The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
vael:
I’m moving my sites off of American servers. No, it doesn’t really stop the possibility of this being enacted against my sites - and in fact, I don’t even serve content that I don’t have the rights to - but I will not support a country that enacts such things.
I understand we want to control…
The best part is what Lifehacker posted earlier today: you could still access the blocked sites through their IP addresses. In other words: LOLOLOL.
It’s like if they said “we don’t want to encourage people to smoke, so we’ll hide the cigarettes behind a screen. But you can still buy them if you really want.” Which is something they’ve done here in Canada, actually. Surprisingly enough, people who want to smoke still buy cigarettes! Who could have predicted that! Granted, I know there are people who are too lazy/stupid to navigate to websites that way (would a bookmark to a site’s IP address still work?). However, those are the people who are just waiting for a decent legal alternative to illegal downloading. The actual pirates, who will pirate any way necessary, will keep doing it even if you try to hide the stash.
So yeah, gotta love ineffectual politics. Oddly enough, Canada is doing alright as far as the internet goes these days - the CRTC changed its mind about usage-based billing. Now, this doesn’t sound all that exciting at first. But here’s an illustrative example:
I don’t remember what the offered speeds were for TekSavvy back then, but I assume they were terrible. But hey, would you look at that, the bandwidth caps went up by twelve hundred percent, making the independent ISP better in every way than the company they source their service from. Thanks, free market! Actual competition sometimes is good for consumers like the capitalists always said it would be!
Anyway, I think this is the exception to the rule when it comes to technology-related politics in North America. Politicians/the lobbying groups giving them ideas are perpetually behind the times, or at least too busy looking out for their own interests. If everything were right with the world, people that clueless/horrifyingly selfish would have no place making decisions for other people.
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As far as school goes, I’ve somehow made it into the final stretch without noticing. There’s less than three weeks of actual class left, and a month from now I’ll be finishing my last exam. I’ve got three-ish final projects due Nov 30th-Dec 2nd, but nothing between now and then. This means there will be no consequences for failure to work during the next two weeks. Delayed punishment is a notoriously difficult thing to feel bad about.
To combat this, I’ve drawn up an actual calendar on a piece of paper and put it at the front of my binder. I can see when my huge assignments are due, and see the divine punishment coming from a mile away. It helps to actually visualize the time I have left, instead of seeing a purely goal-based list of due dates. To that end, before Monday, my acceptable level of absolute failure will be completing two philosophy mini-papers (half a page of writing, unknown amounts of reading beforehand) and either some synopses or a mock research proposal for my research methods class.
I’m actually not being as hard on myself as it sounds, because I’m smarter than that, but I have to be honest too. I’ve been totally useless the past few weekends, and relatively unaccomplished during the weekdays in between (and for a while preceding them, too). Thus far, I’m pretty sure I’ve done well enough to scrape by with >90% in most of my classes - intro to systems programming is a bit iffy, since I’m doing great on the assignments (and, I think, the second test) but less well on the first test. I’m not reading my textbooks as religiously as I did last year, and in some ways it shows (not getting 100% on my multiple choice PSYC 2001 midterms, for example). But if I really push on these last assignments, it’ll be fine. I’m keeping my scholarship, too, even if I’d like to do a lot better than the 80% required for that.
Anyway, I’ll see how it goes. Apparently I forgot to sign into IM today, even though I’ve been home for hours. Oops. I’ll be sitting down to work for real over the next few weeks, though, so expect less availability. On top of that, I’ve got two separate birthday parties to attend this weekend, and I’m probably leaving one a bit early to go see Unexpect live. Whether or not I can survive all of that and still manage to get work done, I have no idea. I’ll be working sooner rather than later, just in case. And hey, if I can actually power through my work instead of pissing away my time, I’ll come out well ahead of schedule. So things are looking alright so far. And I’m eagerly awaiting December 15th-21st, when I’ll have nothing to do but write a couple of papers…
[title inspired by the least important line in Streetlight Manifesto’s ‘A Better Place, A Better Time’. The rest of the song is incredibly beautiful to me, too, but for entirely different reasons. Do me a favour and read the lyrics, alright? Whether or not you can connect the dots, I think you’ll get something out of it.]
I read something in my psych textbook last year that’s really stuck with me. It was a single-line comment, something a good student knows they won’t be tested on, along the lines of “people with anxiety disorders often feel more in control of their lives when they worry about things.” I can guarantee that if I ask the people I know who’ve taken that exact same course, and read the exact same textbook, most of them wouldn’t even remember that part. What I can also tell you is that it’s more like a subtle reassurance than some sort of powerful feeling of controlling your own destiny. And that it takes a hell of a long time to think about the worst things that might happen, and debate how I should react or whether it’s worth the risk. It doesn’t feel good to take three hours working out a 30 second conversation; but think about what might have happened otherwise! I have to keep doing it, making mental conversation trees, guessing at people’s reactions, because to do otherwise is to give up the illusion of control, and risk facing problems I might not be prepared for.
As you can probably guess, spontaneity isn’t one of my strengths. Makes me a terrible role player, too.
The unfortunate problem is that I habitually use most of my downtime to think about these sorts of things. Worse still is the fact that trying to fall asleep is essentially infinite time to worry about things. Lifehacker posted an article this summer about dedicating time to worry - and not doing it during the rest of the day. It’s easier said than done, especially when you have a lot to do (and worry about), and when you’ve spent years replacing sleep with worrying. But it’s definitely something I need to work on, because it’s a big part of why I have trouble with people. Even though I know it’s true, I kind of have to remind myself that nobody is going to remember that time I said something dumb (even if I remember it forever), or expect me to be perfectly eloquent all the time (even if I regret not saying X for days afterwards, and why didn’t I think of that at the time!?). It’s a lot harder to carry on a conversation when I’m trying to keep all those things in mind. And it’s not like I often manage to map things out and predict how someone is going to react. It’s just a reassuring habit I fell into years ago.
From the outside, you probably can’t tell how hard it is to break out of this pattern. It’s incredibly powerful, and incredibly pervasive. The associations get so strong that relapse is completely inevitable. Years of an almost ritualistic reliance on a seemingly harmless activity don’t go away overnight. Maybe you don’t want to see the harm it causes, or you can’t quite connect the dots. Either way, it sometimes seems a lot easier just to work around it rather than try to change.
I’ll do it, though. I’m tired of being paralyzed as I hover over the send button, wondering whether I could improve the message (text, IM, e-mail) that I’ve been writing for 5-50 minutes. I’m tired of being tired, because I tried to go to bed early, but instead stayed up for two hours worrying, then woke up in the middle of the night and worried for another hour before falling back asleep. Tired of psyching myself out to the point where I can’t even talk to people, or talk in the presence of people when it comes to class discussion. It might take me six months, or it might take me two and a half years. But I’m tired of not being able to explain this to people, leaving them guessing as to what the problem actually is. I can take care of that problem now, while I work on the rest.
geni:
I understand that they can’t have both the new and old looks forever because they’re not willing to maintain the older style, but modern doesn’t mean “no colors”. Here, have a look:
External imageFrom left to right: archive, report, and delete email. The report button could have been red, the…
http://userstyles.org/styles/56063/gmail-easy-access-colored-buttons
here you go boys and girls
It doesn’t solve the problem of their default design being a bit dumb, and if you’ve used Gmail prior to the change you probably don’t need help knowing which buttons are which, but I agree that they could use a bit of colour.
Lifehacker’s got some more scripts in this post, though I have no interest in the others, myself.
Also, time for a Systems Programming midterm, woo! gcc -E is for the preprocessor stages, gcc -S is for assembly, gcc -c is for object code… The activation record for a function contains its portion of the function call stack, and the return address for the calling function…
Had a “wonderful” experience this morning of trying to overcome my anxiety enough to speak up in my philosophy of mind class. Something I’ve done before, actually, although I’d never participated as significantly in the class discussion. For whatever reason, just the thought of raising my hand and presenting an argument was enough to leave me shaking due to anxiety. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sitting next to anyone I knew, though pretty much everybody was present (something about essays being assigned raises attendance dramatically). Maybe it was because I was doing more than just asking clarification questions after waiting to see if anyone else would (this might actually be it, because it didn’t bother me when I raised my hand at the start of class to say it was nice to finally read a more cognitive science-y paper). Or maybe it’s something else I haven’t though of yet. I still did it, though, because not only had I done the reading for the first time in weeks, it was like a checklist of all the things I’ve been learning about in other classes. Applications of Ungerleider and Mishkin’s cross-lesion studies to the multiple realizability problem? Hell yeah! Let’s get some actual evidence for our philosophical arguments, please and thank you.
And yet, I spent most of the lecture alternately shivering anxiously, in anticipation perhaps, and then being frozen in fear after I’d finished talking and opened the floor to responses from the prof and the rest of the class. It’s not a public speaking thing, either, because I had the exact same feelings last night as I debated whether to talk to someone I’ve known for years. Figuratively shaking in my boots (what sort of savage wears shoes indoors? Come on, America) as I went to go knock on the door, though there was some potential for disaster there. Then barely able to express myself, even though I’d already spent more than a month thinking about what I wanted to say, on a pretty regular basis. There’s nothing for me to be afraid of, really, and yet it’s there anyway.
But I manage! I’m doing pretty alright, lots better than I was anyway. Went to see Repo: The Genetic Opera with a couple of people, and against all odds I enjoyed it a lot. However, I’m not going to recommend that you watch it, unless there’s a shadowcast performing alongside. Have you heard of that? I hadn’t, but here it is in a nutshell: they take a movie, mainly Rocky Horror Picture Show and Repo, and then they have people who act out the scenes in front of it. So you take something that would (probably) suck and not be at all interesting to watch by yourself, and suddenly it’s amazing. It’s one of those “the whole is greater than the parts” kinds of thing. The next show isn’t until February, but I’m probably going to force some people to go see it with me… Hopefully they don’t hate it.
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On an unrelated note, as for why I haven’t been all that talkative lately, school’s pretty busy right now. I’ve got a midterm thursday and another friday, both of which I’ve barely studied for so far. Hopefully it’ll be ok! One’s a multiple choice exam for my research methods class, which will probably be super easy. The other is in systems programming, and I may not survive. If I do (and against my better judgement), I’m going to go out for the cognitive science social event (the one and only, unless you count D&D) and maybe make a token effort at drinking. Meanwhile, assuming there are no hardware disasters (and I can’t guarantee that), we’re ready to run a few practice tests for the project I’m interning on! After that, it’s time to start running participants and collecting data, which is pretty exciting actually. We took some press photos for the lab, to use for all the “look what sorts of cool research students are doing here!” things. I think I’ll be allowed to post those, and they turned out fairly well actually. I clean up nice, guys.
Oh, and apparently, interning is a word. Who knew!