Brian's World

Disarray

Today has been a pretty terrible day. I don’t think it got off to such a great start, my head was uncomfortable and I kept falling back asleep. I started doing my laundy ok, but I was clearly in disarray when I managed to leave my keys in my room (it was ok, I had only walked 1 foot outside my door.. but clearly a sign. I ate breakfast, where my initial analasis failed to indentify the optimal donuts. It was only after I grabbed my 2 donuts that I realized a much better one was right in front of me on the right side of the plate. I eat 2 small donuts every Thursday. The orange juice was terrible as its been all week. I’m not sure if its something with the juice or the fact that I take my vitamen shortly before I head over to breakfast.

I guess I should be glad I got back from breakfast ok, was able to switch laundry loads, and finished the CANOS homework pretty swiftly. When I went down to fold my clothes after the dryer stopped, 2 men came into the room while I was folding my whites to collect the change from the machines. They didn’t say a word to me or each other, so I just moved out of the way. Soon afterwards I identifed (or maybe failed to identify) that I had lost a sock! I have never lost a sock every while doing my own laundry. I can only draw these basic conclusions. 1) A sock is hidden in my clothes somewhere, maybe a pant leg or a t-shirt. 2) That sock was actually my brothers, I was temporarily using his laundry basket last weekend while I was home so I could have transported an odd sock up here with my dirty clothes. Unfortunately I do not think that my brother keeps an inventory of his socks, so we may never know.

The other big thing on my mind has been the 2 tests I have tomorrow. Chemistry at 8am and Physics at 6pm. Both of those tests are scheduled during some of my default eating times, so I will have to try some sort of phase shift. I wouldn’t mind having 2 tests in one day if they were closer together, but this idea of early in the morning and later at night doesn’t sit well with me. Typically I would say ok, test in the morning means I can relax more in the evening.. or test at night gives me the morning to study. Both just put me on edge. I reviewed the material for chemistry from the book in 1.75 hours, and I just made my physics crib sheet. I’ll likely do more review after dinner.

I’m also either feeling depressed, or unable to conjour an appropriate feeling. I’m not very sure why, but its tricky. Sure, the tests aren’t helping, but I’m unfortunately feeling outside influence as well. Maybe outside influence wasn’t the correct work, I’m subject to an outside force that is adjusting some inside things. Kinda like a magnet maybe? I’ve recognized that pattern that happens very consistently in some applications, and not at all in others. I know, I know, it will all equal out in the end… but I’m very used to these things equalling out in a period of days, weeks, or months… not this several year long cycle as it may be. I think if I didn’t have to think about my tests tomorrow I might be able to sort this out, or at least try but I do not have that luxury. In most situations I think I would apply a negative stereotype to get this out of my mind, but my research doesn’t allow me to cast that so easily. If I didn’t have the data I’d be able to, but I since I have it I can’t just go against what it indicates.

I am both wearing a grey shirt and starving for dinner. I have been hungry for exactly 1 hour and 21 minutes. I would really like to get some pizza from somewhere decent (i.e not commons) but I’m not going to. I can’t ‘reward’ myself without some clear victory, job well done, or something to deserve it. I guess its off to commons. Commons will be my cilice…

Another year

As I’ve been saying today: another year, another disappointment. Its mid-April, which means Google announced the participants for this summer’s summer of code. As per standard operating procedure, I was declined again. I tried to increase my odds this year by submitting more than 1 project, but one of them was quickly torn down as I lacked a mentor. That guilt can sit on you guys readers. The other one, I do not know what happened. During the extended discussion period, I recieved a total of 0 comments regarding the entire thing.

I found it rather frustrating to be declined with 0 comments, or just the fact I got 0 comments to start with. I understand there were tons of applications and everything, but my understanding was that the extended discussion period was to handle that. Apparently not, at least in my case. Whether my application had “fallen though the cracks” or was just too terrible not to be commented on, I do not know. While I got declined last year as well, I was at least given a comment or two on my application where the mentoring organization asked for clarifications and stuff; I felt as if I actually had a chance. This year non of that, just a blank comments section “ranking in progress”.

What I also find strange is the lists of people who get accepted into the program, a lot of them.. at least the outspoken ones, tend to be the same people from previous years. While I don’t have access to the data, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them are return coders. It makes sense, they have proven they can work well in previous SOC projects, so they can likely do well again. Maybe they’re already friendly with the organization, I don’t know. This isn’t what I think about when I think of some of ideas behind SOC, I always imagined the idea was to bring new people into a project and teach them about it and everything. The idea reminds me of those “freelancer” sites where you can look for abd bid on projects, the people who get choosen tend to be the ones who have the most experience on the site, making the entrance bar very high. I certainly hope the folks at Google do everything in their power to make the entrance bar as low as possible.

I would also like to express frustration at repeat students. If I were selected to be a student, I would probably not apply for the program next year. I don’t think anyone should count on this as a steady summer job or something like that, and should give others a swing at it.

That said I’m sorry I’ve been ranting about GSOC again. I haven’t been pleased with the program for 3 years now, maybe next year will prove to be better… though I doubt it.

Setting the tone for summer, I will be disappointed I guess. Things won’t work out for me as I’d like. While I might not be converting financial reports, I am unsure how exciting the IT work will be. I guess I was hoping for an acceptance letter today to indicate to myself that I am stil decent at what I do. The past week has, and continues to, be filled with reminders, emails, etc that boil down to “you are stupid” or “you are dumb”. I am glad Google re-affirmed that fact this year. I did find this year’s rejection email surprisingly familiar, it was very much the same as last years. They told me it wasn’t me, it was my application… which is like saying the F in math is not you, its your tests. The application didn’t fill itself out now did it.

I have to get back to generating 100 tuples of nonsense. It won’t matter though, this will just be a failure like everything else.

I’ll be here all night.

Fire

Its pretty easy to put out a fire, all it takes is some water and some way to get that water to the fire. If you have two or more people carrying buckets to a small fire it can be put out in no time at all. No matter how big the fire, if enough water is carried by enough people it can be put out… unless it is some weird chemical fire maybe… I’m not a firefighter, nor a fire expert, but this seems to be true.

I sometimes I have to step back and think, what is actually going on here. I tend to do this less and less when I’m begin to feel that what I’m going to see isn’t going to be something I like. I shouldn’t avoid doing this just because its unpleasant, I do a lot of things that I think are unpleasant I guess. Its challenging for me to accept the current state of things, not the little state of an individual item or something… the state of a collection of items. I do know that one of the first steps to solving a problem is to identify there is one, but I feel that identifying a problem that isn’t solvable for > a year isn’t a problem worth identifying right now.

The past few weeks have proven to be a challenge on many accounts, and the fact the semester is winding down hasn’t even come into play yet. I know that things are just going to get more challenging, and I’m just going to get more frustrated. There’s some humour to be found in it though, the more happy and excited everyone else seems to get the more frustrated and displeased I get.

There’s this feeling growing inside of me that we’re on the wrong road. I’ve been trying for quite some time to steer against it, but ever since someone else took the wheel its been very difficult for me to do much of anything. I guess I could start doing more of something, but even my recent efforts to do that have gone unnoticed. This doesn’t help that my typical line of work isn’t noticed by many people to start with, but loosing the remaining few has taken its toll.

I guess i could decrease my current load and resume some of the work I left off about 2 years ago.. I think it might actually be exactly two years ago this month now that I think of it. Sure, me the person is once again anonymous, but me the idea is well known. I shouldn’t kid myself, the hours for such work are pretty unpleasant, but I could probably make it fit. I just have to evaluate if its work my effort to make the transition, and what can be done to minimize risk on the shrinking end.

I do look forward to this weekend however, where I will try to put as many of these frustrations behind me as possible.. which will likely be a terrible failure but whatever. Its the thought that counts right? I can only hope that others will understand what happens on a daily, weekly, yearly basis around here. Take my blog for example, it was very easy to write back when nobody read it… now its slightly more challenging, but don’t fear faithful readers, I am still here. I am lucky my blog doesn’t write counter-posts to what I write, because those would be much more popular than these things I am sure. It would be sad to see what my efforts were going completely unnoticed, while something built on my efforts was experiencing lots of success.

I’m not sure if I’m on the right track, that’s why I’m hesitant to start moving again. I wouldn’t want to get further down the wrong line.