Up super late working on stuff, so you get this enigmatic graffiti instead of a blogpost ...
-the Centaur
Posts tagged as “Blogging Every Day”
Been up super late chasing a paper deadline for the past few nights, so no real post for you; instead, enjoy this picture of a photogenic cat.
I do have to say, these past few nights pulling this paper together have proved over and over again that my ethic of "work just a little harder than you have to" pays off, as each night I wanted to quit, and each night I got a major chunk of forward progress done by working just a bit harder.
Now, sometimes that was 4 am, but still ... after spending a great deal of time with what felt like a giant incoherent mess of a paper (17 pages at last count), the exercise of pushing to submit a 6-page excerpt to this conference really crystallized the notion that, yes, we have done something good here, and, yes, if we take the time out to summarize it, it really does add something to our understanding of the problem.
Oh wait. This isn't an inside-the-firewall production. So, AHEM, "... it really does add something to our understanding of SOCIAL ROBOT NAVIGATION." Just to be clear on what we are doing.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, snapped between toe cleanings.
... a computer with a fast fricking hard drive. I use a backup scheme in which one older computer has all my file mirroring services on it (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) and then backs that data up to a local Time Machine backup. But the old iMac I had had long ago reached the point where it couldn't back up to local network storage and needed a directly connected USB drive, and eventually that, too, gave up the ghost, with Google Drive and Dropbox essentially strangling each other to death if you tried to load them simultaneously. In other news, unrelated except for the inexorable passage of time, my personal daily driver laptop had reached the point where half the keys skip and the battery life was down to roughly 1 minute.
SO! I bought a refurbished Apple Silicon MacBook Pro. Even though it is a gently used machine, way cheaper than the most recent models, this M1 Max screamer has downloaded most of Dropbox and a large chunk of Drive without breaking a sweat. Apparently, the larger, faster SSD of a 2022 MacBook Pro beats the heck out of the old spinny hard drive of a 2015 (or is it 2013?) iMac. Who knew? And it can serve as a daily driver until such time as I can afford a top of the line machine, if I even need one if Apple Silicon is as fast as they say.
Cross you fingies ...
-the Centaur
... still falling behind. But I'm not giving up on getting back on track. The key problem is making sure that time is carved out in the day for blogging, taking walks, taking care of yourself; once you start to let that slip, six months have gone by and you haven't posted. And when you have a TODO list two inches thick, it really is hard to make sure you carve out that time ... it's easy to trick yourself that it's much more important to get the "important" stuff done ... even though, sooner or later, you must do "unimportant" things like laundry. Building new habits is like doing the laundry ... the world turns, and so must the dryer, and if you don't make time for it to get done, you'll be sad when it doesn't.
Call your wife, take a walk, post on your blog. The "important" stuff can wait.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A nice meal, somewhere (Iron Hill Brewery?) featuring fish and chips, a Moscow mule, and a book.
... still behind, but, whatever. Pictured: Left Bank in Menlo Park. Hadn't been there in years, but it was wonderful. Unexpectedly I turned out the other way from the bathroom and discovered a second stair with beautiful mosaic tile, sparkling in the late morning daylight in a way I never recalled seeing before.
Still pictures really can't do it justice, but it still is beautiful.
-the Centaur
... I wouldn't have that many quarters, but there'd still be way more quarters than they ought to be.
Fortunately the installer agreed that, um, no, it shouldn't look like that.
One more thing to fix ...
-the Centaur
... still a little behind. Pictured: the "back entrance" to Morgan Hill's very nice downtown; this little pathway from one of the parking garages always reminds me of coming down a gangplank onto a pier leading to a little sea town, even though in reality the sea is nowhere to be found.
-the Centaur
Yeah. The microblogging will continue until the posting rate reaches 1/day.
I feel that one problem I have with "daily blogging" is that quick posts are no problem. But if I have a longer idea - but can't finish it in time - I then forget to do a shorter post to make up for it.
And missing a post itself is a problem. What I find when trying to build a regular practice (daily blogging, taking karate twice a week, whatever) is that if you skip one time, even for a "really good reason", then mysteriously the next two or three times you'll HAVE to skip for "unavoidable" reasons.
In this, case in point, I started writing a longer article on debugging software. There was more to it than I expected - I had wanted to make an off-the-cuff comment, and found my thoughts rapidly expanding - and then the next day I was flying, and the next day catching up on work, and the next day owed my part of the annual report to the church board, and so on. And then its DAYS later and boom no posts. I think at this point I am 8 behind in numbered posts, though there were a few un-numbered ones which I would count, except, if I don't, it makes the problem harder, which helps build the discipline I'm trying to build.
SO! Let's get back on that horse then. Update metadata, hit publish.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my evening work ritual, 2-3 times a week when I'm not having dinner with my wife, is to go to some place to eat (preferably one with a bar or high top tables, so I can stretch out my bum knee), crack open a book, and read a chunk of a chapter while having a nice meal. Most of my books get read this way.
... from the last numbered post, or plus six from the last post.
As for the image? Yeah. They've got a lot of problems on that boat.
-the Centaur
... the block editor of Wordpress seems to be making my old non-block-editor posts turn into solid walls of text. See the post "Pascal's Wager and Purchasing Parsley":
Yeah, it's not supposed to be looking like that. Gotta track those down and fix them.
In other news, my Half-Cheetah policy is successfully training to "expected" levels of performance. Yay! I guess that means my code for the assignment is ... sorta correct? Time to clean it up and submit it.
-the Centaur
... and the trick to getting it working was, as usual, "working just a little bit harder than you want to". Shortly after my last post, I got REINFORCE, a classic reinforcement learning algorithm, successfully training on my local machine, with apparent learning for all three environments in the assignment (though whether my solution is able to reach the expected final level of performance or not is still an open question).
-the Centaur
... delays will continue until progress is made. :-P
-the Centaur
The Charlotte airport, as I recall. Enjoy. One day behind, but it's 3am and I gotta call it.
-the Centaur
A brainflash by my wife, turned into an out-of-nowhere concoction. Breakfast-burrito sized spring rolls, filled with almost entirely raw veggies, backed up by an amazing mix-and-match sauce, all entirely vegan.
We're going to have to add this to The Rotation.
-the Centaur
Eight pieces of sushi from P. F. Chang's. Sadly, even their "vegetarian" options have added fish flakes, making them not vegetarian, much less vegan - so me and my vegan wife no longer eat together there. Sad, because it was one of our favorite date night places until they updated their menu and she re-asked about whether her favorite dish was still vegan - only to find out that it had never been. :-(
-the Centaur
7am fare at the Charlotte airport. Can't quite remember the name of the place, but one of the adventures of red-eye travel is finding a breakfast joint open at 7am (or earlier) on the Atlanta or Charlotte layover prior to the last leg back to South Carolina. There are a few good options in Atlanta - strangely enough, not the fast food ones, which often open a bit later, but as I recall Gordon Biersch is open at 6am, and there's usually some fun quirkly place which you can find to help take the edge off after the long overnight flight.
-the Centaur
Brands of cat food, that is. As I recall, the farther it is to the right, the more likely it is that Loki will eat it. The farther it is to the left, the more likely it is that Loki would rather go outside than even smell it.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you working here?
-the Centaur
I'm sorry, but that is NOT alcohol.
THIS is alcohol.
There, I fixed it for U. You're welcome.
-the Centaur
Pictured: (1): Wine leftover from the Edgemas party; it was not impressive. (B, or 2): Neil Peart's favorite drink, Macallan, bought special for the party; it was quite impressive. (iii, or C, or 3): the La Parilla Margarita, medium, on the rocks, extra salt on the rim; about the best drink you can get - locally in the Upstate, that is, not counting driving to Reposado in Palo Alto to get their Cadillac Margarita, again, extra salt on the rim.
... makes six pieces. Mathiness says that the maximum number of pieces you can end up with from this is sixteen, which is apparently one plus the 5th triangle number, but on reflection I don't think sixteen pieces would make a good quesadilla. I think you're better off ordering the nachos instead.
-the Centaur
Better late than never. I really should develop a Photoshop filter or macro (is there such a thing) for this lines-and-shading effect, but it does actually require some tweaking to get right.
-the Centaur