Hehe. The morning tribulations of mk continue :)

Last week I secreted away to Kadampa Meditation Center in Glen Spey, New York.

To start my school semester off right, I looked on a help exchange website (helpx.net if anyone is interested!) to see about any remote, mountainous locations that needed some help. These help exchanges--WWOOF is a really popular one--are among the best ways to travel on the cheap. You can stay for a few days or a few weeks or even longer, working for about 20-25 hours a week for room and board. I thought I'd maybe find a secluded cabin or a ranch but a few pages into the listings I found a description of a Buddhist retreat and meditation center. They needed help preparing for some large groups coming this fall and I figured I could be of use (groundskeeping mainly, but I also mouse-proofed a pantry. Did you know that there are no lethal mouse traps in a Buddhist temple?) I signed up and went off alone about 5 hours north of Baltimore.

It was as rejuvenating an experience as I could have hoped for. Worked alongside and broke bread with buddhist nuns and full-time residents, as well as some other working visitors, most of whom were foreign college-aged students from places like Zambia, Switzerland, China, and Spain. There was an eight hour workday--which is actually longer than the typical four or five hours required on help exchanges--with three square vegan meals and breaks interspersed throughout. This is really crazy but I think those four days were the longest I've gone vegetarian that I can remember. And we meditated. In the morning, after dinner, 15 minutes or for an hour. It was so useful to practice.

School started this week. I'm feeling cool as cucumber. Calm as a cow.

Hey 'ski. Looks like I'm doing a good job, and my company wants to keep me. Got a review last week that went into detail about the work I do (writing sales proposals) and my win rate, which is only about 19-23%.

When I walked into the meeting, I figured I had a 50/50 chance of keeping/losing my job, right there and then.

Turns out my efforts will be worth about $1.2m in new business to the company this year. That makes me feel MUCH more comfortable about whether I am paying for myself, and whether it makes sense for the company to keep paying me.

The most important thing I learned in the meeting was that the sales proposal work I do is seen as less valuable than the other stuff I do... competitive research and analysis, writing market positioning documents, providing insights into the customer needs in two of our key vertical markets, etc.

So yeah! I went from, "OMG, I'm about to get fired." to "I am paying for myself, and providing significant additional value, too!"

It feels good.

And once Q4/2017 is complete and the numbers are in, I can plan for a large raise on my 2nd anniversary here in April 2018.

whew!

Now back to planning our honeymoon in the UK...

My "I paid €50 for them literally seven years ago" PC speakers died on me a while ago. After a lot of good advice from kleinbl00 I decided to traverse the land of hifi. I've been going to a bunch of stores in the past week and eventually settled on a beautiful set of Paradigm bookshelf speakers and an Onkyo receiver. After setting it up properly and calibrating the speakers, my music sounds better than I've ever heard it. Shuffling through my library has never been more enjoyable. :)

I also picked up my classical guitar from my parent's attic. Cleaned it up, got some new strings for it and it's as good as new. I lost my capo and, to be honest, most of my skill but that isn't gonna stop me from twanging away.

I've met with no less than 30 investors in the past week. By the end of next week that will be close to 50.

YC Demo Day was an amazing experience. In fact, YC in general was. I was telling a friend that I would wish for my children to go through YC. It was transformative for me and for our business.

Got to see the kids for a couple of days. That was nice, but quick. Looking forward to October.

Hope all is well in the hubverse.

Nailed it.

pup!

Training continues. Still working on making time for music, recording a lot to cassette again these days.

I'm getting chunks of human brain today!

After a month and a half backpacking through south-east Asia (Indonesia, Singapour, Vietnam), I arrived safely yesterday in Taipei, Taiwan, where I will start my exchange semester on September 8th. It will be my last semester of university, before going back to France and start looking for a job or an internship !

I hope it's going to be fun. So far the food in Taipei seems to be really great.

I'm still looking for an apartment ; I'm wondering if staying in a hostel for 4 months is doable -- on one side you have your private room and can invite people easily to your place, on the other you get to meet more people, save money when traveling (don't have to pay double accommodations, you save money because renting a place or living in a hostel is about the same price) and have a better shower/stuffs -- you can also change neighborhood if you want to.

Birds

One of our chickens has started laying! Her eggs look exactly like the decoy eggs; fortunately, the decoy eggs are really light (because they were cheap on eBay) so we can easily tell the difference.

I like to imagine her walking into one of the laying boxes, looking at a decoy, thinking, "Oh, ok, I think I can make one like that" and then popping out an egg.

There's some critter that's been trying to dig its way into the coop, so I bought a game camera to determine whether I need traps or target practice.

Books

This summer I wrote a lab manual for the class I developed. Starting this school year, incoming CS students are required to take that class, which means that come next semester there are going to be about 200 students in the lab!

So, this semester I'm editing that lab book so we can get it printed, probably just through the university printing service. The plan is for the book to be very affordable (say, $20ish). In my opinion, charging more than $100 for a textbook is immoral, and if you want to charge more than $50 you'd better have a damn good reason to.

On that note, fuck you Pearson, there's no reason an introductory discrete math textbook should cost $300 new. It seems like almost every 'innovation' in education/'educational technology' is just some new way for a company to extract rent from college students. How you can charge students $20/semester to send radio signals inside a classroom is beyond me.

I recently bought a new copy of Category Theory in Context for $25! If you want to argue that textbooks have a small market...let me tell you, category theory textbooks have a market of about 5 people. If they can make a $25 book on category theory work, I guarantee you can figure out how to sell a discrete math textbook at an affordable price.

Drawing

A few pieces I’ve done in the past month that I’m at least somewhat pleased with how they came out.

Goat – The cardstock I drew this on was a dark brown and it just didn’t turn out well at all, color wise. That said, I kind of like the cartoonish look.

Triangle Bird Thing – I do everything free hand, obviously, so it’s not perfect, but I tried to get all of the angles to try and mostly match up. The sun, horizon, clouds, etc. It’s not the most amazing picture, but it was a fun experiment.

Man Trapped By a Snake Monster on a Cliff – I made the scales of the snake monster using xs and ys and I tried to make the lighter green scales iridescent by going over the area again with a peach color marker. It worked well at first, but when the markers dried, it lost the iridescent effect. If you’ll look at the clouds, it’s the first time I placed clouds on top of each other instead of making them all distinctly separate. I don’t know if I actually like that.

Lizard – This one was purposely made using all right angles. I got the idea to make it after shitting out this abomination and realizing I could do something much better.

Television

I caught a glimpse of The Thunderbirds while channel surfing the other day. I watched about fifteen minutes of it and I found it oddly charming in a same but different way that I find Kaiju films oddly charming. I see that Hulu has a series for them, so I might give it a half hearted try.

Plea for Social Advice

I have a co-worker who, as a whole, is a very awesome guy. He’s usually extremely upbeat and good hearted, very passionate, and has a way of telling the dumbest stories to make them sound like the most hilarious things ever. More often than not, I enjoy working with the guy.

The problem is, he has some very out there beliefs, including ancient aliens, secret societies, and the like. Some of it is your usual fare. Some of it is stuff I’ve never heard before, like The Saraha and Mojave Deserts are the disastrous results of early man trying to bio-engineer crops. He asks for my opinion on things, a lot and it’s often a very weird back and forth where I tell him what I think, he says that’s interesting, then brings up challenging questions I don’t know the answer to because I don’t think I’ve ever heard the questions because they’re really out there and or non-sensical. As a personal annoyance, he has a tendency to interrupt me mid-sentence to ask me to explain something that I was literally just about to explain if he waited 30 more seconds. Many times, I get frustrated and shut down the conversation by exclaiming “I don’t fucking know! Why the fuck do you always ask me things you know I don’t know the answer to?”

It’s not always all bad. This past week, we had a good long conversation about our government’s separation of powers and how the world is really pretty much too complex for any global secret society to really exist. Not a really fruitful conversation, because I don’t think I swayed his opinion at all, but I didn’t get all frustrated at him either, so I call it a win.

Heres my dilemma. I don’t want to have these conversations anymore. The subject matter is often weird and makes me uncomfortable. Even though I don’t sway his opinion at all, he seems to hold my opinion in high regard and I don’t know a lot about these things and I’m uncomfortable with him viewing me as a reliable source to gauge his ideas against. I’m tired of getting angry of question after question and interruption after interruption. I want to tell him these things and that I don’t like these conversations but I honestly don’t know how, in any sense of the way, to do it without risking belittling him or hurting his feelings or being dismissive in any way. Like I said, I like the guy. He’s genuinely awesome and I respect the shit out of him in general, but I don’t want to risk him thinking I feel otherwise.

So, Hubskiers, any thoughts? At all?

So after this

I found myself doubling down and did The Worst Hard Time, which has been in my list for a while. It's not the book I expected - it's the saga of the dumb fucking rednecks too stupid to leave the goddamn dustbowl after things turned utterly to shit. The book does a merry job of shitting on all the people who took free land in the '20s and then bailed when Hoover destroyed grain prices while also canonizing all the people who took free land in the '10s and were too stupid to leave. Nonetheless, I knew my peepz, who have always been white trash, were likely those dumb okies who bailed on shitsville in "no man's land" in what was called "the great american desert" before the marketers came.

Fortunately I have a long-ass lineage prepared by one of my grandfather's cousins that takes things way back. I got it when my grandfather, grandmother and uncle all croaked within three days of each other back in 2012. I didn't realize how far back it went until I started digging in last week, though - whoever did the lineage managed to trace things back to Texas in 1824. As in, born in Texas twelve years before the Republic of Texas. As in, born in Texas 23 years before it became a state. Which, when you look at family names, means I'm not meaningless white trash going back generations. It means I'm bloody Old 300. Speaking as someone who has long reviled those water-stealing, queso-eating, landyacht-driving cornfed rednecks known as Texans, this is difficult for me. Of course, as a buddy pointed out, Texas is where we went for fun, and the women were hot, and despite the fact that we had to traverse 12 hours of cows we fuckin' had a rippin' time and I should get over myself.

Kind of a weird experience when on the one hand, there are Wikipedia pages about your ancestors and on the other hand, there's also this:

Probably my great uncle. Hard to say. Died at 7. Apparently my grandfather paid for a tombstone for his little brother back in the '50s so this one might be misidentified.

Which gets you digging into the more recent ancestral home and how everyone got blown out of there by the drought in the '50s.

Billy Bob’s ranch used to be called Rancho Secate. But when a friend told him that secate was Spanish for “dry,” a dangerous name for a ranch, Billy Bob removed the letter E from the foot-high letters on his sign, cut off the prongs, and re-welded them into an A. Now the name of his spread, Rancho Sacate, means “grass ranch.”

“I don’t know if it’s going to help,” he laughs. “But it can’t hurt.”

If only someone had thought of that earlier. Driving across a field, Billy Bob points to a fence alongside the pasture. Several years back, he was digging a new fencepost hole there when he hit a metal wire. He dug further, only to uncover a whole other fence underneath his own, buried by dirt blown off the plowed fields that once surrounded Claunch.

And then you dig further and you realize that your ancestral home is a mere 40 miles downwind of the Trinity nuclear test site.

People from the region still talk of cows that turned white after the explosion and were then shown off at local fairs as curiosities to ponder over. But it’s cancer that may be the longest-lasting local legacy of Trinity, and while a group calling themselves the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium has spent years fighting for recognition and compensation, it could be too late for Claunch, whose population is now under 10, the old-timers gone, their families scattered long ago. It's a strange and unsettling footnote in the history of the little town of pinto beans and singing conventions.

My dad's family were there back then. Didn't leave until '49 or so. And they're long-lived people and ain't nobody on that side have anything even vaguely resembling cancer, so that's interesting.

So I guess on the one hand I'm wrapping my head around blue-blood Texas heritage. And on the other hand, I'm wrapping my head around my daughter and I being mutants. I guess that's what getting old is - realizing that the geneology you've been avoiding all your goddamn life is actually pretty interesting.

Fuck August. Fuck Augusts in the state of Alabama.

September! Get the fuck in here!

I have a chrome extension called Facebook Eradicator that has an embarrassing number of quotes, of which an embarrassing number of quotes are from people commenting here on Hubski. There's one that I'm not gonna cycle through to find the exact quote. but it pretty much just says "It's possible to strive for self-improvement without thinking you're a piece of shit". Thanks, it's been helpful this week.

I'm finally tackling on a redesign for a website that's been overdue. A lot of factors have gone into me being so stressed about it, but it's pretty much been due yesterday for all summer. 'How the fuck am I going to survive on my own' is the worst way to think about it, the better way to think about is, at least you're getting it done.

I finally got over my imposter syndrome fueled fears of script kiddying and was able to figure out how to make a jquery plugin work on the world's fanciest squarespace designer. It turns out that all you have to do is pull your hair out for 4 hours and stay up until 6am so that you're not discouraged. This can't be healthy.