What I have been up to the past three months

[edit: clarified a statement]

The past three months of my life have been quite the whirlwind of events. It all started with PyCon in early/mid March. I flew out to Chicago with a cold. Stayed in town for over a week. It was great fun, but exhausting as always. This was the first time I ever had to give more than a single talk (I gave three). Plus I was sprint coach which made me point man for any new people working with the core developers.

After getting home I immediately jumped into preparing for AOSD. Since I had a presentation to give I spent my single week home just working.

And after that week working I flew to Brussels. First time in mainland Europe. First time I traveled alone to a foreign country I had never been to (well, sort of alone; ran into people I knew on the flight over, knew people at the conference, and I had a roommate for part of the time). But while I was there my 2.5 year relationship ended. While dealing with the conference and the exhaustion of travel, I had some emotional stress to deal with. Luckily I was able to distract myself with tourism of Brussels and Ghent.

But then I had to go home. In early April I returned to Vancouver and had to face up to the fact that I was no longer with Meesh. That was when the panic kicked in. I started to look for a place to move to. I had been lucky in my life in that I had never needed to hunt for an apartment before. Before a roommate found the possible places to live and I just provided feedback or made the call. The prospect of having to hunt for an apartment, especially in Vancouver's housing market, scared the crap out of me. I knew if I was not happy at home I would feel miserable and just end up holing myself up; not what you need when the place you live is a contributor to your misery.

Since my hunt began mid-April, my choices were not great. I was getting to pick through the left-overs from the beginning of the month. Unfortunately I didn't realize that initially, so I was panicking over what my selection was. Luckily I calmed down about finding a reasonable place immediately, although that didn't alleviate the worry that I would overlook a mediocre place now and end up stuck with a subpar place when I started to look May 1. But I rationalized that while the competition would be thicker around the beginning of the month, there would be more selection. Plus lots of students would be leaving Vancouver by June 1 since graduation was over in May, opening up the rental market.

And while I was panicking about housing I was freaking out over what my life would be like post-Meesh. Remember I met Meesh within my first two weeks in Vancouver and we started dating within the first two months. Up to now my life in Vancouver has been my life with Meesh. With her to be no longer being a part of my daily life, I began to worry about what my life would be like. Would I revert to how I used to be, sitting at home watching movies and keeping to myself? What can I do get out more; find a place in a nice location that is near friends (which just added to my stress of finding a nice place in a good location)?

I eventually calmed down after I realized that I would just have to make myself being social. Getting involved with the right activities would keep me busy on certain nights of the week (e.g., Ultimate Frisbee keeps me occupied Monday and Friday night). Other nights I would see friends or spend it by myself relaxing. It seems conceivable I could keep myself occupied without walling myself off in my apartment.

All of this was happening in the second half of April. Finding my apartment as quickly as I did was a great relief in terms of the house hunting. But my stress for May turned to different things. I had three things happening at the end of the month: my paper submission to a conference was due, I would be moving, and Python 3.0 would be reaching beta with a major piece of work that I was in charge of yet to get integrated. So I had three deadlines all due within three days of each other.

And I still worried about Meesh. We lived together until we both moved out on May 31. But living together caused me to continue to worry about how she was doing, etc. I was constantly worried something would happen and she wouldn't get moved out. And being Meesh's best friend in town meant that she and I talked about stuff. So I still had the emotional investment of her boyfriend, but without the perks or same level of caring. And this is not to say I blame her for causing my stress as I was the one having trouble disassociating.

And of course life transpired to stretch my stress out as long as possible. My paper deadline was extended a week. The Python deadline was also extended a week. And before either extended deadline came due I flew out to my mother to help her move, which is always a stressful event since neither of us enjoy moving.

But now I am home, relaxing in my apartment. The bedroom is mostly unpacked (still need to organize the closet) as is the kitchen. I still need to figure out the layout of the living room before I make a trip to IKEA to buy furniture. But I know everything will be okay.

Have a new place for June 1

I signed the lease on a 600 sq. ft., one bedroom apartment in Kits today. It's expensive (I have to intern at Google now to pay my rent), but it has large windows facing east, a small patio, skylights in the bathroom and kitchen, underground parking, and is large enough that I can actually have people come over and sit at a table or something (compared to some of the studios I was looking at). This should be good.

Reprising my role as international playboy

I am now single again.  I am not going to post any details over why Meesh and I broke up as that's personal and should not be broadcasted on the Net. The important thing is that I am handling it well enough (e.g., I am not an emotional mess, but obviously I am not elated by this either).

And now back to my deadlines of conference papers, Python 3.0, and finding a new place to live.

Why I don't hold on to memorabilia

I originally sketched out this post after I visited my mother during winter break but I didn't get around to actually writing the thing until now (partially because I forgot I had not written it).

I spent most of my visit with my mother helping her clean out her garage in preparation for moving. There was stuff in that garage from my mother's childhood up to that month, so you can grasp the amount of memorabilia that was in there.

But as I helped my mother clean up, I also cleaned out the stuff my mother had been holding on to. I ended up tossing a very large amount of stuff, some to my mother's horror (e.g., all of my high school yearbooks).

Why would I do such a thing? One might think I am not sentimental, which is not entirely true (although I am definitely not THAT sentimental in general). One is that my memory is pretty good. I know Meesh and various friends have been spooked by some of the details that I can remember about conversations. And this can extend a decent distance back through history. This means that I typically do not need memorabilia in order to remember an event that took place in my life. Usually I just need someone to mention something and I can remember most of the event.

And typically a photo works just as well for me to remind me of what happened than some bulkier object. The great things about photos is that they take up hardly any space and are easy to organize. I can snap away with my camera, download the photos to my computer, and print out the ones I truly like for posterity. Maybe I will go as far as to create a life poster at some point that I update on a yearly basis. At this point I have (or plan to) frame photos from significant trips I have taken and put them up on the wall.

Besides, shouldn't we be trying to minimize the amount of space one takes up in this world? Ignoring the ecological impact of the space one takes up, it just makes economic sense. Typically the smaller the space the cheaper it is compared to places to live in the same area. So you can either save money or live in a nicer neighborhood. This is especially important in a place like SF where housing prices continue to be ridiculous.

And most people, I think, typically only look at memorabilia once in a long while. Usually one is either cleaning up, a story is told, or some new member of the family needs filling in on someone's life history. Since the memorabilia is not pulled out constantly they should not be allowed to take up as much space and time most memorabilia takes up.

And this all applies to digital content as well to some extent. End up with too much stuff on your computer and you just can't find the stuff. You have to be disciplined and diligent to keep on top of the mass of files one accumulates over time.

In case this post didn't make it clear, I don't like holding on to stuff just for the slight possibility I will look at it, reflect for a moment, and then move on. I have moved too many times in my life to care to do that. I am sure people who have parents who still keep their first bedroom for them have a different feeling about all of this as they have not had to move all of that stuff at some point. But I have, and it is not fun. When you move almost yearly and only see certain things when you move you begin to realize that you are just shifting things around with no benefit to you for keeping that stuff. I am going to stick to photos and keep the amount of space that I take up in this world in terms of myself down for simplicity.

I wonder how much time my thesis will take?

[please note all names are people I know from PythonLand, so if you don't recognize them, that's why]

Jeremy shared on Google Reader, which I picked up on FriendFeed, a post by Ping on how much time his thesis took. The graph he generated was rather interesting. It made me start to think about whether I would have any interest in such a thing.

I figure I could use my Jaiku feed to keep track of the timestamps. Since I already micro-blog about what I am up to anyway, it wouldn't be too hard to just add a little marker to my posts to denote that I am doing work on my thesis and then a second message saying I have stopped. It could be as simple as "thesis paper ... editing latest draft" or "thesis research ... reading about Java's memory usage" and signaling I have stopped thesis work with "thesis stopped ... doing a blog post on something". I could then just pull down my Jaiku feed and write out the timestamps to a text file. I could even write a Dashboard widget for OS X that fetched the information and then aggregated the data for me so that I could see how things were going. That way I wouldn't have to even remember to pull down the data. Otherwise I would have something launch in my terminal.

Yes, this is extremely nerdy. But knowing the amount of time it took to go from ABD (All But Dissertation) to someone with a Ph.D. would be kind of interesting. I would start once I defended my thesis topic instead of right away as it gives a very specific start point as well as giving me time to get everything in place to actually do this.

Anyway, this is just an idea I currently have. With the amount of other projects I have going I have no clue if I will have the determination to keep it up for as long as I would need to for complete data.

My weekend visiting Jackie and Jer

This past weekend I took a trip down to Seattle to visit Jackie and Jer while Jackie was up for vacation. Drove on down on Friday and rediscovered how horrid Seattle traffic is. It was entirely my fault as I did not head out until about 14:30 thanks to laundry, but still amazed me how badly the traffic was. I really hope the light rail they are putting in will help alleviate the traffic trouble.

When I got there I met Jer and Mike's pug, Hemi (like the engine). He can be a hyper little fella. Seems relatively intelligent.

Shortly thereafter we went and picked up Jackie at SeaTac. Jer was actually able to wait at the curb without issue, unlike other airports I have been to. With Jackie in the back we drove over, picked up Mike and went out for dinner at a McMenamins restaurant. I swear that chain owns the American Northwest.

Our desire for entertainment not sated by dinner, we went to Fred Meyer and picked up some board games; Monopoly, Scrabble, Boggle, and Uno. I also realized how obsessed the tabloids are over Britney Spears (the girl obviously has mental issues. Leave her be to get better already!).

Back and Jer and Mike's we started off playing Boggle. As is the case with all word-based games, Jer trounced all of us. To make the rest of us feel better we then played several games of Uno. The last game lasted quite a while since we played the variant where you keep taking cards until you can put one down. It became a battle of colors as I ended up with a glut of blues but no reds and it was pretty much the reverse for everyone else.

The next day, after I finally got up and stopped holding up everybody (apparently Hemi woke everyone else up earlier), we went down to Pike St. Market and Post Alley. But before we got there we had breakfast at the Original Pancake House. We then made a brief trip to the Seattle Public Library (which is still a really cool public library) on the way to REI. There I was disappointed to find out the Leatherman Skeletool is still not out. But then I got new shoes (a pair of Vasque trail runners) for around town in the wet weather.

After that we were somewhat tired so we went back to the condo and did what we did for most of our undergrad careers when we all lived together; sat around watching TV and doing stuff on our computers. Although, unlike our time in Berkeley, Mike baked us cookies while we lounged about. To get Mike into the fun we played Monopoly in which I got screwed early by going to jail twice very early on, missing out on the land grab. Jer ended up winning by getting both Park Place and Boardwalk and putting three houses on each. It got to the point where we were all happy if we completely avoided both tiles or landed on Luxury Tax to avoid having to pay Jer off with a deed to some piece of land.

I stayed up too late that night since I spent my relaxation time finishing a program I wrote using Google's Social Graph API. Since I doubt anyone knows what that is, a quick explanation is probably in order. There are ways to specify the relationship between web pages (either through special keywords associated with links using XFN or with a special file using FOAF). For instance, from this blog I have links to web pages that are mine and that of my friends. I have used XFN to specify that the links going to my web pages point to pages that belong to me and that the links to my friends are in fact links to web pages owned by friends of mine. Google notices these relationships and make a big graph with nodes represented by web pages and edges based on the relationship between the pages. It all sounds complicated, but it is surprisingly easy to add to your own blog relationship links to other people using XFN if you have a blogroll.

Anyway, as you may have noticed in the right-hand column of this blog, I have started to use FriendFeed (if you want an invite and I know you, let me know). So I wrote this program to find out all the content people I know have online. It actually found some stuff I was unaware of which was kind of cool.

For Sunday we all of us, including Hemi, went to the Fremont Street Fair. There was not there since there was a chance of rain and the wind had been kicking up that day. We then went by some store where Mike and Jer participated in what I dubbed a pug circle jerk; they spent the entire time in the shop discussing pugs and other small dog breeds with the shop owners. Yes, they have become those kinds of dog people.

After getting back we went over to University Village so that I could get a Jamba Juice (they need to come to Vancouver) and Jackie could look at the iPhone. It actually looks like the iPhone is cheaper for Jackie over the life of a new cell phone plan then the package she was looking at which surprised me. The visit to the store also sparked my interest in getting an Aliph Jawbone since my Jabra JX10 felt uncomfortable in my ear on the drive down and there was a time during the drive where my dad could not hear me because of the background noise.

I believe while we waited for dinner time to roll around Jackie, Jer, and myself played Scrabble. Jer trounced Jackie and I; something we knew going in thanks to it being a word game and the fact that Jer has played Scrabble online for literally years.

Once it was time for dinner we went to the Crab Pot at Pier 57. Jer and Jackie got a meal where they literally dump a bowl of seafood on the table and you use a mallet to open up the shells. Made a mess but fun to watch.

The drive home was fast. Did it in about 2.5 hours thanks to no traffic and short border wait. Could have been even shorter if it had not been raining.

A very small number of photos can be found here. Below is a video of Jackie putting her years of mallet practice on Channing to good use.

What I did today

For no particular reason I feel like blogging about what I accomlished today. Prepare to be bored. =)

After waking up and driving Meesh to work I ended up writing a program to generate the Fibonacci sequence in Forth. For the programmers out there unfamiliar with Forth, you can think of it as a stack-based almost-assembly language. For you non-techies, I wrote a program in a language no one but people who program things like toasters use.

I then got some work done. I once again learned how much I wish Java was different. Today was the lack of closures or partial function evaluation. Luckily it was not too hard to roll my own solution as the objects I wanted a partial evaluation make a total number of two. At least I still feel good about my design decisions I have made in my re-implementation of my thesis code. But I will need to work on it this weekend (don't want to put off writing the test code or else I will come to regret it later as I won't get around to writing the tests).

Google's new Social Graph API really caught my attention today. It's the reason I now have a list of friends and their blogs in the right-hand column of both this blog and my Python blog. I really hope various online services and people do what is needed to make the associations people have with one another exposed online so that one does not have to rely on Facebook and other social networking sites. I can see some really cool things coming out of this if it catches on.

Went to a bar to meet up with Meesh and some folks. Chatted for a couple of hours.

That is about it. I did other random things throughout the day, such as play a good chunk of Portal with the developer commentary on, but I think I covered all of the major things.

Winter Break, part 2: Bay Area

The second part of my winter break took place in the Bay Area so that I could spend New Years Eve with Meesh. When I arrived on the 30th we went to hang out with Debbie. Had a nice, leisure evening.

On New Years Eve Meesh and I went up to SF to hang out with Jeff. Had dinner with a friend of Jeff's since kindergarten. Afterwards we played Rock Band until 5:00 in the morning.

During the trip I also managed to see other friends. Didn't really get any downtime, unfortunately.

My flight out of SF was delayed 2.5 hours. While I was waiting Southwest played a movie quiz game. They even let us Alaska Airlines passengers participate. =) I do miss the US short-hop airlines.

Winter Break, part 1: visiting Mom

Since my winter vacation breaks down nicely into segments I am going to blog about each part individually.  The first part was going down to my mother's after getting my paper submission in.

Getting there was no big thing, although LAX still sucks.  Mom's cell phone battery is shot and she didn't have her car charger on her, so that made the pick-up a little difficult.  Luckily I stick out in a crowd so Mom spotted me.

After the pick-up I had my requisite late-night In-N-Out meal.  Good as always.  =)

The next day I started what would be the trend for the next nine days (i.e., each of the full days I was there); waking up at about 10:00 and helping my mother in the garage and house in preparations of moving in March until 22:00 at night.  I did manage to fit in time to check my email and the news, along with helping high schoolers participating in GHOP. But otherwise I didn't really get around to any of the things I wanted to get done for myself.

I did get to see my aunt and one of my cousins.  I also saw some old high school friends.  Had dinner at my mom's old friend's house.  But a good portion of the time was just spent tossing stuff into the trash bin (which we filled two of) or putting stuff into lock-top bins.

Not always the most entertaining, but it helped my mother out immensely.  Plus we managed not to kill each other which is good.  =)

I have chilblains

Chilblains are another disorder/illness/whatever that I have had the pleasure of contracting while living in Vancouver. As if I needed another reason to want to move back to the Bay Area.

Laid back Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a rather laid back affair. There were eight of us total and so it didn't feel like a party but a nice dinner.

Even getting here was laid back. I was the fourth car in line at the border coming back. Fourth! I got through in five minutes! Why can't the border always be like that?

Probably the biggeset negative of this visit has been how bloody cold it has been. With highs in the low 40s and lows down to 31, it has not exactly been warm outside. At least it has been clear outside.

Come see Meesh perform this Saturday, Nov. 17th!

Meesh and her mental health comedy class is holding their graduation on Granville Island this Saturday, Nov. 17th!  See here for details.

2010 Olympic countdown

This is a photo of the 2010 Olympics countdown clock outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery. I hope I am done with my Ph.D. before the Olympics in 2 ¼ years. So I have decided to use the Olympic clock as my own personal graduation doomsday clock. I have also added a countdown clock to the sidebar of this blog (decided I only needed a resolution down to the day for mine). Only 877 days left!

The clock also marks the first time I have written any JavaScript from scratch for public viewing. =)

New business card design

While I have extended the file to add the necessary margins for the bleed printing and I have not designed the back (which will contain my web site address and email address in very plain B&W), this is the design of the front of my next set of business cards.

I decided I wanted to continue the tradition of have chaotic structure to my card. My previous card had my personal information encoded on it (for the programmers out there: I took the ASCII values of printable values and created a 0-255 spread and set the B part of the RGB pixels). While I have been quite happy with that card and received many compliments, I felt it was time for a change. For one the card is approaching four years old so it seems stale to me. Plus the personal information encoded on it is very old and outdated.

I had been planning on using a white text on black background with some reddish hues for some time. I was originally planning on doing the offside name with a hand-drawn line image like my old card. But then I found NodeBox which is an OS X program that takes Python source code and creates images. I then realized I could write a Python script to auto-generate the image I wanted with some randomness to keep the organic feel to it.

So the colours obviously scale from yellow in the middle to red on the edge in a proper gradient. The boxes scale from the middle to the edge based on the size of a lowercase "t". They boxes alternate which direction they have a random vertical shift. Everything else is a bunch of mathematical fidgeting until I got a card a liked.

I am planning on a glossy finish as I don't think matte would work with the rich black. Otherwise I have a PDF that should be print-ready.

Hopefully I can get my act together and have them printed by US Thanksgiving.

Goodbye Twitter, hello Jaiku

I deleted my Twitter account the other day in favour of Jaiku. I just couldn't find a Twitter client on OS X that worked well consistently. Plus their IM support didn't work so well (e.g., I turned on IM notifications and yet I never was notified of anything but my own posts). And finally there have been some availability issues at random occasions.

So I moved over to Jaiku. I am using Juhu as a desktop app and it's rather nice. Plus the IM support is good. I even like their settings pages better. The only drawback so far is that the only badge Jaiku has for blogs that actually lists the last few updates is Flash-based. Otherwise I am happy so far.

The magic of student art

Yes, that is a blow-up globe entitled "Brown Globe".

I went to UBC's student art gallery yesterday after I dropped off my Ph.D. tuition scholarship/award/thing. It was a small show with eight total pieces. Seemed like each student got to have two pieces. One piece was a bunch of latex gloves blow up and tied together with string or from the ceiling. Another was photos/video of some guys playing golf. Rather odd stuff.

And I was asked to not take any photographs (after I snapped this one). That seems kind of lame to do for a student gallery, though. Since the university is public (just like all other universities in Canada) then some public money went into this, and thus you would think that letting a member of the public snap a picture would be within reasonable use.

Went on a hike today

Meesh and I joined some friends on a hike in North Vancouver today. We took the SeaBus over to North Van and took a bus to hike up to the salmon hatchery at the base of Cleveland Dam. After that we went and so the "Giant Fir" (which was not that impressive when you have seen Redwoods and Sequoias in real life). After that we hiked on the Capilano Pacific trail a ways down and then sat by the river to have lunch and relax. Once we were rested we hiked all the way down to the North Shore.


Never felt exhausted, but definitely tired. =) It was a very nice day, though, with the weather being gorgeous and having good company for all 10 hours of the trip.

I need a good book on personal finances

I have always been pretty good with my money. I never carry any credit card debt more than a month (and that usually happens these days only because I put something on my AMEX but don't have enough in my US bank account to cover the payment until I transfer money from my Canadian account). I try not to over-spend (although I am not perfect at stopping myself from making large payments =). Overall I am basically happy with how I manage my money.

But how I manage my money only works while I am a student. When I hit the real world I don't know how what I need to do. I know I should max out my 401(K) employer matching, but should I put even more into my 401(K), or should I divest my retirement investments to prevent the issue of my 401(K) tanking? And how much does one put into retirement: 10%, 20%? How about for housing: I have heard no more than a third of my income. But are all of these numbers net or gross income? And what is an IRA?

In other words, how does one handle the expenses that one starts dealing with when they leave university (mainly a mortgage and retirement)? Does anyone know of a good book on this subject matter? Or does one not exist and this is why you pay a financial consultant to help you with this stuff?

It has gotten hot here (and what I did last weekend)!

Since I interned at Google last summer I have not been in Vancouver for a summer. While it is technically still spring it is hot like summer here already! While the weather sites have been saying it has been highs of 23C (73F), it feels more like 27C (80F) (although it is being reported as 26C right now).

This might have to do with the airport being the point of tempature measurement for Vancouver. It's right off the water and tends to feel cooler over there.

I also realized I didn't blog about my Memorial Day weekend. While Canada obviously doesn't celebrate Memorial Day, Meesh had some friends from Seattle come up and visit. Saturday was spent on a leisurely bike ride around Vancouver. Over the 10 miles we biked we went as far east as China Creek Park, over to Main and 6th for lunch, hit up Granville Island, and then came home.

Sunday we drove up to Squamish. On the way we visited the Stawamus Chief Provincial Park for a short hike (some day we will go back and hike up the Chief). Also very briefly saw Alice Lake Provincial Park. On the way back we had some really good Italian in West Vancouver and got pies at Savary Island.

Monday was spent just walking around Kitsilano Beach.

Overall it was a fun weekend.

Still feels weird to be considered a "celebrity" in the Python community

I am acting as a mentor in Google's Summer of Code again this year. For those of you who don't know what this is, basically Google pays students $4,500 over the summer to work on open source projects. This lets them program over the summer instead of work a fast food job or something. The hope is that they will enjoy the community they work with along with the altruistic nature of it that they will continue on with their work and get involved in open source.

Anyway, the student I am mentoring, Alexandre, has a a blog. He has a post about finding out that he was accepted for his GSoC project. The thing in the post that prompted this blog post is that he called me a "Python star developer". That was rather flattering!

Just one of those things, along with being recognized by people at PyCon and having people thank me for my work, that still surprises me. I hope I never grow accustomed to it as it is rather nice to have it put a smile on my face every time something like this happens.