nathan and audrey

For quite some time I have desired to learn how to draw, and thanks to my lovely wife, I now have a really cool book to learn from. The book that I will be embarking upon this journey with is “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” by Betty Edwards.

This book focuses on teaching what the book calls the perceptual skills of drawing:

1. The perception of edges
2. The perception of spaces
3. The perception of relationship
4. The perception of lights and shadows
5. The perception of the whole, or gestalt

The book is supposedly used in the academic setting. I’m very excited and intrigued to start learning how to draw. It seems quite odd to me to use that language “learn to draw.” Nevertheless, I am going to learn how draw and will take you on this journey with me. I will be hopefully commenting on the book as I go along and providing an active view on the methods of the book as practiced.

::n::

Hey All!

We had mice… yesterday. Today, hopefully we have none. That is because last night I set up some mousetraps for the first time. It was a bit weird. I have never done anything like it and felt kinda bad for the little guys, but alas they were threatening to eat us out of food and home. This morning when I woke up we had caught two of them, but there appeared to be evidence of more. Tonight we will execute mission Mousetrap II, wish us good luck.

Onto other news, the banze has his first tooth breaking out! It’s really exciting to see him grow. It is both a great joy and a bit sad. Sad because he is our little baby and I want to keep him this size forever. There is a bond and intimacy that only last for a while. We will miss that, but it is a joy to see him learn new things and become a person capable of changing the world.

The last portion of this post is about my sadness that the big 15 inches of snow didn’t happen, as you can see in the picture. Note that it did sleet for a very long time yesterday, which reduced the total accumulation. The snow was really cool though. It was like a dense wet sand. You couldn’t make any snowballs out of it, but really neat. I was expecting to wake up this morning to the several inches of thick snow, but it appears as none ever came.

::nathan::

Okay, so I went home for the holidays and attempted to make a family favorite plachintas. Well, for some reason the whole thing was a mess. I couldn’t get the amounts of the ingredients right and the thing just didn’t work. At that moment I committed myself to overcoming my failure and make amazing plachintas someday. Well tonight was the night and it was awesome! I still have no clue why the plachintas failed in NM, but for whatever reason I have now succeeded and do not feel so bad. The Banze had a very interesting response to my success, “yay daddy! that was an exsquisite example of how to cook plachinta!”

On a side note I have looked into what exactly a real plachinta is, and it appears as though I have been a bit confused. A plachinta is a German Southern-Russina dish that is a turnover like pastry thing with filling. You can see a description of it over at fastrecipes. What I had been calling a plachinta is something a bit more like a crepe. So I’m sorry to all my friends who I have confused with my plachina talk, but nonetheless I will still considered them plachintas.

::nathan::

I write tonight to inform you, my readers, as well as make a commitment myself, that I’m going to start blogging in a different style. I think one of the reasons (one of many that is) I haven’t blogged for so long is that I was concerned with the fact that I was putting information onto an open forum that other people will read. As such I think I raised the bar too high (as another post discusses) and made it more about work and not about relaxing and just talking about what’s on my mind and heart.

Therefore, I am going to focus more on just blogging. Blogging about what is going on in my mind and my view of the world. This viewpoint is indelibly and ineludibly going to be fraught with frivolous and incorrect statements, but I’m not too worried about making that mistake. I think in life we are in a constant state of uncertainty — if not on the minor scale there certainly exists larger issues and concepts — and in such a state we must take each of the inputs in our lives and use those to come up with some type of worldview; an idea of how we perceive, think about, and react to the things we are seeing. This is the approach I intend to take on more things in life. I must begin to live in the now and not be concerned with the mythical concept of a perfect or right way to do things. I simply must be and do the best that I can.

I also want to explore language too. I really like the use of the exact word, and hopefully I will achieve these results in my writing. So if I use something terribly, please let me know. Okay?

::nathan::

Hi all!

Yes, it’s been around a year since I last posted. But, don’t fear, for I shall post again. Right now in fact. I just performed a major upgrade to my Gentoo installation and also switched from Apache to the Lighty webserver. I will say that it is a bad idea to attempt two major changes in your system at the same time. I instantly had some tremendous errors that appeared to be the problem of the webserver switch, but in fact turned out to be a PHP linking issue in Gentoo.

I decided to switch to lighty mostly because I heard it was smoking fast, and I’m a systems guy that likes to try new stuff out every once in a while. I’d like to offer up some notes on the process and what I think about Lighty.

Lighty has a simple configuration approach. I suppose it isn’t too different than that of Apache’s, but I liked it a bit better. I should be careful in how I state why I liked Lighty because most likely all of the things I configured could be done in Apache as well. With that said I liked how the Lighty configuration file is parsed as though it were a programming language. In fact it appears as though the config file is/can be parsed as straight Lua code. This felt more intuitive for me as I set up the virtual hosts. Lighty uses something called conditionals to test the current requested host for matches. To set up a virtual host all one has to do is put code in like the following:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "nathanandaudrey.com" {
server.document-root = "/var/www/nathanandaudrey.com/htdocs/"
}

As you can see that is the vhost configuration for nathanandaudrey.com.

In migrating, I had to deal with two major problems. The first, was to deal with permalink issues and the second was a problem with a plugin, which I promptly deleted. It seems as though permalinks cause issues with Lighty because there isn’t an .htaccess file for access control. I’m not sure why this is a problem. It appears as though WordPress uses these in some way to control symlink following and such. To solve the issue I reviewed the solutions at http://blog.forret.com/2007/03/urlrewrite-for-wordpress-on-lighttpd/. I was unable to get the full site working, so if you find glitches please be patient as I attempt to figure things out.

Overall, I’m not using any complicated configuration or dealing with massive performance needs. Lighty does extremely well under heavy load, but will be left untested in my system.

::nathan::

As I write this I’m holding my son in my arms, and I must say it is the most amazing thing ever (of course right next to marrying his mamma and staring into her eyes)! I am in awe at the tremendous opportunity that rests in my arms right now. Little Noah is sleeping deeply,  and I really hope this moment never goes away. Sad to say it will eventually grow into new moments as as my boy grows up, but for this one moment, it is just him and I and nothing else. Its as if time is standing still.

I was just putting him down into his bassinet a moment ago and he just stole my heart away. I couldn’t stand to part with that preciousness, so I brought him back to work with me . He, of course, is sleeping away in the moby wrapped around dad.

I know I haven’t posted lately, but I figured this was a cool moment that I wanted to capture, which is as good as any to introduce my new child to the world.  Noah was born on April 6th, 6 lbs 12 oz, 18 inches, at 2:55 pm. Welcome to the world son.

Now I’m going to return to the endless sweetness that it is to stare at my son’s beautiful face. Goodnight!

::nathan::

Hey Everyone!

Well life is moving so fast now. I completed and submitted my first paper for publication to the Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) conference on February 8th, and since I have been playing catchup with all my other commitments. The first of which was to take care of my wife! We had a lovely full day (I didn’t do any work or school stuff at all) of just spending time together and relaxing. It was wonderful! I have also embarked on several new adventures: working on a team of three to develop our advanced operating systems project, the same with a partner for my advanced distributed systems course, research for my advisor, another fellowship application, UIUC recruiting stuff this week,  daddy classes, baby holding, and missing of lost ones. It has been a crazy adventure and will only get even more crazy.

Garbanzo is 34 weeks old today (well pre-birth age of course). He is due in only 6 weeks! Wooooo hooooo! I’m so excited. This is one of the most magical and amazing things to ever happen, and I cannot wait. It is going to be a huge ball of joy and intensity as we (our family) attempt to figure out how to do grad school, have a baby, and make time for mommy and daddy. The daddy class was so cool. As a dad there have been points during the pregnancy where the reality of things reached the next higher level, almost like a set of stairs. You get to one level and stay there for a while. Then something happens and the reality level goes up one. For example, it was really amazing when we found out we were pregnant; then when we heard Garbanzo’s heartbeat for the first time; then when we saw Garbanzo for the first time; when he kicked for the first time, and on the story goes. Well, the daddy class was surely one of these times, and it got me so excited!

Another thing that’s been on my heart a lot lately is the loss of Yume. We recently passed his 1 year anniversary, and it was very awkward. I didn’t really know what/how the best way to grieve was, what was okay, how far we should go back and remember, but I think we were just fine in what we did. We spent time remembering and crying about our sweet baby. It is interesting how we are given grace to go as far as we can in dealing with life and then things are held at peace (e.g., we didn’t process everything right when it happened last year). When we spent time a few weeks ago, everything opened up again and we started dealing with new stuff. I am really excited though. It has been really sad for the past couple of weeks, but I feel like I processed some things that were hindering my connection with Garbanzo. I never want to forget Yume, but at the same time I’m still a daddy and so I never want that loss to detract from my other children. It is very hard dealing with issues like am I moving on and leaving Yume behind, is Garbanzo not getting enough love because we are afraid of losing him? But, after we spent time remembering Yume, I really feel like I have been able to move past some of these things, and my connection with Garbanzo has increased a lot.

Well, that was a brief life update!

Thanks,

nathan

Well, I have been pretty much incognito for the past week due to my first attempt at submitting (it was just an attempt to submit for a chance to publish) a paper to a conference. The punchline to the story: I failed to complete the paper in time. It is extremely disappointing to work so hard for something and see it come to no where, vaporize into thin air if you will. I have been working about 14-17 hour days for the past week. It is truly amazing how much we can achieve given the right motivation. I didn’t know I could live reasonably off of so little sleep, although, I will not be making it a habit to get 3 hours of sleep every night. Even though I kept working under such conditions next time I will be better prepared (maybe I can’t say this, one thing I should learn is it never goes how you think) for the amount of work.

It is important to note that I was almost completed the paper. I have now learned and am in the process of sorting out how to handle time management of huge deadlines for the future. Read on for a description of the events.

Summary of Events

I would like to provide a brief description of what happened so everyone can know what I’ve been up to for the last week.

My team and I worked really hard last semester on this research as a class project. When we completed the semester our T.A. and prof suggested that we continue on with the work because they thought it had the potential to get a publication.I was in awe at that suggestion, I couldn’t believe that something I did could be publishable. Now of course that is the goal of going to grad school, but hey, I’m still just a small guy trying to get his first publication.

So essentially what happened was that everyone went their way for break and left the project. When we got back I had emailed the T.A. for suggestions on conferences to aim for. He sent me an email with several upper level ones, and suggested we make an attempt. The only problem with this was that some of the most desirable conferences had due dates in February, and we only had a crude implementation completed, as well as no data or experimentation yet. So off we went frantically trying to collect data an analyze it for the best results.

One thing that happened during this initial phase of work was that we didn’t have an advisor to help guide us. I was basically pushing the research forward with no idea of what to focus on. With this being my first publication attempt I felt really hesitant to move forward. I was unsure of wether we were spending our time on the right stuff and extremely unsure of some assumptions we were making for our research to work. Thankfully about a week ago I finally got some time with my professor and we discussed the project. To be honest that came to nothing, primarily, because we didn’t get the paper written on time, but it was still a huge hurdle. The same day I also met with our T.A., and he provided me with loads of good questions and topics that we should cover. After this confirmation of a direction I became really motivated to get working on the project. I started reading the previous research papers and started to see how our work was really novel. I noticed how the assumptions we were making in our research were the same assumptions that previous works had made, and not only did we have the same assumptions but our research improved on some of them.

As I started to read more of the previous works I really got excited and convinced that we had the “good stuff.” That we were guaranteed a publication. Hmm… no publication without a submission though . Nevertheless we charged on with renewed vigor. I was reading and writing our paper while my teammates were writing code to collect the thousands of data observations we would need to be successful.

Time-wise in the story we have gotten to Sunday, and still hadn’t collected any data. The paper was moving along smoothly, but it would hit a wall very soon without results. I incorrectly allowed myself to take time to work on the paper when I should have focused on the data collection code. Well, it turned out that on Monday one of the students became to busy to work on the project and I took the load of writing the code. So I spent several days frantically trying and testing out tons of methods to collect this data. Eventually on Wednesday night I had code it up and running on several machines collecting the data. This was an amazingly Euphoric feeling! I had made it! We were going to succeed because by the next morning we would have the stuff! See the image below for my data collection sweetness. Neat huh?

Well, that feeling faded fast as Thursday afternoon rolled along and we received our first set of results: 4% success rate!!!! I wanted to cry. At this point I really started doubting whether or not we could get done on time, but I pressed onward. I performed some analysis and improved our results to 23%, which was more than enough to push for the submission. The last day (yesterday) was a tumultuous attempt to collect these results and perform additional tests while writing the paper. The code to perform our experiments took a long time to figure out. I didn’t really start writing the final portions of the paper until 5pm, the paper was due at 1:59 a.m..

Throughout the rest of the night I went back and forth asking myself if I should continue to try and get done. I knew very easily that I wouldn’t be submitting my best writing, and that was unnerving. I didn’t really think it was wise to submit a poorly written piece of work. It was extremely frustrating though to have put forth such huge efforts and come up with no submission. At 2 a.m. I finally put the typing away and went to bed.

Lessons Learned

Throughout the process I have learned a lot of new things. I will be parsing these as I go along over the next several weeks, but I thought it would be a great idea to capture some of them right now.

• Time management.
• Results FIRST before you start writing the paper.
• It always takes longer than you expect on a tight schedule. Thus, plan less and start earlier.
• Getting bad results suck.
• Keep pushing even when it looks bad, and importantly when it looks good.
• Knowing when the data you have is enough, and setting a stopping point that will provide enough time to make conclusions and write the paper.

Summing It Up

This week was insane. I learned so much about my abilities to focus and work hard and how failure really sucks. I’m going to provide forthcoming posts that will discuss some of the lessons learned from this past two weeks, as well as some philosophical debate on whether or not one should submit a work that is poor in quality. These are in general more broad grad school questions that deserver their own post. In fact I had intended to place them in this post, but as the length grew I have decided to take them out and give my readers a break!

Oh, and as an astute reader pointed out, not all is lost. I have two more upcoming conferences to submit to, and now I have the right amount of time to get the paper where I really want it.

If you have done research or dealt with deadlines like this, let me know how you handled these types of issues.

Have you ever made a commitment to do something you really want to do but can’t quite get over the hump with it? Examples of these activities include: exercising, practicing an instrument, learning new skills, school, or practically anything that requires a high level of intensity and sacrifice in order to achieve your goals. Quite often we set high goals for ourselves and begin the daunting task of making those things routine in our lives. Once something becomes routine it is easy to do without any focus or effort, but its hard to get there. In this post I hope to identify a primary reason why we have so much trouble succeeding at these commitments, give an example from my life of this, and then discuss how to fix the problem.

The Problem

So you have a goal. In this example we will use working out, but it really can be anything that requires constant determination and effort. Your goal is to work out four days a week for an hour each session. You know this will get you into shape and you believe you can do it with ease. Now that you have established a goal, you start doing it. You very quickly realize how much work is required to keep at it, eventually missing a few workout sessions here and there until you don’t go at all.

What happened here? One of the major problems that occurs with our commitments is that we have a false assumption at how good we will be at a given task. For example the person who made the above commitment hadn’t worked out in a long time, and an hour four days a week was a lot of work, but they thought they could do it easily. The false expectation of their abilities caused them to commit to something that was beyond their will power. The commitment and expectation effectively raised the bar of entry for the task to become routine. The higher this bar of entry is the harder it is to mentally overcome the barrier.

What happens next is that the failure causes a peson to begin to doubt themselves. Their confidence in the own will power becomes so low by all of the failures that they expect to fail at all of their commitments.

The goal of this post is to identify areas in your life where you have raised the bar too high, so that you can focus on creating realistic expectations thus lowering the bar.

Real World Example: Me

I want efficiency! I want to be as efficient as possible at everything in my life (productivity, work out, school). I create higher bars by expecting high efficiency from all the tasks I complete in a day. I will introduce two examples from my life where this caused me to fail over and over again, and that when I eventually created realistic expectations I won.

Bicycle Commuting: I live about 5 miles from school. I have been trying to bike/exercise at least 5 days a week for the past two years. I finally realized that my desire to always be the best was raising the bar so high that I could never consistently ride my bike. I realized that I expected to be at school within 20 minutes. I had broken the barrier twice and I created an expectation of completing my journey within 20 seconds or so of that mark. To bike to school in 20 minutes required a lot of strenuous effort, which was a turn off to me. When I finally realized that this is what stopped me from biking I set a more realistic expectation for “tired nathan” at 25 minutes per ride. Once I made this realization I immediately started riding more often, even when I was tired. This was a revolutionary change in my life because I no longer felt like I had to strive so hard. It was better for me to lower the bar and work out consistently than to demand a high cost and quit to quickly.

Time scheduling: I always wanted to be right on time (I still do!). This caused me to plan on arriving at a location about 1 minute till the meeting or whatever started. It also made me overestimate my ability to accomplish a task quickly. Last semester I constantly set up expected times for studying, and when it would take two or three times as long I would get upset with myself and lack of effort. The truth was that it wasn’t for a lack of effort, but because I expected more from me than I was able to give.

Solution: Set Realistic Expectations

The person in the above example should set a goa for themselves at three times a week for a half an hour, and if that doesn’t work out go with two times a week. The key is for that person to identify what it is about the task that is making the bar too high.

Start looking at goals or tasks in your life that you want to do and just can’t quite accomplish. Ask yourself,

• Am I being honest with how long this will take?
• Am I expecting too much effort from myself?
• Can I relax the requirement to accomplish this activity in terms of time and or effort?
• How far do I need to lower the entry bar to be consistent at it?

Life isn’t about making one big change. Its about being in a constant state of transformation into something better. One cannot hope to be transforming huge things in a not time. We must realize this and set our expectations where we can honestly work hard, but still not be overwhelmed by the task. It is more important to do a task at a low level than to not do it at all. You must identify what it is that makes it too hard for you and fix it in some way. This requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. Have fun!

Let me know of your successes and failures as you try this.

-nathan

Well, I haven’t blogged in about four to five months, and would like to start things off again with a post about a new routine I am attempting to incorporate into my daily life.

I have a terrible time waking up when my alarm goes off in the morning. My wife can tell you of her rude awakening to my morning snooziness when we first got married. I was generally a five to six time snoozer in the morning. She on the other hand had and still has the ability to get up on the first ring. Over the past few years I have thought of numerous ways to either fix the problem or presented arguments for its validity in my life. Currently, I’ve only improved my wake up number of snoozes to three, and even then I usually sit in bed for twenty to thirty minutes after the snoozing has finished.

In light of my recent hardships as a first year grad student, I have realized that I must start my days more focused and productive. Too often last semester I would get up mid morning (9-ish), but then start studying around 11 to 12. Therefore, I am resolved to test out waking up every morning at six o’clock. I am going to commit to this habit for a total of thirty days and test its effectiveness in my life.

In order to carry out my new wake up routine I have done what any great grad schooler does: google it! I read a few blogs [http://www.stevepavlina.com and http://studysuccessful.com] about how to wake up in the morning when you want to. I decided that I would give these methods a try and report my findings here. Steve Pavlina gives a detailed set of posts about the intricacies of the method. Study Successful describes a simplified version of the Pavlina Posts. If you have the time they are worth the read.

Onto the wake up routine! The approach is simple: practice waking up while you are focused and alert a bunch of times. For me this meant the following:

1. Get into night clothes
2. Set my alarm for approximately three minutes ahead of the current time
3. Get into bed and attempt to relax
4. When the alarm goes off turn it off
5. Perform a routine of stretching and getting out of bed
6. Stretch my legs
7. Use the restroom and go to the kitchen (I didn’t actually use the restroom every time, but stood there for a bit to simulate the time spent in the bathroom)

The purpose of the exercise is to train your brain and body to perform the set routine when it hears the alarm rather than allow your mind to give its suggestions about whether or not you should wake up. This brings up a very important concept that I have bought into over the past few years, which is muscle memory. I play guitar and am very focused on being one of the best guitarist. Playing guitar has several facets, but the most essential is the ability to let your muscles memorize the correct way to do a task, and let them do it automatically without brain intervention. This requires extensive practice. I will post more about this later, but for now suffice it so say that the practice routine above is set to accomplish the same tasks of muscle memory for my morning sleepy brain.

The reason why it’s important to practice this is that so often our morning brains are too sleepy. This morning brain doesn’t remember the important reason why we need to get up, or rather it finds it very easy to reason why we don’t need to get up. My morning brain convinces me that I can afford to sleep a little longer. This is toughest or nearly impossible when I have no immediate reason to get up in the morning. When I have a scheduled appointment my morning brain has less arguing authority, but when I have not appointments I sleep until my morning brain is done complaining about how it needs to stay in the comfy bed.

I performed eight repetitions of the above exercise in my first practice session and employed it into my routine the next day. The result, it actually worked. The first morning my alarm failed to go off, but I looked at my clock at about 6:15 and said I’m going to do this and started the routine. It was awesome because once I started stretching I was out of bed within a minute or two without any thinking or reasoning. This is a tremendous success because I am so terrible with getting out of bed when I don’t have to. I am very impressed!

I will be honest I think I need one or two more practice sessions to really engrain the routine into my morning muscle memory, but I think that it is well worth the effort. I will report back as to the effectiveness of the routine as I get further along into it.

If you really want to start waking up on time, take a look at the aforementioned blogs or just follow the simple method laid out in this article. Exercise your morning wake up routine several times in order to really get it engrained into your morning. Let me know if it works for you!