I like portland. The last few days have gone well. I’m ready for burning man. And I’m signing a lease on a studio this afternoon. The apartment is about 8 minutes by bike from school so I’m really excited about the commute. I hope winter will not prevent me from biking. I have been walking a LOT. It’s been good.

The apartment isn’t as cheap as I like but it should be very nice I think. Its reasonably large and has good sized windows that open well. Heat, water, garbage, sewage and even electricity are included in a flat rate utility fee. So at least there shouldn’t be any unexpectedly high bills. Also the building would allow me to move to another apartment in the same building for pretty cheap if I want to later. That way I could ungrade if I want to later. We will see. Also the lease is only 6 months so I am not tied down for long.

I’ve met a lot of good people. Half of them being the burning man crowd, but half of them from other things which is good because I don’t want to only know crazy hippy types.

I have not yet had a chance to visit my school. I’ve just been insanely busy. I will go up there once I get back to portland from burning man. I have been by my school though and I’m confident I will be able to get there easily when from my apartment.

People are really nice here and I really need to unlearn some of my NYCisms. They don’t apply here. The bus system is very nice and the street cars and trains are good. It is weird though that the trains actually run down the street.

Portland really is a bit like a huge lawrence, KS. Nice people, polite drivers. I think I will be at home hear quickly.

The flight in also went well. We flew by mount hood. It was beautiful.

Also since I started writing this I have actually signed my lease. So I have a place to live and I’m set to move in. I will still need to spend one night in the hostel when I get back from the burn, but I will move in the next morning. Then I will start working on settling in.

Right now I am in a mexican resturant having a victory lunch. And tomorrow at 3AM I will leave for burning man. I’m excited.

The first whip I made. (Sorry the picture is fuzzy. Phone cameras suck.)

There are a lot of things wrong with it, but it’s my first and I will be able to do better next time around. I already have plans of how to change the design. I need to tweak various things so I can work up to building a kevlar fire whip. I’ll be practicing with nylon for a bit because kevlar is almost 6 times as expensive and you need a LOT to make a whip.

Anyway I’m totally excited about whip making and actually making a whip that cracks is a really exciting first step.

I will be moving out to Portland, OR in mid to late August. But I will probably be going to KS for a couple weeks on the way, so I will probably be leaving NYC around the end of July. It’s so soon. I’m scared and excited.

Here is the theoretical computer science bragging document I sent them. It looks pretty impressive and it’s all true! ;-)

These are the buzz-words that I know and understand and that I
think would be applicable. I also have a more complete write up below.

* Turing machines
* The halting problem
* Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem
* Bog-O Notation
* Lambda Calculus
* Church Numeral
* Type-level meta programming
* Kernel development
* System integration
* System programming
* Compilation, assembly and linking as separate steps
* Embedded systems programming (without an OS and with a minimal OS)
* Direct I/O handling
* Interrupt programming
* Object-oriented programming
* Pure and impure functional programming
* Functional-OO-Hybrid programming
* Logic programming
* Functional Logic programming
* JOIN-Calculus and Pi-calculus
* The Actor Model
* Software Transactional Memory

I have learned about Turing machines and the halting problem and
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I have also learned about Lambda
Calculus and Pi-Calculus (to gain a better understanding of languages
based on them). I understand and use the Big-O notation of algorithmic
complexity (and its limitations). I have also dealt with Church
Numerals for the purpose of encoding numbers in Lambda Calculus and in
the type systems of other languages (such as Scala) to allow for type
level metaprogramming.

I have been using Linux for more than 10 years now. Over that time I
have done everything from desktop usage to custom turnkey system
integration and kernel development. I have worked on most parts of an
OS from the kernel to application software. I have also worked on
systems with both no OS (PIC microcontrollers) and a very small OS (TI
calculators), so I have done direct I/O and interrupt programming
(including integration with standardized protocols like USB HID). Also
I have dealt with compilation, assembly and linking as separate steps.

I have learned the new languages on a regular basis not because I need
to program in the languages but because the new languages teach me
things about programming and programming languages in general. For
instance I learn about pure functional programming from Haskell and
about hybrid-OO-functional from Nemerle (and later Scala). Also I
understand monads as both collections, processes and pseudo-containers
like the IO monad (though not the category theory from which they
derive, I must admit). I also spent some time working with
JOIN-calculus (Jocaml) and the actor model (Erland and Scala).
Recently I have been reading about Software Transactional Memory and
how it can be integrated with Actors and how transactions can follow
messages from actor to actor. I have read a lot about JOIN-Calculus
and Pi-Calculus because I am very interested in natively parallel
programming abstractions. I think natively parallel abstractions of
computation will be very important in the future of massively
multi-core computers.

I forgot to mention Object-Oriented programming above because I have
been using it for so long (I first learn OO with C++ when I was around
14). I have also attempted to learn a few logic languages (Mercury and
Prolog and also Curry from PSU), but I admit I have had very little
luck. It has turned out to be the hardest kind of language for me to
grasp. I have a basic understanding of how the languages work and I
know what the syntax means and how variable binding works and all that
and how all these pieces should work together to allow arbitrary
programs. I also read an article Sergio Antoy, et al about
multi-threaded functional logic language implementations. It was very
interesting.

This is all true but that’s not really what angers me about URL minimizers on a day to day basis.

• First and foremost, URLs contain real information about the site they refer to. I will often choose whether or not to follow a link based on its URL. This may be unfair of me in some cases (judging a book by its cover), but its my right. I want to see where I am going.
• Also minimized URLs are slower to load than direct links. This is simply because there is an extra redirect on the way to loading the page. This is a big issue when you are on a network that is very slow to connect to a server but fast do transfer data once connected. My network at work really sucks and it take a couple of seconds to connect to a server but once connected I can get a full megabyte per second. So the bitly.com or tinyurl.com request takes a noticable amount of time compared to the over all page load.
• Finally, why don’t people use a damn <a> tag!!! There purpose is to give a nice piece of text to link on. Anyone who is interested in following the link will be using a device that can render HTML (otherwise the link target would be of no use). I know, I know, 140 limit. Why don’t they change that to only could rendered characters and support simple HTML. That way people can use real link and therefor real URLs.

The Real Rules for Time Travelers

So Zack and I talked about time travel a while ago in the context of trying to develop a reasonable time travel system for a role playing game. And I after reading this article I think I have one. Though I’m not sure it what you might be thinking but bear with me. Also I’m writing this based on reading the article so you might have to read it for this to make sense.

To have consistent stories involving time travel you also must have “closed time-like loops” in the physics of the universe and this implies a couple of interesting things. One, the physics are not deterministic (that is you cannot predict the next instant based on the previous instant) however oddly, two, you also have to give up the idea of free-will. This is because for a story to be consistent once an event is observed it CANNOT be changed. So if you go to the future and see yourself kill someone you are now ordained (if you will) to kill that person. You cannot choose not to.

This may seem like it would not work as the basis for a role playing game (because people like to choose what there player does) however I think if you look at role play a bit different it works just fine. First view the game universe as a 4-dimensional blank canvas. Now the players and the DM choose a setting; this fills in some of the canvas, basically a short period of time directly before the “start” of the game and a reasonable area surrounding the start in space. Now the players begin to make choices as to what there characters do and this starts to fill in this 4D canvas. However once a part of the canvas has been filled it can never be changed. So if a player or the DM says that they see themselves do something in the past of the future they cannot choose not to do it later. It is fixed. All they can do is write the story that lead them to that point that they have already set.

This lead the play style to a very “fiction first”, story gaming type of play. The players (including the DM) are writing a story, however they are not necessarily doing it in chronological order. It would be reasonable to say that a player plays all versions of themselves, in all times. So they will never be forced to do anything in any time. This style of play also has the interesting implication that if the players become board with an event they could just jump forward or backwards in time (as players not characters) and fill in a different part of the story that has not yet been “written”.

In the end one of the most important rule would be that if something has been observed it cannot be changed. So if you go forward in time and see something happen you cannot change it. However you could change it’s context or meaning. So if you go forward in time and see a bloody knife with your finger prints on it. Then that knife must be there and it must have your finger prints on it. However if it has not been stated whose blood it is than that could be decided later. It could even be your own. So as a player your goal will be to create an interesting story based on what has already been observed or written on the 4D canvas.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

But I didn’t have some of the ingredients. So I changed it almost entirely. Here was the result. They came out really well. Kinda cakey. Like most cookies that do not have eggs they tend to break up and fall all over while you eat them. But they are really tasty.

They could probably be easily done with margarine and some sort of vegan chips (carob or very dark chocolate) and be vegan (the dry milk is unimportant I think).

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup White All-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cup Whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 T dry milk
• 1 3/4 cup butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 1/3 cup mini chocolate chips
• 1 cup slightly crushed pecans
• 1 tsp vanilla

Instructions:

1. Sift together dries (flours, soda, baking powder, dry milk and cloves) and set aside.
2. Soften butter and cream in the sugars then mix in the juice, chocolate chips, nuts and vanilla. Stir well.
3. Mix in the flour mixture. It should be fairly stiff by the end so I sifted in the flour mixer slowly stirring as I went.

At Beaver Meadow Falls

Today (Thanksgiving day) Lena and I walked 9 miles. It was super pretty and nice although a bit cold and gray. I’m putting up a few pictures here just so I can brag more easily to other people about it. I will post more later; including video and GPS tracking data. (yes I’m a giant nerd)

Us at the half way point and lunch time

Beaver Meadow Falls