Sam's L33t Journal

Time continues humming along.

My mom came to visit last weekend, which was really nice. We took the kid to the aquarium again, among other things. Eris arrived at the aquarium mid-nap again, though she did wake up before we had to go. (We were about ready to leave when the fire alarm went off. No idea what was up with that, but it doesn't seem to have gotten any mention in the news, so was probably something minor or a false alarm.)

This week was quite busy at work. Among other things, I'm preparing a presentation on some of my recent work for next week's team meeting. Tuesday was pretty snowy, and I worked from home.

Ames (tenshikurai9) is back in town this week, so I got the chance to catch up and introduce her to the kid.

My new phone arrived (Google's new Pixel XL). It's not super-different from my previous phone (a Nexus 6P), but it certainly has a lot of polish, the new hardware and software work really well. Eris is also excited about that (in a way) because she's recently discovered the concept of talking to people on the phone.

Eristic improvements: Knee-walking, saying "hello" and "byebye".

It would be easier to title these posts if it didn't take me several days to get around to it.

Melissa came to visit this weekend (arrived Saturday and left early Tuesday morning). She was visiting Boston University since she's planning to apply for their MFA program. Was a lovely visit, especially since she provided a great deal of help with the kid (seriously, she changed diapers and everything). Saturday evening we went out for dinner with extended family (Amy and Josh and Milly and Marty), Sunday evening we went out to celebrate Melissa's birthday, and Monday I cooked dinner at home. Actually got a fair amount of cooking done: Mushroom and pea shoot omelette on Saturday morning, roast chicken and vegetables, pea shoot salad, and baked sweet potato with dukkah (which Julie made earlier) for Monday night.

Sunday morning, Melissa took the kid and went to visit friends, and (in addition to chores) I managed to watch all of Madoka Magica. If you enjoy anime, I'd recommend it: It's short (12 ~20 min. episodes) and has the sort of quality you'd expect form an Akiyuki Shinbo / Gen Urobuchi collab (i.e. a lot).

(I hear the kid enjoyed her museum visit. A good staircase is still a world of adventure.)

The Super Bowl Sunday seems like it was quite the game. (Sorry, Atalanta fans.)

Work is going all right this week, but it's a bit hectic.

Today, I'm out at Olin helping with campus recruiting and doing an interview-prep workshop. It feels only a short time since I was here with the kid a year ago.

This morning, the ground was covered with a thin layer of ice, which made the walk to daycare a bit too exciting. It was all melted an hour later, though. But tomorrow we're getting a snowstorm.

Julie's postdoc ends on Friday. But her entrepreneurial work continues.

This weekend, we're going to Intercon, which I missed last year and is still probably foolishness to go to this year, what with looking after the kid. I'm only signed up for a few games, though.

Eristic improvements: Still working on standing up unsupported (despite some early successes, she seems to be having difficulty with this still, though maybe she's trying when more tired), using specific sounds to communicate specific things (though I'm not sure I can quite say that she's learned words yet), more complex causal modeling (i.e. she knows the remote control works somehow and is determined to figure it out).

This past week, I was home sick from work Monday, and I've continued to be under the weather since. Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow? Or eventually? The week was fairly eventful. Work, and generally not getting as much done as I'd like.

The handyman finally caught up on his own backlog and start on the babyproofing-related work at our place. So our place now features cabinet latches and stair gates, ahead of the kid really being able to get away from us. Also added brackets for our AC units, so that we can install them and remove them again without dropping them out of the narrow windows.

Julie's readying for another round of interviews.

The weather remains unpleasantly hot and humid.

I played a bit of This is the Police (which will be coming out for public release soon). I see why many reviewers are characterizing it as an interesting failure, but the game's story strikes me as interesting so far, and it's indeed interesting how it uses its mechanics in service of its story and aesthetic.

Eristic improvements: Eating solid food in earnest now, first tooth, floor sitting (though not sitting up), more pre-crawling exercises.

ETA: Also, forgot to mention that the kid had her physical last week. Just over 19 pounds now.

Unlike previous years, this year's trip to Sandy Island Camp wasn't a digital hiatus. I didn't leave my phone at home this time. For one thing, I wanted to have the camera, and for another, I was driving and wanted to bring the phone for nav. But unless I'm really committed to taking a complete break from the internet (and I wasn't), I won't do it, so I spent a lot of my time at camp listening to podcasts or huddled in the shadow of the internet shed.¹

But it did mean a lot of time to relax, particularly as the kid had two grandparents and an aunt who wanted to make the most of quality time. Early on, it was, "Can I watch the baby? Change a diaper? Take her for a walk?" Sure, if you insist! Later in the week, it was more like the kid would just vanish and I'd look up and think, "Where did the baby go?"

Eris is still determinedly working on improving her mobility. This makes her extra interactive, but also extra tired and hungry. Introducing her to new foods is fun, and she eats not nearly as messily as I would have expected. Aside from rice cereal, we've gotten in some banana (her favorite) and plain yogurt (which she also liked).

I did manage to get in a bit of reading at camp (though I notably did not read any books from start to finish):

Piketty's Capital - I started reading this at Sandy last summer, planned to find some time to finish it during the year, and failed to do so. It's pretty interesting, though, as a historical account of the conditions that caused inherited fortunes to dominate the landscape of wealth in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and why those conditions were notably absent for much of the 20th century. It's also interesting as a bit of futurism that predicts a return to low growth, extreme wealth inequality, a shrinking middle class, and the reemerging dominance of inherited fortunes. The last part, concerning policy recommendations, will be of interest to liberals, horrifying to libertarians, and probably politically infeasible in any case. Still, I agree with Bill Gates that the book is worth your time if you're interested in the topic.

Haidt's The Righteous Mind - Started this book some time before camp. This book's subtitle "Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" promises more than the book delivers, and Haidt has blind-spots you could drive a truck through, and for all that he notes that he's a former liberal, Haidt seems to think that some of the moral intuitions he cites are absent from liberal politics instead of employed in different ways. Still, it's not bad as a pop-science book about moral psychology.

(If the author's name sounds familiar, Haidt has most recently gotten a lot of attention for writing conservative "what's wrong with the kids these days" think-pieces, including this one in The Atlantic.)

Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land - Started but haven't finished yet. A collection of essays that was a product of an academic symposium, published in 1966. Interesting so far. Notably, it leads off with an essay that predicts the main problem of urban land in the future will be its ever-declining value as transportation and communication costs trend towards zero (the author also predicts that automated freeway navigation systems will allow traffic to flow at 150 mph bumper-to-bumper).

The weather at camp was pleasantly cool, and that continued on our return. (Had to get out a jacket, unusual for July.) Julie's dad was in town for a conference, and that Sunday was my 30th birthday, so we had some fun celebratory meals. Not a bad milestone. I did seem to manage to check all the boxes just in time for the end of my 20s.

Since then, summer has once again turned on the heat.

The handyman is scheduled to do some work on the house related to baby-proofing and climate control, but that's been delayed because he's sick. Hopefully the delay won't be too long.

I've been playing Undertale, which really is as good as people have claimed. And I have played a bit of that new Pokémon game that everyone (kind of shockingly close to literally everyone) is talking about.²

Eristic improvements: Substantial increases in mobility. Maintaining pre-crawling pose, reverse-gear backwards scooting, improved rolling. I'd say the kid is almost to crawling. In fact, she just got in her first bit of what might technically be crawling, which involved taking a lot of wind-up bounces before flinging a leg forward. She's also become more talkative. Definitely making the transition from cooing to babbling, some of her vocalizations are now recognizably featuring syllables and consonants. Some improvements in skill at manipulating objects, particularly those spoons.

1. The camp office, sole source of wifi on the island. There is some cell reception but it's terrible, particularly on T-Mobile.
2. I joked that it turns out that all Ingress needed to be wildly popular was to be combined with the most successful video-game franchise of all time. Of course, that's not really a joke, and it shouldn't really be so surprising that's a winning formula. (Though I do wonder if the game will have staying power, or if its popularity will be a brief fad.)

Four weeks have come and gone, which means I'm now a full member of Team Nutrition. Of course, Julie's still providing all the food, but we now can do some time-shifting without worrying too much about ruining the existing routine. Lazy parenting thing I learned this week: You don't have to heat up fridged breastmilk before feeding it to the baby. Eris seemed to find the cool bottle of milk pretty strange, but that didn't prevent her from devouring it.

Julie and I have done a bit of cooking, but mostly it's been simpler things. I want to continue to get some more elaborate cooking into the mix.

Unfortunately, sleep dep has been really dragging on me the last few days. Julie's more resilient on that front, but she's starting to get pretty tired, too. Really need to get in more daytime naps. Though I'm glad we were able to get out of the house today, the weather was beautiful, unexpectedly very mild.

This December has been surprisingly mild. We met some of our neighbors this weekend because they were outside with friends enjoying the weather and grilling some steaks on their corner patio.

The back streets of our new corner of Somerville (though not far from where we were previously) are much less subdued in terms of yard decorations. There are quite a few elaborate nativity scenes and light displays on the walk between our house and Inman Square.

I hired someone to clean the place, so now everything is nice and shiny. I bought spices and cooked some of my first home-cooked meals here. Progress is being made on the long tail of new-house chores. Thank-you notes have been started, hopefully can finish the batch before the recipient of most of those gifts actually arrives.

The training sessions I was organizing for work are now done. Things generally went well. Still have much to do.

After the snow last week, I got out to Olin for career fair, which was awesome! Also ran a resume workshop, which went really well.

I came up with a silly metaphor for my resume remarks, which I hope will stick in students' minds: A resume is like a cupcake, served upside-down.

You have the wrapper, essential but not exciting. That's name, contact information, what are you studying and when, and your summary of skills (useful, but that's a summary of a summary, so keep it short).

You have the cake, the main point. That's delicious work experience! Ideally, this section is the closest approximation you can muster to, "I did exactly this job, did it extremely well, and have the numbers to prove it." Prioritize discussing relevant paid work, followed by relevant close approximations of paid work and relevant projects that produced something concrete. Discuss unrelated employment if necessary, but more briefly. Use metrics to quantify your achievement (at least showing that you set goals and measured results, ideally show that your results were impressive). Estimate if necessary. On the job learning is a good thing to demonstrate, and that can be something to quantify as well.

Finally, you may want to add a bit of icing, some leadership position or award or hobby that makes you look cool or smart or interesting but isn't directly relevant to work. I don't think there's a real risk that the person who doesn't put any hobbies on their resume will be looked down on, but if you have something cool, it might help your resume be memorable and might help you have something good to talk about in interviews that have more social-skills-y "so tell me about you" sorts of questions.


The rest of the week was very busy, and this weekend is once again mired in snow. (With more scheduled for next Tuesday and then a significant amount next weekend.) I braved the snow to have Valentine's Day dinner with Julie at Cafe Artscience. We went out for brunch at Puritan and Co. and I made hot chocolate at home.

I'm glad to have the day off tomorrow.

So how about them local sports teams?

Boston got a significant snowstorm last week and a follow up early this week. Friday is bringing just enough snow to tide us over before another snowstorm Sunday-Monday, with not much melting in between, and some very cold weather, too. (Mild today, though.)

I'm trying to figure out logistics for conferences and other travel in the spring.

The last few weeks included lots of birthday parties, and one going-away party (for Gui, who's off to San Francisco to build giant robots).

Also games: Enjoyed the tech-tree building card game Progress: Evolution of Technology and the industry-building board game Brass. On the digital side, enjoyed the impossible-architecture platforming puzzle-game Monument Valley (it's not long or super-difficult, but it is beautiful and clever, well worth the few dollars it costs).

Work is stressful, but productive.

Crazy rain today.

There was a $50 coupon for Yelp Elite members for Washio, a new dry cleaning / laundry delivery service. The price wasn't too bad for door-to-door service, and the service was really good and very convenient. The offer came at just the right time because I had several loads of laundry and some dry cleaning queued up (winter weather has arrived for real, and it's going to get really cold in no time, so this is the last chance to bring things out of storage). They picked up Saturday morning and delivered today. I wouldn't want to replace my every-day laundry with that (it's not enough trouble to be worth the wait and expense), but it seems good for spring-cleaning sorts of laundry chores and it's a good option for dry cleaning (especially for those heavier items), since that can be annoying to lug around without a car.

I'm making some more beer bread for Julie's office party. I made some last weekend, too.

Today started with torrential rain. A tornado in Everett and flooding in parts of the Boston area. By 10 or so, the weather turned beautiful again.

At work, moved desks to be closer to teammates on (somewhat) newly reorganized teams. My new office is an interior one, and still looks a bit bare. Maybe I can add a poster or something.

Spent a lot of time today fixing a test I'd thought already worked. Still, wasn't a bad day.

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