Now that NodeOne is running out of Drupal the Card Game I feel like it’s time to introduce my version of the game rules which I believe are actually significantly more Drupaly than the main rules.
If you don’t already know the rules check out this video:
Now, in the main rules you compete to complete modules and sites, which is all well and good right, but we don’t develop modules in the dark at all, we all know what’s going on with other modules through twitter, blogs, and actually meeting up in person at conventions and meetups. We even talk about our sites but in my experience outside of the exciting modules we rarely go into the details of what modules we’re using.
Modifications to rules
During play:
When you put development effort into a module you play your points face up so that all can see when a module is completed
-2 cards have to be played and cannot be played on the same module and cannot take a module negative
During scoring:
Now put your cards down on the table face up and figure out how many points were scored in your hand. Add this number to everyone else’s number and total.
Write this number on a whiteboard and then give each other player a high five.
Now try to outdo yourselves in the next version of Drupal (the next game you play).
Bonus points:
Bonus points if you’re within 20% of the maximum possible points for all hands. This may have to be adjusted in your games. I usually represent this achievement by giving each player a peach or some similar fruit depending on season.
All apologies for a regular life post, for those that don’t know this blog can be sorted by category and the auto-rss feeds actually do work to separate by category. So my promise is that the tags Life and Programming will be stuck to religiously. If you only want to read programming related topics, and I suspect that is the case for most of you, this is the link to do so. Like any good Rails app that link works perfectly for both RSS readers and human readers.
Living guilt-free with a woman who is driven
I live with, and am hopelessly in love with, a woman who on the absolute worst days could be described merely as ‘driven’. Those of you that know her know that this word ‘driven’ pales in comparison to the actual manifestation that is my very-soon-to-be wife. At any given time she is volunteering, working a full time job, going to school or doing another volunteer position, planning a wedding, moving all our stuff from one house to another in her car instead of a truck, and making handwarmers or clothing for our cats. She is an amazing woman and I think this quote from a close friend of ours sums it up nicely: “How does it feel for everything you touch to turn into awesome?”
I on the other hand, work a job. Granted, it’s a hard job that requires lots of strenuous thinking from my ergonomic chair in a temperature controlled environment where everyone is required by corporate mandate to leave me alone, but well, actually I’ve lost my train of thought. Oh yeah, I don’t do half the stuff she does; I think I would be lucky to consider myself as doing a tenth of the incredible things she does. I merely fill a role in her life which is to be unendingly supportive and encourage her to stop working on occasion through any of a variety of methods including tickling or telling myself jokes and giggling.
The last piece of this pending nuptial catastrophe is thus: I was raised, either by my parents or my college roommates, to feel unbearable guilt and shame if someone in the house is working and I’m playing video games. There are a lot of roots here but I don’t think they bear analyzing at the moment.
Work budgeting (Conclusion)
Luckily, in addition to being ‘driven’, my beautiful love is also a complete and utter genius. I write this document to later remind me of how wonderfully smart she is (and because my memory is about 3 minutes long). How does one strike a balance when one partner relaxes by doing things, and one partner relaxes by doing nothing? Surely, even the slightest analysis suggests that this is going to end in tears when I feel guilty or she feels put-upon or under appreciated. It has, but as with all things she has come up with the following method:
We have created a chore budget. We are both required to do a small amount of chores and after that point, if she feels like continuing to work I am absolutely not allowed to feel guilty and she can feel free to derive all sorts of satisfaction from finishing things and checking them off her mental checklist. Now I know that there is an end in sight, after my chores are done I no longer get to feel guilty (she actually got mad at me and made me play video games instead of continuing folding laundry tonight).
I know that I’m not alone in the world, so if you find this blog by some happenstance and you’ve had a similar situation please let me know. Links containing various sexual enhancement drugs will probably not be accepted but it’s worth trying, I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone, especially robots.
Okay, as mundane as it sounds there are a lot of articles around the internet that are fundamentally misunderstanding the simplicity of this request: how do I reconnect my bluetooth device after it’s been disconnected from being in my laptop bag or whatever.
There is no reconnect option in Windows 7 and the reconnect option in OS X is fairly buried. As long as your device is in the bluetooth devices menu the following should work for you:
Mash buttons.
I know how stupid that sounds, but it’s been working for me for a couple days now and I’m staggered that I didn’t think of it earlier. I always wiggled the mouse or hit the alt key on the keyboard like I do to wake my mac from sleep, but it really needs a good ole mashing.
I have nothing of interest to post today but out of a dedication to keep people reading I post regardless.
Over the last week I’ve been spending a lot of time studying and researching for thesis, a requirement for graduation from this Chinese program. My thesis is vaguely related to the Internet as it exists in China; naturally it is pretty much a front for me to spend a lot of extra time playing video games in the Internet cafes (wang ba).
But the wang ba is a different beast from the Internet cafe entirely. In a wang ba there is no wifi (or if there is there’s no reason and nowhere to sit to use it), instead there’s row upon row of computer desks. The one we go to must have 150 computers in the main room. Each of these computers is networked to a fast network storage array with plenty of space for… you guessed it, VIDEO GAMES GALORE! I’ve hit the jackpot! Except I can’t read Chinese and the icons are usually different so I end up just trying random games every day. Those icons that I do recognize though I’m getting quite good at.
Now here’s the real difference between a wang ba and a LAN (local area network) center (which would be the American equivalent), all the games are 100% illegal which means that there’s no way to play online, right? Wrong! Through a clever loophole most games still allow LAN games even if they’re illegal. So there are multiple services in China that will allow you to set up a “LAN” game across the entirety of Shanghai so that any number of people can hook up to your “LAN” and play together. How freaking cool is that workaround?
In the beginning there was one monk on a mountain. There was a lake at the bottom of the mountain but his studies were at the top. When he was thirsty, and he usually was from carrying the water so far, he had to hike down and carry the heavy bucket all the way up the mountain.
At some point a second monk arrived and they lashed the bucket to a bamboo rod and balanced it between their shoulders. Their studies improved and they were less tired.
Thinking that more of the same would be a good thing when a third monk arrived they rejoiced but found that there was never any water when they wanted it. Everyone trekked down the mountain at some point but there was always some conflict about who would stay and rest while the other two hiked.
This is a loose telling constructed from what Ben told me. It may have missed some of the points but it came up when we were talking about why the dishes never get done. I believe the numbers are approximate and pretty much always work for numbers > 1. We see this all the time when we live alone versus living with one or more others.
What is the moral? Find a way to lash the task to a bamboo rod so that it is easier no matter how many people are in the house/group. When everyone works together at once there is no conflict. Of course this doesn’t scale at all unless by some fluke everyone in the house is home and not exhausted at the same time (a rarity in most college houses I believe).
There’s a lot of depth to this, lots to think about.
-Edit-
Ben suggests that maybe the answer is to sign a contract or kick one of the monks off the mountain. Watching him smile after he’s launched a very successful joke is just about the best thing I can think of.
Warm feet, cool head
This was something that Ben hadn’t heard of but when I told him about it he said that it made perfect sense considering the Chinese views on foot warmth.
The meaning is roughly that the way to success isn’t through rash actions but can be achieved through calmness and good self-care (self-care is a major part of Chinese life). The feet are the locus point for many acupuncture points and as such if they are cold perhaps your organs are suffering.
Interestingly enough, my Econ teacher independently confirmed the value of good foot care recently as well. He mentioned that in pre-college and in many areas of life sandals are considered poor form, not just because of the obvious fashion formality problems, but also because it shows a lack of respect to the person speaking. If you don’t take care of your organs then you can’t pay attention which means you don’t really care enough. So sandals are a sure-fire way to piss off your teacher and show them just how you feel!
773861 army
This isn’t a proverb, just interesting. When people started migrating to the cities for increased wages they say that the only people left in the towns were members of the 773861 army.
77 is a symbol for old people. Possibly related to the first day of the second Sino-Japanese war but I’m not sure about that. Ben says this is a plausible explanation but he’s also unclear.
3/8 is women’s day
6/1 is children’s day
Conclusion
China is cool. All those things about getting in trouble because of some weird thing are really true here. Also, never mention pork in Xi’an, there’s actually a chance that you’ll get beaten to death. It’s happened before.
Okay, I’ve been writing little notes to Erica for the last couple weeks and I feel bad because I’m leaving out a bunch of awesome people. So with that I unleash to the world my twitter account. Please read my little thoughts there and I’ll try to continue to update the blog as well.
It’s been about two weeks since I last wrote, I’ve been trying to spend most of my freetime with Erica on the phone but I just don’t get much freetime anymore. So I apologize but I’m also really far away so what are you going to do about it punk?
At rate, last night I had a dream. I’ve been calling it “Screw Ritalin” all morning and I would like to share it with you. Many years ago there was a woman in my life who constantly inspired me to do wild new things. She still inspires me on occasion just by looking back at how life was at the time, it was some of the best years of my life I think. I was utterly sexless (at least for a while), I was interesting, inspired, and I had a job that worked relatively well with my Adhd.
Last night in my dream I was at a new college. Every morning I would espouse my opinions, I forget what she called them but it was incorrect word choice I remember, something like ‘marketing’. And every morning she would fawn over me and respect me. However in the dream at some point during the year I started taking Ritalin and she disappeared. When I finally found her I asked why we didn’t speak and she told me that she missed my morning speeches, that when I started Ritalin I stopped making those wild speeches to her.
This is not the first time someone has told me this and unfortunately I believe the times match up perfectly to blame Ritalin completely. What worries me is that I wonder if I’ve changed also and Ritalin just facilitated the change. What if I’m actually boring off of Ritalin too and I’ve permanently made myself dull and uninspired?
In keeping with the title I’m stopping Ritalin today. I still need a stimulant of course, I’m American afterall, but I think that my stimulant of choice will be tea for a while. I’m eager to see how this works out.
Today I had an exam that went well, at least the written part seemed to go well. But the spoken part was fairly dull and my teacher lambasted me for not speaking Chinese enough outside of class. Specifically she said that while all the other students are learning new words outside of class I am not, nor am I learning new grammar structures. Of course she is right so I’m going to make an attempt to speak only Chinese and keep a book handy for new phrases I learn. Maybe next exam will be better.
When a subject matter is inherently multi-person it doesn’t help to be self-taught.
Stepping off the plane in gloomy Pudong airport I was assaulted by feelings of strangeness mingled with familiarity. My biggest concern, typical for any computer scientist, was that I might be unable to access the Internet during my stay in China. Maybe the firewall was too restrictive or maybe Ethernet is implemented in a different way, that I would regret not bringing my cable crimper. Maybe everything I could access would be in Chinese and I would be unable to integrate without help from locals. Stepping off the plane I immediately recognized the familiar and comfortable signs for Wifi, cat5 jacks in the walls, and many, many laowai using the Internet in the terminal. Now that that was sorted I only had to convince a Chinese taxi driver to drive me to my apartment an hour away in a town that I had never been to where few people speak languages I can recognize; easy in comparison I think.
In a few days I will celebrate my two month anniversary of being in China and I’m proud to say that I can now order food by myself. Naturally, only food that I’ve had often and know the name of (I can’t read the menus) and only at a few restaurants (where they tolerate my pointing at other people’s food). But while I’ve lost some weight from not eating well and not eating any vegetables, which are a luxury here, I’ve not spent any less time on the Internet than I would normally. When I set out I had my concerns about the “Golden Shield” or the Great Chinese Firewall, but it turns out to be pretty easy to circumvent with a proxy. But while I had my concerns I was also very curious to find out how much Chinese people know about their own informational prison, whether they know how to circumvent the firewall and if they do, and how it’s affected their use of the Internet in general. But when it comes down to it China is basically the same when it comes to tech so my general experiences in China end up being much more interesting.
When you learn a new language what do you always start with? Probably something like, “Hello, my name is Chen Se.” Really, a hello world program for natural languages. But do you know the first thing you need to learn to say when you get into a foreign country is really not a greeting, probably the first is more like, “I speak no Chinese but I am very hungry, please bring me something to eat, I really don’t care what.” We rarely consider our needs when they’re being met, I have no idea how to say, “I need air!” in Chinese, the need has always been met, but I know a hundred ways to ask for particular foods and drinks yet I barely know how to converse. Friendship and companionship is so much farther down the list of needs compared to food, water and air that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of that language.
When you begin to program most people make a “Hello World” program which exposes us to the essential grammar of a language, but like learning “my name is…” it is completely useless to the programmer. This leads me to believe that formal languages like natural languages must also have a way of learning a new language in an intensive way. If I ever learn spanish I will smack my teacher if he tries to teach us “my name is…” I don’t care, I want to learn, “What is that food? Waiter, please bring me this, it looks tasty”. What is the equivalent for a programming language? Is computing Fibonacci recursively closer to what’s needed or are there particular exercises that are necessary for a particular language in order to learn quickly? In Ruby I think monkey-patching String to print out all strings backwards would be a good “Hello World”. Naturally, some languages just shouldn’t be used so there is no “Hello World” program that will help someone program well in that language (cough, PHP). Maybe this is just a case of premature optimization, that “Hello World” has its place and things like Project Euler are there to take us farther.
In my Student Originated Software class we asked what it was that separated natural languages and formal languages, our answer was that ambiguities were the separation. However now that I’ve studied natural language more I’ve come to realize that even if a natural language was specified with EBNF it would still have the spoken component which formal languages do not typically have. For all my training in learning languages, I have learned at least seven programming languages, I am completely incapable of remembering how to say things. My vocabulary is excellent, my handwriting has been praised many times, in fact, anything having to do with the visual representation of the language has been a strong point but the spoken part is consistently difficult. I was unaware that the spoken language section of the brain was different from the written language part, my assumption that study of formal languages would make the study of natural languages easier has only been partly correct. What would be interesting would be to study Chinese Sign Language and see if that’s easier or if we have another language area of the brain for physical representations of language.
This makes me want to create a spoken programming language or a manual language but I’m not sure what these would look like.
As I write this last journal entry the Internet has crashed again. I can no longer communicate with America and I find myself wondering whether the Internet actually crashed or if google was just blocked, you always have to check multiple sites when in China because google has no more political clout here than anyone else; in this way it is a very equal-opportunity country. My understanding of the Firewall is that the border routers, the last routers before the end-user, have filtering software which searches through requests and responses before delivering them for illegal words. If a border router finds something it dislikes it will sever the connection and the user is presented with a generic network connection error. Further connections will be blocked for a few minutes however if the border router finds the bad text again from that website it will block for (a few minutes)^2, each time doubling the amount of time the border router blocks the entire site.
CCCP has been pretty brilliant about their scheme. A big warning page about illegal searching would be intrusive and scary, would scare a lot of people off the Internet entirely and sow discord. As it is now institutions that publish politically sensitive things just appear to be unreliable, which would make me question the sites ability to present accurate information also. As it is a blacklist system there are always holes and ways around the firewall, but they are a pain in the ass and for most things there are other news agencies and websites that may present the information in a way less objectionable to the border routers; this allows CCCP to make certain websites preferred. In addition China has been know to change the DNS of major ISPs so that their preferred sites are represented. For several months, when Google and China were fighting, all requests to google.com pointed directly to baidu.cn the search engine that the CCCP likes best.
The CCCP is masterful at minor manipulations which change people’s opinions, under Mao the second most powerful and prolific organization was the department of propaganda. While this department is significantly less powerful now the knowledge remains and students who graduate from college with art degrees are well versed in the psychology of propaganda. In the US I believe we call this Advertising or Marketing but the differences are not large.
Curiously, in my survey of foreign students 77% have known about the Chinese Firewall while only 13% knew how to get around the Firewall with a Proxy. Among the four Chinese people I was comfortable talking to half have known about the Firewall and one quarter have known how to get around it. I believe that the number of people who know about the Firewall is significantly lower in China because all information about the Firewall has been blocked (including my blog) and because it affects US sites much more than Chinese sites.
But do we know much more in America? I find myself questioning the American government much more here than I did at home. In many ways China is exactly like America, we both have a lot of corruption, we both have egregious human-rights violations, we both have the death penalty, but China is more blatant about these things. If Chinese people don’t know about the Firewall, because the CCCP is so good at what it does, does it make sense that the American govt. is any different? How do we know that there isn’t a Great Firewall around America? We had behind the excuse of the free-market but China’s market is much, much more free than America’s so I have to wonder whether our freedoms are being restricted without us realizing it. And if we do realize it are we really capable of doing much more than the Chinese citizens? We can demonstrate, something the Chinese people can’t do, but this seems to be effective at removing small players from politics when something really tragic happens like the WTO protests. The WTO still exists, the only thing that happened was a lot of Americas got gassed and hurt and one mayor lost his job.
When I stepped off the plane I stepped into a country remarkably similar to America. The Internet is the same except slightly more annoying in some regards, the animals we eat are mostly the same except they may have some more bones, and the government is still intrusive. My journey to China has taught me many things, but mostly it has shown me a little more about myself, my country, and my government that I hadn’t seen before. Only when you learn a powerful programming language do you finally understand how impotent your previous languages were in comparison and vice versa. It’s the comparison that is enlightening, not the new language. Visiting China has given me perspective on America, has shown me the things that I love and dislike and has made me question the motives of the US Government, whether they have our interests in mind and whether we are even capable of influencing policy. It has been enlightening.
Someone pointed out the other day that most people in Shanghai have been driving less than a year, many for around nine months as that’s how long the test takes to prep for (iirc). Imagine a city with about 1 million cars on the road, all of which are driven by people with the same experience level as an average 16 year old. Now try riding on the back of a taxi-motorcycle! :)
