Embracing Chaos

I recently picked up a book called Secrets of Mental Math written by one of my college math professors.  It has very practical advice on how to learn to multiply large numbers in your head.  He gives practical advice on necessary skills like addition, subtraction, and related mathematical trivia.  To practice multiplying numbers in your head, I’ve created a fast, simple javascript tool which you can access from your phone at http://leodirac.com/mathquiz .

The author of the book is Arthur Benjamin.  He gave a demonstration of his mad skillz at TED a while back, which I’m embedding here because it’s awesome.

Migrating this blog has been fun because it’s forced me to look over a lot of the old content I’ve written.  A couple years ago I found Benjamin’s Ted talk, which has inspired all this craziness.  I think it’s good to keep the brain fresh by taxing skills that one might not have used in a while.

As the year wraps up, I'd like to share some of the major events that have happened in my life recently.  Many of my readers will be well aware of these events, but I recognize that personal news travels through a variety of channels, and all of those channels are unreliable.  (I'll save the diatribe on why Facebook is a horrible way to keep up with friends for another day.)  For readers who are looking for insightful analysis of technology, my apologies.  Note the "ego" tag.  This is a personal update but does contain a little insight into real-estate finance.

December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

I caved.  I took a job with Google as a Product Manager.  I start today.  I’m down in Mountain View all week to have kool-aid forcibly injected intravenously.  Make note of this day and see if you can sense a shift in tone of my posts as time continues.  We’ll see when I start thinking and posting about Google in first person.  This change is important to you my dear readers for a couple of other reasons. 

Most significantly is around intellectual property.  Google’s IP policy for its employees can be effectively summarized as "All your base are belong to us."  It’s a fairly standard employment agreement — anything I do or think of on Google’s time or using Google’s equipment belongs to Google.  The only exception is if I do something entirely on my own that is not related to Google’s current or reasonably foreseeable future business.  I’m not a lawyer, but California and Washington laws both read about the same.  The thing with Google is that essentially nothing in technology is outside of that scope.  Designing juggling balls or running shoes might be.  This was a concern for me in considering the position.  But in the end I couldn’t resist.

I suspect this means I won’t be able to post as much about what the industry needs to be doing.  On the flip-side, hopefully I’ll be in a position to be getting the industry to do these things.  People often ask me what I’ll be working on, and I always answer honestly that I don’t know.  As a Product Manager I’ll be working on products but not writing code — this is similar to a PM role in other companies, but there are very few at Google and their relationship is much more of a peer than in some companies.  As to products, I think everybody has to work on ads as a kind of penance.  But hopefully when I get my feet on the ground I’ll be working on all the things I’ve been posting about here.

Personally this means I’m going to be extremely busy for a while as I finish up a full quarter at school and start up a new job.  I’ll also be a cross-bridge commuter heading into Kirkland most days which I’m really unexcited about.  But the opportunity to work with lots of brilliant people and have a huge impact on the world makes up for it.  I’m pretty excited!

Okay, not quite a full ton.  The Lilypod only needs 1,500 lbs of dissolved epsom salt to make the water dense enough that you can float on it.  In 250 gallons of water that gives the solution a density of about 1.7, which makes it quite easy to float on.  Heat it to about 99 degrees Fahrenheit, put in ear plugs, turn out all the lights, and concentrate on your breathing.   It’s a great recipe for some deep relaxation.  I’m looking forward to borrowing some time on it, hoping it will be a good way to help focus my mind.

I’m talking about my good friend Barry’s new float tank.  It’s called the Lilypod for hopefully obvious reasons.  Setting this thing up and maintaining it is sure to be an adventure.  And adventures deserve blogs.  This one’s lives at http://thelilypod.blogspot.com/

Please excuse a bit of rambling, but I’ve got a seedling of an idea I’d like to publicly explore.  The classic definition of economics concerns the allocation of finite resources to unlimited desires.  Resources here are physical goods and services that people buy or trade.  There’s only so much stuff in the world that people might want.  If you add up what everybody wants, it’s more than the amount of stuff available to go around — classically it’s infinite.  Economic systems manage this discrepancy.

I increasingly find myself facing a related problem: trying to allocate my finite time to seemingly unlimited desires to do stuff.  As I grow and learn there seems to be no limit to what I want to do.  Similarly, as I grow and learn and the world evolves around me, I seem to be genuinely able to accomplish more things in given amounts of time.  I think this feeds into my desires. 

How can I balance my time between all the professional goals, intellectual challenges, social activities, physical adventures, artistic pursuits, etc. that interest me?  The realization of this parallel between personal economics and classical economics gives me a hint that there are systems out there.  I’m going to think about market-based systems for allocating my time towards achieving my goals.  I wonder if I can do this without explicitly stating and prioritizing them.

Another tool that might be useful include meditation.  These unlimited desires often give me a short-attention span, maybe even A.D.D.  My good buddy Mez suggested some basic meditation as a way to help focus the brain.  I’ve been trying it for the last few days and I can already see some benefits.

After 6.5 years of having dreadlocks, I decided I was done.  So while I was at Burningman this year, I had my friends help me cut them off.  I wandered around on Saturday with a pair of scissors, and would ask friends one at a time if they would help me by cutting off one of my dreads.  Some of them went into a bag for future nefarious purposes, and some of them got put into my new dread hat, and others got burned ceremoniously.  In all, 33 people helped cut my hair.  "It takes a village" Mason said.  I did a tiny amount of trimming myself afterwards, but really this is a community haircut.  At some point I’ll need to get a professional to clean it up.  But considering how it was formed, I think it’s not bad.

Now, with a few weeks of introspection and perspective, I can explain my thought process and motivation.  A big part of it was that I was sick of maintaining them.  For a pale guy like me, keeping dreads looking half-way decent is a lot of work — arguably more than I was doing.  I was attracted to the hairstyle initially because of its promise of never having to do anything with your hair again.  That might be true for somebody with thick, curly african hair, but not for me.  I had to go at them with a crochet hook for an hour or two every couple of weeks to keep from looking too fuzzy.

Now that they’re gone, I realize a number of things about them that were really downers: I had a giant lump of matter stuck to my head.  It got in the way when I lay down.  None of my hats really fit anymore.  Helmets have all needed re-adjustment.  I was always pulling it out of my face.  My hair took forever to dry.  All these hassles are gone.  But bigger than that, now people can run their fingers through my hair!  I feel like a purring cat whenever it happens.  I probably have a limit for how long I find that activity enjoyable for, but I haven’t found it yet.

But the most substantial reason was that I knew I was ready for structural changes in my life.  I knew I needed to focus my energy on school rather than my job.  I’d been working at Real Networks for 4.5 years and learned a ton, but doing both has been a killer.  As I squeezed the scissors through that first lock I was thinking to myself, "If I can cut off my dreads, I can make other big changes in my life."  It was an act of empowerment.  I control my destiny.  I actually haven’t exactly quit my job — I’m taking a leave of absence from Real for 6 months while I finish up my MBA at which point I’ll consider all my options.  But I am in control of my time, and time is the most critical resource any of us have.

Next step in taking control of my life: Puppy.  That one’s still pretty scary for me.

XKCD is a rad web-comic.  Today’s makes passing yo-mama jokes while discussing the concept of the "28-hour day." 

It’s an interesting idea.  Six 28-hour days make up a week.  6 x 28 = 7 x 24 = 168 hours.  {math corrected} If you sleep 8 hours out of 28, then you’re getting 48 hours of sleep a week, which is equivalent to just under 7 hours of sleep a night on a regular schedule.  (6 hours 51 minutes).  Personally, I’m optimal at about 7 hours 25 minutes a night on a long-term basis, but I can go 6 hours a night for quite a while and stay upright.

To see what this might be like with my schedule, I put XKCD’s schedule into a public Google calendar.  It doesn’t fit with my school schedule next quarter, so I won’t be trying it.  But if you give it a try, let me know how it works.

Or here’s the ical version.

A number of folks have been courting me for positions as a software development engineer recently.  Many of them sound really fun.  I love writing code, and even though it hasn’t been my professional focus for years, I think I’m still alright at it.  But I’ve had to come to a sober realization that I simply cannot take a job where writing code is my primary function.  I’m just not physically capable of it.  I just about cried during a job interview once when explaining this.

People come in my office and say "that’s a cool keyboard."  My response is generally something like "that’s what it takes."  I don’t use a $300 keyboard because it looks cool.  It’s more like a wheelchair.

I have repetitive strain injury.  It’s not carpal tunnel syndrome.  My wrists basically never bother me.  It’s more my pinkies, more the left than the right.  I can think of 3 causes.  In high-school I took a 3-day bike tour from San Diego to Santa Barbara wearing gloves that weren’t well padded.  For about a week afterwards I had no feeling in my left pinkie.  Then in 1996 a marathon perl coding session of several 100-hour weeks left my pinkies pretty sore because of all the mixed-case variables in our code. 

Also, I suspect cubital tunnel syndrome might have some part of it.  I’m not expert but my understanding is that it’s a result of spending too much time with bent elbows stretching some nerves causing problems with pinkies.  I understand the easiest thing to help is to sleep with straight arms.

The ironic thing is that with a good ergonomic keyboard I can write English text day
in and day out, but more than about 10-15 hours/week of coding and
things start to hurt.  Writing code on a laptop in bed, fun as it is, will get to me after about 10 minutes.  Code involves tons more time on the special keys
than English.  You don’t need a lot of
[]{}()<>*=+-~&^_!#@$%/|\ in e-mail or in specs.  And you don’t
need to bounce around the arrow keys for editing nearly so much
either.  The Kinesis advantage keyboard helps quite a lot, because it moves most of the keys that the pinkies do under the thumbs.  But it’s not quite enough for me, because the shift keys are still the responsibility of the pinkies.  I’ve tried using a foot-pedal for shift, but haven’t been able to
re-train myself.  And I’m not sure I really want to limit myself by
having a job I can only do in front of a super-tricked out
workstation.  Screwing up (gee it sure would be nice to get
something done on this here laptop) means having to use a microphone
and eat grams/day of ibuprofen for a few months which I’ve done and really really
sucks.

So physical disability has sent me down an interesting career path towards middle management.  I have tons of fun in this capacity, but sometimes I miss making things work with my own hands.

Also, if any of you have hints of repetitive strain injury, I strongly encourage you to shell out the cash for a good keyboard.  It’s way cheaper than the alternatives.

My girlfriend has an auto-immune skin condition called psoriasis that gives her rashes.  For some people the condition gets serious enough that patients and MD’s turn to drugs that suppress T-cells, the part of the immune system which causes the inflammation.  Turning down the volume level on your immune system has all sorts of easily predictable side-effects, but for people whose immune systems are just a little too enthusiastic it can be the right choice.

My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable.  But instead, she’s opted to do something much more difficult and follow the advice of a naturopath.  She’s agreed to eliminate basically all tasty foods from her diet for some unreasonably long period of time.  After weeks of eating nothing but rice and steamed vegetables (I’m exaggerating, but not much) she’ll slowly start adding foods in one at a time to see what might be causing an negative reaction.  It’s an elimination diet — a fairly common practice which is pretty easy to visualize but takes care and dedication to do properly.

Why suffer through this process instead of just taking some pills and getting better?  Because it promises
to understand and solve the cause of the problem, rather than just cover up the symptoms.  I admire her strength and wisdom in this choice.  Until then, we’ll be making lots of use of the veggie steamer.  (My veggie steamer actually looks a lot more like this one, but mine has the fabulous retro-luddite feature of a knob to set how long to cook for instead of digital controls.)

I lost my temper today.  It doesn’t happen often, but it always gives me pause to reflect on how I might have handled the situation better.  In this case I think it’s pretty clear.

I was biking home from work, riding up Pinke on my normal commute route.  A bus was stopped in the right lane so I moved into the next lane to pass it.  As I did this, a white SUV (IIRC license plate 974-PPF) pulls up close behind me, revving its engine and honking repeatedly.  The driver yells out of the window "Get out of the road!"

My immediate reaction was what I always do in such circumstances which is to assert my position in the middle of the lane to ensure that the car doesn’t try to zoom by without leaving me enough room.  In the next block he found space to pass in the third lane, yelling obscenities on the way until a red light stops him.  I ride up next to him to have a chat.

At this point my blood pressure is quite high and I’ve pretty much lost control.  As I rode up I yelled "Do you have a problem sharing the road?"  His thoughtful response was "Get out of the !@#*& road.  I’m in a car."  Regrettably at this point I just laid into him for being lazy and contributing to global warming, to cheers from passing pedestrians.  The light changed and we went our own ways.

What makes me most sad about this interaction is that I didn’t make the time to understand what was going on in his head.  I would have enjoyed exploring the logic that accompanied "I’m in a car."  I might have learned something by listening a little better.

I’m also disappointed in myself for losing my calm.  His behavior was so patently absurd that I shouldn’t have any reason to get upset over it — it’s not like h was pointing out my personal failures or anything like that.  Arguably the implicit threat of physical violence on me justifies anger, and that the accompanying adrenaline actually helps me deal with the situation.  But the subsequent clouding of judgment really doesn’t help.  A fear reaction might have achieved the same benefits of adrenaline with a slightly more measured response.

Overall I wish I’d remained calm.  I’m hoping that by reflecting on the situation like this I might prepare myself to handle it better next time.