Yesterday's Post

The Matrix was still magical, for the 63rd time. The perfect dialogue, the salad of spiritual references, the gorgeous special effects, the ineffable ineffableness, none of that has aged much. But the speed has slowed. I'm beginning to feel a generation gap. 10 years ago the Matrix was a rollercoaster ride, a non-stop thrill that throbbed with suspense. In 10 years, The Matrix will be Bladerunner, a languid film-noir. The newer sleeker models are higher velocity if not higher impact. They don't dole out meaningful dialogue in consumable chunks, they slam you with it like a slam poet and leave you to figure out the details for yourself on the 3rd viewing. In this sense, The Social Network moved faster than The Matrix. I didn't understand a word they said in their crossfire dialogues and yet I walked away with the feeling that they were saying something interesting. Poor Matrix.

I was reading up today on how networks work. Some of it was review for stuff covered in my Computer Systems Engineering (6.033) class at MIT, but concepts learned in my formal education are often obscured by so much fog that it'd be easier to try to see the Beijing sky. Some seemed completely new, in other words the fog in front of it has solidified into intrabrain Jello and is refracting the hell out of my searches.

My favorite thing about networks is the hilarious pessimism that defines the whole field. For example, TCP vs UDP (the two major communication protocols on the internet):

TCP: "There is absolute guarantee that the data transferred remains intact and arrives in the same order in which it was sent."

Sounds good so far...

UDP: "There is no guarantee that the messages or packets sent would reach at all."

That's the spirit I love. I understand that this is true by definition, that such a protocol is very necessary, but the wording is always so tragic. They build you up...

TCP: "Sir Sean Connery will deliver your packet himself if necessary. Tom Cruise will not rest till your packet is safely at its destination."

And then they murder you...

UDP: "We take your message and throw it in the shredder. Sometimes we miss and if your destination happened to be the floor, congratulations!"

Too much fun.

One of the things that frustrated me about my education at MIT was that very little of the main curriculum was focused on practical applications. There were "hardcore" classes that delved into operating systems and compilers and other witchcraft, where you could probably get some solid experience, but the required courses in the CS branch hardly stressed practical skill acquisition. In other words, we didn't code much.

What we did, was perform largely a depth-first search into important but (in my opinion) secondary concepts. Intro to Algorithms, for instance, was probably my favorite CS class, but at the same time probably one of the most useless. At a real job, unless you're a researcher, how often do you need to come up with low-level algorithmic solutions? About as often as you need to build a lightbulb as an auto-mechanic. It was about as useful to me as the Special Relativity class I took for fun. I'd much rather have gotten a firmer grasp on the next levels up in the software abstraction onion - object oriented programming, application design, common development patterns, as well as gotten some crash courses into the most commonly used technologies (especially in web application programming) - CSS, Javascript, Servlets, programming for mobiles. When I did an internship at Microsoft the summer after junior year, I had to learn all the practical skills needed for my project on the spot. My MIT education hardly helped me at all. When 5 years later I did some more serious hacking for two start-ups, I had to learn everything as I went. My MIT education played with itself somewhere in a far corner of my mind while I was getting my hands very very dirty.

I remember during the tour at MIT, when I was still a senior in high school, the guide was telling us how MIT teaches people "how to think." It sounds oh so romantic, but it's hadly true. It's more like you go to MIT to train to be a blacksmith and when you go to your first smithy after getting out, you find yourself constantly hitting your thumbs with the hammer you've never wielded before. But you sure know a lot about iron.

Anyway, MIT was fun, I don't resent it at all. I could have pushed myself harder and searched out the opportunities for practical application. It just wasn't force fed to me, like I think it should have been.

Nostalgia And More Chinese Antics

Had an interesting evening meditation yesterday. I had started reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now a couple of days ago, and he emphasized that people live either in the past or in the future but never in the present. He himself is of course a level 6 ninja in this aspect, so I trust him. Anyway, I was doing the surrendering exercise, and I was focusing on some of my nostalgia for a certain girl whose name I will not say explicitly (I will be fair however and give a hint: her name is one of the 24 arrangements of the letters 'c,' 'h,' 'u,' and 'n').

Anyway, I was surrendering this and that, and some of the other, some etc., and also lots of yadda yadda yadda, and I was feeling pretty good about myself, which is of course strictly prohibited by the meditation police. It was going well though, but at the same time it wasn't a relaxing process, it was a bit of a race; I'd surrender one scene, and another would show up with a little sign saying "dwell in me for a bit," and I'd say "good idea...wait! No! I surrender you!" And then I'd sit there waiting for the next ambush.

This game continued for a while, and then I decided to invoke some Tolle magic on myself. Not being a "future" kind of guy, I decided to start with my past, and went ahead and erased it all in one stroke. Of course, I didn't actually give myself amnesia, but I somehow managed to get a feeling of what it might be like to exist in a state of memory loss. I said to myself that I of course have certain feelings about things, but that now it no longer matters how I got to those feelings. Thinking this way, I figured that it would be easier to surrender emotions - they'd have no past to cling to.

I never really got to that second part (surrendering past-less emotions), but I did feel really weird for a while. The state of having no past was odd and interesting, a bit like coming out of the pool into the fresh air. Eh...pretty bad analogy, go ahead and insert your own.

Feeling on a roll, I decided to try one other thing, and inspiration suggested to attempt disappearing myself. I visualized stepping back out of my body, and tried to erase both my body and my mind, dry-eraser-across-blackboard-style. This isn't the first time I've tried this, but it was the first time it gave any sort of result. Usually I just end up waking up from yet another daydreaming sequence where my erasing had seamlessly morphed into fingerpainting, or worse, the dreaded "washing dishes" nightmare.

This time though, I managed to slip into another weird feeling, different from the past-less one, but equally strange. I felt like I was in the background - this is the only way I can think of to describe it. I didn't feel my body at all, and didn't really have a center of mass to my consciousness, just kind of faded. Pretty cool, but very tenuous and hard to hold onto.

Blah. No more.

I woke up today at 7AM and remembered some dream, but then, in a moment of weakness, decided to get some more sleep. And that's the end of that story; dream lost forever. Shame on me. To atone, I took Michelle for a 4 hour vacation to the dentist chair.

MIT finally shut off my webspace a day or two ago, so the previous entry's sound files pointed to nowhere (at the time of its creation). Yesterday I spent a good 5 minutes(!) remedying the situation and throwing my hands up in the air at the various inconveniences involved. For instance, Blogger doesn't allow uploading sound files. Pictures and video are OK, but there's some kind of prohibition on plain old audio. Being, as always, on a tight schedule, I didn't have the time to fight the man on this one, so I just converted my clips to video.

More Chinese learning took place today. I was learning indefinites - things like anywhere, anything, somelobster, nokitten, and I thought the Chinese approach to using these was really funny and simultaneously brilliant. For example, when you ask a Chinese person who's headed nowhere in particular "where are you going, my Chinese brother?" he'll tell you "I'm not going where." Isn't that efficient? Or if he's really not going anywhere at all, he'll say "I'm not going everywhere." This is like something made to order for Abbott and Costello.

Here's a semi-accurate semi-completely-inaccurate Chinese style English conversation for you to see what I'm up against in my quest to learn Mandarin.

Mark: you good.
Authentic Chinaman: you good.
Mark: you are going where?
Authentic Chinaman: I'm not going where.
Mark: not going where?
Authentic Chinaman: yes. not.
Mark: ah...and there is who?
Authentic Chinaman: there isn't who. There isn't everyone.
Mark: and you there will do what?
Authentic Chinaman: there I will not do everything.
Mark: excellent! can I come with you?
Authentic Chinaman: but I'm not going where...
Mark: I'm not going where either. I'm going there.
Authentic Chinaman: I'm not going there. I'm not going where.
Mark: me too. Or was it me neither. Crap. You understand?
Authentic Chinaman: I don't understand everything.
Mark: you everything don't understand? Or you don't understand everything?
Authentic Chinaman: I don't understand everything.
Mark: yea, I'm pretty lost too. Good, I go now. See again.
Authentic Chinaman: see again.