Day 4

Today my task was to increase my testosterone by completing at least three testosterone-boosting activities from a list. My first two--getting 8 hours of sleep and not eating any soy products--were pretty easy to handle. Meditating was also a simple task, though it took me two tries to keep it up for the full ten minutes. Given how stress-free my life is right now, it seemed a little superfluous anyway. Additionally, I ate fat, animal protein, and cruciferous vegetables, though perhaps not as much of any of them as I should have. Finally, I changed my exercise routine for today to use improvised weights, but after my "weight rack" fell off the deck and the handle on my salt bag broke while I was deadlifting it, I would have to say it didn't turn out to be a stellar workout. Maybe I should stick to my bodyweight routine until I can go to a real gym.

The only two remaining tasks were not smoking, which non-smokers were not allowed to count, and morning sex, which, well, requires someone to have morning sex with. Also of note: the fact that I am awake right now seems I need to learn to get better at accepting poker losses.

Day 3

Today's task was to find a mentor. I've had a few men in my life start to play the traditional mentor role, but none have lasted more than a few months. I like the idea of having a mentor (or several, as many of the guys on the forum seem to have) but until today had never actively tried to foster that kind of relationship. So today I contacted someone who I think would be good for the job. I can't guarantee it will work out, but if it doesn't (or maybe even if it does), I will do everything I can to find someone else. Brett recommends having a mentor in four different areas of your life, so I suppose that even after today I have some work to do. =]

A Month of Manliness (not the Spike TV variety)

The Project

I had forgotten how much I loved the Art of Manliness blog until I visited it for the first time in several months on Monday. While there, I discovered I had just missed the "30 Days to a Better Man" project, which ran through the month of June. But after reading the first challenge, I reached the last paragraph and read the following:

Remember, these posts aren’t for passive entertainment! The 30 Days to a Better Man Project is about action! You have 24 hours to complete this task.

I knew I had to do it. Not just the first task, but the whole project. And since I'm more than a month late on it, I've decided the accountability group on the AoM forum probably won't do much to motivate me. Instead, I'm going to post my progress here. I read the Day 1 post at 6:00 pm, so every day by that time I need to have my assignment completed, though I'll grant myself four hours after that to post about it. This means that I want you, whoever you may be, to ask me what's up if you wake up one morning this month and I haven't reported progress the night before. E-mail me, text me, call me, or talk to me if you see me. But make sure I'm keeping up, all right? Even better, you can check in here and see just what it was that I was supposed to do.

Ok. Now here's my first report: I missed my first deadline. And my second one. I received a last-minute invitation to Springfield on Monday night and didn't get back until today at noon. I vaguely considered simply pushing back the whole thing by one day, but I knew that wouldn't cut it. I would just have to catch up.

Day 1

And catch up I did. This afternoon I locked myself in a closet with my little red Google Open Source Office moleskin notebook until I had completed the first task: Define Your Core Values. I came up with the following list, in order of importance:

Truth
Integrity
Close Relationships
Self-Improvement
Trying New Things

While I was listing them, I tried to decide which of my potential values were ones I actually found important and which were ones I just thought should be important. I think I arrived at an accurate result, but I'll be thinking about it a lot this month and reserve the right to make changes if it seems correct to do so.

Day 2

I finished the first assignment shortly before my parents came home from work, and decided to wait for my dad before tackling the second one: Shine Your Shoes. After retrieving his shoe-shining kit, I sat down to work on my two pairs of dress shoes, asking questions about some of the instructions I had read on the blog.

As I was working, I felt like the experience was exactly what Brett McKay was hoping for. First, my dad's kit is little more than a few cans of Kiwi and old rags, but it is exactly was was prescribed on the blog. Second, as I was putting on the polish, my dad told me how when he was growing up, people used to polish their shoes every week before they went to church, and that his family would all polish their shoes the day before they went to town. He went on to comment that it seemed most people don't shine their shoes at all any more. It's true. I never had until today. It's just this kind of generational difference that is frequently pointed out in AoM, and this kind of interaction that it encourages. While things like shining your shoes or shaving with a single-blade razor may seem somewhat unimportant or even antiquated, looking to past generations of men as examples certainly is not, and is one of the reasons I like this blog so much.

Today's song: Have You Got it in You? by Imogen Heap



The note about lyrics at the beginning of the video is only true of the YouTube page.

System Themes and My Contribution to the World

I sat down at my laptop to write this post and when I started typing I saw nothing. Well, almost nothing. There was an almost imperceptible motion of something across the screen as I typed, but I certainly wasn't able to resolve it into letters. I've had this problem before. I recently started using a dark system theme on this computer, which features light gray text on black backgrounds. This works great until I get online and access websites that can choose to specify their own colors. Sometimes they make sure to say they want black text. Awesome. But that means I fall back on my default black background and can't see what I type. Other times (like here) they specify white backgrounds. Sweet. But my default light gray text doesn't show up very well.

It turns out this has been a known issue for over a year, but has yet to be fixed.

And as I type that, I follow my own link to get a little more familiar with it (because I'm coming back to it later--you might want to at least queue it up in another tab if you haven't looked at it yet). And what do I discover but a fix? A fix that, unlike other fixes I've seen for this, works for me! And uses files that actually exist on my machine! Good deal. I shall continue typing this back in my wonderfully gothish theme and not leaning in until I'm two inches away from the screen, only to find I still have to highlight what I just typed to confirm it's actually there. Isn't contrast wonderful?

Now, still have that tab open? Launchpad, the site hosting the bug report, is also hosting 628 lines of veritable C++ written by none other than yours truly. That's right, this week I published open source code for the first time in my life (ok, I guess you didn't really need the other tab for that). It feels good to finally have something to show for my work, and it feels crazy to think that this could some day be a small part of some incredibly revolutionary technology. Even better, this is exactly what I've been learning to do in school and could be what I do for the rest of my life.

I've been tossing around the idea of devoting my next three decades (or however long it takes) to helping create the world's first artificial general intelligence. If I do I have a lot of learning to do before I can make really serious contributions, and even then I will only be playing a small part. But if I do, you can, right now, see the first 628 lines of my life's work. And if I do, I would be taking part in the most significant human advancement ever. How incredible is that?

For that to happen, though, I should probably at least complete the Summer of Code in good standing. And part of that is completing weekly progress reports, which I have not done yet. I suppose I should get on that...

This week's song: I'm Still Here by Vertical Horizon

Pardon the Smallville; It had the best audio of the videos I found.

Of course, now that I understand that this universe actually exploded out of nothing and went from a pinhead to a massive broiling ball of gases in far less than a millisecond, how can I possibly believe in miracles anymore? (That's tongue-in-cheek, folks).

One of the ways you can impress me is by demonstrating an understanding of modern physics. Opening a book with a summary of everything I've learned in the past year about quantum mechanics and astrophysics goes somewhat beyond that. In fact, in his book "Finding God in the Questions", Dr. Timothy Johnson confesses that the intricacies of the universe in both the sub-atomic and inter-galactic scales are for him more compelling evidence for God than is the existence of morality, which is the much more traditional demonstration of deism. This intrigues me, as does Dr. Johnson's very honest treatment of his belief in Christianity.

Also, a rather unrelated song:



If I knew how, I would link you directly to 2:06.

On the Road

As crazy as my polyphasic sleep schedule will be later this summer, it will be nice to have something regular. After much sleep deprivation at school, I slept 15 hours on Wednesday night, eight hours Thursday night, seven hours Friday night, all day Sunday, then two hours last night. All that to say that my kickoff post for our grand Canadian adventure is going to have to be shorter than ideal, but what can you do? Not pack as much, comes the answer from the back seat to a different question.

With Wi-Fi an uncertainty and my limited cell-service internet reserved for work and e-mails, I'm not sure how much I will be able to update this over the next two weeks or so. But rest assured I will take any opportunity I can and will be back to regular scheduling soon enough.

And with that... we're off!

Why this semester is the best semester of my life

This semester I finally did it. This semester I had a goal and I reached it. This semester, I broke. I hit my limit. With seven classes, two TA positions, and independent study, and two extra-curriculars, my usually effortless balancing act finally failed.

This semester, I got my first B. Ever. I have never ever ever in my live long life gotten a grade below A- in a class. Not in lower or upper elementary schools. Not in middle school. Not in high school. Not my first three semesters at WashU. Heck, I just got $100 and an Engineering honorary award for having a three-semester 4.0.

And then tonight, I checked my e-mail. Will had mentioned getting his Engineering Math grade, and I have the same teacher for Probability and Statistics. Huh. I guess I should check to see if my grade is posted, too. I needed an 88 on the final exam, and it would be nice to confirm my strong suspicion that I had gotten it. Sure enough, waiting in my inbox, was "ProbStats final exam scores". I opened the e-mail, to which an excel spreadsheet of our scores was attached.

I opened the spreadsheet as a Google doc. It was loading too slowly. I opened it as html. Again, too slowly. Really? Must you play with me like this? I know I got an A, but that doesn't mean you have liscence to tease me. They both load. I find my unique four-digit number and look at the score. 41. Out of 50. Whatever my grades say, I know enough about statistics to realize immediately that the ride is over. I am human/mortal/normal/what-have-you, and... and... well, that's it.

To be honest, I thought this week might be the end of the line for my academic perfection. But my concern was purely with Quantum Mechanics. I was easing up a bit after taking the exam today and expecting to brace for the results at the end of the week. And then BAM!

You know the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden asks the narrator to punch him? But he wants it to be kind of unexpected. He wants a new experience and he wants it to be genuine. It is entirely over-dramatic of me to make the comparison between that scene and my semester, but I kind of like the idea, because in some ways that's really how it was. At the end of last fall, I looked at my registration worksheet and said "Punch me. As hard as you can." And it did. And I learned a lot about myself and what's important to me in the process.

For starters, I don't like taking 21 credits. Even when I thought I could pull out the 4.0, I was
dissatisfied with my level of understanding of the subjects I was taking (ironically, this was
least true of prob/stat). And they were all great classes. Taken under a lighter load, I would easily have put in twice as much work into most of them, purely because of how interested I was. Notice I say most.

Another thing I realized is that I really love computer science. Definitely more than physics and abstract math (both of which I, nerdily enough, still like). There's just something about it that makes it so interesting and fun and it comes naturally to me. I honestly can't think of a more enjoyable summer job than working on a Google-sponsored computer science project. Combine that with my plans for road trips, camping, canoing, and just hanging out with the people I love, and you have a recipe for the best three months I could ask for. Hold onto that last ingredient.

This semester increased my appreciation and understanding of the idea that no man is an island. I went to a "last lecture" given by Kit Wellman, one of the professors in the Philosophy department. (For the uninitiated, a last lecture is a talk given by professor with the prompt, "What would you say to your students if you knew this would be your last lecture?") He said that the two essential ingredients to the excellent human life are strong relationships and meaningful projects. (cut to my summer plans... cut back) What he said reflected something I had started to feel myself. I've realized that, particularly in the case of my academic prowess, I tend to look down on a lot of people as inferiors. I don't really even do more work than they do; grades just happen for me. But I look down on them. And this is something I wouldn't admit, even to myself.
I have a clear memory from freshman year, thinking about why I didn't really spend time with any of the guys on my floor. I imagined they thought of me as somehow stuck-up and too good for them. But of course, I told myself, of course that's not true. In fact, rather the opposite. I don't spend time with them because I wouldn't be good enough to fit in.

But it was true. They swore, they drank, they weren't as smart as me, they slept around, and they actually thought of this as a tough school to get into. Ha! This was my fallback school. This was the school I applied to on little more than a whim! I'm MIT material and I'm stuck in this "hidden ivy" school with people who are NOT my peers in any meaningful way.

I was stuck-up and too good for them. They were people I had to endure until I found better ones. They were unavoidable, but temporary. I was an island. Or at the very least a penninsula, staring straight out into the sea, where my award was waiting for me to overcome this challenge and demonstrate my worthiness.

I should perhaps mention here the subtle influence I really believe video games had on this mindset. Granted, I won't claim that it was any more than a limited promotion of an already developing attitude, but I do think its influence was there. You see, video games (single player ones, at least) tend to make the player an island. Even if there are other characters in the game, all of the success you have in the game is of your own making. And the games are designed so you succeed. That's what makes them fun. You can rescue princesses, save worlds, destroy worlds, win championships, win battles, and solve problems. You. Sitting there on your
couch, you have power and influence because you put in the time so you would level up and you found that hidden item that wasn't marked on the map. You.

This semester I gave up single-player video games. I realized I wasn't really happy with myself when I played them. I felt like I wasted time. I felt antisocial. I felt like I went over the line when I played almost a full day of Spore last semester, skipping classes and everything. I did go over the line when I played almost a full day of spore. But I really do enjoy video games when I play them with other people. We can talk and laugh about what's going on. We can be competetive. Or, as has happened this week with Fallout, I can just be a spectator, sharing the experience with the person playing the game without the need to have control of it myself. I've been happy with this decision.

I've been happy because I have shared that time with other people. Not because I beat some stupid game (or some stupid class) myself. And you know what? I've met some incredibly interesting people. Grad students, rock climbers, and music junkies, everyone has a passion. Some share my love of technology. Others are motivated by religion and philosophy. I met two people with a vision to restore the WashU radio station to its former glory, and got to know better someone with a dream for a whole new culture among the student body at school.

And now, somehow, the semester is over. Nearly, at least. With two more finals to do today, I probably shouldn't declare the end just yet. I also probably shouldn't stay up much later writing this. For now, I wish you the best with whatever summer signifies for you, and hope to get up a slightly tangential slew of Project 365 pictures very soon. Good night.