It’s New Year’s Eve, so an appropriate time to make resolutions and such. I won’t describe them in depth; I’m mainly putting this here as a place to remember them.
Resolution:
Goals:
Happy New Year to all my numerous readers!
I never seem to be able to read technical books. It’s fun to buy them, but then I get a little ways in and forget about it. I usually treat reading as recreation. Maybe I need to treat reading a technical book as a project. Now, rather than the twin problems of not being able to read technical books, and not being able to do side projects, I just have the one.
(I can’t take credit for this idea. There’s a quote somewhere that, “You don’t read programming books; you work through them.”.)
I’m assuming it’s actually worthwhile to read technical books. I think it’s more fun to just mess around with something until I understand it, occasionally consulting the web where necessary. Here’s a new format for a programming book: 600 pages, divided into 6 sections. Each section starts with a 10 page tutorial, followed by 90 pages of reference material for you to consult while you’re messing around with whatever tech the book is about, designed to answer the questions of “so how do I do…?” and “why am i getting this error…?”.
Someone’s probably thought of this idea too. Know of any books like that for MVC frameworks?
I’m reading Microserfs (first chapter here), which is great so far. In the second or third chapter the characters start talking about playing with “Lego”. Whenever I hear somebody use “Lego” as a collective noun, I get this angry feeling of injustice. At first I thought people were just caving to the Lego thought police, who enforce their trademark because they have to, or because they believe this will optimize the profitability of their brand. But it seems some people actually talk that way.
This is surreal to me. When I was a kid, I didn’t play with “Lego”, or “Lego bricks.” I played with Legos.
G-Bike is a mini-game within Final Fantasy 7. It is found in the Wonder Square of the Golden Saucer area, and can be used to win GP, which can then be used to compete in the Battle Square. It is completely skill-based, not depending on any stats or items you’ve accumulated up to that point (except that it costs 200 Gil to play). It may or may not be a faster way to earn GP than chocobo racing–I haven’t put much time into that yet, but at least you don’t have to capture a motorcycle in the wild, then breed it until you get one worthy of racing. I hear that chocobo racing also has some other advantages in terms of loot, so if you just want to get through the game in the optimum way, that might be your best bet. Check out the aforelinked strategy guide.
I define “winning” as getting 10,000 points, thus getting 10 GP (anything less and you’ll only get 0 or 2 GP). As the intro mentions, you lose points when the truck is “attacked”. Every time a biker bumps the truck, you lose about 100 points, and they can do it several times in a few seconds. Also, when a biker is destroyed in front of the truck, and the truck runs it over, you lose about 1000 points. You gain points by destroying bikers, 500 each.
Spend a few rounds practicing your attacks, without worrying about losing. If the 200 Gil charge is a problem, go outside and kill stuff or master and sell some All materia. If it were cheap, they’d call it the Plastic Saucer. As the intro mentions, you’ve got left and right slash. You also can bump the other bikers. They can’t hurt you. It seems to be possible destroy the bikers by bumping them, especially from the front, but this is hard to do. The main uses of the bump are 1) pushing them away from the truck, and 2) getting in close for a slash.
The slash takes some practice. Cloud takes a second or so to wind up for the slash, so you should take a few swings to get used to that. Then practice slashing the bikers at the right height. Which way you’re leaning affects the height of your slash. Easiest is when they’re right beside you and you’re not leaning at all. One technique is to get beside and slightly ahead of a biker, then move backward as you slash them. Another is the diving slash: moving horizontally or diagonally toward a biker while slashing. Bumping them and then slashing works too. The important thing is to get the hang of where they need to be for you to slash them.
It might be tempting to play defensively, since you lose points when the truck is hit. But if you keep the truck from being hit without killing any bikers, you’ll still have zero points. Furthermore, when you kill bikers, the game will spawn more of them (up to 3), so the faster you can kill them, the more points you can potentially earn.
When you’re done practicing, try this mental trick. Name each biker you attack after the score he’s going to give you, rounded down to the nearest 500. Mentally say his name as you attack. (Slash.) 500. (Slash.) 1000. (Truck gets hit.) (Slash) 1000 again. (Slash. Slash.) 2000. (Slash–miss!) Come back here, 2500! (Slash.) 2500… After a few rounds, you’ll get a feel for how fast your score needs to advance in order to make the 10,000 point goal.
The orange bikers seem to be more aggressive in going after the truck, but the orange and red bikers are both worth the same number of points (500). When there are no bikers on the screen, the best place to be is a length or so behind the truck. It’s possible to control the road, preventing the bikers from passing you for a while, but then you don’t get to kill them. Try to kill them before they surround the truck. If they do get near the truck (and you don’t already have a shot), wedge yourself between the truck and them, and then slash them.
The worst place a biker can be is right in front of the truck. They repeatedly do damage (lost points) when the truck bumps into them, and even more if you kill them and the truck runs them over. Try to bump them out of the path of the truck before slashing them, if possible. Don’t waste too much effort on it, though. It may be worth losing some points to kill them quickly, so you can move on to killing the next set of bikers.
Once you reach the required 10,000 points, it again becomes tempting to play defensively. This doesn’t seem to work, as it’s pretty hard to keep the bikers away from the truck. Just keep the mental count and go for the next level of of scorage. When you reach 10,000, shoot for 11,000 instead, and 12,000 when you reach that, etc.
When you learn how to win, next you need to know how many times you need to win to get the required GP. My goal was to have enough GP to play in the Battle Square for long enough get Omnislash and W-Summon, so I played G-Bike until I had about 250 GP. It sounds very Principal Skinner, but you may be able to keep yourself from getting bored by setting a higher or different goal each round. One round, shoot for 13,000, then 15,000, then take a round to practice your slashing, then try to see if you get more GP if you go over 20,000, etc.
Another famous programmer has deleted his social media accounts and pulled down his websites. The first one was _why This one is (was?) Mark Pilgrim, author of Dive Into Python, Dive Into HTML5, and several other resources with similar names. One day there, one day gone. It sounds like the premise to a mystery story. Why are these programmers removing the fruits of their hard work, risking their reputations in the process as they remove resources on which others have come to depend? Is it a prelude to real-world suicide*, or just an attempt to make a clean break with a life they no longer want? Are they disappearing–or being disappeared?
* If you are reading this and considering suicide, please seek help. I’m a programmer type, so here is a bit of logic for you: no matter how much your life might suck right now, you only get one, so you may as well stick around to see how the rest of it goes.
_why was an artist, and it was suggested that his disappearance was an artistic statement. Maybe his whole public persona was created to make that statement. A statement of what? In my mind, it’s about both the fragility and the resilience of the Web. We create links, but there’s no guarantee that what they point to will always be there. We think of Web “sites” as *places*. But without power, without a running server, without Internet access, or with someone’s active intention to remove them, they cease to exist. And yet, people have preserved what they could of _why’s work, because they cared, or because they thought it was important. People have created the Internet Archive, and attempted to archive GeoCities and Twitter. Maybe browsers of the future will let you automatically follow dead links to their archives (maybe there are already plugins for this?).
Mark, as far as I know, isn’t a performance artist, so that leads me to suspect he had a more unpleasant reason. I don’t know him personally, but I do hope he’s alright. And if so, how about leaving a note?
Update: “Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.” — Jason Scott
I’ve apparently figured out the trick to everything I’ve ever done that remotely resembled discipline. First of all, it takes the form “Whenever X, do Y.” Second, there has to be a tangible result each time. Third, it has to fit in with existing patterns, not stretching them too far. Here’s an example: Before bed, do the dishes. Here’s another: When you do something at work, log it. I’ve been doing both for over a year, and the second for probably half a decade, with only minor lapses. I am a very undisciplined person, yet these patterns were easy to establish.
I think this is an example of classical conditioning. The behaviors aren’t automatic though. I think it’s that the antecedent gets associated with the anticipation of the tangible result. I can work all day without logging things, and then it becomes uncomfortable that they are not logged.
This is an exciting new toy, because I’m a programmer, and I’ve just found a way to hack myself. Give me conditional jumps and I’ll write you a Unix.
I’ve been listening to a podcast called Out There Radio. It ran for two years on the University of Georgia radio station (mid 2005 to mid 2007), and delved a bit into things like Bigfoot, and “hidden history,” before finding what seemed to be its calling, if a radio show can have a calling. They covered the JFK assassination and from there, conspiracy theory became the primary focus of the show. Eventually they did an episode about 9/11, or at least some of it. There were too many loose threads to follow in the time available (in the second season, each episode was 2 hours long).
Another episode centered on the 9/11 Truth movement, which is about uncovering or disseminating the truth about 9/11, whatever that may be; as well as the kind of resistance that 9/11 Truthers meet. The two main schools of thought, they said, are called LIHOP and MIHOP. These theories either assert that the government Let It Happen On Purpose, or Made It Happen On Purpose. Whether either of these theories is true, 9/11 is sure being Milked For All It’s Worth (MFAIW). We are involved in two wars, and civil liberties are being eroded as intelligence and law enforcement receive more funding.
Given the resistance that the 9/11 Truth movement encounters in trying to bring the truth of the matter to light, perhaps its energies are better spent making sure that the next 9/11 is not nearly as profitable. There are millions out there that, whatever the truth may be, believe whatever they see on the news–and that what they see on the news is what their attention should be focused on. Focus on awakening the public– in small ways, and initially with issues that seem less important than 9/11– to the ways in which they are being misdirected, and teaching them to direct their own attention and find their own information. This has the advantage of presenting a harder target to those who would call you crazy conspiracy theorists or otherwise try to censor you, and you may get people on board who wouldn’t have joined the 9/11 Truth movement. Who could argue with the “Media Literacy Movement”?
Then again, maybe I’m just one of “them” trying to direct your attention away from what really matters.
I’ve noticed that in ALL problems, once I establish a solid consistent language around the feature I’m building, the programming part is easy. This is true even on complex problems. Its very rare to have a problem I can talk about in detail that is not easily solvable.
I couldn’t unwind this evening. I tried really hard. It wasn’t even a particularly stressful day. Maybe it has more to do with the bad ergonomics of my work cube creating tension. Maybe I can’t really unwind while hanging around my apartment. I should probably rearrange both my work space and my apartment.
I had a thought about the resolution I made the other day, about doing things wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly might not be the right word. What I had in mind was something I remembered from somebody’s profile on a site way back when people had to code their own website if they wanted something like what social networks offer today. The site asked for hobbies. His answer was something like, “I have no hobbies. Everything I do, I do full-out.” I’m not sure what full-out means. It might be a Canadian expression. You get the point though.
Anyway, the thought I had was that in order to do things wholeheartedly, I should refrain from things that I can’t commit to doing wholeheartedly. Which is not to say that there’s no place for short-lived experiments. If something’s an experiment, do it as an experiment, rather than a half-assed attempt at a long-term project.
This raises the question, how do you know when you can commit to something wholeheartedly? This reminds me of my belief about software project estimation, i.e. that it’s bullshit. This is fine. All ideas are bullshit.
Today is my 30th birthday. Last night an idea came to me. I would make Birthday Resolutions. In this way I would transform it from just another, slightly more depressing, day into something meaningful. The resolutions are these:
Today has been a good day. My coworkers took me to lunch and bought me dessert. The Hibachi chef was the best I’ve seen at that place so far. The Blizzard tasted better than average. One of my coworkers said something really nice: “Thanks for being born.”
I’ve been in a good mood. Part of my good mood could be sleep deprivation induced euphoria. I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m kind of tired, so I don’t think I’m doing anything crazy tonight. I think I’ll go for a walk though.
