At the beach, lying on the sand, Justin demonstrating how when you try to grasp a huge chunk of sand, it just slips through your fingers until there's nothing left.

That's how life feels like right now. Like it's just slipping through your fingers until you have nothing left to grasp.

Dream Post #43

- Freaking out at a sports shop after realizing that I left my backpack on an airplane, with no way of going back to retrieve it. And then finding out that they were only able to retrieve my laptop, which didn't relieve me all that much because then I started worrying about everything else that had been inside the backpack.

I had to wake up in the middle of the night to reassure myself that it was more likely impossible that I would ever walk off an airplane without remembering to take my backpack... which I always put at my feet when I'm on airplanes.

- I don't remember most of the second dream, but it ended with me inside a giant Super Shuttle, (whose interior resembled a cargo jet more now that I think about it) trying to stop it from riding a giant ocean wave and destroying everything in its path. I somehow managed to take out the pilots from afar using a weapon that wasn't really there - I think I inferred that I had a weapon because the pilots were dropping whenever I singled one of them out by sight? It felt more like I was having the view of one of those arcade shooter games.

randoms

- I feel like there must've been something magical in the air at Camp Jitterbug, cause one week later now and I already feel like I'm 10x suckier at social dancing again. not that I was that great up there, but at least I felt more comfortable dancing with random people on a regular basis. one bad dance last night was enough to kill my mood for the rest of the night. I need to work on communication... and dealing with fast/odd tempo music.

It's really hard to dance with a follow that knows how to... well, follow, because it becomes pretty apparent to them when you're not leading them well. and then they start telling you what you're doing wrong midway through the song, which is helpful, but at the same time kind of humiliating if you aren't intentionally having a practice session to begin with. sigh.

- A question I get asked sometimes: "Were any of your classes useful for your job?"
I guess the stuff that I found most applicable to what I'm dealing with now would be... (listed by Berkeley class)

- cs61b/data structures. it's kind of assumed that you know them off the bat anyway.
- cs61c/machine structures. mainly because I work with C, and memory management tends to be a big deal when it comes to routers. have even looked at assembly a few times via gdb.
- cs162/operating systems. considering I work in the network operating systems group, of all places. I was kinda surprised to see random topics from this class come up in varying ways at work.
- ee122/networks. so I didn't actually take this course, but in retrospect since I work on routers now, it would've been REALLY HELPFUL. although I've been able to pick up things somewhat on the job.

Honestly, though, most of the stuff that I needed for my job now, I wound up learning on the job... which I figure is typical for most jobs. I felt pretty useless the first month, and 10 months later I still feel like I barely know anything about the product I'm working on. I mean, I guess I can configure quality of service on a Cisco router now, but then again I have no idea what the heck is actually happening when I'm configuring it most of the time, and this is after staring at the source code for 10 months. -___-

- While reading C.S. Lewis's "Transposition" essay the other day, the only thing I could think about was linear algebra. Particularly when he started describing transpositions between "richer" and "poorer" systems as what pretty much was a many-to-one function. and so on.

To be honest, I'm not sure how much I like his writing - half the time it feels like he's using straw man arguments - but he has interesting insight sometimes.

- Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the thought of how little time there is to do anything. I find it hard to believe it's June already. I feel like I graduated last month. Oh wait.

- Those moments where you have people you want to see but nothing to say to them.

Today I went with some coworkers to SF and did the biking expedition that goes from SF, across the Golden Gate bridge, and then winds west->north->east? into Sausalito... which involved a rather painful hour-long uphill hike in the middle of it all (actually, all of the uphill parts were horrible), and a moment where I got separated from the others and wound up crashing off my bike into a nest of plants at a randomly steep intersection.

...and then I went home and proceeded to code until 4 AM this morning. I am probably going to hate myself mentally and physically at work tomorrow. aaaagh.

[I would have something longer to write about but now probably isn't the best time. Good mornight!]

Summary of Seattle Trip

Shimul: Are you limping?
danced for ~12 hours this weekend at camp jitterbug (+ brunch with shimul after!). it was eye-opening. although after staggering through the airport just now, I'm starting to wish airport hallways weren't so freaking long, uggh.

bug

I know I say that work is generally a lot less stressful for me than Berkeley usually was, today I swear I almost hyper-ventilated over a freaking bug.

Granted, this is the hardest bug-fix I've had to work on since I started working, and I've learned a lot that I never thought I'd learn about... well, routers in general because of it, but seriously, it's been two weeks and I feel like I've made no actual progress. I can't even reproduce this issue consistently. It's like this bug is taunting me. STOP TAUNTING ME ALREADY.

Ironically, the more I learn/spend time actually doing work, the more I like my job? Guess my academic masochism translated to work pretty well.

Series

I don't remember the last time I put a list on here. I think Evernote's been satisfying my list-making cravings for a while now.

But anyway, a list of series I've been getting into in the past year. Because I like obsessing over different series, particularly if it has a wiki associated with it (my other source of obsession. >_>). As of late:

1. A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series that spawned the Game of Thrones TV show, which I also like)
The books tend towards being too verbose and long, with lots of pages where it feels like nothing's actually happening, but the clever dialogue and all the moments where stuff actually happens kinda make up for it. This actually got me back into reading book series again. I'd forgotten what it was like to get all giddy and excited to read the next book in a series, or at least since Harry Potter ended... 4 years ago now? I guess technically, I read Dune and Ender's Game not too long ago either, but those novels ended on a note where they didn't necessarily need a sequel and could easily stand alone on their own right. With A Game of Thrones on the other hand, it was kinda harder to ignore how it was pretty much setting up for the rest of the books.

2. MS Paint Adventures - specifically, Problem Sleuth and Homestuck
I'm a sucker for anything that remotely resembles a text adventure game (aka interactive fiction), and these web comics are just that. Problem Sleuth had a noir-ish kind of setting and Homestuck had references to data structures... and then they both kind of exploded into something else. According to wiki they're estimated to be the longest comic on the internet, and probably with good reason.

3. Batman comics
Trying to read most of the important stuff in chronological order (which is a lot harder to do for American comics because they like to retcon stuff all the time - it took me a while to understand the release cycle). Started with Year One, currently on Knightfall, although I've been holding off on it for a while cause Knightfall is a lot bigger than any of the past trade paperbacks I've read.

4. Outer-space based sci-fi (Mass Effect, Battlestar Galactica, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien)
I'm lumping all of this in one category, but lately I've been realizing that I'm a bit of a sucker for anything based in outer space. Although I never could really get into the Star Wars universe for some reason. I think the whole idea of the Force was a little too mystical for me for a space-themed setting.

5. Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra
I never got into it too much originally because seemed too much like a western imitation of anime, but after recently marathoning through everything in order this past week, I am now beyond obsessed. Great animation, great characters, great setting. I feel like this show is the realization of all the elemental power stuff I used to like daydreaming about, the stuff that didn't make it into X-Men or whichever.

and now currently:
Baldur's Gate
So like Planescape: Torment previously, I've been meaning to get to this RPG series since high school but never really got around to it. Ironically, talking about Diablo 3 as it was released earlier this week made me really want to play Baldur's Gate, so I started. It took some getting used to the user interface and the nature of gameplay, though - this game was clearly made for patient people. Will see how it turns out.

The Earthsea Trilogy
Just started the first book, but I like the writing style so far. It's only around 160 pages, but compared to the ~1000 page books of the Game of Thrones series, it feels like a breath of fresh air. My perception of it is slightly eschewed by the fact that there's a Studio Ghibli Earthsea movie, so I keep picturing some of kind of mystical pseudo-Miyazaki fantasy world when I'm reading it.