One of my students used audio in his project. And I fucking hate audio. (This will in no way affect the grade.) For some reason, the volume control on the mac wasn’t working, so I had to search for the remote to mute the sound on the monitor. I couldn’t find the fucking remote. My desk is a mess, and I assumed it was somewhere there. So, I started cleaning up. While shuffling around papers, I discovered some glue sticks that I didn’t even know were there. I put them away, but one slipped out of the container, and bounced… off the remote face-down on the floor. Whatever works.

When you boil it down, cloud just means your shit is on someone else’s computer.

I find lecturing more difficult for AIC than my writing classes. I don’t feel as if they are retaining as much information as I’d like. (Luckily, the class is mostly exercised-based, which means they are still doing the learning even if everything didn’t stick from lecture.)

One of my CS professors did lecture by hacking away at code in class and narrating as he went along. I liked the professor. Plus, TIC had that giant projector screen in TMF too. Since I haven’t taught a CS class before, I kind of follow that model.

I think one problem is the room configuration. We have a projector set up. I sit at a computer and type away, or comment on code that has already been typed. All the seats are arranged along the walls, and the projector screen is at the front. My computer is in the middle, facing the projector screen. They’re all facing the projector screen, so I can’t really see their faces. I could see a few faces if I turned around. I’m used to lecturing at the front and seeing everyone. In fact, I can’t even see most of them at all since I’m too short to look over the computer that I’m using. It makes it difficult to gauge engagement. I’m sitting down too, so I’m less energetic. I’d prefer a chalkboard.

The room configuration isn’t the only factor. I started providing code samples for them to use for their exercises. This makes it less important to listen to lecture, I think. So that might affect engagement. That’s only a gut feeling, though, and not really based on data. However, I feel like the code samples are really helpful (based on the way I learn, and based on how I see them building on it for their own code).

One change I might make is providing code samples before lecture. That way, they can look at it and play with it. Kind of get an idea of what it does. Then, I can explain more about how it works in class. I think that would provide better scaffolding for the lecture. Otherwise, I sometimes think it’s hard to figure out what’s going on during lecture.

As the class has progressed, I’ve started to feel more useless. Which is actually a good thing. It means they’re becoming more self-sufficient. I’m still busy, but I’m not getting tugged in a million directions at once, and the questions they do have are more interesting and not trivial.

In retrospect, perhaps I could’ve started with a game framework on Monday. I could’ve gone over the game loop and entities. Wednesday could’ve been keypresses and collision detection. And today would’ve been sprites and backgrounds. Dang.

Yesterday, I was just going to do animation with canvas, and then handle events today with a game loop. Instead, I jumped straight ahead so that the assignment was more fun. They made it so they could fly a UFO around the screen. This leaves me unsure of what to do tomorrow. Particle generation, as I had once planned for Wednesday? Sprites? I guess this wouldn’t be an issue if I was planning to have them work on the exercise for the entire class. These topics are complex. But I want to leave enough time to work on projects. So, I somehow have to simplify things without making it too simple. I wish I could just skip to a game framework. I am stress-eating candy.

I get more excited about JavaScript as a language the more I learn about it. I’m really intrigued by the way it treats objects. I’ll probably buy a few books on it soon.

Remember the old days when JavaScript was mostly used to do annoying things?

Someone shared this on facebook: How Doctors Die. It’s a really good read.

Percival did his job last Friday. I sat out the game, and the spies failed to assassinate Merlin, picking Percival instead.

Friday was also Alumni Day at TIC. We lunched, and several people hung out at AIC afterwards.

The topic for AIC was Ajax. It’s shockingly easy with jQuery. I made a point to make the assignment shorter (since the last ones have been so long), and everyone finished early. Wednesday was passwords and PHP sessions. Monday was database design. Next week will be all Canvas stuff. One student worked on the bonus portion for Friday’s exercise and seemed excited, and I got excited in turn. This stuff is really cool.

After AIC, there was more hanging out (and games) and a movie. Some of us saw Monsters U. Fun movie.

I looked up Yelp’s mission statement and was surprised to see a simple “Our purpose: To connect people with great local businesses.” Every tech company these days has to revolutionize the way we do X, or disrupt such and such marketplace. I imagine if Yelp was a startup now, their goal might be to revolutionize the way people connect with local businesses. And with its success, we wouldn’t be surprised to see tech media reprinted PR releases about how the revolution is happening.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, Yelp is something some people use sometimes, a few people use a lot, and a lot of people don’t use at all. It’s another option that I appreciate, but it hasn’t radically altered the way I shop and eat.

I dislike the arrogance and neomania. It feels false. (Or maybe it’s merely a distaste for revolutions coming from the Burkean in me, haha.)

Well, that’s all the time I have for now. I could go on and on. Instead, I’ll stop here. Time to eat breakfast and visit TIC. Good-bye.

The spies keep winning at Resistance. I’m not sure why. I was almost always a spy, so that probably helped the spy side. I also think certain students are just naturally better at being spies than Resistance. Generally, I think my students are too quick to vote up missions and not doing enough talking and logicking as non-spies. Or maybe the bigger groups favor spies a bit more? It’s harder to figure out who the spy is when the first mission starts as 3.

In an attempt to tip the balance a bit more towards good, I brought in Avalon. The Merlin knows who everyone is, and even though the spies can assassinate him, I feel like it should help good. Unfortunately, the first time we played, the Merlin thought someone was a spy who wasn’t because of how the thumb was positioned. In attempt to change the balance more, I added Oberon. He’s basically a spy cut off from the rest of the spies. They don’t know who he is; he doesn’t know who they are; but the Merlin knows who he is. I think I may even try to add Percival. Percival knows who the Merlin is, which should tilt it towards good even more. Or maybe I should add the Lady of the Lake. I just worry that will take too long since we only have 30 minutes for break.

It’s strange what sticks when you teach. Dev used a Reading List (books for each class) from the ATDP database as an example when explaining a many-to-many relationship. Now they all think of that kind of table as a reading list; I can use “reading list” as a shorthand. What the heck is the formal name for it?

Most TV shows aren’t that good when they start out. It usually takes a few episodes or even a full season before a show starts to figure itself out. So I usually try to avoid judgment at first. I try not to dismiss a show when it’s just beginning.

This BART strike is annoying. Luckily, I still have the option of taking the bus to campus or walking there if I really have to. I have no idea what I’d do if I had to commute to SF. Usually, during labor disputes, I default to rooting for the workers over the ownership. For this scenario, I’ve adhered to the default, not having done much research. I don’t know what to think about the people who default to rooting for the other side. I remember looking at comments at ESPN during the NFL lockout, and people were blaming the rich players, even though the owners made way more and it was a lockout, not a strike. Of course, regardless of who’s right or wrong with the BART strike, I’m annoyed at how it affects me personally because I’m not a saint and I still think about myself.

AIC continues its fast pace. We focused on jQuery for Monday and Wednesday, going over DOM manipulation and then event handlers. On Friday, we started to ease back into PHP, going over front-end and back-end validation. This week we’re doing databases. Monday was SQL and the next two days will be PDO. Tomorrow we’ll focus on read operations, where they’ll get to display my comics. Friday will be designing a database and writing to it. I’m worried that may be too complicated.

I wanted to write an essay that would encompass the evolution of my current philosophies. I keep getting bogged down because there’s so much to cover and I don’t know what’s the best order. This seems like something I should try to break down into parts.

The first week of AIC is over. What have they learned? The first day we reviewed HTML forms. On Wednesday, they learned the syntax for PHP. On Friday, they learned how to process forms using the PHP superglobals. Back in my day, we didn’t have superglobals. We just had regular globals. No really. It’s true. PHP would just automagically create variables; we were way too trusting back when I was their age. I also went over JavaScript on Friday, but they didn’t do any exercises with it.

In general, the thing I was most worried about was pacing. This is a new class, so I wasn’t sure how much material would be appropriate. In general, I feel as if the exercises are taking longer than I thought they would (well, for most students). I think most of my overestimation came from expecting them to be better programmers. I’ve been programming almost non-stop. While I’ve forgotten a lot (entire languages and libraries), I never forgot about programming itself. My students, on the other hand, my have taken Java summer, or two summers, ago and then never used it. Next year, Dev and I decided that the first HW assignment should include some programming review. We already had HTML review for the first assignment.

Maybe tomorrow (ach, not tomorrow, way too busy… class prep, lunch, class, then house night), I will post some of the assignments we’ve done.

Still, the overall structure we have for learning the material is still in place. At least that pacing has gone okay.

So, wow, they’ve learned two programming languages already.

I remain excited. The students are fun. Some of their assignments cracked me up. I brought Resistance for break (and somehow managed to lose track of one of my other spies, oops… I’m usually so good at that game). No great stories from that, but one student seemed to be a natural spy.

The first project has now been assigned and I can’t wait to see what they do with that.

Next week is jQuery and form validation.

Obama continues to prove how terrible he is when it comes to civil liberties. I keep bringing this up, but it’s more relevant now than ever. Obama betrayed everyone in 2008 with FISA. He voted to give the telcos immunity for breaking the law and spying on us. That was 5 years ago. I don’t know what I can do. I feel like it’ll just be worse in another 5 years.

We have bamboo floors at our apartment. They look great, like wood floors. However, bamboo is soft, so it dents easily. It is a stupid material for a floor because you stomp on it and put furniture on it. It’s a freakin’ floor. Of course it’s going to end up with dents. Floors should be durable.

I suppose bamboo’s main advantage is that it’s cheap. If you assume a tenant is going to treat a floor like a floor and you’re going to have to replace it anyway, it might be best to go with a cheaper alternative.

It does look really nice, though. Way better than the old carpet.

[Spoilerrific, as is pretty much anything I write.]

Because the book is currently being made into a movie, some of my friends have started reading/re-reading Ender’s Game. The movie is coming out in November. I read Ender’s Game so long ago that almost everything was fresh in the re-read. I only remembered the ending and some of the battle tactics. It was a quick read. I wish I could compare my thoughts on it now to my thoughts on it then, but I have no idea what I thought. I think that I wasn’t as interested in some of the deeper ideas. I mean, I never bothered to read any of the sequels and was happy with the book as it was. Now, I’m kind of interested in what happens afterward.

But instead of going to the future, I’m currently reading Ender’s Shadow, which I’ve never read. I feel like there’s a lot more action going on inside Bean’s head than inside Ender’s. Bean does a lot more observing. A lot of scenes in Ender’s Game you could easily see being translated to the screen, but it seems Ender’s Shadow would be harder to translate. Bean is also much weirder than Ender, which makes it harder to relate to him as a protagonist.

Stevie loves Bean. She should write about him.

I felt very sorry for Ender. He didn’t want to be a killer, but he was tricked into being one. It’s such a weird tension with how they used him. He did have a killer instinct. However, his empathy made him a better strategist. It makes him a better killer, but it makes him not want to kill. So, they had to trick him to use all his best traits. I just felt so bad because the whole time he’s afraid of being like Peter, and in the end, he wipes out an entire sentient species.

Robb Stark: ” … I’ve made a huge terrible mistake.”

What a cute callback with Gilly calling Sam a wizard. Too bad no one will ever remember it because of all the other shit in this episode.

Just tweeted this: It was the leeches. #TeamStannis

Orientation was today. It seemed like it went okay.

Also, I almost missed the bus, but I think that will be a comic instead of a blog post.

I’ve left the Bay Area twice. First, to Colorado when I was in middle school. Second, to Baltimore for college. I don’t want to leave again. The weather is great, and more importantly, I have fantastic circles of friends and family. I love it here. With this, at least, I am content.

Strangely, I’ve never heard career advice that mentioned geography first. Interested in movies/TV? Move to LA. The “dream” comes first. But what happens if you have roots in a place, if you’ve already begun to build a life? Why leave? Why undo all that hard work?

Some suggest traveling to find who you are. However, the insights gained are often shallow and/or easily forgotten. A flash of insight isn’t enough to create behavioral change. That requires hard work and time. Sure, you can learn about other cultures and expand your mind, but habits and worldviews are reshaped through our everyday behavior. The real work doesn’t begin until you make sure you’re the person you want to be everyday. Otherwise, you’ll surely drift back to your old habits.

Place matters. Learn to be a better friend by seeing the same people all the time. It’s harder to build lasting connections without the benefits of geography. When someone lives further away, you see them less often. Want to be closer to your family, emotionally? Live closer to them, geographically. Eat at the same restaurants, shop at the same stores, get familiar with the people there. Forget travel. Build something, damnit. It’s something that can only happen when you’re in the same place for a long time.

Perhaps we have it backwards, then. Consider geography first and then career. Pick an industry that is strong where you already live (or where you want to live).

I’ve only stumbled into my current, still young career in software. I’m 26, and I still actually have no idea what I want to do with my life. I majored in philosophy, not CS. But it was way easier to find a job doing software. I have other interests. I was way into politics when I was in high school and college. I’m still way into television, and I would love to write for a sitcom. But I don’t want to live in DC or LA. I want to live here. Thus, working in the tech industry isn’t actually something I stumbled into, but something I have now chosen.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it. I definitely do enjoy programming. But I don’t necessarily find purpose in it. I don’t know if it was what I was meant to do. (I’m opposed to teleological thinking anyway when it comes to careers, so there isn’t really anything I was meant to do.) I could probably be just as happy doing some other things. And I would be just as clueless about what I wanted to do.

Want a good heuristic (if you’re rather privileged socioeconomically) for picking what to do? Do what your parent(s) did. Presumably, there are jobs doing what they do because they live here and can support a family. They should have some career capital they can expend getting you a job in their own industry; it’ll at least be easier than helping you in finding something unrelated.

Coming way too soon. And yet, I can’t wait.

Stevie and I made our way through a few more episodes of Arrested Development. I’m starting to get more into it. I think there are two factors in play. First, the episodes included ones focusing on Tobias and Gob, my favorite characters. Second, the story becomes more enjoyable as the layers build. Stevie mentioned that it’d be hard to judge the series until really after watching it twice. Given the complexity of the storytelling, I’m inclined to agree.

I am part way through season 4 of Arrested Development. I’m not enjoying it as much as the first 3 seasons, but at least it hasn’t disappointed me as much as Community. I just don’t feel like I’m laughing as much. Hopefully, it’ll pick up.

I don’t have the time to write something long, but it’s impossible to think up something short to say.

There is no new episode of Game of Thrones this weekend. Noooo! Sad face emoticon.

I’ve been playing a bunch of games on iPad. Stevie gets free apps from Starbucks, and Apple puts out a free app every week, so I’ve been able to mostly snag games for free the last few months.

The only game I’ve shelled out for was Bastion. I was eyeing it for a long time. When it went on sale for only a dollar, I bought it without hesitation. Not only is the game fantastic, it has excellent music. The publisher put the sheet music (piano and guitar) on their website for free. As of now, I’ve pretty much memorized Zulf’s song. I can sing and play piano at the same time.

Before that, I learned Bruno Mars’s When I Was Your Man and (part of) Muse’s Explorers. Those songs I learned via YouTube rather than sheet music. It’s amazing how many free piano tutorials there are. This kind of stuff is new to me, since I’ve mostly stuck to classical music. Even though I’ve played some jazz and some Disney — by the way, Gaston is the greatest song ever — I haven’t done much singing. I’ve also learned that my singing range is balls.

The next song to learn is Setting Sail, Coming Home from the Bastion soundtrack, and do it as a duet with Stevie. The piano rhythm’s more complicated than previous pieces I’ve tried to sing with. It’ll be quite the challenge.

A lot is happening this weekend, for both real people interaction and media consumption:

• Smash night at my place
• Graduation party for my cousin
• New season of Arrested Development
• A wedding (GoT)
• Fast & Furious 6

MySpace was ugly, but at least there was individuality. I miss the old web and the way it showed our creativity. Before we had powerful tools, we were forced to design our own websites.¹ Everything had its own custom touches. I remember looking through the weblogs that Lloyd linked to and seeing how each one was different.

Then, facebook came and wiped out creativity. We were all given a profile and they all looked the same. White and blue. Boxes. At least we got our own picture. The old frontier was replaced by the pre-fab web. I guess it was better: MySpace was godawful ugly. Glittery gifs for text, unreadable backgrounds, sparklies following the cursor, and pop music that automatically switched on. Yeah, I don’t miss that. But we’ve still lost something.

WordPress came along. Customization became picking someone else’s theme, instead of making something of your own. Even now, my own weblog is some default theme. Unremarkable. A lot of corporate websites re-use the same themes and start-ups use the same styled landing pages.

Now everyone’s switched to Tumblr, and we’ve moved from the pre-fab web to the primacy of the feed. No one actually visits anyone’s tumblr. Instead, they get a stream of posts from different sources.² So, we can pick a theme, but no one will see it anyway. Individuality is stripped away, and we’re all lumped into an equal pile. Well, except the corporations that pay for sponsored posts. The same is true with facebook. Before, you’d visit someone’s profile and post on their wall. That was how you’d send a message. Even though it was pre-fab, at least it listed our interests. Now, we don’t care for that. Just give me a list of everything from everyone, please.

Of course, the feed age is even worse than that. We can’t even be bothered to post original content anymore. No more reflection. Let’s just repost a funny picture someone else made. (Oh and this picture is a drawing of someone else’s characters, who are actually from a remake.) Individuality gets stripped from our pages, and then it gets stripped from our content.³

The nostalgia becomes most potent when I see my own weblog. I look at the default theme and cringe. If I’m going to rail against this sort of thing, shouldn’t I at least take the time to not be a hypocrite? What happened to my individuality?₄ In the frontier days, I designed (and then redesigned) psycho-ward.org from scratch. I suppose that some time in the near future, I will need to make this weblog into something that better reflects who I am right now.

¹This is a narrative, so it is a lie. There was Geocities back then and Frontpage and all sorts of options to make websites easier for the less tech-savvy.

²Again with the lies. This has been around since RSS.

³Then again, so many of the original popular blogs collected links to other content. They were aggregators themselves, not creators or artists or even writers.

⁴Much of it was channeled into my comic. Some of it was taken offline due to the demands of needing a professional persona. More importantly, while I have made modifications to themes in the past, this blog has never really been that much of a creative outlet beyond the writing.

My abilities to forecast the future are very limited. When I was in high school, I imagined we’d all have TiVo by now. On-demand streaming never occurred to me (probably because dial-up was still a recent memory). Nor did the iPad, which is now my primary screen for consuming television. Here we are, 8 or so years later, and we still have cable TV, and we still have network TV (and I watch it more than ever). The models that were supposed to be disrupted are still around. Perhaps people think they will inevitably die, but some of those prognosticators have been saying the same thing for years.

The Smart Home was inevitable back then. All our appliances would talk to each other and regulate themselves. Nonetheless, my fridge isn’t hooked up to the internet, and I still must manually open it to check what’s in there. And despite the plethora of electronic list keeping options, I mostly use pen and paper for a grocery list. I’m curious to how inevitable it really is because I don’t want my home to rely on my fickle internet connection to function. There are more security concerns. The home becomes more fragile because unconnected devices have been replaced with connected ones. So many disadvantages. Plus, if I don’t need internet in my fridge, and I won’t pay for it, then why should anyone manufacture it on a ubiquitous scale? The inevitable seems less inevitable.

One of my favorite jokes is how instead of our wrist watches becoming phones, our phones became pocket watches. It so delightfully captures our inability to predict the future. There are some wrist watches that emulate phones, but they’re less easy to use and they do less stuff. The technology exists; sadly, no one uses it. Part of the problem, as I mentioned, is usability. Tiny-ass buttons. And who wants to shout into their wrist? One, it’s not the most ergonomic option, and two, voice commands aren’t as good as touch. I don’t think this is merely because of the limitations of voice technology. Touch interfaces are inherently more usable. (This is something I’d have to do more arguing to back up, but that’s another conversation for another day.)

When we imagine the future, we tend not to envision how it’d really work if we used it everyday. Usability requires testing, but our ideas of the future tend to be untestable. They sit in our minds as Platonic ideals, untested by the real world. So, in movies, we see a “Minority Report” interface as the future. We’ll be waving our arms around, swishing them through thin air. Of course, the keyboard and mouse already fuck us up with RSI. Let’s now use our imaginations to think about how terrible our arms would feel if we had to do that all day everyday just to make a fucking spreadsheet.

Ebooks are inevitable, as well. They’ll replace our heavy textbooks. Books themselves will because artifacts only for collectors. And yet… Students will often prefer the hard copy when they use it to study. We can’t encode ebook information spatially, as we do with books. Thus, it becomes harder to keep the information in one’s memory. It’s harder to flip back and forth between multiple pages. Ebooks have their own inherent limitations. Cui bono? The companies that make devices that read ebooks, and the publishing companies that have decreased margins but still put a ridiculous markup on the ebooks. Not necessarily the students. Ebooks may replace so many books, but that may not be because they were superior. VHS wasn’t better than Betamax either.

Google Glass may be as inevitable as the flying car, or maybe it’s as inevitable as ebooks. Maybe it’s a terrible idea that’ll never happen. Perhaps it’ll never overcome the inherent limitations of voice interfaces, and so it’ll stay a niche product. Or, perhaps it’s not even that great a product. It’ll lessen our human interactions because of the barriers between us. It’ll Hulk smash our 20th/21st century concept of privacy, giving over more information to governments and corporations. Yet, there will be some benefits and it’ll become ubiquitous despite the obvious flaws. I don’t know.

I do not know the future, but I still have an opinion on Google Glass: I hate it. And I’m allowed to hate it beyond merely being curmudgeonly because Google Glass is not inevitable, as far as we know for now. I think it looks stupid. I think a phone is just a way better computing device. I would never play games on Glass. (There’s a reason we still have consoles and not the inevitable immersive helmets that wrap around our entire heads.) I think the way it takes pictures and videos is sometimes stupid. First person POV can be useful sometimes, but I’d hate to see it all the time. Imagine if every movie looked like a first person shooter. Ugh. I hate the idea of augmented reality. I don’t want a fucking overlay when I take a walk; that’d defeat the purpose of clearing my mind with a walk. I don’t want reminders popping up when I’m trying to have a conversation. And most of all, I don’t want assholes walking around taking videos of everything and being completely distracted.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh for a product I’ve never tried. I’m exaggerating some things. Still, I’d think we’d all be worse off if everyone wore it all the time. Luckily, that future is not necessarily inevitable. Facephone isn’t anymore inevitable than wristphone. Let’s keep our computers in our pockets and off our faces.

Warning: There be spoilers ahead, potentially.

My favorite part of Star Trek Into Darkness was how it commented on the drone issue. The moral thing to do was capture the criminal and have a trial. The immoral plan was extra-judicial murder via remote missile (into someone else’s territory, no less). Bravo for that.