Metablogging and Achirality

I have started a number of blog entries and left them unfinished.  There was a massive run of a lot of things, including, but not limited to, finishing the thesis (very anticlimactic, and that's all I have to say about that), a trip to O-Hi-O to visit family and friends, a well--needed vacation to the southern Caribbean (I might talk about that later), and returning to work.  I'm writing this entry for solely meta-blogging reasons, to kick start some real writing back off again.  It's been a while.  

On another note, chiral groups preserve handedness, while achiral groups do not.

resurrect

In the ongoing narrative of complaining-about-the-thesis-on-my-blog, I finished writing the thesis about two weeks ago.  Then I started making some new figures, which ran over by a few days, and American Bird Day took over before it got wrapped up.  

While visiting a state that is round on both ends and high in the middle, the cold air has been quite refreshing.  Not much work has been done on this trip, but I realized the way of holiday life can be summed up, shampoo-bottle-style, as "visit.  talk.  eat.  repeat."  After a week here, I really miss getting work done.

No Magsafe for You!!!

The furball is obsessed with unplugging the magsafe cord from my laptop.  She has unplugged it about 10 times in the last half hour.  In other news, two-year old figures just got updated to have better notation.  Exciting, huh?

241 Addendum 2

Another thought: Something tells that next near will be very different.  Moving this aside will free up a lot of energy, thought, and irritation.

For example, writing these blog posts is about 1000% more efficient as adding new details to a thesis that has an audience of four people.  Because this is creative and fun and that is not.  Another that is, but that's a story for another time and place.  

Back to that coffee…

241 Addendum

Back to sucking up a lot of time:  250 pages of tenth draft rewriting is really inefficient.  I'm realizing that I'm spending about 80% of my time reminding myself to concentrate and only 20% of my time actually writing or making new figure or new examples or whatever it needs to be that is going into this.

I'm going to go break all my rules and make some coffee after 5pm, so get today's work cranked out, since I gave myself a deadline.

241

I have not written anything substantial here in a while.  I have two entries going, that have been in progress for weeks, but the never ending thesis has been taking up a lot of time.  Or, I should admit, sucking up a lot of time.  

Rewriting material that I've rewritten about ten times before is exceedingly mind-numbing.  Especially when it's about 200 pages of such material.  But I'm now revising the final three chapters, which are revised from the papers they're associated with.  Two of those papers have had about about ten drafts (with the eleventh drafts next up after turning in the thesis versions).  The hardest part is that the mental concentration to stay focused on something exceedingly boring drains a lot of creativity out of the work.  It would be much more fun if this were a first writeup, but so it goes.  

There's two upsides. 

Overall, the whole document was outlined in less than a week and then put together in first draft form in about six weeks.  That was more fun.  The revisions will come to about three months of work.  There will be two more rounds of revisions after this, but they'll be significantly shorter.  Overall about 4 months of work (the first draft was done part-time).  

And the quality of this will be the highest of all the write-ups.  Even the eleventieth-ninth drafts of the papers that get submitted to siggraph 2089 will still be constrained by page length, so some things will just be hard to follow.  The thesis has the freedom to be arbitrarily clear.  

I may or might start writing a bunch of nonsense here to keep writing momentum going for the next couple weeks, which is the final stretch.  I planned some travel for Thanksgiving, so that's the ultimate deadline, as I'm not taking this with me.  If only these things had real deadlines.

And I'm not proofreading this entry today.

And you an track the page length on facebook.  Yeah, that's what those numbers I've been posting all year are all about.

TI Thesisdesystem

Fast paced day.  Wake, breakfast, exercise, planning, out the door, reading Dr. Silex's Lovecraft collection on the way to Treasure Island.  Thesis distraction--I mean music festival--day one.  Very electronic.  Highlights:  Phantogram (they were fun), !!! (also fun, I'm into playful music these days), Kruder and Dorfmeister (amazing electronic set), deadmau5 (a lot of fun to dance to, and an awesome stage show), and LCD Soundsystem.  The latter was probably my turning point for going, especially since they're hanging up the hat, and I haven't caught them live before, using silly excuses like working on my thesis.  A very enthusiastic crowd--it made me very aware of how much Toronto music fans stand around, watch, and do nothing, for the most part.  A short, but very good, set.  Long trip home, dinner, and off to make today's requisite thesis "result" before bed.  A "result," for the coming week, is a single motion, analyzed using four different algorithms and making all the figures and videos that go along with that motion and those four algorithms.  Tonight is running.  The current top rule in the get-it-done game I'm playing with myself is that a new example has to be finished every day until they're done.  There's a lot more than I thought I would need for it to be solid, but so it goes.  I'll probably get a fourth paper out of it now.

Impromptu Albany Circus Characters

Albany, CA, 2010.

whiteboard art history

toronto, 2010.  found on a whiteboard in my old office after the siggraph deadline had passed.

Music Switching

I go through music buying-and-listening phases.  I will suddenly stop listening to everything I currently listening to, start a new itunes playlist, and start buying new music.  It's refreshing and absurd and nostalgic, because with all the moving I have done in the last decade, I start to associate music with times and places.  Most playlists have names things such as "tronto09" or "eville05," meaning they have the music I bought while living in a particular place in a particular year. Here's a run-down of the current spree:

Lady Gaga is 80's Genesis.  Yeah, that seems kind of absurd, but in my head, they're the same.  Both are well written pop music.  Have have many things I don't much care for.  And each is written in a very different style, they're people who really get pop music and push its form around in interesting ways.  Oh yeah, my having this is Tom's fault.

LCD Soundsystem:  The only reason I started listening to LCD soundsystem has to do with mentions in print by both Trent Reznor and Stephen King (although they were made years apart).  I picked up Sound of Silver while reading Under the dome, since King uses it as a soundtrack in an early part of the book.  I once read a review that called LCD Soundsystem  "electropunk hipster nonsense," which is about the best description I've heard.  But it's fun.  "You wanted a hit" is my favorite.

Weezer:  They took off when I was in high school, and I was listening to them a lot during the blue album/Pinkerton era, so they're one of those bands whose music I buy without ever hearing it first.  And "Tired of Sex" was covered by Wild Willy and the Wonder Weevils.  Enough said about Wild Willy and the Wonder Weevils.  I just picked up Hurley, and while it's really irreverent in parts, I really like it.  It also has the obigatory "Viva la Vida" cover.  Every popular band should cover Viva la Vida.  Especially if they don't like it.

Aphex Twin:  I bought two Aphex Twin albums about 10 years ago, and they've come and gone, but been regularly played, since then.  I just picked up Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which is the best I've heard.  It sets a certain mood extremely well.  I think it's my new favorite music to have on while on public transit.

Brian Eno:  Music for Airports.  It's music for airports.  I've been playing with Bloom  and Trope, his iPod app collaborations.  

Tom Petty:  Feels very classic.  New Order Joe was visiting in town, and laughed when I told him it was Tom Petty's "new" album (Mojo).  It reminds me of David Bowie's Heathen, going back to what a particular musician does naturally, but in a fun way.

Also picked up:  Jack Dangers, Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, Orbital, more Aphex Twin, Gorillaz, and new music by Meat Beat Manifesto, Marcus Eaton, and Trent Reznor & his Happy Fun-Time Band of the week.  But I haven't listened to them enough to say anything meaningful yet.