sacha chua living an awesome life

Whenever we sit on the couch to watch a movie, the cats inevitably gather. Neko prefers to sit on W-’s lap if he’s available (I’m only slightly jealous, harumph), but will curl herself up on my lap if W- is working on his laptop. Luke will jump on my lap for a bit if Neko isn’t there, or he’ll nap beside me if my lap is occupied. Leia prefers to play monorail cat along the back of the sofa or on the arms. If one of us stands up, the warm spot is almost immediately taken by a cat (usually Neko).

W- usually works on his computer while watching a movie. I’m tempted to do so as well, but since Neko doesn’t usually seek out company, I figured that it’s fine just spending time with her on my lap. Sometimes I try to type or draw on the side, and that’s not particularly ergonomic.

I could relax and focus on the movie, making it practice for being in the moment. Or I can play around with the possibilities, since not all movies need full attention. Knitting and crochet are out of the question because the cats are crazy about string. I can flip through Japanese flashcards on my phone. I can dust off my Twiddler one-handed keyboard and see about learning that again. I can skim nonfiction books to see which deserve deeper reading.

Hmm… This Twiddler thing looks promising. It’s amazing how much muscle memory can retain after so many years. I think it might be interesting to develop both right- and left-handed facility with this. Who knows, it might even come in handy while sketchnoting, so that I can trigger keyboard shortcuts.

This is me from 2003 or so, with a Twiddler one-handed keyboard and an M1 head-mounted display (on which I looked up stuff in Emacs, naturally). My dad took this picture. =)

It’s funny how things come together: cats, wearable computing, writing, drawing… We’ll see where this goes!

On the #emacs channel, aidalgol asked me if people ever looked at me as if I were crazy because of my interest in Emacs. =)

I used to worry about being too different, being someone people couldn’t easily relate to. There were practical reasons for thinking about this. At IBM, I wanted to help people and teams make use of new tools and ways of working. Early adopters are terrible at helping mainstream people try out new technologies or approaches. You need someone in between, someone who can relate to early adopters and with whom mainstream adopters can identify.

If people thought I was too different from them, they would stop really listening. You know the excuses people give: “Oh, you’re young, that’s why it’s easy for you. I’m too old to learn this.” “You’re a techie, of course this is easy for you. I’m not very good at this computer thing.” There’s this gap, and that gap becomes a reason for people to not even try. This is also why I don’t like being called a rock star. It creates too much of that separation.

So it was natural to respond to compliments by downplaying what I do. “Oh, they’re just stick figures. You can do this too!” “It’s just that I’ve been doing this for a while. Everyone starts somewhere!” I toned down some of my excitement, tried to giggle less. Worked on minimizing the gap.

It’s becoming more and more fun to revel in the geekiness, though—to follow my curiosity into the winding rabbit-holes and share that sometimes incomprehensible joy. Emacs, Quantified Self, visual thinking and sketchnoting, cooking, reading… I am deeply into things. I play.

People often come up to me after presentations and tell me that I blew their mind. I used to think that was… hmm… Not bad, but not particularly good either. I wanted to show the possibilities, sure, but I also wanted people to walk away with practical things that they could do right now, those first few steps that could take them on even more interesting journeys.

But then there’s this quote, still one of my favourites over the years:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Here is what I’ve come to realize: it’s okay to be weird, to be geeky, to be different, to explore things that many people don’t get a chance to do so. It can inspire people to know what’s out there and what’s possible.

And then periodically come back and balance that with building bridges and on-ramps and ladders. When people are stymied by a seemingly insurmountable gap between where they are and where you are, help them figure out the next small thing that can help them move forward in the direction they want to go. Find it or make it. Then do that again, and again, and again. People come from different perspectives and start at different levels, so your answers may feel scattered in the beginning. Keep doing it. Then the patchwork of resources will grow, and you’ll be able to see how different things can come together and what’s missing. Build, organize, build, organize, step by step, and you’ll learn tons of things along the way.

This seems to work a lot better than trying to convince someone that you’re just like they were and that they can do what you do. No one believes that anyway.

I spent Friday evening and all of Saturday at the Generative Art Hack Party that Xavier Snelgrove organized. It was a good excuse to learn paper.js and d3js.

Here’s what I made:

• Bouncing spline: Reminds me of that old screensaver, with a little bit of randomness thrown in.
• Flowers: Playing around with opacity
• Faces: Simple shapes for awesomeness
• Kapow: I read too many comic books.
• Pasketti: Because drawing curves like this made me think about spaghetti, but not quite.

I thought Partycles was cool. infinitedaisyworld was nicely done, too. =) Check out the rest of the submissions.

In addition to learning more about HTML5 canvas drawing with Javascript, I learned that:

If I start thinking of things as “art”, I can get stuck waiting for an interesting idea, especially if I’m in that mid-afternoon slump. If I don’t worry about coming up with a vision first and instead read the documentation or play around with functions, I can let curiosity take me to interesting places.

A room full of 20-30 geeks coding away isn’t distracting, although I still haven’t figured out how to interrupt people and ask about stuff.

Add another ~20 people and switch into party mode, and I begin to shut down socially. I don’t particularly feel like engaging in conversation, and I don’t feel like I’m completely there in conversations. It might be a decibel thing, it might be a listening thing. I wish I’d thought of sneaking downstairs for quieter conversations instead.

Xavier Snelgrove, Jen Dodd, and TinEye know how to have a great event with awesome healthy food.

After lots of social interaction, I tend to get wiped out. I slept for twelve hours the following day.

An evening and a full Saturday feels like it was enough to disrupt our home routines, which is not good news in terms of my participation in hackathons. I think I need to be more social in order to make the most of hackathons, anyway.

So, how do I want to follow up on this?

I’d like to add that d3js calendar visualization to QuantifiedAwesome.com. I think it would be interesting to see heatmaps of activities.

HackLab will probably be a good way to practise being around other people when I’m coding, and the open houses on Tuesday would be good desensitization for mingling.

I’d love to learn more about Quantified Self and visualization.

Sometimes, if I start thinking of things as “possibilities,” I get stuck waiting for an interesting idea. What if I set aside one morning each week to do this kind of planning / brainstorming / looking ahead, knowing that the rest of the week can be focused on actually trying things out and making things happen, even if they’re not Super Brilliant things? If I brainstorm a list of things I can explore, then I can keep moving forward even if the creative part of my brain wants to procrastinate. I trust that if I keep exploring, curiosity will lead me to interesting places.

Good experience. Would do it again, especially if I can figure out how to hack the social parts.

I ran into the dreaded 0xc00000e9 Unexpected I/O error on Windows 8, which meant that my drive was probably messed up. W- plugged my drive into his computer and found that he couldn’t read the files on it, so it was time for a format and reinstall. Fortunately, most of my information is in Dropbox or Evernote and therefore synchronized with the cloud and I backed up most of my other files, so it was No Big Deal (or not much of one) to format my drive and reinstall Windows. I’d been meaning to do that anyway, although I would’ve preferred to do it voluntarily. I didn’t back up the Quantified Self videos because they were so large, but I can copy

One of my mentors told me how he stopped deleting files because storage space is cheap. I’d stopped too, archiving my downloads directory instead of clearing it out. Now it’s paying off, since I can easily reinstall my favourite applications instead of tracking down links.

The most hassle will probably come from installing all the drivers I need and setting up all the shortcuts I’m used to, but that’s just a matter of slogging through it.

Then I can take a proper full-image backup, since it turned out that my last full-image backup was of Windows 7. I could’ve restored from that, I guess, but I couldn’t remember if there was anything compelling enough to go through a backup-and-reinstall cycle instead of a straight install. I’ll keep it around just in case.

How can I use this inconvenience to help me prepare for other situations better? Let’s see how it could have been worse, and how I can make my defenses even stronger.

I could’ve needed my setup for a client engagement. Coding environments are relatively easy to replicate: a virtual machine, a source code checkout, and we’re mostly back to normal. I have multiple computers that can do in a pinch. My drawing setup is a little more difficult because some of the drivers are finicky, and you can’t easily buy a tablet with a proper stylus.

• When it’s not important to publish right away, I can draw on paper. I have sketchbooks and markers.
• When it’s important to publish right away, I should have a backup computer. In a pinch, I can borrow J-’s or W-’s. I might upgrade my computer next year, and then this computer can be my backup.

My drive could’ve completely crashed. I kept the drive that came with my computer, so I could swap that back in while waiting for a new SSD to arrive.

My backups could’ve been messed up. My full system image backup wasn’t as useful as I wanted, because it wasn’t recognized by Windows 8. Fortunately, I have the habit of backing up both system images and files. I have the extra hard disk space, so I should back up full system images more often.

I could stash my license keys in one place instead of searching two mailboxes for them. Evernote might be a good way to handle that.

Every almost-catastrophe is also an opportunity to make systems better. =)

On the plus side, Windows Live Writer works again. Hooray!

I wanted to get a better sense of time, so I configured my phone to vibrate every half-hour in a short pattern of two quick bursts. That way, I can feel time passing, and I can distinguish these vibrations from message alerts. I used the following Tasker script:

Profile: Buzz time (13)
Time: From 08:00 every 30m Till 22:00
Enter: Anon (14)
A1: Vibrate Pattern [ Pattern:0,100,100,100 ]

After the quick buzz, I usually glance at the clock to confirm the time. It’s a handy way to remember that time is passing and that I should make the most of it. It’s not a big distraction. I can still stay in flow when I’m coding or writing. If I find myself wandering, I can bring myself back.

I don’t remember whose blog post started me down this path of making time a sense, but that was a good idea. (If you recognize yourself, please comment!)

I often draw with my stylus in tablet mode. Palm detection doesn’t work particularly well, so I prefer to disable the touch screen and use either my stylus or a mouse. Unfortunately, the option for disabling the touch screen disappeared when I upgraded to Windows 8:

See, no checklist to disable it!

After much searching, experimenting, and updating of drivers, I’ve found something that lets me keep the pen capability while disabling touch. I needed to go into Device Manager and disable the HID-compliant mouse there:

I missed it because I was trying to disable all sorts of other things under Human Interface Devices:

… which includes the pen input. I thought the touch input was there as well, but no luck. Good thing I checked other categories.

I’m glad I’m doing this now instead of right before a conference or on an international trip. Next time, I should make sure to check driver support, not just software. I don’t know if that would’ve completely avoided the problem, though, as many of the web pages I came across talked about other solutions.

Onward!

I wasn’t particularly keen on Windows 8 myself. We’d just helped W’s dad switch Windows 8 from Chinese to English, which turned out to be difficult if you can’t read Chinese and don’t understand the various messages, but we managed to do it. The interface was different, but didn’t seem to offer a compelling reason to upgrade.

Naturally, this meant that I had to go ahead and do it. I figured that most people on Windows 7 would be hesitant about the upgrade, or even griping about the radical changes in the user interface. People buying new computers would be on Windows 8, and newcomers might even assume that the Windows 8 interface was simply the way to do it. Someday I might be more conservative about technology, but I haven’t reached that day yet. I can take tech risks (especially since I’ve got backups!), and it’s better for me to figure things out on my own time than to have to switch over when the circumstances require it.

I’m often in tablet PC mode, so I was curious about whether the new interface really would be more touch-friendly. I was also curious about the “Sharing” feature, which promised to be similar to the inter-app communication that I like so much in Android.

So far, Windows 8 is actually not that bad. I’d switched to using Launchy to start applications a long time ago, so I hardly used the Start menu. I didn’t miss it. I knew about the Charms bar and how to bring it up with a keyboard shortcut. I read through the other keyboard shortcuts and started finding my way around. I customized my lock screen, which my fingerprint lets me bypass.

I’m slightly disappointed that sharing isn’t supported for desktop applications, but oh well. It makes sense that the traditional apps haven’t been yet been rebuilt to take advantage of Windows 8’s new features.

We’ll see what new capabilities this might open up. Will I find apps that work together with my workflow? New tools that don’t yet support Windows 7?

I still miss the configurability of my Linux environment, but it’s easier to recreate the aspects I like from Linux in a Windows host than it is to get the drawing programs and automation programs I like working under Linux. Oh well. If I shift my business ideas towards development, I may dual-boot to Linux and have my lovely Emacs development/mail setup again. =)