It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

This paper we are working on is finally coming to and end. It better be because I have to get on a plane in a couple of weeks and zip-over to Bulgaria. Yes… finally after 3 years of work the V-day has come.

With a clear departure date, I can plan my life a little better. How many things do I have to fit into these two weeks? How much of her can I see? How much does she want to see me? How much book writing can I get done?

I have 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. bringing some heavy flows right now via Jan’s super isolating headphones. Energy. Upbeat flow. Let’s code some LaTeX and finish that proof.

Go.

Go go go!

I am not wearing shorts yet, but I have been spending a lot more time outside in the sun. Looking at the calendar I see that 15 days of summer have already expired without much productivity from my part. Not on projects, not on research and not even on the resting front.

Now is the time to sit down and make a little plan for the coming months to see how things will go down. The main plan is to work hard this summer. Yeah. Seriously work, work and work. Try to get to some high-energy level where I am waking up early and getting 4h of intellectual labour per day and 4h of other stuff.
Come september I get on a plane and ship myself to Bulgaria for a couple of months. Productivity in-a-de-homeland? Vacation too. Go to the cottage. Visit P. in Berlin. Visit D. in Austria/London. Why not an Amsterdam trip while we are at it.

But lets get more specific on the work side. What work absolutely HAS to be done by the end of this summer.

1. PhD thesis topic settled
2. Interference channel paper
3. minireference content (en: and fr:) be written and organized
4. minireference website
5. liblda.py must be started

Apart from that there are these projects that I would like to work on,
but they are not mission critical.

• The kronos project with A., more specifically the web-text editor, the scheduler and the pdflatex renderer…
• Non-binning information theory for neuroscience research
• Writing up papers
• minireference iPhone/iPad app in Objective-C

So the TODO list has been set down. Now the harder part of actually doing all that is in the list comes about. I have to be frank with myself — none of this will get done without effort and without getting up early in the morning. I have to get myself to a higher energy level and then things will work out.

Vamolos !

it be the last week of the semester
coming up

what you gonna do?
how you gonna play it?

roll with the trusted avoidance technique
or change posture and motivate yourself?
be productive and shit
like for real

the main objective on the block is the comp 610 final exam
and the interference channel project

yet exactly at this moment I have another two prominent ideas bouncing around in my head….

1. Professor pad
A web service for profs to store all their documents — scan in, 2d barcodes and all that jazz.
I can charge for this service for sure…

2. liblda
A web service business that receives DocumentCollection objects and returns TopicModel objects … ;)
Privacy of submitter?
Parallel computing and efficient message passing?
CUDA?

now go to bed bro

It is March something and today we have hit on sunshine in the weather roulette. Nice. Makes me want to go outside and maybe even go to work. I am listening right now to the subset of songs in my iTunes that matches the query “thug”. Lots of bone-thungs-and-harmony and some 2Pac and Biggie. That is a good combo to get me motivated.

I need mental power today to overcome a mental roadblock that has me procrastinating a simple homework assignment for the past week. That and also the cold that is sort-of-hitting me for the pas three days. The bhenchod wind from Tuesday hit him hard.

Hopefully this will all get done today and I will be able to focus on more important things. It is very important that I don’t turn to party mode right away, before the semester finishes. In particular I can’t be talking to Bob Marley too often since this activity does not contribute to

1. The Interference channel needs some attention from me. Both for class project and for the collaboration with Omar and Mark.

   I am also interested in pursuing the alternate 4-tuple description of the rates for the IC channel:
   

   The TODO list for the project looks a little like this:

   1. Read classical papers
   2. Write up a review of classical papers with detailed proofs
   3. Read quantum papers on MAC and BC
   4. Come up with outer bound n prove it
   5. Connect the two

   timescale: Friday 2 papers, Saturday 2 papers, Sunday 2 papers + classical write up.

2. I think I really need to move on the LDA project. Coding a clean liblda with Dave Newman’s lda code as a backend is going to take 3-4 days of work, but then I will be able to do lots of cool stuff.

   I need to write up a new project proposal and go talk to Doina to see if she wants to be my supervisor while Patrick is gone.

   In reality this is the best idea that I have kicking around. This is the only thing monetizable and useful to other businesses. If I don’t do it someone else will.

   All this because I want to be rich — scientifically-smoothly rich — not hard-working rich. Couple of servers-running-jobs-for-clients-in-the-cloud rich not me working-for-a-company rich.

   Let’s make it happen…

3. Speaking of monetizable ideas, I want to plug my new mechanics class that I am writing up with Bo. I figured out a way to distill only the most important parts of the material and collect them into a wiki. I will then print this compressed textbook and try to sell it at UdeM, UQAM (does UQAM teach mechanics?) and maybe USherbrooke for 5$.

   Will it sell? Only experimental verification can answer this question…

There is more stuff to talk about, but it is almost 1pm now so I better get on down to school and … oh i don’t know… work maybe?

Aint no two ways about doing this assignment thing. Sit down. Take pen in hand. Write write write.

Go.

I had a little thought this morning walking to school. Coincidentally, there was an article in the morning news which introduces a term that best fits my though: over-education.

Do we really need to use our brain so much? I mean I sure enjoy it (when it works, less so when I am stuck and unproductive), but isn’t there something better to do with it? The human brain has evolved through thousands of generations of life and grown to a hefty size. Lots of folds to maximize the cortex area. So over the past millions of years Nature has decided that it is better for survival to have more CPU power.

Mother Nature doesn’t say what you should use your brain for though. Should you be reading papers about quantum codes, LDA topic-models, cutting edge web-development or philosophy? Should I maybe not study ANY of these and go help people?

I think it is clear that every person must answer this question for him/herself. What I want to draw your attention to is that any choice you make comes with its consequences. Think too much and then you won’t be able to stop thinking — like that prof I saw on my walk to school, who seemed deep in it… to the point of not looking where he walks.

You have to also keep track of the forces that are influencing your decisions. If society says it is good to be smart you might adapt to this “requirement” and make choices in your life that make you too smart for your own good. (By smart here I mean having technical knowledge above the common person). I know of at least a dozen friends of mine who are very bright individuals with advanced technical skills and developed rationality, but who are in reality deeply flawed characters because of their lack of basic everyday life skills. What is really dirty in this whole story is that large corporations will always want to hire these people because they know that their lack of personal life is an asset. Personal problems and awkwardness with people means you can pour all your energy, frustration and pain into your computer terminal.

If I don’t want to end up like them, I better start diversifying. Where is the fine line of balance between theorizing and doing? Where is the fine balance between cooperating with society and doing what is best for you?

got the coffee… not too much motivation, and definitely bad expectations (for God’s sake I don’t even understand the questions in the comp610 assignment!).

But this is nothing to fret about… I’ve been hit with assignments before and I survived. Surely I will survive again…

I spoke with Bro today on the phone from Mexico. It was an inspired conversation helped by a few bottle of wine on my side and god only knows how much tequila and other marinero drinks on his side.

He reminded me of some good advice he had given me some time back. He says I should be heavy. That term covers a very broad sense which includes but is not limited to:

1. Walk slowly.
2. Talk slowly.
3. Never to be stressed out, unbalanced or affected by circumstances.
4. Do everything with calm confidence.
5. Do the above with pure love and without arrogance.

This is good advice and I feel sometimes I need to be more like that sometimes. It is a weird thing though, since changing who you are is sort of a weird self-referential activity. Who is changing whom? How can a system change itself from the inside? Isn’t it about different kinds of personality?

I think a lot of my self confidence is linked to my work and this is not necessarily a good thing. For one, I am Bulgarian and so I am genetically prone not to work, which in my case will lead to low self confidence. It would be a good idea to decouple how I feel about myself from my activities. At least partially.

The other thing which I need to work on is to stop being affected by the outside world. I guess I often feed off the positive exchanges of energy with people: when you help people, they thank you and help you back and generally good things come to you. People smiling at you and generally being positively predisposed toward you is definitely a energy boosting phenomenon. But people aren’t always nice. On any given day the “energy” of the situation can be that people woke up on bad beat, have personal problems, frowns on their faces and generally want to preserve their energy for themselves. Why should this affect me?

It the hot girl smiles to you in class then take the energy, but if someone gives you a dirty look because there is a stain on your coat and this makes you look like a bum, then don’t take that in. I guess this is one of the important skills in life we must practice. How to be open and at the same time selective about what we let in?

Tomorrow morning I will be on a bus full of Monday morning work-goers. I will practice this selective decoupling. I’ll be heavy.

GM came to visit me today at McGill. We went to listen to some organ music, ate Jamaican patties from the architecture cafe and passed by my office.
At some point J. and F. came into the office and I introduced them and said they are my colleagues. After the introductions J. and F. immediately went to their computers.

Upon seeing this my GM observed: “So the computers are their bien aimées“. This is what they feel most comfortable interacting with. Not a girl. An LCD and a keyboard. Windows 7 for own of them, Linux with a tab window manager for the other. This is what our generation has become.

The observation is spot on. Sad, but true.

It has been quite a shitty rainy weekend. I slept through most of the Saturday and then went out for a bike ride and to listen to some Serbian music. The whole day I was feeling somewhat down though — and for no good reason.

I am losing focus again. Machine learning, neuro ideas, crypto ideas, computer ideas, multiparty independence, new channel capacity research with M.W. and everything else that is spinning in my head. Some work is necessary to clarify all these “open files”.