1)

I’m having trouble motivating myself to do anything today. I did one load of laundry and vacuumed half of my apartment. The rest of the time was taken up by Angry Birds. It’s a high-quality game, and I’m considering shelling out for the full application.

The sound effects are hilarious but not annoying, which I find an impressive touch.

2)

I want to write more about technical things because those things take up more of my time. I’ll have to experiment with ways to do it that are less boring than straight forward how-to’s.

I’d really like to find partners/mentors for programming. Self-learning is great, but I do need some type of feedback when I’m learning things.

Lately, I’ve been working on a Ruby on Rails application called RackView. I’m just playing around with a way to replace an increasingly unwieldy Visio diagram of the racks of one of the labs at work. I’d like to share what I’ve done. I can’t do it now because all the code’s on a VM I installed on my work laptop. My work laptop is at… work. I prefer doing rails development on a Linux machine over a Windows machine, which is why it’s on a VM.

3)

I read Game Frame and found it very disappointing. It’s supposed to go through and show how you can apply game mechanics to everyday life. I found it way too breezy to be useful. Anyway, it’s kind of soured me on a genre of books. I picked it up in the science section, but it’s more of a business/self-help book. I guess what attracted me to the book was that I like philosophies that can be put into practice. In general, I find the books I’ve been reading too shallow to be useful. I’m also going to be more careful about avoiding pop psychology books and anything written by a journalist.

The last 3 books I picked up were: a collection of DFW essays, How I Became Stupid, and The Bed of Procrustes. I already finished the last one listed, which is a book of aphorisms by Taleb. He’s got a great aphorism about business writers. I don’t have the book with me, so I can’t share it. Sorry. Haha.

I’m really excited to start reading How I Became Stupid. I originally read this in high school during my existentialism phase, and I really, really liked it. I’ve looked for this several times and couldn’t find it, so I’d concluded that I lost the book. Recently, I saw it at a bookstore in Berkeley, on top a stack of books. I decided it was fate, and I had to buy the book. I was worried that it wouldn’t hold up — The Myth of Sisphysus didn’t feel as brilliant the second time around — but the store clerk ringing me up said it was really good.

I have prided myself on buying interesting books (and I’ve been complimented on this). Many of the last books I’ve picked up have been duds, and I started to doubt my prowess. I think I can change this by leaning more towards literature and discounting recommendations from certain sources.