Young Hands Club

The Panama and Fiesta Week:

I had a wonderful time in Panama, the trip was a success on almost all fronts.¹ It was a pleasure to meet dorion and jfw, both one on one and then together for a networking event and their weekly junto meeting. Selina’s was a great place to stay² and I enjoyed walking through the surrounding neighborhood, Casco Viejo. I went one day for a bike ride, and then the next day I saw the Miraflores Lockes and went long boarding along Cinta Costera.³

Throughout the trip I made a concerted effort to talk to more people than I usually do. During college / my year surfing opportunities to meet new people were ever present. But now, living in a low population town, I only get a countable number of (Spanish) interactions on a weekly basis. I am considering looking for some group activities I can do once/twice a week. Two ideas that come to mind are salsa and jiu jitsu classes.⁴

As for the failures, the last few days of the vacation were wasted days. My sleep schedule was blown apart by the late night fiestas. And I did only a tiny bit of saltmines work. Two more glaring problems must be announced: (1) I made only ~30 pages of progress into The Odyssey. I put a few explicit reading blocks for the week’s plan to make sure I progress on this front. (2) I never followed up with another comment to address the points in mp’s comment that I had neglected in my first response. I listed responding to the comment as a TODO item for next Sunday, although I hope to respond before then.

1. The one mistake I paid for is a week prior I had I booked the wrong dates for the hostel. [↩]
2. dorion’s recommendation [↩]
3. Details to follow in an upcoming article. [↩]
4. If I were to do this I would need to once again make an effort to get a car. [↩]

Annnnd we are back! No more chased-by-bulls-bullshit this week. I only have one day planned of saltmines. EOD reports will resume.

1. Monday 01/20

   1.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Publish Day) (1.5h)
   1.2 Publish a plan for building computer (4h)
   1.3 TheFleet (4h)
   1.4 Allocated reading time (1h)
   1.5 Spanish Study (1hr)

2. Tuesday 01/21

   2.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Prepare Day) (1.5h)
   2.2 Build Computer (4h)
   2.3 TheFleet (4h)
   2.4 Allocated reading time (1h)
   2.5 Spanish Study (1hr)

3. Wednesday 01/22

    3.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Publish Day) (1.5h)
    3.2 Continue setting up my computer (2h)
    3.3 Saltmines (8hr)
    3.4 Spanish Study (1hr)

4. Thursday 01/23

    4.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Prepare Day) (1.5h)
    4.2 Continue setting up my computer (2h)
    4.3 TheFleet (8hr)
    4.4 Spanish Study (1hr)

5. Friday 01/24

    5.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Publish Day) (1.5h)
    5.2 Continue setting up my computer (2h)
    5.3 TheFleet (8hr)
    5.4 Spanish Study (1h)

6. Saturday 01/25

    6.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Prepare Day) (1.5h)
    6.2 Plan and review for next week (4h)
    6.3 Write up FleetBot Pseudocode (4hr 45min)
    6.4 Spanish Study (1h)

7. Sunday 01/26

    7.1 Daily Writing Exercise (Publish Day) (1.5h)
    7.2 Open Slot / Makeups (5h)
    7.3 Reading time (?h)
    7.3 Respond to blog comment (if not yet done)

Monday-Thursday 01/13-01/16

I’ll be exploring the city and meeting with Dorion and Jacob in Panama.

Friday-Sunday 01/17-01/19

I will be catching up with saltmines work. I would also like to spend one or two evenings at a festival in Santa Cruz.¹

TheFleet and the computer will be resumed the following week.

1. This is a large rodeo that goes from Jan 14th – Jan 20th. My cab driver amigo has been telling me about for some time now. [↩]

The vacation has been alright. An unexpected pleasure was playing Need For Speed Guanacaste.¹ I drove my mom and friend around to various nearby beaches.² The freedom having a nice car afforded me makes me want to return to the car-buying process sooner rather than later.

Here are the aspects of this week that make the vacation only ‘alright.’ First, I had this feeling of “I don’t have that much time off nowadays, and I wish I were spending the little time I do have getting into mischief with my surfpals instead of hanging out with my mom and her friend.” Going surfing in the more populated beaches made me miss the fun I had last year in Tamarindo. I also didn’t “carpe diem” as much, there was some time spent lollygagging that could have been spent reading or studying more Spanish. I am worried that too much of my motivation comes from fear of the whip, and that I was lazy because I didn’t sense its presence this week. Lastly, I hurt my thumb/wrist on my right hand.³

1. I knew drivers here are crazy, but I now have a better appreciation for just how nuts they are. A car passed me while I was going 120kph on a 40kph road. [↩]
2. Unfortunately there was not that much swell this week, but I scored a few waves on Friday at Playa Langosta. [↩]
3. Being a selfless gentleman, I was helping a young lady out in the surf. All was going well, I pushed her into a few waves and she stood up and was having a blast. But then a larger wave came, and I tried to pull her farther out to sea so that it would not crash on her. I did not succeed, and her board’s leash was wrapped around my hand. So while I pulled the leash in one direction the force of her slipping down the wave yanked the leash in the other direction. One poor split second decision made all my slight ergonomic improvements prettty trivial. I am lucky I did not break my wrist. [↩]

This week I’m taking a vacation and spending time with my mom. I will focus on some of the more relaxing activities that have been neglected, such as reading, studying Spanish, and practicing the guitar. I am going to pause my EOD reports until January 16th when I get back from Panama. I will keep up with the logs and check on TheFleet bots.

The failures in terms of not following my schedule:

– I only worked 12/16 hours of saltmines.
– I only studied Spanish on one day (Tuesday)
– I only published one article between Thursday-Sunday.

This week I tunnel visioned TheFleet project. Instead of doing 8 hour 45min well planned programming sessions, I did ‘mad scientist’ 12 hour sessions at the exclusion of other work. This was in part avoidance behavior. I knew I had to do other assignments such as writing my bi-daily articles, but I chose to stick with TheFleet. It was easy to bury myself in the project. I think it was correct to prioritize getting bots connected before I stepped away from the terminal. However, I may have been able to get something working in fewer hours had I gone about programming in a more structured manner.

A selection from a trilema article stuck with me this week.

You know why children under ~5 years of age fall so much ? It’s because they conceptualize the world as a static construction. Everything it sees is, to the infantile mind, as unmovable as scenery in a side scroller. Captain Comic isn’t going to push a ledge out of the way. Similarly, the toddler doesn’t expect any dynamic equilibrium in his environment, and he will step on a precariously balanced chair with the ease he’d step on granite bedrock. He sees it there, so it is there, so it will support him. Or a tank, really, or anything else. That’s the other thing, they keep building these towers that fall down because who could have predicted you can’t balance a fridge on a pickled olive ? They’re just as non-transparent, what magic is this!

The infantile mind doesn’t go away. It just withdraws. The knowledgeable derp is still very much a derp, he’s not become a man through spending his youth reading and thinking about things. On the contrary, he’s stayed a child. He doesn’t, on account of the painful bumps nature provides, expect mechanics to work like in a picture – but this doesn’t impede him from expecting economics, for instance, to still work this way. Because nature doesn’t provide any bumps he can recognize on that scale, and so there’s nothing to fix his toddler stupid.

The way I program reminds me of the infantile mind described above. Unlike the toddler, I know that some objects are in dynamic equilbrium. My method of ‘figuring out what is and what isn’t stable’ when programming is similar to methodically going around the room knocking each structure to see if it gives way. It takes time to run all of these tests, and I only gather data points instead of understanding.

Tying this back to programming, I spend more time running my code than I do rereading it. Testing is necessary, especially for TheFleet which deals with unknown responses from servers, but I need to find the right balance. It would be better to go for longer blocks developing before I fire off scripts and wait for their results.¹

I wrote an article about the problems of not making plans before embarking on a task. Yet I ignored my own advice and went on to do ‘incremental development’ the next few days.² I am not sure what causes this cognitive dissonance. I think that although I know what I should do, I have trouble following through because of entrenched bad habits. It’s also possible I don’t fully believe what I said. Part of me still thinks, “you can’t know what problems you’ll have until you hit them, so better to leave the plan open and handle things as they come.”

1. Each time I test against a network I have to wait a few seconds for a response. This interruption pauses my train of thought. Features such as re-connection put my script to sleep for ~60 seconds. When testing re-connection I would connect my bot, disconnect my computer from the internet, wait for the bot to drop from irc, and then reconnect my computer to check if the bot was able to get back into the network. Running this repeatedly was expensive in terms of time. [↩]
2. I fell flat on my face from this when trying to put together my computer. [↩]