Freshly-baked home-made croissants filled with marzipan and sprinkled
with slivered almonds. Check.
English Breakfast tea. Check.
Are there any better ways to start a Sunday?
Random Emacs symbol: forward-list – Command: Move forward across one balanced group of parentheses.
I’ll upload pictures someday and then go back and edit these entries,
but I wanted to make sure that I got the stories out at least.
I need to read more cooking magazines. I’m running out of superlatives
for describing what I’ve been eating these days. Today’s vocabulary
challenge was posed by dinner: a strawberry spinach salad tossed with
a raspberry vinaigrette, sprinkled with almond slivers. The tartness
of the raspberry vinaigrette contrasted with sweet strawberries and
nutty almonds. Feta cheese might have added an interesting saltiness
to it, but we didn’t have any handy, so we added grated Parmesan
cheese instead. And all because strawberries were on sale today at No
Frills, $3.49 for 2 pounds.
Just thinking about it makes my toes curl.
For brunch earlier, we had buttermilk pancakes: stacks of six airy
buttermilk pancakes with a slightly crisp face, heaped with strawberry
chunks, drizzled with pure maple syrup, and—the final
flourish—dusted with confectioner’s sugar in the fancy-shmancy way
that restaurants justify high prices.
It actually doesn’t take a lot of money to live the life of the rich.
In terms of eating things in season, I think we’re totally there.
Sure, there are little things that we can add over time as our
circumstances improve. A griddle would be nice, for example. But it’s
hard to imagine a better life than this, with plenty of time to
leisurely cook and cheerfully linger over one of life’s basic pleasures.
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Sunny day, chocolate, clarity, life is good. =)
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Thanks again to all those whose hot-chocolate thoughts and
conversations reminded me that the world is actually quite a wonderful
place, even though it throws you for a spin once in a while.
Life is going well. Research is going well. Love, ah, love is making
me learn. But it's all good.
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Squee! <bounce, bounce, bounce>
Last, and certainly not least was Sacha Chua. If we could harness it I'm pretty sure we could power a few small cities of the energy that's contained in this one, tiny person – especially when you get her talking about Emacs. Sacha's demo, entitled, “Livin' la vida Emacs” was hands down the most entertaining of the evening. Sacha has basically taken this simple, extendable text editor and pushed it about as far as it can go – at DemoCamp10 she pulled back the curtain and showed us all her little systems and apps she's created in it. I like my GUI/Windows so the whole text-based thing isn't for me but it certainly was interesting to see just how strung out she's got that machine.
DemoCamp 10 was held last night, and three of the five presentations were from U of T. Sana Tapal (now at Jonah Group) and Andrey Petrov led off with the Online Marking tool; Jonathan Lung (who was part of the student team that presented at DemoCamp 5) showed us all how productive PHP procrastination can be; and Sacha Chua tried to convince us that Emacs isn't actually bad for you. The other two demos were a social networking/quotes site called Quotiki.com, and Broken Tomb, which advertises itself as the world's first commercial Smalltalk host. There wasn't any new technology, but the presenters were entertaining, and it was fun to read the stuff that flashed by on the screen during their demo; the Smalltalk demo had a lot of technical and other difficulties.
Demo Camp Toronto 10 : The return to MARS
Sacha Chua showed off what can be done in the scriptable environment, in this case emacs, as she went from Text editor, to a.i. doctor, to game engine to task / email organizer and beyond. Sacha was six feet tall on that stage, even though she did not actual levitate at anytime (although she came close, as always). A Tour de force of the Emacs, a text editing tool built in a interpreted lisp language environment, bascially a personalized productivity platform which allows for massive customization. Sacha had the crowd entertained and enthralled. (Sacha blogged her own impressions and mentions that Emacs was speaking to her!)
What would you do with Sacha Chua?
Within Toronto's Web community, Sacha Chua has become one of the leading “personalitiesâ€ÂÂ. Armed with infectious enthusiasm, charm and smarts, she would be an excellent person to hire once she graduates from UoT. The key question is how best to use her talents. It would probably be as a “super customer service rep, who can come into a bad situation and get everyone happy by the time she leaves. If I was an HR person from Microsoft, IBM,, etc. I'd be knocking on Sacha's door ASAP.
You are really becoming an great speaker ;)
btw, I was hanging around the back and overheard people asking if you had
gone yet – apparently you were the only thing they were there for! awesome!
E-Mail from Mike Tsang
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Since childhood, I have had a gift for working with computers. For a
while, this seemed like the perfect fit for my life. My grade school
teachers were not surprised to find me interested in computers in high
school. My high school teachers were not surprised that I took
computer science in university. One of my university teachers told me
I'd do well in “hard” computer science and encouraged me to go for a
master's degree, maybe even a PhD.
But I am also awakening to a gift I have with people. I want to reach
millions and millions of people over generations and generations. I
want to lift them up, inspire them, share my experiences with them.
I want to tell their stories and help make their dreams come true.
This is what I want to do with my life.
I don't want to wait until I've made my money before I do good. I want
to get out there and live and love and do and write and speak and
share. I will keep my needs simple, my schedule flexible, and my
overhead low so that I can spend as much time as possible developing
myself and other people.
I belong to the world not just as a mind, but also as a heart, and I
will make a life that allows me to express both.
So, concretely, how can we make this happen?
How can I make this self-supporting? I want to get as quickly as
possible to the point where I don't have to worry about my expenses so
that I can follow these crazy ideas for free. Then I can build up my
crazy idea capital, and then we're off!
The best way for me to do that is not to plan for retirement at 60
with a slow-and-steady savings plan, but to take advantage of my crazy
ideas, train my intuition, and get better at going from crazy idea to
reality.
If I open my mind and look for ways I can create value for other
people (like my networking business cards that list my favorite
networking books!), then I'll probably be able to create enough value
to make the kind of life I want.
(Crazy idea! Trust in coincidence by having business cards with random
stuff on the back. Moo cards does this with Flickr photos. Why not do
that with whatever you currently want/have? I think business cards
should be short-run and current. That way, they're more than just a
static piece of contact information, and you'll have reasons to keep
giving people your cards and for people to keep reading yours! Maybe I
should start date-stamping my business cards… Ah, now there's a
great idea…)
Right. That's the ticket. I should keep a notebook of all these crazy
ideas. Probably a blog page *and* a paper notebook. Probably part of
my Moleskine. And I should go and make those crazy ideas happen, like
advertising on my laptop or tweaking my business card, etc.
I don't mind giving the ideas away. I get terrific feedback. In fact,
if other people pick up the idea and run with it, that means I get to
train my crazy-idea sense for free!
Remember the movie Phenomenon? I want to be that guy, overflowing with
lots of ideas and improvements! I want to be someone you tell about
the cool stuff you're working on because I'll be enthusiastic about it
too, and I *might* just go “Hey, what do you think about trying out
…?”
Simon's fantastic at designing systems from scratch. I'm good at
thinking about how to improve something that's already there, finding
things to smoothen, noticing things that are missing… Come to think
of it, even my computing background points to this. Why do I love open
source development? Because I can build on what's there! Why am I
totally addicted to Emacs? Because it indulges my crazy-idea thing!
Whee!
So I want the ability to explore all these crazy ideas even when I'm
working. I have lots of options in terms of the type of job, too.
Right. Getting a better sense of what I want in life. There we go. Does that sound like a plan? Let's make it happen. =)