Richard Carter

Happy New Year!

You know how when someone tries to talk to you and you’re mostly asleep, you usually reply with a gibberish sentence?

I wonder if you’re actually having coherent thoughts and your brain’s “speech processor” is asleep, unable to translate your thoughts into coherent sentences, or if your thoughts are really as scrambled as your grammar.

I’m leaning towards the latter. Usually if the person is persistent enough to really wake me up, I snap out of it and reflect on how confused I was in my dream state.

Many of my all-nighters are terrible and I end up regretting them, as necessary as they usually are. But tonight hasn’t been all too bad. I want to make note of the various things I’m doing, so that I can recreate it next time I need an all-nighter.

1. Comfortable spot on the couch; all my work surrounding me.

2. Focus! Occasional breaks to check Facebook, but for the most part, I’ve kept on task.

3. Soft Christmas music in the background. Substitute something else soft for any other time of year (e.g. trance or chillout or soft jazz).

4. My new Aromatherapy “Stress Relief” candle from Bath and Body Works. It smells great and seems to have worked; it’s been burning all night. It might be a placebo, but what’s the difference really? I believe in the candle therefore it helped. (thanks for buying it Elizabeth!)

5. Plenty of light and an open window in front of me to look out of (but not right in front of me; it is across the room and the blinds are mostly shut, so that I can just barely see out and it’s not a distraction).

6. Plenty of water. Also a couple cups of hot chocolate throughout the night (slightly caffeinated).

7. A good, filling dinner; I wasn’t hungry for a long time. Then when I got hungry around 5am, I realized it and popped a bag of popcorn. Not the best nighttime snack, but it worked.

8. Keeping warm! Long sleeve shirt, pants, and slippers. Cold is bad.

Also, a few don’ts: loud music. Headphones. Laying down or closing eyes.

When starting to feel tired, get up and walk around. Even go outside in the cold.

I cast aside Twitter and Google Reader, at least for the moment. Maybe it’ll last; in the case of Google Reader, probably not, though I do need to trim down my subscriptions again. But I’m really wondering if Twitter is really worth keeping up with; there’s a lot of overhead in scrolling through tweets I don’t care about just to find one or two that I might actually care about.

I cleared Twitter from my phone and removed it from Adium. As far as Google Reader, there’s not really anything to clear about it (as I have to visit it manually).

Now it’s a matter of staying away from them, and finding something better to work on. Maybe I’ll start by browsing Git and Bitbucket for some project that I can fork and implement a feature of. I suppose my ultimate goal would be to get a push request accepted, which would signify me having made an impact on a piece of software.

Should this perhaps be a new year’s resolution?

My other exam weeks have been relaxing breaks at the end of a busy semester. They were the calm AFTER the storm; they were the time that I played video games (and almost every one, I got hooked on RuneScape again after not playing it all semester).

This exam week is different. Elizabeth and I are getting along okay I guess, not the best but there’s a lot of stress coming from me as she only has a couple exams. Then there’s the pressure to get Christmas gifts; I’m not exactly sure what I’m getting, and I’m trying to put it out of my mind until I actually get out shopping tomorrow, but it’s very difficult to just forget about it entirely. It’s that kind of unconscious worrying that is the root of my stress, even when my conscious mind has nothing to be stressed about.

I feel kinda burnt out too, after a whole semester of non-stop school and work. At the same time I feel somewhat unaccomplished. I haven’t done much programming this semester, especially not on personal projects. I feel like I’m a pretty good programmer but I need something to work on, and the motivation to actually work on it.

I have an idea in mind. I’m not going to post it publicly here. But I’m starting research on it and it will be a great learning experience; if I can actually complete it. My history shows I’m not very good at completing anything large (but in my defense, that’s a very common problem among people of all types). I just feel like I need something to get done!

I’m considering shaking off the cruft. I spend a lot of time in Twitter and Google Reader, and for very little benefit. I feel like I want to isolate myself from all the news and hype, find a programming project to work on, and spend my spare time programming instead of reading junk on Google Reader and checking Facebook.

But I’ve felt this way for quite a while now, and yet I continue. Will I ever actually do it? I guess deep down I wonder if it’s worth it.

Hmm, here’s a thought… What if I just back up all I have right now (Google Reader subscriptions, Twitter follow list, etc.), store it someplace in my Dropbox, and then remove it all? That way I can go back if I regret it.

It’s a solid idea. I’m going to give it some serious thought over the next few minutes or hours and maybe do it.

http://xkcd.com/350/ plus http://corewar.co.uk/ – are you thinking what I’m thinking?

http://xkcd.com/350/ plus http://corewar.co.uk/ – are you thinking what I’m thinking?

About three weeks ago, I bought a MacBook Pro. This is my first Mac, with the exception of the Macintosh Plus that I played with as a 3-year-old (all 1 megabyte of RAM, and an expensive hard drive which I broke…). I’d been researching laptops for a few months, but only in the last month or so did I consider getting a Mac. I opened my mind to the possibility, and suddenly instead of being opposed to them, I saw all the great things about Macs. I am now absolutely thrilled with my 17” MacBook Pro and the benefits make up for the outrageous price. My biggest reason for going with the MBP, by the way, was peer pressure. I looked around me, and I saw that most computer scientists smarter than me use MacBook Pros. I knew there had to be something to them. Well now I have experienced it first hand.

Anyway, then another open minded thing happened. In my Game Design & Development class, we have been given an assignment to create a game in Unity. We were warned early on in the semester, and I dreaded it. Sure, I’m well aware that Unity is all the rage nowadays, but I have this odd opposition to many game engines and development kits. I had a miserable time doing research a year ago because I was working with UDK, and now having heard of the Unity project, I was dreading it. But now that I’m in the middle of my assignment, and being forced to use it, I have finally seen the elegance of Unity. I hate that it’s essentially monopolizing the game middleware scene, just as I hate that Apple tries to monopolize and proprietary-ize their computer scene, but I do now understand the good and bad of it.

I wonder if this “open-minded era” of mine will be a trend, or if it was just a two-time coincidence. Having an open mind is a great thing; it’s good to give the other side a chance.