Relaxation

I had an odd experience today, at least an experience I haven’t had in a surprisingly long period of time.  It was triggered by two otherwise unrelated events:  1) I gave a backrub yesterday, and 2) I was listening to a song whose message boiled down to “RELAX, stupid!”  While listening to the song I got to thinking about training, something I haven’t done in a very long time.  In my mind, training in martial arts requires total relaxation above pretty much everything else.  It gives you much finer control over your own body, and even increases your stregnth in certain situations, as a plus, being relaxed is much more fun than being tense.  Somewhere inbetween my stream of conciousness and this song, something clicked, and I told my body to just stop for a second, and to relax.

It was simple, familiar, and totally amazing.  I don’t think I realize how much more stress I am under on a daily basis nowadays as opposed to college.  I never really try and compare, and have a wonderful time without such comparison.  I think that it might be important to take small moments like I did today and at least aknowledge the fact that we are under stress, and honor it.

Interupted

Well,  I’m back online.

A few weeks ago our server was compromised.  a password sniffer was put on the machine, and it was left for us to unwittingly give some hacker username/password/IP combinations.  Needless to say, we did some quick thinking, got the machine completely wiped, reinstalled with a fresh OS, and back up and running.  It’s taken me a while to get back to blogging because all the files I took off of the machine before we wiped it were spread across a few of my personal machines.

I’ve been swamped with work recently as well; we are working on a huge project that is due at the end of the month.  I don’t really like to talk about my work on the blog for a variety of reasons, but I am pretty much re-coding the way our site deals with corporate clients, based on a rather llarge deal we made 2 months ago.   It’s a lot of fun, and a challenging project to pin down in the course of 3.5 weeks of work.

There have been a few frustrationg moments in the past few weeks where I have wanted nothing more than to be able to blog my way through a thought I was having, but alas, my general lack of writing utesils and paper came back to haunt me again and again.  It happened so many times recently that I ended up going out to a Ataples near me and buying 10 legal pads and 20 number 2 pencits.  Ihave scattered them strategically around the house so that if I ever need to jot down a thought I’ll have a place to do it.  Un-breaking my blog also helps, as my laptop stays pretty much fused to my side these days — trains, work, weekend work (I told you it was an intense project!), fun weekend coding, etc.

I’ve been experimenting with soup lately as well.  I say experimenting mostly because I have been too lazy to go to the store, and have made a game of seeing how long I can stetch out my supplies:  the answer is quite a long time.  I dug up some sausage out of the freezer two days ago and made a sausage/barley soup with a homemade veggie-tomato sauce.  before that was black bean stew (made with a few chunks of beef to buff up the flavor), and before that was another barley vegetable soup that had mushrooms, celery, potatoes, onion, carrots, &c.

Today I finally went back to the store and stocked up on some staples like milk, eggs, and pasta.  I also got fixings for Mac and Cheese because it’s been a little while.  Made that tonight and watched a movie.   currently sitting back, drinking a glass of wine, and trying to come up with interesting things to talk about and having limited success.

The only other thing that I can think of at the moment is thiat I want to both excercise more, and read more poetry.  perhaps I shall design a morning regimen of situps and blank verse to get me through the cold, upcoming winter.  Not a bad I dea if I do say so myself.

PS.  Wow my writing feels rusty.

Ch-Ch-Changes (but not really)

NB: I almost posted this about 3 weeks ago, before it got stuck in the “drafts” section of the blog. It’s close enough to a real post to put out in the open though, and I want to start writing something new, so I’m letting it go.

Over the past two weeks, three very good friends of mine have left Chicago “for good.”  In the weeks leading up to this, I have been thinking again about leaving Chicago myself.  The city definitely feels a bit emptier, but really, nothing has ch-ch-changed.  Made a great dinner last night, finally figured out the Jerk thing. I made a tenderloin, and William made some plantains friend in molasses and rum to complement the meat.  Also, with the help of Pelks and Bekah, we have brewed what will probably be a *very* strong, or *very* sweet, pale ale (we didn’t water it down quite as much as was suggested because the pot wasn’t large enough. Since there is so much more sugar per part water, we will either have more fermentation of more sugar leftover once the yeast dies out.)

I was given some wonderful opportunities to get out of the city myself for a while, as well as to start thinking about school again, (specifically in those places).  Emily and I went on a road trip to Pittsburgh, where I was lucky enough to tour the Carnegie-Mellon Campus.  Now, CMU has probably the best CS program in the country, and I really liked the feel of the university, as well as the city itself.  So far I’ve done a bit of preliminary research and have found that I qualify for a Masters in Software engineering program, which I might follow up on in the near future.

A week later I was in Palo Alto, visiting Elizabeth at Stanford, and again was struck with a feeling of “I could do this…”.  Stanford also has a very good CS program, and I would love to live in the Bay area; it’s another place to consider.

Two days Later I was visiting some friends in Sunnyvale who are planning a Wedding Party for themselves in Boston at some point in the near future.  With MIT being very high on the list of engineering schools in the USA, I will also make a point of visiting there when I arrive in Boston to fufill my “Maid of Honor” duties (!!!).

Suffice to say I have a short list of schools and I’m interested in applying to for graduate school.  I also need to see whether or not I need to take the GREs at all.  but If I do apply, I think it will happen next fall some time.

Back from the Dead

Hello everyone, all 12 of you!  It’s been a while and I’ve been itching to write a post that is more than 140 characters for a while.  A bunch has been going on in a very non-linear fashion, so I hope I can keep some central narrative all the way to the bottom of this page.

Friday afternoon I finally leave on a roadtrip that’s been in the planning since April.  We’ve been pushed back more than once:  for schedule conflicts and moving violations alike.  Regardless, We leave Chicago Friday afternoon to arrive in Pittsburgh around midnight.  In a brilliant tactical move, The Ruboritto faction will sweep in from the East as we flank the city from the West.

In preparation for this trip I have finally got the van fixed up (or am currently in the process of doing so).  It’s in the shop, with the registration transfered over to me, new city sticker, and new plates arriving the day before we leave.  I’m excited to finally take a roadtrip that I can actually drive on.  I’m also looking forward to actually driving in the countryside, I get the feeling that it will be downright theraputic when compared to city driving, which tends to stress me out since the accident.

A week later, I leave for California. I’ll be in San Fransisco for a few days, then head down to San Diego for Comicon (Nana, I’ll call you this week some time to figure out how to see you and Papa).  After couch surfing for 5 days and conventioning for 4 more, it’ll be back home, and sleep for about a week.

On a more mundane, day to day level, I’ve just planned out a few different bike routes around the city.   I want to get on a regular exercise routine, so that I can bike a reasonable distance at least a few times a week since my two mile ride to work is not really sweatworthy (versus the 4 miles from Lakeview).  I’ve put together a 4.5 mile, a 7 mile, and a 10 mile ride.  the 4.5 mile took about an hour (including a half hour stop at the end for groceries and a book shop; about 20-25 minutes without.)  I’m going to try the 7 mile today:  Biking west on Division to Kedzie, then north to Logan Square, and back South along Milwaukee to my apartment.  I like making the end of the bike ride a trip to Jewel because generally by the time I get back i’m ready to start cooking dinner, at least.  If the 10 mile, a square route between Kedzie & Halsted and Division and Diversy, proves easy I can extend it to the lakefront path, which I can take back south to North before cutting back inland.  We’ll see.  If I do as much biking as I want early in July, I hope to take weekend trips up to the Botanical Gardens north of the city on Saturdays, or if I’m feeling REALLY crazy bike up to Ravinia some night (about 19 miles one way) after work.

Work is going well.  We’re moving on to some new (and some revisited) projects) that I think will prove to be more fun than what we’ve been doing the past month.  Speaking of which, I should get back to that.

Cheers!

Smalltown Chicago

Last night, after getting out of work late (~6:30-7:00pm) I ran into an old high school buddy and his girlfriend on the train platform.  They were headed to my neighborhood to visit his sister and another or my friends from high school.  I was invited along, and we had a wonderful eve ning of sushi and eventually chocolate mousse.  We went to a place along milwaukee, just a block frm where I live for dinner, then back to an apartment for dessert and wine.  It was a lovely time and a lovely coincidence.  My high school friends are a group of people who I haven’t interacted with on a regular basis for a very long time, and it’s quite fun to start seeing them again, not to mention finding out that so many of them live so close.

In other news I have a mostly put together apartment:  I got a couch and two chairs which allow me to kind of actually define the space in living room.  I will hopefully be getting a fold out love seat as well, so I can host overnight guests without troubling them to sleep on the uncomfortable metal frame of couch number one.

Bike is now fixie and the AADC (Alex’s Almost Death Count) is hovering around 2.

leftover WIN.

The weekend was a magical time for leftovers in my house.  almost everything in my fridge went to a better place.  The highlights were a mushroom curry made with portabella mushrooms, a little leftover white wine, scallions, garlic, some curry paste and some heavy whipping cream I had sitting in my fridge; also I made a asian-ish shrimp soup by making shimp broth to boil israeli couscous, then adding shelled shrimp at the end along with scallions, soy sauce, sesame oil, salt and pepper.  I managed to put the shrimp in at just the right time too, they weren’t too rubbery, but just perfectly cooked.

To be fair, the successes above were balanced by my saturday night dinner of leftover rice with hot sauce, and sunday breakfast of a cupcake, but all’s fair in love and cooking.

morning commute

1) Found out that the city got money to refurbish the blue line!  Very good.  Also, potential delays in the near future.

2) The loop smelled like chocolate when I exited the train.

3) read an amazing poem:  “Love and Tensor Algebra” is the closest thing it has to a title.  Found it in the book, “The Cyberiad” by Stanislaw Lem.  Keep in mind this has already been translated from the original Polish.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy field of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov Chain!

Come, every  frustrum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Reimann, Hilbert, or Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our Asymtotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
and in out bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of Thy supernatural sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
a root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine

I see the eigenvalue of thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but know such a squared cosine two phi!

4) reciting Shakespeare at top speed while walking to work is a good way to get weird glances from passersby

a game

I was sitting on Thursday, in Shaw’s Oyster Bar, waiting for my mother;  We were going to get drinks, half price oysters, and hand off a cell phone charger I left in my parents apartment the last time I was there.  Waiting for her, I started playing a game with myself:  what, exactly, would she look like when she walked through the door?  Immediately I imagined her, wearing a dark jacket, salt and pepper (sorry mom!) hair, digging in her purse for some odd end.  Flustered after a long day at work, and ready to think about other things, then looking up and seeing me across the way at the bar relaxing her shoulders, and smiling.  Then I started doing this with all my friends.  What would each one of them look like, walking through the door to the bar?  It brings out the key things that are important to you, about that person in the given surroundings.  The two loudest details for me, in my mothers case, was the purse and the finally relaxed smile.  The first because she always does it, and the second because she always does it when she sees me.

New Toys

I got two new toys yesterday, where the word “toy” is defined broadly.  The first,, the actual toy, is an eee pc the big boss at wrk didn’t want.  The tech team drew straws for it, and I got lucky.  It is tiny.  Much smaller, in fact, than the laptop that I use for work, which I am already ridiculed for ( I like a laptop that fits on my lap, thank you!).  It is fun to use, and I am beggining to get my typing feet back on the 6 inch wide keyboard.

The other toy that I recieved was is more of a toy enabler than a toy in and of itself:  I finally got my drivers license.  it only took me 24 years to finally get the government to tell me I’m allowed to risk my life on the highway, just like everyone else.  It was a struggle to get where I am, but now I will be able to roam the countryside, wreaking havoc as I drive a decade old van from city to city.  It should be totally worthwhile!

bike fun and new environs.

So this past weekend I took an hour or so and converted my Fuji Absolute (a 10 speed fuji roadbike) into a singlespeed. It was fun, and took a bit of problemsolving to really get it working. The first thing that I butted up against was getting my chainline correct. The gear ratio that I wanted didn’t work. whenever I set up the chain across the two sprockets and tried pedaling the chain would shift up to the next gear on the freewheel.

Hmm… that last sentence is a little dense if you don’t understand the vocabulary, here’s some clarification.

• sprocket: The gears which the chain is wrapped around.
• chain wheel: the front sprocket.
• free wheel: the set of back sprockets (this is not 100% accurate. could be a cassette instead, but a good enough definition for gov’t work).
• chainline: lit. the line the chain creates. It is important that this line is parallel to the motion of the bike for singlespeed riding (not for multispeed), or else the chain tries to straighten itself by shifting to another gear, which could be problematic.
• gear ratio: this one is a bit easier — namely the relative size (number of teeth) of the free wheel and chain wheel. by bike is currently ~52/14, if my memory serves.

To fix the chainline problem I had to choose which set of gears I wanted my chain to ride on, and consequently what kind of gear ration I was looking for. I opted to go to a higher gear ratio, which is a little bit harder to push, but great once your moving at slightly higher speeds.

After choosing my gear ratio i resized my chain and adjusted the chain tension.  It was my first time tensioning a chain and although I got the general idea of it down, I was given a few pointers later when I visited my local bike workshop.

What Alex (the owner of said workshop) showed me was a way of slowly increasing the tension of the chain by working it further and further back into the dropouts (where the back wheel connects to the frame of the bike), until a suitable tension was reached.  After that I tuned up my brakes and headed back out into the night, which had just cleared up.

Set up on my new bike I traveled south to Chicago and Ashland, to the Mercury Cafe, to meet Paul, who was at a meeting for the new hackerspace that he and a friend are setting up, Pumping Station 1.  I hung out with Paul and the various other hackers from the group for the rest of the night.  We ended up at a bar called Club Foot, near Augusta and Wood.  It was much fun and I met a whole bunch of new and interesting people, which is always a win.  Paul and I finished off the night with a dime tour f the neighborhood and a few midnight tacos at a taqueria around the corner from my apartment, then called it a night.