Hi readers; I have a confession to make. I am really good at procrastinating. “How good?” you might ask. Well, I installed StumbleUpon for Google Chrome and Leechblock for Firefox; I completely removed Chrome because I figured out how to disable Chrome whenever I feel like, which it turns out is all the time. Example two? I’m writing a blog entry right now.

I also have two drafts in my folder with subject lines – “What I learned from sharing an apartment” and (title in quotes) “Owl City sounds like The Postal Service getting raped by a lollipop.” Both were written in 2010, so you know I haven’t been on top of my shit. Probably because in the past year and a half I’ve essentially devoted my life to the Band (I’ve been done since last fall, but then I had to catch up on my thesis).

This will be a short, but meandering post. But here’s a bit of a revelation I had. I’ve long since accepted that I’m never going to be the most successful or intelligent person in the room, at least not in the future I’ve planned for myself. The person I had in mind here is David Spergle, the chair of Princeton’s Astronomy department.

Spergle graduated from Princeton summa cum laude (so what? that could mean anything) and then got an astronomy Ph.D. from Harvard in two years. Holy fucking shit. This is the guy who insists that Princeton students get their Ph.D.’s in four years instead of the national mean of 6.5. Anyway, it turns out Spergle is interested in basically the same sort of stuff I am, and when I first found this stuff out, I figured, “Hey, I can’t compare myself to him. He’s got the perfect combination of resolve and natural intelligence, of course he’s going to be like that.”

But I started reading through the comments on my thesis yesterday, and boy there were a lot. For some reason it clicked as I read critical comments on every single page that regardless of what I’m capable of or what my resume says, I will be judged by a certain objective standard, no matter how I stack up against other people in my field. I have an IQ over 100, so I’m smarter than average, but my “astronomy IQ” is closer to 90; I have to work harder.

For too long I’ve accepted that I will never reach a certain level without trying to achieve my maximum; the fact that my maximum potential is lower than other people’s need not come into any future equations. I have to try my best, regardless of what everyone around me is accomplishing.

And with that, my procrastination ends. Maybe I’ll post something else before I graduate.

I initially thought that it would just be a fun tracking tool, but I didn’t anticipate its deep impact on my workout routine.  I had previously neglected leg and back exercises (besides running), but when I realized that squat and deadlift were worth a very high amount of points, I added them to my routine.  It’s funny how different conceptualizations of goals affect our motivations.  Instead of doing a haphazard workout with no goal besides general physical fitness, I now feel driven by a pursuit of points. The end result is me possibly in the best shape of my life.

I, of course, realize that points and the whole point system are fundamentally arbitrary, but somehow, it doesn’t alter my desire to amass more of them. Perhaps this is related to my shift away from video games, and I need another outlet for competition.

Are the best motivational methods derived from changing intermediate priorities?  In a previous blog post, Tom wrote about the Seinfeld system where you reduce the long-term problem of refining a skill set into a short-term one of marking Xs into a calendar.  I’ve actually been failing at this, and I need to get back on it (sorry, Tom).

After this experience with such an effective strategy, what is the next step?  I feel that the points (or whatever they may be) must be externally generated in order to have the same effect and sense of legitimacy.  How do I “gamify” other aspects of my life?

(By the way, my profile is cli.  Tom and Duncan are on Fitocracy too.  Add us!)

Allow me to relate to you two major themes in my life right now:

1) I am visiting graduate schools so that I can pick a cool place to go;

2) I am working on a senior thesis, and not doing so great.

I’m definitely in an overall fortunate situation, and assuming I can finish enough of my thesis to pass Astro 99, will (probably!) graduate and get to go to grad school. I just came back from a visit to the University of Texas at Austin, and at dinner with one of the professors (the awesome C. Wheeler) the question came up:

“What does it take to be a successful grad student?”

After a few moments, Prof. Wheeler responded, “Mettle.”

“This implies not just hard work, but additionally, a certain resilience and spirit in the face of challenging situations.”

I like this a lot. In fact, I’ll do my best to apply it to my own life. We’ll see how things shape up in regards to this over the coming weeks, but I would definitely call my senior thesis a currently “challenging situation”.

Charles and I are bad at time management (although I think I have an idea of who’s worse), and we want to get better. Charles stumbled across this link: http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem describing a novel method of getting-things-done: Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” calendar strategy. It’s hard to explain so I’ll have to ask you to go read about it on the lifehacker page: http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem (Yes, that’s the same link twice. Get off my back.)

The twist: Charles and I have a **joint** calendar, so that we have to make sure that we both get our shit done every day or we’re both screwed! And we would be disappointments to the other one. It’s like a competition to see who can get more done!

We’ll see how it goes. One of my weekly required goals is to make a blog post every Saturday (hence this post!). My other goals are mainly about classes, thesis, and guitar. So, pretty good overall.

Unrelated to all that, I quit facebook again last night, this time with Charles’ help of password locking.

OK, see y’all later!

Ubuntu was the first Linux distro that I used, and I still run it on my computers.  This may now change given my experience with the (not-so) new Unity interface in versions 11.x+.  The lack of customization (which is a main factor of why people use Linux) is driving my switch.  A particularly annoying example: in order to stop the menu bar from autohiding, a fairly simple task, one must install a “flaky” configuration package.  Unity provides no options by default!  It is as if Canonical performed absolutely no user-testing before pushing out Unity.

In contrast with Tom’s decision to remove Unity, as I am writing this post, Linux Mint is being installed for a test run.

For various reasons (mostly dealing with my senior thesis), I decided to wipe my old Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid, 32-bit) install in favor of a shiny new 11.04 (Natty, 64-bit).

Anyway, this post is mostly useful for me, but could also be useful for you too if you wanted to do my senior thesis instead of me!

Getting the dual-boot (with shared storage partition – crucial!!) working:

http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony

The bug that made me choose to install Natty (11.04) instead of Oneiric (11.10): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/836250

Turning off Unity: http://www.virtualhelp.me/linux/324-disable-unity-on-ubuntu-1104

Moving the “close” buttons to the top-right of windows rather than the pseudo-mac top-left: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-classic/config-desktop/C/window-button-order.html

And now for the science…

Getting the Python extensions working: http://blog.adamdklein.com/?p=416

(with this https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-virtualenv/+bug/780220 as an important caveat… I also had to apt-get build-dep python-numpy at one point. The matplotlib dependencies want to take 1.2 GB of space! although it appears a lot of that is LaTeX stuff. the QT stuff took a good half hour, and pyzmq seemed to fail. I attempted to work around this by installing zeromq via https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zeromq/2.1.7-1~natty1 but that didn’t work, so I enabled https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports  and ran

sudo apt-get install -t natty-backports libzmq-dev

which I think is a sufficient substitute. I then had to remove the build folders. AND IT WORKED!!! IT ALL WORKED DEAR GOD!!!)

I finished it off by installing

https://github.com/bradenmacdonald/astrodendro

https://github.com/bradenmacdonald/astrocube

and pyfits.

A few sample plots, to prove it worked:

We’ll see if this continues to be a positive development, but I already feel good about the shape of things to come.

I was being carried through the air

Beneath me, I gazed upon

hilly, glowing cities half-clothed in clouds of mist

an almost ethereal quality

And with a turn of the neck upwards,

my eyes found a still-richer city: the city of stars in the sky, more numerous than I’d ever dreamt.

Those seemingly immortal beacons of light that outline Orion;

the familiar angles of his hunting dog

the meandering but determined river of light, steadfast in its self-same, looping course

The stars told me I was still on my own world, but the experience suggested otherwise.

Until I dare return to this realm of the sky, I can only dream of what wonders it holds.

• Danny and Tianyi both graduated last year
• We picked up a new roommate, Senan
• Tom and Duncan are applying for astrophysics/physics grad schools
• Senior spring!!!

After a summer in banking, I realized that I wasn’t actually very interested in finance.  I came into college with ideas of picking stocks for a career but grew disillusioned along the way.  Stock-picking is fun, to be sure, but I like it more as a hobby.  Banking and trading are not that related to fundamental investing, so I decided to focus on finding a tech or consulting job during senior recruiting.  Fall recruiting proved to be much better for me than junior recruiting, and that can probably be attributed to more interview experience and practice.  In the end, I got my top choice at a large tech firm, and I continue to feel very lucky.  Switching to computer science was definitely one of the best decisions that I made in college.

As for senior spring plans, Tom and I want to rent Zipcars every few weekends and explore New England.

I’ve been home for almost two weeks now, and it’s been very relaxing to be able to read and exercise on a regular schedule.

This past summer I got a root canal and a crown for one of my molars. Now I have a perfect, decay-proof, pain-immune tooth. I begin to wonder how feasible it would be to replace most or all of the human body with superior artificial prosthetic parts, and whether I’ll see this starting to happen within my own lifetime.

I’m developing a new fantasy: as I grow older, I think it would be fascinating to have my bones replaced with artificial substitutes, one at a time. I’d keep my bones in a safe collection, until one day I could assemble them. I would then be able to show people my own skeleton.