kistaro

I feel guilty for forgetting to update this when I did post to my other various social channels, but I have mostly gotten the job. They're doing the final reference check now and figuring out how much money they'd like to give me, but I've been told that unless there's some secret hideous crime in my past, I will, before the end of the month, start employment with Google.

Now I'm going away from the stress of "MUST STUDY AAGGGH" followed by "I have no idea what is going to happen and there is nothing I can do about it", into "...well, now what do I do for two weeks?", which is combined with a nice spot of guilt about not spending the last three weeks getting the apartment cleaned up. It's actually worse than it was when I had a day job. To be fair, the stress of "will I ever get money again?" is a piquant sort of anxiety that does a brilliant job of not letting me focus on my usual tasks, so I perhaps shouldn't be surprised.

Perhaps I'll get it fixed in the next week or two. (Two is more likely; I could start my job in one week if I really push it, but the recruiter sounds harried enough as it is.) Although I do worry I would be much better off spending my time writing software, to stay in practice. (I'd like to! I'm definitely feeling that 'I'd really like to program something' itch again.) I really should balance my time between these pursuits, I guess; I just have to get myself motivated to do housework.

What the last few weeks have shown me is that I should stop buying video games. Most of them don't hold all that much interest for me. (Unsurprisingly, the ones I spend more on are the ones I'm likely to like least.) I actively dislike elaborate 3D graphics; simple 2-D sprites are much easier for me to identify and use. I have bad vision in a neural sense; there's little wrong with my eyes, but my brain is pretty bad at processing everything. I think, in the end, this is why I tend to like Nintendo games the best- and the extra visual cues of the 3DS make actual 3D games more playable than usual, although I find myself going back to 2-D much of the time, on a variety of systems. I need to let this guide my choice of games much more than it does; it helps my estimates of what I'd like or not, although to be fair this does match most of my recent purchasing decisions. More importantly, I have a stupidly large library of stuff I've never even started or never gotten through the tutorial of, and I should just play my backlog before making the problem worse. Save money, enjoy what I already have, and if I really feel the urge to recreationally shop, I should give Hasbro my money and get back into Magic: The Gathering.

For now, though, I have an intermission, of a week or two; perhaps it would be a vacation if I had planned it, but I haven't, so I should really just spend the time making myself feel secure and stable again. When I think about it that way, though, it gives me more guidance on what I should actually do and focus on; yes, housework first, and then more time with Rakeela than usual.

I haven't spent much time talking to people online recently, which I know is frustrating for those of y'all who would like to talk to me. But for the last three weeks, I've been this absolute stressball and trying to deal with OMG PEOPLE wasn't going to do me any good; I might be more available soon, but don't set your expectations very high, as the last few weeks have also reminded me that I really am an introvert and quiet, solitary pursuits really are my best means of emotional recovery.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/483111.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/483111.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

The problem with reading dragon-centric fiction is that I enjoy it at the time, but it tends to have bad effects on my mental state thereafter. It's rare that this focuses on the world of the book, mind you; traditional dragon-centric fiction is a violent thing I'd prefer not to be part of. Emphasizing the very sincere sense that I am the wrong species is not the primary issue, either, since that's a perpetual motif in my mind anyway, and reading does little to shape that one way or the other.

It's incidental things that tend to get distressing. Maybe it's because they're less constant from novel to novel, and I have less of a cognitive defense to them? In any case, the details vary. The Eragon series, for example (which I just finished; I agree with the criticisms of the first two books, but then Christopher Paolini became a much better author and reinterpreted flaws in his ability to develop sane and well-rounded characters when he was 16 into very real and, often, severe weaknesses in his characters, which makes the series dramatically better for the third and fourth), has rampant telepathy and I wind up feeling very lonely and isolated inside my own head. Another one that comes up (most notably from the Temeraire series) is missing flight; you'd think that'd be common to dragon fiction, but enough authors (having, presumably, not flown under their own power recently) completely miss the mark enough that it evidently fails to affect me, except when it doesn't.

I like dragon-centric fiction, but I'm not sure it's actually good for me. It does, in a roundabout way, remind me that I really need to pursue my own spirituality more than I do, so it does at least have some merit.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/483062.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/483062.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

I have, over the course of the last several days at work, learned enough Perl to be able to read, trace, and edit existing sources, and with a library reference I could probably write software reasonably competently. I have also learned enough to feel very secure in my conclusion that Perl is not my favorite programming language.

It probably doesn't help that the code I'm tracing through for work uses global variables to auto-increment an index (starting at undef) to provide "unique" "standardized" names for a quadratic number of sequence cross-alignment records, which are calculated in an order derived from the iteration order of a hash table. Because we all know variably sized hash-table order is a great way to normalize data.

This is not why I dislike Perl. This would have been absymal code in any language; it is possible to write illegible, bad code full of functions that take 14 parameters and use 3 globals and care about call order in almost any language, and it will never be good style. Perl does tend to encourage this, given that specifying how many parameters your subroutine takes is actually a new feature (as is the "return" keyword) and it encourages heavy use of its $_ "the last thing" automatic variable, but it is possible to write clear code in Perl. I don't like the stupid things Perl does with variable binding- specifically, how $foo, @foo, and %foo are three different variables with no relation to each other, and $foo, $foo[0], and $foo{0} is the proper way to refer to one element from each of them in turn, because the type prefix refers to the type of the data being pulled out, and indexing an array or hash nets you a scalar. It also means I can't read left-to-right and know what the hell variable I'm working with when there's been such a namespace collision. Which is clearly bad style, and happens left and right in this code.

Anyway, I think I'll continue to use Python when I need a scripting language. I might be tending to use Java less for a compiled language, if Cython works as well as advertised; I really do develop about ten times as quickly in Python as Java, and if annotating a few types lets it compile to C that runs about as fast as Java code, I'll take that and, if you'll pardon the pun, run with it. I'm practical; I'll use which language meets my needs best. I suspect Perl will be that language when and only when my needs include "work with existing Perl code".

It did teach me something else, though! My first reactions to things are still very dragon-shaped. That code had me, quite literally, hissing and snarling at my computer as the atrocity unfolded line-over-line. With the occasional deep, threatening growl, baring-of-teeth, and a quadrupedally tense posture over my swivel chair.

This isn't too abnormal for computer programmers, so I don't think my co-workers noticed.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/481953.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/481953.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

Something that I mention now and then, and should bring up again because new content came up-

In my more whimsical moods, or just more overly "hug me?" moods, I've been known to represent myself as an inflatable vinyl dragon toy. I've gotten this illustrated now and then.

I have a content filter for the purpose; it's relatively open. (I mean, I'm announcing that it exists, for one thing.) I've picked up a few audience members since the last time I mentioned it, so- would anybody like to be added to the filter?

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/481561.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/481561.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

For those who haven't caught on, or read my interests list, or brought up the subject in conversation: I'm polyamorous, and in a polyamorous relationship. Conversation on different takes on the concept has come up enough recently I feel I should post my own.

Of course, I also have other reasons to think about it; a dragon who Rakeela and I are both in love with finally got a chance to visit last weekend and it was, for each of us, sincerely one of the most emotionally beneficial experiences the any of the three of us have ever had. I'm not good at describing emotional experiences; I do know it did quite a lot of good to have someone in an emotionally close relationship with me who is very physical with hir affection around for a while. I guess I'm selective about who I want to be touched by, but it's done me some good to, even for a little while, be able to answer the quiet urge to hug someone I care about by hugging someone I care about. Cognitively, I just got to relax for a while- which is as much an effect of "it's a vacation" as anything else- and that's not an experience I have all that often. I had someone else actually defending my interests for once, and acting as a priority and a reason for me not to just scurry off and do whatever random thing someone around the house wants as opposed to whatever I've wanted to do or have been trying to do.

A lot of what helped is that one big fear I had is gone. I was afraid that maybe I wouldn't be very good at polyamory when confronted directly with it. I had this fear that I'd get jealous over people I love spending time with each other, or with people they love, instead of me, or that I'd be receiving such jealousy. That no such thing happened did a great deal to get rid of one of my persistent anxieties; my tendency to be happy that people I love are happy is strong, and jealousy doesn't even bother entering into it.

Which I need. Jealousy, I don't need. But I'm emotionally polyamorous because the alternative makes no sense to me. I cannot understand why a relationship with a person should be this strong and defining limitation on relationships to other people. Being forced to spurn a person you love is the basis of an immense quantity of emotional pain; love triangles are the foundation of tragic stageplays throughout history. So, what good comes from being forced to make such a fundamentally painful decision? The only thing that makes sense to me is fear- most specifically, fear of jealousy- and that just seems like choosing an unavoidably painful thing that can do a lot of damage to people forever in favor of learning how to manage an emotion that not everybody will even bother experiencing in the circumstances.

I can't understand why it makes sense to force onesself to make such a choice for an arbitrary headcount limit of one. So I'm polyamorous because having a relationship won't stop me from falling in love with people, and it's not any more complicated than that.

This isn't to say I love easily; my relationships have taken multiple years to develop. But that happens, and trying to fight against it won't help me any.

I love multiple dragons, and we are all making it work out quite well for us all. I guess there isn't much more to it than that. I'm happy, and so are people I love, and those are the things that matter.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/480694.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/480694.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

It's taken a year to recover after the damage of my previous job, but it's finally come back.

I want to write software. I'm not too picky about the details. I just want to solve things, engineer things, make something work.

In short, what I most want to spend my time doing is what I'm being paid to do.

I remember this feeling from college, this need-to-solve that got me extra credit through my CS classes because I simply didn't want to stop, this thing that made me get a respectable rating in TopCoder algorithms tournaments, the desire that built all of the decisions I made throughout my education.

It's been too damn long.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/480289.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/480289.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

Today's plan was to work from home until noon, go to the dentist to get my last two fillings, come back, and finish working.

What actually happened is that I felt increasingly ill all morning, went to the dentist, threw up, rescheduled, and went home. I'm pretty sure that was the bastard child of stress, an illness I may or may not have been fighting all week, irritable bowel syndrome, and of course anxiety about dental treatment.

At least my dental office is compassionate enough to not bill the late cancellation fee in circumstances like this.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/480131.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/480131.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

I've been having increasing problems with my netbook vs. creative variations on Linux I'd like to try. At this point, it's sort of my regularly-mindwiped scratch computer. It's like a ten-inch avatar of instant messaging and IRC, and I haven't yet found an OS that actually does that well, for several varieties of reasons.

Windows builds are kind of clumsy for the task, really. There're several varieties of Linux that would almost work better, but "almost" and "would" are not quite the same...

HP thought it was a clever idea to use a touchpad that has no actual buttons. Instead, the entire thing clicks, and if you were touching the "right mouse button" painted onto it at the time, it was a right-click. This is not in hardware and requires driver support.

It seems like I can either have right-click working, or basically any of the other features of a useful touchpad working, but not both. No scroll margin or two-finger scroll, no inertia, no acceleration, but at least it can right-click.

A netbook has limited space, so trying to save space by omitting physical buttons is semi-reasonable. But why not do what Acer did for my Aspire One and just stick them to the side? There's plenty of space there!

I'd like to try one of the various builds of Chromium. But, wi-fi issues aside, they can't seem to keep the gsynaptic driver package reliably loaded, and that interferes pretty badly with usability.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/479712.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/479712.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

A very recurring theme on my various writings has been writing about writing. Specifically, the writing of notes. Ideas leak out of my brain, and the only way to avoid them splattering about and making a mess of the floor is to collect them in some sort of proper aggregator, and thus I am learning what notetaking tools I need.

After years of heavy-duty computational solutions, I've dropped back to the fundamentals: paper. Staples Arc notebooks for large-format notes, because they still solve the big problem I kept using computers for; since the pages are easy to remove and reorganize, I can periodically take them out, scan them in, mark them as scanned, put them back, and then not worry about losing them. It's the most practical paper-to-PC note system I've found yet. It's only really practical because work has an industrial high-speed full-stack double-sided automatic document scanner, but, well, that's kind of why they have one.

Portable notes cause more of a quandary, though. People who have been following my Twitter feed will know I've switched to an iPhone by now, and I am startled to admit that I have a much higher text entry speed on its virtual keyboard than I ever did on any of the hardware keyboards of my previous smartphones; the physical act of pushing a tiny button is significantly slower than tapping the approximate region of a key, and autocorrect usually helps more than it hinders as long as I'm paying some attention now and then.

It's just the wrong form factor for things, though. Handwritten to-do lists are just more expressive and more present, for me. If I enter a to-do list on a PDA, I put it there and then I forget it; it's not a to-do so much as a tomb, and the act of entering data is such a trivial thing that it fails to gain mental traction. A handwritten list is much more present: it's more flexible, it takes more effort to enter and thus sticks in my mind better, and its physical nature means it confronts me more often- things get off from it more often.

To-do lists and "scrap data" are why I've taken to using a Hipster PDA (the Levenger variation thereof, actually, which means I can fasten old pages into my notebooks) on a regular basis. Unlike a conventional notebook, old-but-still-important items don't get lost in a forcibly-sequential snow of completed lists. Completed items are simply removed, and what remains is generally more relevant. It's extremely useful for getting things done.

What it isn't is very inspiring. It doesn't make me want to write. It's a stack of cards, and that's very helpful, but its perpetual, reloading, flowing nature keeps me from having something to fill or write into. It doesn't have a real sense of continuity, and that's by design; it's the best tool I have for getting things done, but it's bad at thought debris.

This goes back to a concept I've brought up many times before: ideas need respect. This is why I'm in favor of good notebooks: a notebook is a physical representation of your thoughts, and as your thoughts are something to respect, one manifestation of that respect is a good notebook. Cheap index cards with little mushroom-shaped tabs punched out to hold onto plastic discs are practical, but not very reverent. Little notebooks? Those have a lot more presence.

Which means that, once again, I'm carrying multiple note-taking devices. My phone, because it's my communication device but also as an excellent recorder of factoids; a disc-bound pad of index cards, because it's my best tool for actually completing things; and a small notebook, because something that sits there asking for ideas to be written into it tends to cause me to produce more ideas.

It's worth noting that I'm starting to unravel why Field Notes work better for me than other, similar products. The quality of the paper stock and reliability of manufacture are significant pluses, but the fact that they are unabashedly small notebooks counts for more. They're only 12 sheets of paper plus a cover, folded in half, for 24 leaves, or 48 pages of content. The other notebooks I've tried are, for the most part, 80 pages. This works much worse for me. Filling it seems much more distant, rather than an achievable and reasonable goal. The notebook physically starts to suffer from the strain of travel long before it's full; Field Notes are a bit sturdier, but perhaps it's more important that their small size limits their travel life. Little tiny notebooks aren't exactly indexed things, nor is having much other than a front-page meta-todo-list practical, so they need to be searched for relevant content- and that's harder in a larger notebook. (Also, Writersblok's notably thin paper makes it very difficult to work with.) I'm probably just trying to justify buying a stupidly premium-priced product, but it's one that actually works for me.

This is sort of a conglomeration of about five different posts I had notes on about making notes. Every time I started to write one, my opinion changed. I think it's starting to shake out by now...

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/478822.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/478822.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

The City of Redmond employs drive-by water-meter readers.

This involves a team of two people and a city Jeep. One person is the driver. The other person is leaning out the window holding a thing on a stick that looks to all the world like a black golf club. Instead of smashing mailboxes, they're driving by black plates on the ground marked "WATER METER", slowing down, she-of-the-stick touches a circle on the plate with her implement, it goes "beep", and they drive on.

Modern RFID tech is impressively flexible. I'd just never seen a meter reading before. Looks like an efficient system.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/478085.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/478085.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

Large swathes of the Internet no longer hold my attention as they once did. It is now pretty much only TVTropes that I stay up late reading, unless I'm behind on my LiveJournal Fiends List. Twitter is this lightweight and temporal and temporary thing, so I make no attempt to read back in that; my RSS feeds have slowed down because I've been thinning them out, trying to keep myself under 100 news-items per day. Google Reader has streamlined my Internet reading habits such that I don't have a set of sites I regularly check for updates- just the one, and that's pretty much the point of RSS.

I have no interest in Facebook, and most other venues of conversation have ground to a slow halt. Which is too bad, really, as conversation is what I'm here for; the Internet is a valuable platform for exchanging ideas, among its other uses. I miss baxil's former forum, among other things, but attempts to revive it aren't likely to work- attention spans just aren't there.

I don't think this is purely due to the Facebookization of the Internet. I am also inclined to blame the economy, draining peoples' time, energy, mood, and capacity for creativity and self-expression; a constant state of anxiety about financial security does not lend itself to philosophical thought. I hope the economy will improve, and slowly bring back peoples' states of mind along with it.

No matter the cause, the consequence is straightforward: I run out of things I have real interest in paying attention to much, much faster than I had previously. It's more likely than not that I am becoming jaded and cynical to the exchange of ideas; probably true, but it's an attitude I'm reluctant to reject when it's doing me measurable good.

It's given me quite a lot of time back. I'm reading again. I'm starting to actually get into my massive collection of unplayed games from the last handful of Steam mega-sales. Video gaming is hardly the pinnacle of cognitive achievement, but it's better than just zoning out, browsing various sites but fundamentally psychologically disengaged, as otherwise claims too much of my time. Heck, it's a distraction from itself; I'm several months out of date on Homestuck because I kept forgetting to get back into it, not because I didn't want to, and am only now catching up. It's media I'm actually interested in, instead of driven by this strange compulsion to read everything.

And it's that compulsion that's drained a frankly massive amount of my time for the last several years. My irrational, self-destructive fascination with the Internet is finally fading, and good riddance; I've already started to balance my time (much) better as a result.

(Today: garage organization.)

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477825.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477825.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

Figuring out whether I "got what I paid for" when I purchased something is surprisingly hard when that thing is inexpensive. How low quality should I consider expected?

I bought a group of index cards (because the Hipster PDA concept is actually working quite well for me). They arrived today. As hoped, they are printed with a grid pattern. The printing is imperfect; several of the lines don't go all the way down. The cards are not perfect rectangles, cut slightly too large, are more "heavy paper" than "light cardboard", and came pretty badly curved, with the shrinkwrap apparently on too tightly.

I got 3,600 cards for about $20, though, so how much room do I have to complain about objects that cost less than seven-tenths of a cent?

I sincerely don't know the answer to that.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477478.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477478.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

I've recently gotten curious as to the fate of one of the entertainments of my youth. This was a book/toy/thing I had in the 90s, but have completely forgotten the name of. Does anybody remember what they were?

These were thin books, printed on sturdy paper in full color, with white plastic spiral binding so they could be turned all the way back. The left pages were a quiz or puzzle, and the right pages were a short essay on the subject of the quiz in case you didn't know and wanted to look it up- but if you just wanted to test yourself, you could fold the book back instead.

They were associated with this little black plastic frame, the gimmick of the book. It was the "DECODER", as labeled in gold ink at the top. It was mostly rectangular, with dials for wheels sticking out of each side- five left, five right- and turning the dials caused a circle, square, or triangle to appear in a window (keep turning to get the one you want). Each one of those windows was next to a larger square window cut through the entire thing, resulting in this little pattern of ten zig-zag holes through it.

The quizzes were 3-way multiple choice (for the most part, there were some alternate formats), and the answers corresponded to a circle, a square, or a triangle; to answer the questions, you turned the dial for that question number until its window showed the shape for the answer you wanted. Once you'd tried all ten, you checked your work- there was this cloud of the answer shapes over a thick black line with an arrow on it; you lined up the bottom of the Decoder along the line, and made the arrows point to each other, and the shapes that showed through the window were all the correct answers and you could compare them to yours.

I've forgotten the name!

Does anybody other than me remember them?

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477183.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/477183.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

I have been slowly learning what is important in a daily-use random-debris small highly-portable physical notebook to me. While I'm more than a little obsessed with everyday note-taking and thought-recording (my blog backlog is stupidly long), this is actually my first foray into paper notebooks, because I'd been obsessed with the goal of digital archiving- this fear that I'll lose anything that isn't in the computer. and as such, need to use only devices that support easy archiving. That's either an electronic notetaker of some form, or recently trying to use a little tiny notebook for the Livescribe Pulse for the purpose. Needless to say, all these approaches have had deficiencies. As bad as my handwriting is, the specific act of writing notes by hand is important to me. I don't know why that is, but handwriting has this very strong appeal to me; maybe I picked it up from my mother, and the pages of notes, memos, and handwritten letters she'd generate in any given day.

I can now confidently say with some degree of certainty that absolutely no digital note taking solution works anywhere near as well as a little tiny notebook. I bought a pack of Field Notes, and I've just about finished my first notebook today.

In the end, these aren't notes I have to worry about archiving in perpetuity. They are four grocery lists, six or seven to-do lists, three restaurant orders, and eight blog topics. Those I could, of course, archive, as I perpetually do; I note a subject I want to write about, write a summary, archive it, and then forget it, and never write on it. Better is the inherently transitory nature of a paper notebook; eventually I will no longer carry it when it is full and the to-do lists are to-done, and that sets a time limit. Blog subjects sit forever in my permanent electronic notes; if a 48-page paper notebook lasts me two weeks, then that is a time limit for how long a subject can sit before I must post it or accept that I never will. This is my first experiment with notes that are so inherently transitory, and until now, that transitory nature had never seemed like as much of a benefit as it is proving to be.

There's one very important trait of these notebooks, though, and it is that I want to write in them. I now have a small pile of little paper notebooks to use (next up: a Writersblok, similar form factor to the Field Notes, but more pages, thinner paper, dot grid instead of line grid, and, most importantly, much lower price), and I'd like to use them, and starting a new one when I'm not out of paper yet is wasteful, and filling notebook pages just to fill them is just stupid- if I'm going to fill them with no content, I at least want to doodle! (Which is a perfectly good use of a notebook page.) The blog for Field Notes called out that a small grid paper notebook isn't so functionally different from a portable laptop computer with no internet connection and no boot time- it's even got its own selection of games, after all.

Wanting to write for the sake of writing is good for me. Entertaining myself with pen and paper is a good habit to be in, is a useful way to get thoughts out of my head so I don't have to waste time obsessing or worrying about them, leads to more blog posts, and leads to the sort of more-considered, more analyzed thoughts that makes me look more intelligent than I actually am, which is always fun.

Digital notetakers haven't worked for me as a portable solution. When working, and at a computer, nothing beats the OneNote/Evernote combo: OneNote for what I'm doing, Evernote for what I'm researching that I want to archive. But pulling out my phone and typing a text note on a little keyboard just doesn't work out, nor does it capture the real texture of my notes- which are covered with diagrams, arrows, boxes, and other scrawled little text marks that mean a lot more to me than flat text ever did. OneNote, for its part, actually does let me do that. Larger devices, like a netbook, iPad, or iPad-with-keyboard (what I'm using for this post, actually), simply fail the portability test; it is rare that I'm inclined to just whip out my netbook and type something up on it. It is quite common that I'm inclined to grab a little paper notebook and write something.

For everything I thought I needed about digital notes for everything I do, it turns out the most important attribute of a notebook for me is that it makes me what to write in it. In the end, that's why I'm willing to pay a premium for a good notebook and good pens; they are critically important tools to me, and if anything's worthy of my respect, my thoughts and ideas are, and a decent notebook makes some emotional statement about that respect to me.

I suspect this is more generalizable. I am in favor of decent-to-good pens (I prefer Pilot G-Tec 0.4mm Gel Rollerball) and decent-to-good notebooks (Field Notes are beautiful to my aesthetic, but Writersblok has its own distinct elegance) for everybody who is even thinking about it. While possibly expensive by commodity standards of paper and pen, it seems more likely to be incredibly cheap for its psychological value.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/476871.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/476871.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.

Sometimes, I just want to share a piece of memory-

As much as I enjoyed my judo classes (back from when I was being homeschooled), I was never very good at them in competition. My little collection of judo trophies comes from the small size of such tournaments, and represents a proud little array of last-place finishes; the exception is the kata tournaments- demonstrations of form with the cooperation of a partner, rather than applying techniques in a fight- those my partner and I won.

While I wasn't very good at competing (actually, I did just fine, but Sensei tended to put us at least two divisions higher than our actual weight class should have had us in- she was a very good teacher, and anything less was basically noncompetitive- at least for most of the rest of the class; I've never been the most athletic), I did wind up very good at running the scoreboard. It gives you a great front-row seat, teaches you to pay attention to what the judges care about for scoring points, and it's more fun to do something than just watch. Someone had to take over for me when it was my turn to compete (or my turn next), but that was really a very small fraction of the matches- divisions were small, but there were a lot of them.

A standard judo tournament scoreboard is not a high-tech piece of equipment. It is a wooden frame on which house numbers and flags made out of dowels and squares of cloth are hung and attached, and the official match timer is a $5 stopwatch. As well as recording the scores and tracking penalties, I had to watch for match end conditions: the pin timer, the match timer, and two half-points. (One point wins, but only half-points actually "add up" to any higher point; the two smaller points are infinitely smaller than the previous level. There's no "one point" mark on the scoreboard- that's just game over.)

There are two common ways to note an end of a match when the judge doesn't notice. Either a beanbag is tossed into the ring, or an air horn is blown. The air horns are loud and annoying and make everybody jump, so they've fallen out of favor. The beanbag has the opposite problem, though; the judge doesn't always notice. We have a couple of spares, though.

The correct thing to do is to throw it gently into the ring in front of the judge, near the competitors. There was one judge who almost never noticed, though.

He actually didn't mind when I got into the habit of aiming for him with the beanbag. He noticed it then!

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/476419.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/476419.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.