Got married! Travelled across Spain! So many good vibes that I still have a hard time comprehending it all. As a surprise gift, we got an envelope with a date from each of the guests. Inside the envelope, to be opened on that date sometime in this first year, is a fun task to undertake for us. It is such a thoughtful gift and such a great way to celebrate our marriage, like when we “had to” dine with sushi and wine this week because it’s a go-to combo from a good friend. Good luck all yall with the dumpster fire (/ballot box fire??!) that is next weeks election. Feels like the whole world is watching.
I no longer have a girlfriend… …because I now have a fiancée! We’re currently on holiday in the Italian Alps. When I mentioned our plans for our summer vacation to kleinbl00 he went “you know, being proposed to on a lake in Como is pretty storybook” and I was like “you’re not wrong that’s for sure”. Proposing had until that point been an idea for a future day, but we’re still going strong after five oftentimes turbulent years. So after finally finding a ring two days before we left, carrying it in my camera bag where she wouldn’t have any reason to look around in, finding to a gorgeous green lakeside pergola in a beautiful village on Lake Como, and her mentioning how romantic this place is, I tell her I’d love to make a video of us with my new camera to capture this wonderful place and go down on one knee. She was completely surprised and elated. (And she loves the ring! Phew.) I’m still surprised it worked out as well as it did. I even got the video exactly the way I hoped. Not that that matters too much, but it’s the cherry on the cake that I got both the composition right as well as the technical settings that I wanted (6.2K, 30fps, shutter at 1/60 with my variable ND filter and the Eterna Fuji film setting). It helps that my new Fuji camera has been a joy to (learn to) shoot with.
I got a new job!
Greetings from Germany! With the SO out of town I decided to head out on a little solo road trip. I had never been to a sauna / spa before but felt like going today. I went to a large one with 10 “sauna worlds” ranging from koi karpers to Vienna coffee houses, lol. It was less relaxing than I thought due to heart rate / covid woes, but I had a good time. Boy is it nice to jump into a cold waterfall after a good sweat. Next stop is arguably Europe’s best themed themepark: Phantasialand! Haven’t been there before. I might not ride much if anything so I’m trying to keep my expectations low. At the same time I’ve been a thoosie (theme park enthoosieast) for two decades now so I can’t not be excited, y’know?
Funeral of a wonderful, hopeful and passionate cousin today. She died far too young, too quickly and left behind too many. If you do anything today, show someone you are there for them because one day you might not.
Welcome, all, to the checks notes... ...Alpine cottage? where we have... FULL GLASSES OF BEER
Remind me to never commit to speaking at a conference 3 months in advance ever again. In two weeks, I'm speaking at a single-track conference for public transport professionals. My talk is scheduled right after four senior executives and one well-respected academic have had their turn, and boy am I struggling with the fear of saying dumb shit in front of a very large group of people I respect. Whenever my mind wanders, it wanders to the talk. This Monday I finally locked in the topic, next week I need to submit my slides, so any advice beyond "stay true to yourself" is welcome. Besides the low-key anxiety, I do feel happy about finally getting back to connecting with people in my field again and having something to say to them. It's one of the things I didn't expect to miss the past year.
I almost forgot! I'm officially a scientist now! 🥳
So let me get this straight: We have a financial system of investments that "worked", by which I mean for the sake of this simplification that it produced decent return on investment with relatively little investment risk. Over time, it has stopped working because the foundation has slowly eroded underneath it: the returns on things that are relatively low-risk are lower than ever, hardly beating inflation. This has pushed people controlling large sacks of money into more and more risky, more predatory investments just to keep the returns on their investments good enough, attempting to secure future wealth. The financial Overton window has shifted dramatically towards risk, the solid foundation of alpha gains falling out. We have a financial system that used to be limited by the speed of a broker's mind. That used to be limited by the ingenuity of an Ivy League econ major to come up with new risks to create out of thin air on top of existing market and goods movements. Over time, the yelling at phones in a big room in NYC was replaced by computers, the creation of financial markets by computers, they're all interconnected in strange ways. The dark side of the pools are now squarely out of view of anyone with regulatory power, the frequency of high-frequency trading bots from companies gobbling up CalTech and MIT grads so high it's measured in nanoseconds. We have a financial sector that got not much more than a mild burn from the Financial Crisis. No real strucutral repercussions, of course. With the bailouts left and right, and the money printer going brrr evermore, we have a financial sector that is not restricted but spurred on into madness, totally fine with taking obscene risks because their Clubhouse buddies are doing it too and you gotta keep up with the Jonases over at Goldman, right? So they short what they want. Who cares about a bit of leverage here and there if you're right. We have a generation (or two) of the 99% who had the 'boomer dream of college-jobbyjob-house-pension shattered in front of our eyes in 2008, who are no stranger to nihilism in their 9-years-out-of-college 180sqft bedroom their degree got them. A generation who have not forgotten the tents of Occupy that did not colonize an inch of the bank accounts of Big Money. Enabled by the slot machine of Robinhood, unhindered by any lack of expertise, some gather on Reddit and speculate on the straight white bro horoscope that is the NYSE. They move a market here and there, but only if they align their lulz with their cash for a bit. They tell themselves this is how they reclaim their grip on the(ir) future, but deep down they know it's mostly a game of which they're a bunch of duck-sized horses fighting against an army of horse-sized ducks. UNTIL someone came up with a plan that is equal parts nihilism, meme, and a call-out of the madness of the market. A plan that squarely points the middle finger at the amorphous class of the Rich who destroyed their future, by destroying their future with their own hubris. A plan that's easy enough to communicate in one of the few thousand Twitter threads that popped up as soon as $GME started getting traction. Easy enough to follow through on, throw a bunch of cash that wasn't growing anyway into it just to believe in the long arm of justice. Throw in some Musk and crying billionares to keep the train steamin'. Cue billionaires crying because the wrong people are getting rich. A friend of a friend is actually hit badly by this! Can you imagine them picking something in my portfolio? Let's gear up the scare tactics and make Very Important Calls with Very Important People to put an end to these plebs. Let me call up that guy we lost to those Robinhood losers. He can buy us some time, for sure. We have a stock market that has still ignored the largest health crisis since WW2. We have economists screaming recession for the last eighteen months. We have a market that has done nothing but radicalize, on the flimsiest of economic foundation, for the past decades. We have books left and right telling us how close we got to a meltdown a decade ago. And now have Bed, Bath & Beyond going places. I'm not saying generations to come will learn Gamestop and Lehman in the same breath? But it's not unlikely.
I just voted! Our ballots are hilariously large, as in 2 bij 4 feet large fold-outs. There was only one person ahead of me and I was done in less than a minute, most of the time was spent properly re-folding the ballot. The whole process was a wonderfully strict and orderly display of electoral logistics. Got to keep my red pencil AKA mark of democracy because of Covid restricting the use of reusable pencils. It took until yesterday to decide which party to vote on. There were some newcomers, like the pro-European Volt movement and a new radical equality party, that piqued my interest. In the end I cast my vote (again) for the green socialists. There was some reluctance, but I realized nothing is more important right now than voting for a better climate and I think the green socialists have the best programme for that.Voted for a woman on the list who's been actively working on accessibility and justice and is also a badass wheelchair hockey world champion. We spent a long weekend at the SO's parents. A much needed change of scenery with lots of quality time. Board games were played. We watched a phenomenal weekly late night show together on TV, which is all about music and finding the joy of wonder in covid times. My soul hasn't been this soothed by something on linear television in...ages. Came back from the weekend refreshed, almost like we had gone on holiday!
My sister is getting married this Friday! I've been to only one wedding I can recall, and now I'm the witness too. Gonna be interesting to see if we can actually maintain 6ft distance. Everyone's supposed to have their own seats at distance. Excited to start my secondment next week. My SO graduated in March and, after months of sending out resumées and cover letters only for them to fall on deaf ears, suddenly found herself selected as the best candidate for two positions last week. She can start ASAP at a very good NGO that's doing research into education. Super happy for her. Gonna be a busy few months I'm sure. We also need to figure out how to deal with both of us in calls most of the week; we only have one office that we usually both work in, with me on calls. I also want something of a standing desk for calls, as I'm starting to hate my fantastic Aeron chair simply because I'm glued to it 8-10 hours a day.
Sigh. Honestly? I'm at a loss now what's safe to do and what isn't. Private gatherings should be limited to 6 people at most per government recommendations, which is easy enough. But we know risk outside is limited, so can you sit with a larger group in the park if you keep distance to most people? What if you sit across from someone for a while the one day of the week I go into the office? Public transport seems to be fine, but the official policy is to use any mouth covering, preferably noneffective nomedical stuff. So I got myself some N95 non-medical masks, which are the best non-medical efficiency, I think. And at what point do you have symptoms? An amount of sniffs or sneezes or coughs that can be counted on two hands per day seems fine. But we also know that 40% is asymptomatic. Does that mean no symptoms at all, or does it fly under the radar as "it's nothing"? And how should I recalibrate now that testing capacity is limited again? Hospitalizations are very low over here right now, but a lot of young people seem to test positive. Yet I've heard nobody in my peers who has tested positive, only a few negatives. So am I a terrible person for seeing friends again? For having a board game night? I can go on but I'll stop now. Safe to say it's tiring, it's grinding my will down to apathy and I hate it. Something cool; one of my work projects is to help build the mobility app of the future. One app to not just plan, but also book and pay for not just PT but also scooters, ebikes, rental cars, you name it. Yesterday we launched our closed beta, so after half a year of working behind the scenes to build up the data analytics platform to support development, we're now out testing with real users and I can buy actual e-tickets for trains and buses. There's a lot of competition in this space, but I'm really hoping we can make a difference and compete with Google Maps and the likes for multimodal trips.discovidture, dis·co·vid·ture, n : the uncertainty and unease at taking any coronavirus related health risk.
Name: veen Location: Netherlands Age: 25 Current Preoccupation: fulltime data analyst / sustainable transportation consultant / product developer, academic researcher on the side Previous Preoccupations: student, being alone. I'm fairly certain I've been checking hubski almost every day for the past few years. :)
My college years are now officially over! I had my final thesis presentation and defense on Monday. I got an 8 out of 10 for my thesis, which is equivalent to an A or A+ I think? Above average at least. My thesis committee really liked the parts I cared about and had some good feedback. It was a great day, except for the fact that my family couldn't make it. They departed well on time but got stuck at a bridge that wouldn't close properly for four hours with no way to turn back. We were supposed to have dinner together afterwards. My mom was really heartbroken that she couldn't make it. In a weird turn of events, the story of the bridge and my mom made it onto the front page of the local newspaper, and now a local restaurant has offered to give us a free dinner this Friday. So at least there's a silver lining. :) The title of engineer is protected here - you're only allowed to use it if you've graduated with an engineering degree. So besides MSc, I now get to use the "ir." title. Gonna look super fancy on business cards.
Gf and I celebrated one year as officially together yesterday. We went to a great restaurant that I knew she'd like. Did a lot of talking; we were one of the first to be seated, and one of the last to go home. Hard to believe it's been a year already - in what seems like a short time we've built something great together. I've been messing with Linux today. It was bound to happen some day - getting packages to work on Windows can be a total bitch if you aren't a command line wizard. This week the two package managers I had were not sufficient to get an OpenStreetMaps data extraction tool to run, even with help from two devs, so I said fukkit and installed WLS and Ubuntu. Now I just need to figure out how to get data from here to there and back. At work I've been setting the gears in motion to do more product development. It's a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing, but we're getting somewhere. A colleague also dryly noted that 3 million in revenue per year is entirely dependant on me as a product owner...while to me it's not even top 3 in priorities. Think I should probably ask for a raise next review cycle. I forgot to mention last week that I started my electronic music making minicourse. Made some shitty tunes, but I am very much enjoying fiddling around with sounds for hours on end so I think this new hobby might be a keeper. DM'ed for a few colleagues this Monday. It went amazing. The two new players had much more extensive fantasy, fiction and RPG histories then I realized and learned the ropes in no time. We're now thinking of making it a monthly campaign thing.
Birthday pubski! 🎉 The round's on me.
Rocky week. Seemingly out of nowhere, my company has been taken over by a big (20x nationally, 200x internationally) consultancy firm. On paper it's a hostile takeover. It was decided entirely behind closed doors by our shareholders, and that did not land well - we value transparency, candour and working together with all things internal, and this is the direct opposite of that. Lots of coworkers specifically joined our company so to not work for one of the big consultancy firms in our field. Myself included. I happened to figure it out earlier, so I had some more time to think about it (/go through all stages of grief). My conclusion is that I'll be fine ( - maybe even more than fine)? But a large part of what I like about my work is that it's filled with interesting, engaged people who hate corporate BS as much as I do. I worry about the rest, the team, what will happen when 10, 20% decides to leave after a year. The longer people have been around, the more negative their attitude towards this change. We've changed before - in my two years here we grew from 55 to nearly 90. But we have kept a common denominator alive, and I'm worried about that. Rubbing against Boring, Inc. will definitely change things one way or another, as much as they're emphasizing that they don't want to change much because we're doing so well already. In other news, I had my final private lesson in electronic music creation yesterday, which was a good change of pace. My teacher had a room full of synths and modules and he showed me some of his beats and work process. My girlfriend and I also booked our tickets for our Scotland trip. We're going there by ferry and back by train - I was adamant to not fly there. It's funny, the time it takes me with the Eurostar from London to Rotterdam is a good ten minutes longer than it used to take me to travel from one corner of the Netherlands to the other. Already looking forward to that trip! I'll be out of office for a good four weeks in total.
Made a bunch of progress on the ground source heat pump tool we’re building. I devised a way to check for all 250k+ parcels in the county how many boreholes could theoretically fit. 1 borehole means a 30ft standing column, so the question is how many points at least 60ft apart fit into a parcel. It works pretty well! My roommates also made a bid on a house, which got accepted today. So my plans of moving in with my girlfriend seems to perfectly coincide with them moving out, which is just perfect. Then we’ll have this bigass apartment just for the two of us. My mind is already thinking of all the things I want to change or add.
Ten years ago I was still in high school. It's safe to say that a lot has changed since, so much so that I don't feel many similarities between the awkward high school loner I was back then and the person I'm now. Almost everything that matters to me has happened since 2010. This decade I found the field that I love, somebody to love, work that I love and made a ton of friends. I've gone far from home and ended up closer to my inner self. Most of all, what can be learned is that great things come from series of small, good decisions. That you don't need to know exactly where you're going to go far. - you just need to find the right direction. That it is best to assume others are just as complex and wonderful and kind (even if they're not that right now).
Hey Pubski. Lots to think about this week, not a lotta time. Climate So I had this awesome trip to Milan last week. I spent a good day preparing my speech, and while I was nervous in the week leading up to it, the presentation itself went phenomenal. I used to have real stage fright as a teenager. Yet here I am, being flown into a national conference and nailing my presentation. I'd never been to Milan. It has its nice spots, but I was very aware of how commercialized it is with all the hip brands dominating the city center. I spotted three fashion models posing with a posse of makeup/photo/whatever people in less than an hour of walking around town. There were also more homeless than I'm used to seeing - but then again, I also recently learned that we Dutch have one of the highest number of homeless per capita. What does it matter if they're visible or not. Flying in for a day did make me feel kinda conflicted. If this trip wasn't so last-minute, I probably would have planned to do the trip by nighttrain, which is doable. But as it was now I had to miss the Climate Strike because I was flying, and I would be lying if that didn't make me feel uneasy. Then again, I was there to promote electric mobility, so if the ends justify the means, then those are pretty decent ends. Yesterday was also the day of a farmer's strike. My sister's soon-to-be-husband is taking over the farm of his father. The tide's been turning against farmers recently - they account for 40% of our nitrogen pollution, and Europe has told us to drastically cut nitrogen levels to preserve nature. Which I'm personally totally behind, but it's very complex matter (does closing farms here open up farms somewhere else?) and it's a very poignant and visible case of the consequences of sustainability policy. There will be much more difficult decisions to make if we really want to get somewhere. It won't be pretty. Family Went to see my sister yesterday. We aren't that close, not for any particular reason other than distance. She ended up wanting to talk about our parents. They're not in a great place, which I am fully aware of, but she pointed a bunch of things out about the dynamic between us and between them that I hadn't noticed. They were not compliments to say the least. At some point the image children have of their parents bumps into reality, their imperfections put in a stark and unforgiving light. I have yet to figure out what to do with the new information, but I can't shake it off that's for sure.
Been in a really good mood lately! Things are going well. As of this writing I am checks notes 25.98223 years old, so my birthday's coming up soon. My gf just had her birthday, so we are combining ours into one family gathering this weekend, the first time we have everyone together. I've been tinkering with Reaper and making electronic music lately. Part of my foray into music making is the private lesson I have every other week. This week was the third time and instead of spending the lesson fixing everything that's bad about my fragment of a song like last time, he went "that's not bad. i have some questions for ya" which is about as much of a compliment he can give. My process feels very slow, as I need to carefully listen and do a lot of experiments to get the sound that I have somewhere in my head. Or to even find a sound - I have a good beat setup, but now I need to have something to lead. I think my next step is to add a guitar layer on top but I haven't found a satisfying riff or sound yet. Work is going great. For the first time in months I have a bunch of breathing space again and I really notice the effect of that on my energy and happiness. Because I've had such a busy year, I hardly took any time off so I will start 2020 with 51 paid days off. I'm thinking of working fewer days for a month or two in addition to a bunch of free time / side projects / trips. We'll see how it goes - the biggest determining factor will probably be what kinda job my girlfriend is going to find once she graduates early next year. She got a promising lead this week so I'm crossing my fingers that she'll strike gold on the first hit.
Pour me a strong one bartender, I need to vent. "I regret my failures. What I regret more are my failures to try." Last Friday I had a great evening with a bunch of my colleagues. My company, small as it is, has a handful of 'divisions'. They're like business units except there's no management and everyone is self-organised around a topic. So I went with the ten people involved in sustainable transportation (mostly EVs and carsharing, but in the process of tackling more) to this great Ethiopian place. I've never had Ethiopian before, but they brought out two enormous plate full of food for everyone to share and eat. Spicy, but delicious. To cool our stomachs, we went out to a few bars that were participating in a local-brewery-fest. It – the evening, the people, the places – was incredibly gezellig. But I still ended up wallowing in self-pity on the way back home. We ended the evening at a small club, and after the music got too loud to talk, I just danced a bit while sipping yet another beer and watching people. I'm not the kind of guy to go talk it up with girls at a bar – never was, never will be. I've also been alone for like forever, and I can't say those two things haven't gnawed at me. So while other people were having fun and/or hooking up, I just felt incredibly, eternally lonely, despite being with great people, and having friends that I value in my life. And I did not try anything, because I don't even know where to start. The next day, after waking up and taking my swimming class slightly hungover, I decided to make a change. If I can go from 'not at all moving forward' to 'doing a mediocre front crawl' in a few weeks, surely I can show some dedication and persistance in other parts of my life by giving it a try. Making an effort is worth something in my book, and I'm not even doing that. So I gave that one app another shot. No dates yet. Maybe I'll give speeddating a try. I don't know what I should do, but I want to try harder.
Good news, everyone! After three months of job interviews, calls, negotiations, asking people for advice and what not I have made my choice and will be signing my contract this Friday. Out of the five companies I've had serious talks with, two weren't a good fit for me, two were really interesting, and one was the gig I'd been doing alongside my last year of my master's degree. They made a compelling offer but I mostly thought of it as my backup option. Yesterday I called my manager there to let him know: "Hey! I've made my choice, and it's sadly not in your favour. I had two other very interesting options - one was [well-known engineering firm], and the other was [the Chosen One]. I appreciated your offer and am glad that I could work for you guys, but the Chosen One was better in [all the ways that matter to me]." "Congrats on the choice! You definitely chose the best out of the three, [Chosen One] is a great company and would totally fit you." He said that like three more times in the same phone call - not at all disingenuously. I do think I've made the right call, the company I chose is a small urban planning consultancy focused on sustainable innovations. If I were to start a business like that, I'd probably do it the way they already do. Now I just gotta finish my darn thesis. I want to have it done by Christmas so that I can spend that week with family (and without worries). I've written my executive summary, formalised my methodology and have rewritten the first two chapters, so I'm on track, but I still have lots to do. Plus, I need to do Adult Life Stuff like find a better insurance company and find a place to move to. What's the John Lennon lyric again? Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans? edit: Also, because I don't celebrate Sinterklaas this year I bought myself this Casio I had been eyeing for a while: I love that it has a world map! I can scroll through time zones and the map will show the part of the world covered by that time zone. Plus, it's supposedly inspired by the James Bond's watch in Octopussy.
The St. Gereon basilica in Cologne is pushing back the dark! Had a lovely weekend there. Gf and I celebrated one year of being together. It was lovely. I booked us an awesome hotel room in a former water tower, and it exceeded all my expectations. We mostly explored the city streets and sights and had good food. It was not as beautiful a city as I'd hoped, with the WW2 bombing and all, but that didn't matter much. I'm very busy with the Cape Verde project at work. Coordination alone is a lot of work, and then I also need to deliver a report next Friday that's good enough for the presentation the week after on-site. I've also started wargaming my way to a more fulfilling job. The plan is now to get myself some Google-esque 20% development time, or to at least have something of that nature. It's what I love doing, it's what I'm good at and it's what the company needs to stay innovative.
Kinda chaotic days recently. Lots on my shoulders that I can’t or don’t want to let go of. Irregular sleeping patterns are also throwing me off my balance at times. Exercising and reading is going great, despite the above, but tonight’s the first evening I don’t have anything that I planned or need to do. I want to write more - my paper hasn’t moved in weeks. In other news, I commissioned a cartoon artist to make a drawing of my D&D character. Because I think that’s fucking cool, that’s why. This is the first detailed sketch. Couldn’t be happier about it:
Met galen this weekend! We had a good conversation and good steak. Finished another draft of my paper over the weekend. I'm responsible for a bunch of work stuff to do before the weekend, but if I don't procrastinate too much I should be fine and head out to my fam for the long Pinkster (Pentecost) weekend.
One week from now I’ll be flying somewhere over Greenland on my way to Seattle! I’m stoked. Gonna be fun. I’m hoping I can make some progress on my paper writing while in the air. I had a talk yesterday with a professor I know about whether a part time PhD, building off of my paper, could be something for me. He asked me to write down what I think I need to make a PhD worth it. It’s mostly about agency for me, which is good because part timers don’t have to deal with anyone’s crap but do have access to all the resources that a top notch university has available. Which is alluring, for sure. But I also feel like I need to figure out what my personal mission or goal is, at least for the coming years. I feel like I need a solid answer to the question “what do I really want to do” in order to decide whether to pursue a position or not.
Instead of creating a separate thingy, I'll use this Pubski as a chance to reflect on 2017. John Green recently recommended writing two letters to your future self about what to take with you going into 2018, and what to leave in 2017. I think that's a great way to reflect and look forward simultaneously. ---LEAVE IT IN 2017--- The first thing to leave behind is my indecisiveness. If 2017 has taught me anything, it's that I need to make decisions and stick to them, not fret and worry and ponder forever on them if it doesn't make the result any better. At the end of 2016, I read something which took me most of 2017 to internalise: "doubt must come to an end." I haven't been able to find that quote's source ever again. The insight that phases of doubt are just that, phases, has been meaningful to me. The second thing I want to leave is gliding. In a classic "it's not you, it's me" scenario, I've had a lot of fun gliding, but I don't have the free time to do it properly. Once or twice a month isn't gonna cut it for something as complex as learning to fly. It's been fun, but I gotta close that chapter for now. I also want to leave calorie logging behind in 2017. I tried picking it up again last year, but it made me feel guilty for eating, which is the exact opposite of what I needed it for. It helped me figure out a healthier diet, which is good. Other than that it's just not for me. Finally, I want 2017 to be the last year I would describe myself as reticent in unfamiliar social situations. I avoided small talk the first weeks of my internship as I've done many times before. It took a Sherry Turkle book to make me realise how embarrassingly unsocial that is and that it doesn't hurt, you fuckin' hermit, these people are nice if you just let them be nice. ---BRING IT IN 2018--- First some minor things I want to take with me from 2017. It was the year I went out of my comfort zone a bunch of times, which is always insightful. It was the year of less distractions: after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I realised I should do with much less distraction in my life. My phone is now almost always on silent and I'm all the happier for it. 2017 was also the year I started meditating. For me, it's valuable as a kind of mental defragmentation: if I have any stress, worry or emotions on my mind I've found meditation to clear that up, or to at least make me more aware of how I'm feeling. I have also noticed that that clarity of mind carries over to the rest of the day. Meditation, for me, is a kind of mental health upkeep I didn't know I needed. I also started upping my reading game, and it's been one of the best things the year has brought me. A quick back of the envelope calculation puts me at more than 11,000 pages of nonfiction just in 2017, which is more than I have ever read in a single year. After five years of following my interests and curiosity to the best of my abilities, I finally figured out what I want to do in life. Not in the "I have found my calling" sense, but more in the sense of finally being able to connect the dots: That's from Steve Jobs' commencement speech in 2005. I remember watching it ten years ago, and those words have been etched into my soul in the form of hope ever since. The naive and dreamy kind of hope that everything will work out in the end. While I can't say that has happened or will happen, I feel like I'm headed in the right direction with the right tools and people around me, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. 2017 was the year I connected a whole bunch of dots and settled on a direction, and I look forward to see where that will take me.Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
About a week ago I finally met the author that inspired my thesis research topic in person. It wasn't the first time we talked — I'd skyped with him a while ago — but between then and now, I've done a lot of work that builds on his. So I made an appointment to meet and took a train to his university last week. Like many interesting professors, he alternates between enthralling mini-lectures and stern-faced inquiries. Near the end, I asked him what his motivation was behind all this research of his. He went on for a few minutes about everything that's wrong with our current models and how a fundamental rethinking of our tools was well due. "In other words, a blunt tool in the right direction is better than a sophisticated tool askew?" "Yes, exactly." A few days later I wondered if that was also the case with Tesla's Autopilot. As part of a visit to my uni's automated driving research lab, a bunch of us got to test drive a few Teslas with a rep explaining its features. Despite knowing almost as much as the rep about the car, I haven't driven one before. As far as cars go, it's not a bad sedan. But it's also not the top-notch quality I hear people raving about. The interior especially felt kinda cheap for such an expensive car. That touch screen is ginormous, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it's just an upsized $300 Android tablet. I don't know if this is the default, but when the car knows a speed camera is coming up it makes a loud, jarring WEEOOWEEOO sound that I would expect from a kids toy, not a high end car. It's downright insulting when you look at the price tags on these things. It drives okay, although it is much wider and heavier than you might expect. After testing its acceleration on an office park (not bad!) we drove to a 70 kph road to test the Autopilot. (That's 45mph in Freedom Units, fyi.) When I was behind the wheel it seemed to do a pretty good job of driving. It's a bit weird at first, but I got used to it very quickly - in seconds, not in minutes. In case you didn't know, the dashboard shows you not just your car but also shows other cars and line markings while driving. So in addition to paying attention to road conditions and to what the car is doing itself, you can check the dashboard to be reassured that yes, it's seeing that Ford one lane over. It handled a traffic light intersection without a hitch, coming to a full halt behind another car and continuing to drive 70 without any input from me. At one point the road was still wet, so a puddle made the car wobble a bit. But the general impression that I and many others got, was that it can already drive itself. Changing to the rear passenger seat I could pay more attention to what the dashboard showed. I was surprised at how often it doesn't recognize lane markings. It also showed curbs as obstacles a few dozen times. When you're driving, you can't pay that much attention to the dashboard because it really is a more difficult and attention-demanding driving experience. The two other that got to drive it noticeably struggled with it. One guy just got his license. The other can't be more than ten years from retiring. Neither of them knew anything about how the system worked, and both managed to override it multiple times in the ten minutes they each drove it. I already felt conflicted by Tesla's approach to automated driving, and that feeling is not reduced one bit. I mean, it is very cool that it can steer itself under the right conditions. It represents a future that I would drag to the present if I could. But on the other hand I'm now more convinced that it is a terrible idea to unleash this the general public without proper instruction. It's distracting or confusing at best, but dangerous at worst. The only way to drive this responsibly is to know how it works and know when it doesn't. You can't do that without at least some sort of training. If it were up to me, I'd make it a requirement to get an annotation on your drivers license before you can drive something like this on the road. In my opinion, it's a blunt gimmick by a company perpetually in crunch time.
Finally, the beginning of the end. Of my master's study group that we formed two years ago, we now have the first graduate among us. I went to her thesis defense this morning. Much like a PhD defense, master students also defend their thesis at my university as part of their graduation ceremony. She did great! Only a month or two and it's my turn. Over lunch, I caught up with someone I've known since 2006. Never as a friend, always as an acquaintance - imagine a Venn diagram with 'socially inept' and 'mildly annoying' and you can put him in the middle. He went to the same high school as I, but was in a different class. He did the same bachelor's degree as I, but made different friends. And now he's attempting the same master's degree that I am finishing. He even lives in the same block of buildings. Whereas I am almost done after 5,5 years of higher education with two degrees, he was already delayed with his bachelor's and has managed to cobble together less than ten percent of all credits in more than a year. His situation is exactly what I feared when I started my master's. It's a bit like looking into mirror of what I feared when I made the jump two years ago. On the one hand I pity him, but on the other hand, I think he should know himself better. But then again, it's not like I was super confident two years ago...nor am I confident about what to do next. A PhD position opened up which I am interested in. The professor is nice, the topic is 'public transport data science' (choice models and forecasting mostly) and they got the Amsterdam transit agencies to provide and help with data. So I can seamlessly continue to build my data science expertise in a topic that I like, while continuing to live like I do now (but with a salary instead of student loans). But maaan...four years of full-time is a long ass time. That's until 2022, which seems decades away. Anyway, this week I finally finished my code. As in, it now includes everything that I want (including the sensitivity analysis) and when run on a 22-core remote beast it only takes a few hours to run all my scripts. What's left is a bit of refactoring and commenting. The output is 30 CSVs, each of them with 158 indicators for 1192 areas, which is what I wanted. So finally my cool maps and graphs are actually correct! And the best thing is that everything seems to work as expected. My reasoning is sound, my data is sound and my results look sound. Tomorrow I present these initial findings to a bunch of colleagues at my internship. Next Tuesday my thesis committee gets the same story. Hopefully after that week I can focus on writing the thesis itself and making it look cool.
