I swear, the longer I’m in engineering school, the funnier and funnier Wasted Talent becomes. For a synopsis of the last three months, see Angela Melick’s life of a second-year mech, part 1 and part 2.

My next-door neighbour has these taped to her door.

Rands has a fantastic article this week on truth and spin:

Traditionally, the opposite of Truth is Spin. Spin is a pejorative term that comes out of Public Relations land. Spin is the deliberate selection of facts constructed to prove a specific point. For example, if there was a presidential debate where one of the candidates magically transformed into a blue whale in the middle of the debate, there would be someone from the blue whale’s camp on camera, after the debate, explaining the many benefits to America of being lead by a blue whale. They’d point out, “Are you aware of the average brain size of a blue whale? What do you think they’re doing with all that grey matter? Can you name a single war involving a blue whale?” While the rest of us would be giggling, someone, somewhere would think, “Yeah, I really want a blue whale as President… we could really use a bigger pool in the White House”.

In the rest of the article, he goes on to discuss the efficiency of communicating enthusiasm that good spin has. I was reminded somewhat of this guy, who was told by YCombinator that he was a “Woziak looking for a Jobs.”

Sometimes a good idea isn’t enough; you need a good idea and the charisma to persuade everyone else of its significance.

They say Engineering school is hard. But there’s a point at which you simply become numbed to it… when 78 of 99 students get a midterm mark below 50%, it’s not hard to start fantasizing about a long and successful career as a line worker screwing lids on toothpaste tubes.

And apologies to arts majors for the image. We think it’s funny. (They think it’s funny at UBC, too…)

It’s a verb, a noun, an adjective and nothing if not an enigmatic company; the greatest place for a hacker to work, a pattern for the future, and more romantically, a cathedral awaiting Alan Turing’s soul. In January, I’ll be heading to NYC for a few months of working with the Google Maps Team—it’s hard not to be a little excited.

Once again it is that my life has taken a bizarre and unpredictable turn. Surprise is the flavour that keeps one anchored in the present; I have no complaints.

In an article about telephone interviews, one of the design questions Joel says he asks is, “How would you implement code to operate the elevators in a high rise?”

Presumably, he’s looking for something like this; a system that avoids “starving” the top and bottom floors.

It’s a really interesting question, though. Legend has it that SimTower had its origins as an elevator simulation, but then the SimTower elevator cars have that bizarre property that they can pass each other in a single shaft. I’ve heard explanations that each “shaft” represents a 15-deep bank of elevators, but that would require each condo and office to also be a group of 15, which in turn messes with all the other money- and people-scales in the game; ultimately, I think it’s easier to treat the elevators as fantastic and the game rules as highly abstract.

When this article showed up last spring, it was unfortunately the middle of my exams, but I still took a few hours and tinkered with a quickie simulation. The notion of a rotating elevator is a highly interesting one—even moreso when you add in some kind of usable system that lets you declare your destination floor before boarding. The real challenge there, then, is to create a game theory-based control system that can group together people aiming for a single floor while still minimizing the wait time of each individual user. And also taking into account that lots of people will make mistakes, change their mind, and misunderstand the system.

Basically, I’m just writing because officially I’m studying for Signals, and it’s quicker to write than to dig out that code and start playing with it again. But yeah, I’ll post it up eventually.

When I changed my banner image for the fall, it was more an act of defiance than as some sort of genuine reflection of the reality outside. We’ve now had several dustings of snow, and there was the small issue of my bicycle brakes being encased in ice, fused to the wheel.

Anyhow, I ran into Matthias Wandel at Swing Club this afternoon—he’s a UW grad, and has a number of really neat project writeups on his site. It was just funny that I was half-heartedly studying some circuits in the studio, and when I asked him about an op-amp question, his response was more about what a useless circuit it was, than what exactly the filter behaviour would be.

In other news, I seem to be getting the hang of Tango a bit more. It’s a far simpler dance than Lindy, and certainly less flexible, but fun enough in its high-heeled, strutting sort of way. Like any of the more intimate dances, it’s more about the subtle communication between partners than big showy spins and tricks.

In an article about mistakes a startup can make, Paul Graham writes:

Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. If it’s a subset, you’ll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won’t be wasting your time. But more likely you’ll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you see more clearly what the rest should do.

I found this interesting simply because it has been my strategy for tackling our Realtime Operating Systems project this term. No individual piece of the project is particularly difficult, but it is a little tricky to map out a plan for incrementally developing it.

It’s obvious that certain auxiliary things can be bolted on later, but the majority of the assignment has to be in place before it does much of anything at all.

My approach? Get the major bits running in entirely separate, proof-of-concept programs. One group member is implementing a simple text parser, another the IRQ system, and I’m working with the final person on the switching stuff. There will still be an awkward moment when these parts have to be glued together, but at least each component will be known to function correctly on its own.

Around the end of the summer, I titled a post “Five Resolutions” and began drafting some pledges for the upcoming school term. Looking at it now, I realise that there were only ever three, and I’ve really just kept the easiest one of them.

What’s to say? It’s back to school: studying, cooking, hanging out, cycling, and dancing, but less of each than I feel like I’d like. It’s not that I’m wasting huge tracts of time either; there’s simply a lot going on.

One of the byproducts of being busy is that it seems to make the mind a fertile breeding ground. It’s frustrating to feel full of interesting notions and project ideas when I have the least amount of time to explore them.

These days are just packed.

Some weeks ago, I randomly ran into an old acquaintance with whom I had a brief but extraordinarily profitable working relationship with during my last year of high school. As partners in Drunken Ogre Entertainment, we produced this little gem, over the course of a few shorts months of work:

Unfortunately, it won’t run playably under DOSBox on my Mac, but for PC readers interested in trying this out, all you need is a friend and the download here. You may need to turn off the audio (use the “nosound” command-line parameter) to get it to work, but it’s still a bucket of fun.

The thing I remember most about the game was not so much the fun we had making (and playing) it, but how much it taught me about geometry. It was in programming the particles and guided missiles that I finally gained a true understanding of how to apply basic trigonometry; until then, it had been a sort of voodoo-math that revolved around some strange acronym.

Recently, I was sort of hoping for some similarly practical exercise to teach me all about Laplace.

Last night, in Waterloo, there were two parties.

The first was thrown by a frat, and was bone dry. The second was thrown by a local employer and featured a good deal more beer and liquor than could have been safely consumed by the persons present.

Not that all Waterloo frat parties are dry, or that most employer recruitment sessions aren’t, but it’s a little amusing to observe the contrast between students now and the students who graduated ten years ago to start companies in town.