It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

Today I saw a very important fault in my fighting style. Not in a class, not teaching but just walking around my parent’s house. Overturning. It is so simple but once my proprioception had accepted “turn” to mean 15degrees there was no way I could consciously correct it. Often times the correct turn is something like 5degrees (so that your shoulders point straight-on towards the adversary), but if I naturally turn to 15 then no wonder my movements will be crap.

So tomorrow, and every day afterward I will now look out for this obvious mistake.

(For those of you outside of the “Church of wing chun”, there is a simple reason for this: you want to be able to use both your hands in order to fight the person so it is best to place your shoulders, at all times, facing the opponent.)

Fig 1. Red is the attack. Green are the defending hands.
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I am in the dualities again. I had a talk with Prof. Alt0unian and he scared the shit out of me. He says that he has inside information that NSF funding for quantum information science projects will cease. Like zip-o. Closing shop. Zero. According to him NSERC will soon follow suit and cut the juice of the quantum in Canada as well.

This is hard to imagine given the superstar team Waterloo has built and the relative importance of the Canadian researchers in the field as a whole. But I guess it could happen.

Now, obviously I wasn’t in QIT for the money so this shouldn’t change my outlook on life too much, but it made me think about the value of a PhD in quantum information science if the field is dead in 3 years. In other words the academic option for my future will be severely endangered if my entire field suddenly disappears.

So then I must think about the coding option as the general direction for my future. Can I be a programmer? Do I want to be a programmer? Isn’t it better to go into construction or engine repairs? Surely there is cool things to do with neural nets and the new web technologies but let’s face it — in the end of the road you are sitting in front of the computer all day long. The coding approach by itself (as in coding all day long for company X) is pretty crap. The things that could be acceptable though are coding for mad money and coding science. If I can get a company off the ground soon and get some cash flow I could be a tech entrepreneur, leverage my personal skills, wear a suit and have smart people working for me programming the ideas I come-up with. A small agile company. Coding science is cool because it will allow me to continue reading papers all day long and only once in a while will I have to sit in front of a computer and get my hands dirty.

The main conclusion I came to is that I should steer away from duality and bullshit. If continue to work on the “real stuff” in QIT and play with “real” programming I will be O.K. in the end. And who said I have to choose only one thing to do in life? So why choose the dualistic view of :this: or :that:. Why not have everything at the same time? (Just have to drink twice the coffee;)

It really is that easy…. just adding one line according to the instructions and you get the cozimo plugin to load directly in word press. Thus you can add comments to any image or video (.flv) as easy as one click! Neat neat neat.

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Where do we go from here? The image side can be used to discuss maps (offline) and to have chat on an image gallery. The more interesting possibilities are about video comments. The comments in youtube suck… because they are about the video as a whole. This could turn into comments on a section very easily….
What about a two-pane setup where clicking on some link in a comment of the video opens up some extra information in the sidebar.
I am just amazed how easy Juan is making all this look. Listening to him, you would think that flash, Zope collaboration servers, PHP and all-browser support working together is child’s play :)

First an image:

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And so I am back now to the city of freezing rain and snowbanks. It was good to get away for a week.

The todo list looks like this now:

1. Submit expense report
2. Pay taxes and hydro (depends: get money from Patrick)
3. Students, students, students!
4. Work on book-to-website script (depends: Python book)
5. Work on crypto website

No time to waste. Just godda work on them.

So I am done now…. windows on the laptop crashed on me exactly when I was doing the most crucial step… Adobe didn’t have the Times font for embedding and I had to rework some parts of the thesis.
i win in the end… i win! (to most of you this might appear as a regular PDF file but actually it is a glorious PDF/A as required by the McGill eThesis program.)
I even uploaded it to the arXiv.

Which makes me think… how could a free paper archive produce such a quality solution whereas a McGill, surely with a huge budget behind them can’t do a good job. For god’s sake… they don’t even have a way to link to an entry in the database with a unique identifier… I would say this is the MAIN function of an online repository. Oh well… maybe it is because everyone keeps saying that the future is search :)

Ok. So I thought I could get this done quickly in the morning but it turns out the process was longer…. hey wait… can you hear that? I think the coffee machine is calling my name from the kitchen…