Audacity of Awesome

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Audacity of Awesome

Throughout my life I’ve been successful in everything that I’ve set my had my mind-on: chess, golf, hockey and other sports, school, programming, math and so on. Each time I move on to something new I run through a similar sequence of actions:

Motivation

In every action you do there must always be motivation behind your effort, the cause behind your effect. Many people are goal oriented, they set some target to go for and are motivated by it to accomplish itself. I think for the most part that goal-oriented action is superficial and you miss out on what’s real.

I think the best motivation is enjoyment. If you enjoy what you’re doing you don’t some goal or external force to keep you going, it’s inside of you. Typically, people don’t need to be forced to eat chocolate, I don’t need to be forced to program or solve math problems, it’s what I want to do.

Why Study?

I once wrote how Plato wrote that beauty exists for it’s own sake, and in the similar way learning should exists of the sake of learning. If you’re in a discipline you don’t enjoy but force yourself to partake in then you’re going to fail. If you’re in a subject where you’re continually just trying to pass and get by the next exam rather than learning the subject matter and just writing the exam to test your knowledge then you’re going to fail.

I’m in Mathematics and Computer Science because those are some of the things I would be learning even if I weren’t in University. The degree is a bonus, not a necessity. That’s not to say I don’t self-teach myself in other disciplines, I just find these to be the most practical to be taught. In the Arts you’re being taught to be creative, a contradiction.

Note: The previous section could be taken as what is the reason for doing anything, do it for the sake of doing it as you have chosen.

Heroes

In each discipline there are heroes who have taken similar paths before you. In golf: Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Gary Player, Tiger Woods and so on; in Chess: Garry Kasparov, Bobby Fischer, Emanuel Lasker, Jose´ Rau´l Capablana and so on; in Computer Science: Donald E. Knuth, Alan Kay, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Alan Turing; in Math: Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Leonhard Euler, Euclid, Kurt Godel, Archimedes and on and on.

The point is that in the same way we learn the negatives in history to not repeat them, the contrapositive being that we learn positives in history to emulate them.

Read the stories and lives of the greats, a common pattern will come on out: unwavering self-confidence in their work and willingness to sacrifice everything in-order to complete their journey.

Comparing to the Best

To be best someday you have to compare yourself to the best. If you compare yourself to anything else you’re never going to get there. Comparing yourself to the best let’s you know exactly where you stand in the grand scheme of things. A great Computer Scientist relative to your average Undergrad in CSC100Y1 doesn’t mean anything when compared to Edsger Dijkstra.

Last Get-Out Opportunity

To the chagrin of the proverb: “It’s never too late.” there comes a point in everything where it is too late. It’s too late to do anything when you’re dead. It’s too late to go to University when you’ve flunked out and no other University will accept you. It’s too late win a golf tournament if you’re on your final round standing on the 18th tee and the leader is in the Club House with a three shot lead.

You need to realize that you have a limited time before you come to an ultimatum. This where you are honest with yourself on whether you have (or can find) the discipline to make a permanent change.

Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Albert Eintstein

Either you need to make plan and change on your own, seek an intervention from another or get out move on.

Closing

The bottom-line is once you know where you want to be don’t let anything or anyone get in your way.

It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Emiliano Zapata

Limiting Facebook For Productivity (For Mac And Other *nix People)

Facebook is the bane of my existence, the way it (has) change(s/ed) people is sad and it’s only going to get worse. Facebook is also a major productivity killer.

Facebook is a useful tool for keeping connections with the people who matter to you, and it’s a very good messaging and photo collection tool. So it’s not logical to get rid of it completely.

For what I use it for I find it best to make myself use it on my phone. That way I’m not continually wasting time on it. Here’s how to configure your computer to make sure you can’t go on Facebook without effort.

1. Open Terminal.app and run the following commands:
2. sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts_backup
3. sudo pico /etc/hosts
4. At the bottom of the file add the following and save:

209.85.171.100 facebook.com
209.85.171.100 www.facebook.com

5. Clear the cache of your browser
6. Go to Facebook.com

You’ll see that you were redirected to Google. You can change the site you want to be redirected to by going to the Terminal and running ping SITE_NAME, the output will start with a line like:

PING SITE_NAME (IP_ADDRESS)....

Copy the IP_ADDRESS in between the parenthesis and replace 209.85.171.100 in the file with them.

Note: To save a file with pico press ^-x (keybinding Control-x) it will ask you if you want to save the modified buffer, which you press y for yes.

Piping | Like A Pro

Piping is one of the most productive features of command-lines. Basically pipes let you use the output of one program and the input to another.

  OUTPUT | INPUT  

For people coming from Mathematical backgrounds, it’s similar to combinations of functions, where one function’s return value is then used as the input to calculate another function’s return value. As show here:

  f(g(x))  

I use Ack (Grep replacement) all the time, it’s great but scrolling up in the Terminal is unpleasant. It’s not Ack’s fault, it’s a problem of how little advancements have been made in the Terminal since being created.

Thankfully with pipes, Ack’s data can be manipulated and be read with a program meant for input like this: such as less, or Vim. To do this run Ack or a similar program like so:

  ack --nocolor TODO | less  

If you’re supplying input to Vim in this manner then you must append either a “-” or a “-R”. The first will open Vim in the regular manner allowing you to edit the input, and the latter: “-R” will open Vim as read-only. For example:

  ack --nocolor TODO | vim -  

  ack --nocolor TODO | vim -R  

Enjoy pipes, they’re very useful. Like anything you may be uncomfortable at first but after a while you get comfortable and will find yourself using them quite often.

Don't Get Involved For The Money

Whatever you do, don’t involve yourself in anything with money being your main motivation. You’ll likely not be successful and will soon find yourself on your next project to make a quick buck. The better approach is to find what you’re interested in and follow where it leads. You’re likely to find yourself making a consistent source of revenue that you will enjoy more.

In relating this to programming: the best programmers I’ve seen have at one point or another worked on open source projects. That could seem obvious as they’re typically the only ones who’s code you see romantically but that isn’t true as you see a close source programmer’s code at some point or another, which along with the security of their application, the performance of their application and so on all give you a informed idea of a programmer’s worth.

The best are in it for the enjoyment, exploring a thought or idea they have or for writing something that other people will find useful.

Here’s a few examples of people in software for reasons other than money and have/had very successful careers.

Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python: He wrote Python as a hobby project to stay occupied during the week of Christmas. Now, Guido works at Google and is paid to devote 50% of his time to work on his own project, Python. An activity he was chose as a hobby is now the cause of 50% of his salary.

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux: Red Hat and VA Linux, leading developers in Linux-based software gave Torvalds stock options in gratitude for his creation. When the companies went public his net worth went up to $20 million.

There are others who used their projects as a source of revenue but many, many more programmers who, because of their open source project(s), were later employed in a very good position.

Why I like Older (Genuine) People

I’ve always hung around older people, it happens when you like reading, golfing, not destroying your brain with binge drinking, business, computers, world affairs and so on.

There are two reasons I’ve found, the first I’ve always known:

• Older people are generally more intelligent than younger people. Thus we have more to talk about, things I want to talk about, can be rational and give good arguments. In most cases they have more to give me (such as knowledge) than I have to give them.

This next one I recently grasped and is more important:

• They know themselves, they have a defined character. I can be comfortable being myself, knowing that they will be themselves. With younger people they’re always mimicking and copying each other. With older people, I can tell a joke or tell a story knowing that they will tell their own and later on at dinner say something on the lines of: “Travis tell everyone your story you told me”. I can write something knowing that the next day someone will write something similar. I can have a favorite movie knowing that unless they generally enjoy it themselves than they won’t label it a favorite of theirs.

It’s such a relief to be around real people, even if they’re often over three times my own age.

If there is one thing that I always liked about golfing is that often I was a single player going to join some scheduled group of one, two or three golfers and I got to meet some awesome people, hear some great stories, all of which were authentic, genuine and their own.

To Surgery Or Not to Surgery (Broken Collar Bone)

Back when I broke my collar bone and was trying to decide whether to have surgery or not to properly align my bone or leave it be, I looked around on the net to find out other people’s opinions and what decision they made. So if you’re in the position I was in hopefully this will help you out:

The results I saw when I looked around were pretty clear, the people that had the surgery were much more happy than the people who didn’t.

In my situation I was right on the minimum of overlap length (two cm) where they think about surgery and because I’m young and athletic they left it to me as an option. So I had the surgery and I’m happy with my decision.

Even though I’m pretty much done with golfing at least for the short term my shoulder was too awkward being pulled in towards my chest as it was and it would have affected everything I did with my upper body; from playing squash to typing.

Make sure you meet your Doctor before and ask him if he’s done this before, watch them and see if they look at ease and confident—make sure that he makes you feel good and confident about what you’re going to go through. That probably made me feel the best, before my surgery meeting the Surgeon and seeing how comfortable, at ease, relaxed and smart he was/seemed.

The day of the surgery you can’t eat at least eight hours before. In my case I was on a waiting list at a public hospital so I had four consecutive days where I couldn’t eat from midnight till about two-three pm and then they said I could go home and then do the same thing the next day.

The surgery itself was surgery, you walk/roll in, get on a bed they give you a little tiny needle on your hand to numb you up for the huge IV needle which you don’t feel at all (look away while he does it and it won’t bother you at all.) Then you’re gone in no time, as soon as he adds the anesthesia it’s a few seconds before you’re out. I felt in coming in to my system and immediately knew I was going out. I had just enough time to ask “How much longer till I’m out?”, see the Anesthesiologist look at the Surgeon, smile and say “A few seconds”…and I was gone.

Then next thing you know you’re up and the people you know are around you. Things got pretty emotional at this point, probably the happiest I’ve ever felt in my life, all the worrying from hearing the potential problems that could occur are all swept away when the Doctor walked up and said “Everything went perfectly.”

Then that night you’ll probably stay the night in the hospital. If you want they’ll pretty much give you as much drugs as you want. I i) don’t take any drugs and ii) like putting myself through pain so I didn’t take anything. At one point my Nurse was getting frustrated with me saying my Blood Pressure was going too high because of the pain and I ended up doing an R.P. McMurphy trick: swallowing the pills, drinking the water while she watched and then spitting them out when the Nurse walked away. Anyway if you want to save yourself some of the worst pain you’ll ever feel in your life, take the drugs. The night of the surgery is pretty bad but the following night is by far the worst. After the second night the pain gradually goes away.

Then other than just waiting while the incision heals, keeping it clean, changing bandages and waiting till the stitches fall out you’re done.

Here’s a picture of the scar I have now.

It’s pretty nice, the bigger part to the right is where my scar opened up and I had a gaping hole for some time while it healed and filled up. Other than that it went really well, just do exactly what your doctors tell you do. If you have a problem with the healing go and see the hospital immediately if you get there before it’s infected they can stitch you back-up or else you’ll have to wait while the hole grows back in.

That’s about it, now it doesn’t bother me really at all. I haven’t tried to golf yet so I can’t really say, but for day to day stuff can’t really tell it’s there. Other than when you look at it and carrying a heavy knapsack hurts a little. Whenever I try to do the stretch where you pull your arm across your chest to stretch your shoulder I can only go so far because the bar gets in the way.

Bottom line is, if the Doctor gives you the option to have the surgery I would seriously recommend having it.

Grades and Education in the Humanities

Means to an End; Education <=> Knowledge

The Illusion

Grades to the educational world are what the super high end expensive, sophisticated uncomfortable furniture is to the decorating world. It’s a front, an illusion to what’s really important, which is function. For most cases in furniture that means comfortability (there are some circumstances where looks are more important, however balance is more important in any case) and in education it always means knowledge.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. Those got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

(Pirsig, Robert. ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE. New York City: HarperCollings Publishers, 1974.)

You can have the best grades in the world, but if you can’t apply it (or what you’ve learned isn’t applicable) it doesn’t matter.

The Value Is In The Intangible

Post-secondary school, and a University/College degree has become more about the tangible piece of paper you get in the end rather than the knowledge.

Not that I’m saying grades are unimportant. They are, I mean you’re in school and you should be applying yourself in everything you do. But they can be taken in the wrong way. Grades aren’t the means to the end, your education is.

F The Humanities

Humanities is without a doubt the biggest joke in education.

The Workload

Let’s read books then look at another book and paraphrase something someone paraphrased from someone else. It’s pretty funny to see Humanities students complain about their work load: “Oh I have so much to read and then I have four papers to write!”.

Due Dates

I saw at least five different people get extensions on their final papers, and much more than that during the rest of the year for other homework. In Mathematics they will slam the door shut on you for weekly problem sets (typically you have ten which are worth about two percent each, yeah two percent) if you’re walking up one minute past the due date, I’ve seen it happen.

All Nighters

Another person complained about two all nighters during the whole year — how about two all nighters weekly. Also it seems like if you’re in the Humanities you don’t to start to work on your paper until the day before it’s due. This certain person I mention did this for every paper and other people did it all too often as well. This certain person also thought it was a good idea to go out to a bar till four am the day before a paper they hadn’t finished was due.

The Subjective

In a Humanities test, exam or essay you’re working with the subjective. You can dream up practically anything you want and make an argument for it.

In Mathematics and Computer Science you’re working with the objective. If you don’t know how to solve a problem there is no making something up to get an answer. And it’s not like you’ll be able to make it up on next week’s assignment or whatever. I’ve seen grading schemes in Math being up to 60/40, that’s 60 for the final and 40 for the mid-term.

Memorization Over Thinking

The next problem I have with the Humanities which is related to it being subjective is that it’s much more useful to have a good memory than it is to be original, intelligent and analytical. Having trouble filling in some space to finish off a five page essay? Fill it in with some related quote from one of the well respected Humanitarians, done. Given just about any question in the Humanities someone has written about it, you read it, remember it, move around some stuff, write it down and hand it in — not necessarily on time.

Humanities Isn’t That Humanitarian

When ranking people by their contributions to society as a whole Humanities people rank down there pretty far as well. What’s more useful to society? Given person A, an English major who is a Journalist writing for some newspaper or perhaps an author writing five dollar, formulaic Bestsellers and person B, a Scientist majoring in Chemistry/Biology working on vaccines and medicines for people, or perhaps B is an engineer working on making electrical motors more efficient. It’s not hard to see that B is much useful.

Twitter as a Google Competitor

Google has long sought to improve their algorithm and the performance of their matches for your query. You make a query and they want to give you exactly what you want as efficiently as possible. The founders of Google have spoken about their interest in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and bringing that technology to their search engine.

This is where Twitter comes in. Computers are as good and in cases much better than humans at a lot of different things. But one subject they are not, and won’t be for quite some time, is pattern recognition and making connections between seemingly non-sequitur things. People on the other hand are really good at this, as shown by Joyce we are pretty much connection making machines, trigger -> memory, trigger -> memory over and over again.

So given an A.I. computer that will do a good job at giving you some information that you want or the real deal from a human which would you prefer?

This is why Twitter is at least in some part moving in on Google’s turf. It is surprising simple and easy to find what I’m looking for with Twitter by doing “@name What’s the best place to eat downtown Toronto?” or “@name What’s the best text editor” or whatever. These are subjective and are what humans do best, giving their opinion (even when it isn’t asked for.)

Open Source Software and Contributing

Open Source Software (OSS) is wicked awesome, I use OSS as much as I can. In fact everything I use other than my Operating System is OSS and even then it’s built-on the foundations of an Open Source project.

OSS doesn’t work without involved users and active developers though. Anyone can contribute to any given OSS project. Things as simple as writing documentation, something that a person with no coding experience whatsoever can do and which would take time away from the developers. The result is that you can contribute to a project and the programmers have more time to code on the project and make it better.

Don’t start too big though and don’t try and do everything yourself. Pick a small part of a project that you want to work-on and get in touch with the other developers for a hand on getting comfortable. Mailing lists and IRC are the de facto standards for OSS developers to communicate.

Check out the project’s website for a link to the mailing list or IRC channel or of course just do a Google search.

For example recently I contributed to two of my favorite OSS projects, (Mac)Vim and Emacs. Two very, very simple modifications but still modifications that many people other than I will find useful.

In each I just added a few file-type extensions for Mac OS X to know that the editors support them.

So pick a project and start contributing. If you don’t know a programming language just get in touch with the developers and see what you can do. If you do know how to program and want to start contributing code, start small and until you’re comfortable with the existing code base which can be overwhelming.

Here are some OSS projects you could contribute to:

• Firefox
• WebKit
• Vim
• Emacs
• Thunderbird
• Transmission
• Linux
• OpenOffice.org
• Gaim

Beauty, To Travel is Better Than to Arrive

I’m still in my second run of reading The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, everyday I come across a passage that hits a priori (thanks Kant), experience or springs some sort of connection between myself and the narrator.

One of the latest for me was when I read

The statement “To travel is better than to arrive” […] For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.

(Pirsig, Robert. ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE. New York City: HarperCollings Publishers, 1974.)

This is definitely true and I’ve had a bit of issue with this experience throughout my life. Pirsig describes this feeling at the conclusion of a goal, but I feel same emotion occurs when you become aware of the beauty around you.

Of course this emotion has sprung up in the typical major events in my life that any person growing up in Canada would have; such moments like graduations (grade, and high school), but it happens for me in the most simplest of things, finishing a book or movie, walking down the street, writing a program.

When I studied Buddhism, the thing that stuck with me the most was learning to let thoughts and ideas flow, not trying to grasp them but inquiring your being as to why it came up and then letting the next thought come and experiencing the cycle again.

One quote/experience that comes to mind are two separate occasions in American Beauty:

And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember… and I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time… For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars… And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined my street… Or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper… And the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird… And Janie… And Janie… And… Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.

I think that this feeling is one of the most beautiful and special experiences a person can ever feel, if you have lots of them you can be sure you’re living. This feeling is one of the reason I don’t like pictures, or home videos or any other media that is supposed to help me remember some moment. Keep your mind sharp so you can keep the real thing.

One of the reason’s why I think keeping your brain healthy is so that you’re able to have a good memory just to keep and build these moments for the future. Another is that only with a mind-set of clarity are you able to be aware and grasp these moments.

The philosopher is in love with truth, that is not with the changing world of sensation which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

Plato

Plato argued (see Theory of Forms) that beauty existed for it’s sake, divine knowledge and truth, a timeless form and an ideal. A practical example that I recently heard was during Wil Shipley’s talk on creating an iPhone application. In the talk the talk he described how he was fixing a gradient that was within pixels of being what he wanted. There isn’t a single person other than him that would have noticed it — but he spent literally an entire day fixing it. Why? Because beauty exists for it’s own sake — not to impress your peers or whatever but for itself. Wil Shipley also gave some insight as to why we don’t always see beauty, simplicity leads to beauty and often things are too complex for us to see it.

Life is pretty sweet, no matter who you are, opportunity and beauty is everywhere. Simplify things down in your life, cross out some variables and see the beauty.