead. I don't know what to do or how to talk about this with people because in my head it just sounds like "yeah I'm too lazy and unproductive where can I get some low expectations" which isn't exactly something I want to be saying to faculty in my department. At least my wife has a job so we aren't immediately in trouble if funding gets tricky. Shop Over a year ago I did a few oxyacetylene welds on my exhaust. They were not very pretty, but here's one: Recently while doing some very-not-instagram-quality welds on a lawnmower blade (long story) and disintegrating mower deck, I realized that part of why my welds are so bad is that 1/16" filler rod is way too big for the tip size I was using. As soon as I'd dip the filler in the puddle, it would freeze and stick the filler to one side or the other. I'm going to pick up some smaller filler soon and give this another try. Yesterday my wife bent a lug wrench removing a flat tire from the truck. I'm impressed. Those nuts were on tight and rusty.
It's not the rod, you need a bigger tip. Oxyacetylene is great because you can pretty much weld with whatever you have around. Baling wire, coat hangers, hardware cloth... we never bothered buying stock for oxy 'cuz you can use literally anything. Same with TiG if you're doing steel. But if you're not getting it hot enough your welds will look like...that.
I mean yeah the thin stuff rips but exhaust tubing ain't that skinny. Boilerplate it ain't but exhaust tubing is bread'n'butter oxy stuff because if you arc weld it you gotta go like two inches a second and that's no fun. You need to keep the puddle from blowing through. Tap the rod into the puddle and it doesn't much matter about anything else; the trick to oxyacetylene welding is that there's enough solid under the liquid to keep it from going poof with the gas pressure. After that it's like soldering; you just feed the puddle. That gets tricky with like gas tanks but you can do it with bodywork no prob (minus the puckering of course). If you have more exhaust shit to do it's not cheating to buy a 45 degree bend and lap-weld it.
Everyone hits that point where they feel like they’ve fallen behind in their degree program. Are these deadlines your advisor has set for you? What are they based off? In my experience, truly inflexible deadlines in academic research are uncommon. Professors will almost always try to go fast though. Best thing for you to do is remain calm and continue to be thorough with your work. Little trouble will come your way if your efforts are solid but progress is slow. Research is just slow.
How important/significant are those deadlines? Sorry if it seems daft, but from what I've seen/been told, research-level maths is exceptionally slow when it comes to stuff like peer review, so it feels to me like a natural question. I'd love to have something constructive to say about your problem, but there's a rather significant gap in experience. Wishing you all the best, though.Wondering how many paper deadlines I can miss before my advisor drops me as a student.
I’m on vacation with my kids. I just took a call with an investor and I’m about to take a calm with another. Being a business owner is tough work. Always on. I’m vowing to not work the rest of the time I’m here. (Charlevoix) At the end of the month I head to Scotland with my wife. I will try, as best I can, to not turn the phone on. mk and ecib will hold down the fort without me. I find myself oversubscribed with offers to invest. A good problem to have. One very large and key investor is sending his sharks to our offices next Friday as a final due diligence step. I’m pretty excited about Forever Labs right now. I feel like we are really finding our footing. Happy birthday America! I love you, warts and all. I’m scared for the path you are on but I think you’ll find your footing too. I bought a new guitar. A Martin. I like it. Music coming soon!
I am returning to answer this comment. Why? Because it’s important people see this. I bought a composite Martin. Brand new. Apparently, it’s supposed to be every bit as good as Wood. Well, it’s not. It was total, shit. Just returned it got a fraction of what I paid for it and got a Taylor mini Koa in the same price point. A much better guitar.
Composite might be garbage or you might just have gotten a dud. I know other people who've bought a top of the line instrument and for some unknowable reason that particular unit was stillborn. A professional woodwind player who comes in the shop told me about his friend who purchased a $10,000 flute that is a model everyone who's played it says is awesome but which for that particular instrument sounded like student level garbage. But maybe composite is trash. The first guitar I owned was an ovation (rounded fiberglass backed) which I received for Christmas. Holy hell did that fiberglass back make it sound terrible.
Also, I know those ovations well. In high school everyone liked them because they were loud. But I couldn’t agree with you more, they sounded really thin. No heart; kind of synthetic.
When I walked in and the tech saw the guitar I was holding he said, “I know exactly why you are here.“ Apparently they are garbage.
It's been more than half a year since I last posted on Hubski, but this seems to be about as good good a time to jump back in as any. A few months back I started working at a job that's essentially glorified tech support for a tiny CNC firm. The customers we get are mostly hobbyists who know very little about the machines they are trying to set up, so at least I can sometimes explain to them the little I myself know about controllers and the such. My days are spent writing manuals for the myriad settings and functions hidden within our software which I myself do not quite understand fully. There is nearly zero existing documentation on some features, and what we have is usually already outdated, so I am effectively trying to document everything from the ground up. The pay is minimal, but this gives me something to do for now. My family has been suggesting I get back to studying, perhaps doing a Masters in engineering, more and more as of late. I myself am not quite sure of what to do - currently I feel as if I am in a limbo, stuck with my diploma but not really able to apply it anywhere that would make good use of it. On a more positive note, I have been working on myself - working out, swimming, learning French - and for the first time in what feels like in forever, I don't feel like I am getting dumber with every passing day. [EDIT]: what's up with the donations bar? Please, mk, I would rather my $5 went to hubski than another latte.
I’m almost over a cold I caught nearly two weeks ago. I think I was only really sick for a couple of days, but the congestion has lingered since then. It’s almost official that I am switching jobs in another week and a half. I’m more confident with that choice now that it’s pretty well settled. Either Way it goes I think I’ll be in pretty good shape regardless. Still, I can tell this moment is one that I’ll look back on years later and wonder what if... Im sure there have been countless singular choices I’ve made over the years that have altered the path of my life significantly, but I can’t recall a single one where that weight was on my mind before. For whatever reason, it’s been on my mind this time. Music Hobbies and creative stuff have been on the back burner a bit even though I’ve had more free time than usual. I need to jump on that and wrap up some stuff I’ve been sitting on at this point. I guess I’ve been watching too many shows. Netflix added new seasons to a bunch of stuff just recently so that doesn’t help.
Work So, last week I talked to the head honchos at my company and told them my job was stupid, and it wasn't the way our company should be doing business, and that they were not getting as much value out of me as they could, and they should move me to a different position in the company and eliminate my role. I told them a couple of different thoughts I had about how I could provide more value, and they thought it was interesting. (I told Hubski about it in the Pubski last week.) Within a day, the honchos came back to me and said, "Fucking great thinking there, mate. You are right. Let's not wait to make those changes: let's do it now. You have your new job starting Monday." So on Monday I sat down with my new boss and we created a job for me. That is AMAZING. And has a FUTURE. And gets me working on a TEAM again, rather than a lone(ly) wolf. Oh. And everybody on this team gets paid a LOT more. So this new job I just gave myself? I also got myself a pretty significant raise, as well. (Exact numbers will come next week, but will include bonuses and profit sharing.) So I've got that. And that's nice. =) Fireworks Tomorrow my family continues the tradition begun before I was born, of shooting fireworks professionally on the 4th of July. Yep. We get paid to shoot off $30k of someone else's fireworks, and are licensed by the State to do so. Weird, huh? We still have all of our fingers and toes, and most of our hearing, and we have been shooting this city's show now for 30 years. We have gotten GOOD at this. But, everybody is older. So nowadays, it's about 30 people sitting around in the shade eating, while about 5 of us use a tractor and shovels and hammers and nails and hand tools, doing heavy manual labor for about 7 hours to get everything set up. Then we work in close proximity (this is a hand-fired show: no electronics) with high-powered explosives while completely cracked-out and exhausted from the day's labors. And then the 5 of us spend two hours in the middle of the goddamn night tearing everything down and packing it up, while the other 30 people mysteriously disappear into the night without lifting a finger to help. We collapse into bed in our RVs around 2:AM to try and get a little rest, then get up about 7:AM to finish cleaning up the site in the daylight. Around noon we go to brunch, gulp down enough food and coffee to get us home safely after a 3-hour drive (or so), and then collapse into bed and don't move for about 3 days. And we go through all this work for about 20 minutes of actual fireworks. Oh yes... shooting fireworks professionally is all glamour and fun. (Not.) But it is a requirement when you are in my family. Have a safe 4th.
No, the money is terrible. We get about $1,000 for this show. To transport the show in the U-Haul truck from the fireworks factory to the site, you must have a Commercial Driver's License (CDL). This is the same license that semi truck drivers need. When you get your CDL, all of your penalties for poor driving are doubled, and the allowances are halved (for things like blood-alcohol level, to determine whether you are DUI, or not). This is the driver's license you drive with every single day, regardless of whether you are transporting fireworks from the fireworks plant to the site of the show. It takes a minimum of 5 people about 10-12 hours to put on a show of this size. (And Blaine, WA is NOT a big show.) Build and set up racks for the mortars, then dig 5 yards of sand to build berms along both sides of the racks you built. (From noon to about 7:PM.) Around 6 or 7 you go through all the fireworks and prep the fuses, assess any damage to any of them, and generally make sure everything is ready to go. Then you load the mortars with the shells, and set up any ground-effect fireworks. Now you need to do security for the next 2-3 hours, as your team guards thousands of feet of perimeter from drunks and kids, who want nothing more than to sneak in and set off all your fancy fireworks with their lighters. If this is an electrically-fired show, plan about 3 hours to run wiring, tests, and configure the radio communications and go through the script for the firing order and to catch any mistakes in the script. Finally, about 10 to 10:15 or so, it gets dark enough and you can shoot the show! WOO HOO! 20 minutes of thrilling fun, danger, and big booms. Then you have to immediately get back on perimeter duty to protect the site from any public incursion (you also need to make sure all the guns are empty, put out any little fires, and check to see that everything fired properly and you don't have any live ordinance still on site). After an hour or so, everything has cooled down, and you can begin tear-down. Digging all the racks out of the sand, loading everything back in the truck, cleaning the site (in the dark), and assessing the area for any potential hazards that kids might find the next day. (Unexploded 'stars' or fuses or other composition that came out of the shells and didn't burn, etc.) The truck is a target for vandalism, so you either need to get it back to the fireworks plant tonight (it's now 2:AM), or have a safe place to store it (NOT a motel parking lot!) for a couple hours so you can get a nap in. For $1000. For 5 people. We do this for fun, only. You can't make a living at it.
I find out whether I get in to university or not on the 11th. I should get in, if you look at statistics from the last few years I am well above the cut off. I'm nonetheless quite nervous about it. I switch between planning for my own apartment and what I'm going to furnish it with and not wanting to get ahead of things. The prospect of university is quite scary as well. I haven't had to seriously academically apply myself since about 2016 and part of me wonders if I'm up for it. I really should be, other people can do it so why not me, right?
Don't worry about it. As an undergraduate the baseline is the guys who haven't sobered up from the night before and spent every lecture playing video games on their laptop. You should put in much more effort than them if you're not just there for the sheepskin, but if you do it's really unlikely that you'll do badly in your classes.The prospect of university is quite scary as well. I haven't had to seriously academically apply myself since about 2016 and part of me wonders if I'm up for it. I really should be, other people can do it so why not me, right?
My partner is starting a working from home trial soon. It's the first time his office has allowed it due to the confidential nature of their work. We had to buy a new desk to satisfy OH&S requirements. It's a much nicer desk than the previous one. The study area/corner of the living room was predominantly my space in our tiny one-bedroom apartment. My partner doesn't play video games or use the desktop for anything, really. I can't help but feel somewhat displaced.
Aircraft One overhead yesterday. While posting this to the image site, I noticed an analysis of the now-viral language in yesterday's speech that troops "took over airports" in the Revolutionary War. The Australian marketing professional alleges these goofs are intentional, and is only unsure whether the specific mistakes are planned in advance or a reflex learned from experience. The argument is that a blunder strengthens his base by 1) making supporters feel better because they wouldn't make the kind of mistake that a rich and powerful person makes and 2) demonstrating that "he is one of us" when the elites mock and condescend to the president, just like they mock and condescend to them.
Started Earth Abides, per kb and goob endorsement. Doesn't waste time setting the scene, it's refreshing so far. Drove down to my brother's for the extended weekend. The Silmarillion is much better as an audiobook than as paperback. Batman: Hush is the comic I'm on. Perfect timing as a comic-con's in my brothers city this weekend. Could be my first comic-con! The day I'm looking at has a couple Batman segments Q&A, a Star Trek: TNG with Will Riker's actor, plus some.
Happy Birthday America. Just came indoors from photographing songbirds in the backyard while Dala and the pup were hanging out there. Birds tend to not be very cooperative subjects, moving around a lot, sticking to the shadier areas of the trees, etc., so only maybe one in twenty shots come out as halfway decent. But when I do get a shot that comes out more than halfway decent? It's pretty rewarding. It's a fun way to kill an hour.