It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

What-a-gwon on mon?

I am sitting in my new apartment with the nice view listening to SILENT SHOUT by The Knife and taking the next 10 minutes to reassess where I am at and what is the big picture.

Recently, I read two articles about “how to be a researcher”. One of them is recommended by John Preskill who is the superstar in my field. Another one is written by Michael Nielsen. They give good advice and most important of all give a method about how to do research. I think research and intellectual labour in general are some sort of art, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get rid of all the processes in your life that waste your energy and make you unproductive. Even with the best research techniques and solid discipline you could still fail to discover something significant, but if you are going to try then you might as well place all the chances on your side.

These basic life skills are going to prove useful for any life you might live. We are not in kindergarten anymore, nobody will watch over your shoulder and guide you what to do next.

As a first attempt to re-gain some direction in my life I will put down the short, medium and long term goals I have right now.

SHORT:

1. Buy a mattress
2. Buy a couch
3. Finish multiparty mutual independence write up
4. Bring one carpet

MEDIUM:

1. Find topic of research that is thesis worthy
2. Paint kitchen

LONG:

1. Write fiction
2. Do good research

I must continue with this list some other time… I must go now and move the car — else another 37$ will be taken from me. See u all soon…

This is supposed to be just a simple demo of the power of pyjs, but it turns out it is quite entertaining as a game.
http://pyjs.org/examples/lightout/output/lightout.html

Haven’t stopped these last couple of days. There is always something to do. I feel good energy from my new apartment and my new neighborhood. Waking up early in the morning has never been so easy for me. The kitchen hasn’t been fully figured out, but I do have a shower curtain now.

The only thing missing is a bit of direction in life. I feel like Chinese is wasting too much of my time — it isn’t really, but I would if I really wanted to invest in learning it properly. So I think the best thing is to stop going to class. I will have more time to work on science.

Let’s not repeat the mistakes of last September when I has split my energy between 3 occupations. This term we focus on Machine Learning and research. No time to waste. If I find a good topic I could be done in 2 years and a half!

Vamo-los !

I would have used the word “interwebs” to make the title more catchy but I will do that shit. That is below me. I mean look, for christ’s sake i haven’t even enabled a good url scheme for this blog! We are still on the whole pid= technique ;)

First observation is about facebook and how it is composable with other services. Say you see a girl on your gchat, then you want to say what’s up to her. Perhaps you can rekindle an old relationship, check out how she is doing or start a new connection. Now you are trying to imagine what she looked like. You kind of remember the person, but you are not too sure. In comes facebook with the killer app. You go to this site and you type in the person’s name and you see a picture of them. You can see her, imagine yourself next to her and prepare the phone conversation in accordance with what you can read about her from the pictures.

Facebook’s growth is due to this feature and specifically the “user chooses to show you their WHOLE profile”. I don’t mean the UserProfile data, i mean her in a bikini on a Mexico beach looking into the camera with a little tipsy look in her eyes and showing off her beautiful long young legs. People will sign up for that stuff…

Nowadays we are stuck in the whole public profile restriction thing. Not so good for facebook anymore. They have the yearly batch of ugrads to feed off of, but the population at large is like… ok what does that give me? i don’t want people to check my pictures… So then you are down to wall posts and messages…. not so good for picking up. I mean sure…. but it is not a killer app that people would use. Or is it? We will see.
Sex sells. Wall posts no.

In a way an entire society can be defined by the ways men and women “get down” and cross the genetic material. How do people pick up? Apart from the culture universals such as owning a motorized vehicle and having money in your wallet, what general patterns occur when people meet in any generation G. This abstract high level psychological phenomenon which is “the game” is a prior for the probability of genetic combination that will exist in generation G+1.

This is life. Sexual energy and its channellment between people sets the stage for the future. Did Mother and Father meet in a bar or a library. Was there a good pickup line? Was it a chance meeting or would they have met anyways without the pickup line?

One often thinks about the nature versus nurture “debate”. What is the point of this division if ultimately always occur together? Depending on who the parents are that meet (their genes) and the way they were raised (culture) they will raise kids with certain genes and particular upbringing.
I guess I need to have a psychologist guest here who can explain to me how he can trace the line between these two mechanisms of personality creation.

In a completely unrelated topic, I think I finally found a money making idea. A url redirecter with strong cryptography. I am not sure what but something cool and catchy so that industry will be like… we better make this a standard ;)

There is crypturl, ex: pass:moisemoise, http://crypturl.com/?s=tag1-tag2.
But that is not very crypt at all …

Need to work on the business plan…. encrypted content delivery network? What about content listing of the resource? You have a read password and a write password… hmm… or a specific read on each file? crypto network coding?

Really. I am just thinking about my life and I have everything I ever wanted. All the people in the family are happy. I have some sort of a mission for the next couple of years. I have a decent income and a beautiful view from my balcony.

What a difference coming early to school makes with a coffee in hand and listening to good music.

Yours truly is sitting at the commands of his brand new macbook pro 13” with the shiniest display of them all. So far I am very pleased with this machine. I have only done web browsing, but everything feels snappy and zoom zoom like.

I was originally planning to make this an Ubuntu box, but it seems the battery life is not so great under linux so I will stick to Mac OS (also this means I get to save a day worth of my time playing with linux and custom patches to the kernel!).

Above all, the keyboard is sooo nice. I feel like my fingers are flying around and typing very fast. Kind of like the desktop mac keyboard, but with backlight.

Now lets do some matlab to see how this machine REALLY goes.

I stayed a bit late tonight to “talk” to the neighbour’s wifi router.
A nice BELLnnn style router with WEP encryption that took about 20 minutes to crack.
I shouldn’t abuse it too much and save 40$/month ;)

There was also another AP called “NETGEAR”, but this is what happened when I tried to associate with it.

23:12:54  Sending Authentication Request (Open System) [ACK]
23:12:54  Authentication successful
23:12:54  Sending Association Request [ACK]
23:12:54  Got a deauthentication packet! (Waiting 7 seconds)

I presume there is a list of MAC addresses that the AP expects to get.
Since my invented MAC is not on that list I get rejected.
I could snoop some more on this NETGEAR and spoof my MAC to one of the guy’s computers. But then we would have two devices with the same MAC talking to the router at the same time… he might get wind of me being there if half his packets are not destined for him….

The signal from my new internet provider is kind of weak… one bar two bars… any bars is good when it is free ;)

I (wǒ 我) am not so sure about learning Chinese anymore. There are multiple components of my personality responding all at once and giving conflicting advice. Even though I know making lists is useless, I am still going to try and compile a list of impulses for and against continuing with the class.

Continue:

• Knowing Chinese makes you look cool. So show-off ivan will be happy to impress people with his advanced exotic knowledge.
• There are lots of pretty girls in the class and it would be good to know them. So ivan-the-penis is definitely excited about getting to know them over the course of the semester/year.
• The only noble aspect of me that wants to continue with the class is ivan the challenge taker which thinks learning Chinese will be a serious challenge and wants to go for it.

Quit:

• Waking up early in the morning is going to be tough for lazy ivan. There will have to be studying, practice and effort. He don’t like the sound of that.
• Also keep in mind that responsibility of taking this class, assignments, quizzes are all going against free ivan who wants to be free of all such things.
• What about all the other more useful things I could be doing with my morning? Sure it is most likely that I would NEVER wake up before 11AM and work, but what if I wanted to do lots of stuff then I would be interrupted every morning 10:30 to 11:30 by this class. The dreaming of achieving ivan is not happy about such a commitment.
• Add to this judging ivan who is questioning the teaching ability of the professor and the worthiness of knowing Chinese in the first place. Won’t the Chinese learn English? What is the point!?

As you can see the inner battle is not settled. The regularity of having to wake up at the same time every day, show-up at 10:30 every morning is pretty good. After class I can do some administrative crap for 1h and then have lunch. Which leaves me the afternoon of every day for productive research in quantum information…. hmm…. when has the afternoon EVER been productive for me? Then there is the option of working before the class…. not very realistic. Waking up at 8am for 2h of work? Not realistic and how much work can you do in 2h.

I don’t believe in free will, so I guess i just have to wait and see which personality traits win over the battle.