stevengharms.com

It’s rare that this happens, but I’m at inbox zero.

A tiny bit of progress.

Randy Nelson of Pixar University is filmed at Edutopia talking about hiring the best, and most creative, people possible. It’s a 10-minute video that won’t take much time to watch, but which has some great insights.

Here’s the link: http://www.edutopia.org/randy-nelson-school-to-career-video

Here were my rough notes:

1. Failure avoidance (in test pilots) was not the quality [NASA] wanted, failure recovery is the mark of the person they desired in this innovative field [i.e. walking on the moon].
2. “Remember the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a resume.” For those of you in-between jobs right now, I think this is an important one. Especially college grads coming out with little work experience. A light last semester where you get some work done and uploaded on github may seal some deals.
3. We need people who are broad: interest_ed_ not interest_ing_. Do they amplify me. They want to know what you want to know. Lauren is immensely good in this capacity. Awesome, in fact.
4. Communication: Can you communicate between fields? If technicians know enough about art to pre-translate, they can have a much greater force-impact. Working with them re-kindles that thing that interested you a long time ago. What joy!
5. Collaboration is not “I could do each of the roles, given sufficient time” — collaboration means “amplification.” Bringing separate depths and great breadth with multi-level inter-communication is what makes collaboration not mere helping do all the bits of bolting-on tha assembly line requires.

I started the pursuit of graduate education about a year ago.

Through the intervening 9 months I’ve learned a lot about myself, about what interests me, about what things have animated my intellectual development my entire life long, about the unique and coherent thread winding through my educational history, and yes, my friends, even a little bit about human nature.

I spent most of last Spring and the summer preparing for the GRE. In the fall I wrote the LatinVerb library and re-drafted a paper “Against the Anthropic Principle” in an effort to impress those with sway over my admissions process.

Ancillary thereto, I became involved with the Austin Ruby and Rails communities. I met the across-from-me-sitting Mr. Clinkscales, got a Twitter account, became active on Facebook and spent many hours at Sodade.

As winter closed in, I went through scores of drafts with my lovely editor trying to assemble a compelling presentation of my educational history and future plans all within a terse, LaTeX-formatted, 2-page bundle.

I asked people I respect to take time out of their busy days to put ink to paper describing me and commending me for graduate work.

But, like a wedding, it all came down to one moment, when you lock in the fruits of months, or years, of effort.

This was it:

I admit, I’m a bit cagey about admitting and showing this because, there’s the “what if:” “What if you don’t get accepted?” This is a very real possibility, though all my kindly-minded friends try to encourage me with “you’re smart” or “that’s just so you.” Well, let’s be honest, the school in question has quite a reputation, and while I may be devoted to learning, “wanting it bad enough” doesn’t have a field on the application, I’m sorry to say.

But I want those who read this to know my results: come Hell or high water. I also want to officially absolve you from saying “that’s too bad,” or “you can just try again,” etc. If I get rejected, I’ll take my lumps, I may appreciate offers of alcohol or Mexican food, but I’ll take my lumps. And do you know why?

Because I am proud of my application. It is absolutely, 100% me. It’s me through and through. If they don’t think that person is a fit, if the story I told of my intellectual development doesn’t jibe — well, then we were not meant for one another. It’s only by this act of radical honesty that I can truly feel comfortable facing the possibility that they may reject me. I advise this same approach to anyone seeking dates online as well.

Obviously, I hope they don’t reject me. I hope they can see my passion and my love for the material, I hope they can see that twisting path as adding up to someone chomping at the bit. I’ll confess I have fantasies about the fat envelope, I admit I dream of walking among the Rodin sculptures. I allow that “Pizza My Heart” and that special expanse of the Bay Area call to me…

But if I live in the maybe-yes / maybe-no zone I’ll go cuckoo as I await the verdict. At this point, though, it’s out of my hands.

So for those friends who’ve not seen me since before Thanksgiving or for those people I didn’t call back or email back, I am now coming out of my retreat and am trying to get me life back into order. First order of business, Thursday night dance at The Fed.

With Spring coming, I propose a picnic day out, where the various circles of my friends might mingle. Big park, blankets, picnic, mild Austin, Spring. I know some of you have new children whom I’d love to see in a sunny setting.

Any ideas?

Donald Knuth started writing The Art of Computer Programming and along the way decided that technical publishers didn’t know what they were doing. Knuth’s yak-shave?

Writing TeX: A 10 year yak shave that has produced the most elegant typesetting language ever.

A fabulous link between the science of this book, art, and symbolic systems: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4532247

Unlikely Phrases in the Recording:

• Bar Coding
• Arabic Language
• Algebra
• Samuel Johnson
• Betsy Ross
• God
• Wastebasket

As many of you may know I’ve been writing a lot. I mean a lot lately. One of the great things about being a humanities guy who knows high tech is that you know better ways than “email my gmail account a backup copy of this document that’s leeching my soul” to handle version control.

I used subversion.

A few weeks into my first project I became really aware of git, Linus Torvalds’ distributed version control system. My friends, the times that “getting interested in a new technology” has turned my KISS project into a monumental yak-shave is beyond count, so I resisted git. I even complained of people hassling me to shave that Yak.

Like Stimpy, people kept taunting me with the red, jolly, candy-like button of git.

History Eraser Button (Ren and Stimpy) - Free videos are just a click away

In the middle of this, I found the PDF version of Travis Swicegood’s Pragmatic Version Control Using Git. I decided that instead of a massive yak-shave, trying to piece together bits of web wisdom and screencasts, I would go a chapter a day on Travis’ book.

So, each day I scribbled notes from a chapter in my Moleskine:

Until I finished. Well, I’ll be humdingered if Travis’ book didn’t teach me git. I have to admit I was really scared by commands named “rebase” and flags like “—hard” (sounds permanent, you know?). Travis really focuses on the important parts of git:

1. Git is a distributed version control. This means you have the entire history versus the latest instance, like in Subversion
2. Git loves branches. Branches are great because they let you try things, foo-up fast, and then move on
3. When a branch becomes más macho, you may want to move it into the base. Instead of merging all those changes in, move in the finished product, that’s rebase.
4. Merging, by the way is like a staggered rebase
5. Remotes are like virtual branches, you can merge them into your local stuff.

There’s some subtleties around this, but walking out with these understandings, the basics of branch, commit, and clone really got me plenty far. I even set up a github project for Latin + LaTeX + Textmate utilities.

Travis also uses github to give you your “work at home” directories. That means if a chapter feels familiar to you, you can skim it until you feel like you want to work along. When you wish to do that, simply check out the code for that chapter and follow along. I like that the book is flexible and allows you to map your level of expertise in.

Personally, I didn’t miss the paper version (mostly because i make notes anyway) so having the PDF was sufficient. It’s definitely a good book at a reasonable price.

So, while I will certainly concede that Travis’ book is a yak shave opportunity, it’s a pretty tiny yak. Take it a chapter (< 1 hour to read each one) at a time and you’ll have a really great, new tool under your fingers in no time.

I was going to do a short video clip where I would need the visage of Ruby creator, and general nice-guy Yukihiro Matsumoto.

By Dave Thomas

So, I go to The Google and type in “matsumoto” singly because I’m lazy.

The top image results are of Matsumoto Rangiku LINK NOT ENTIRELY WORKPLACE FRIENDLY

In the words of Stephán Urkel: “Matsumoto, Bazooms!”

Gosh.

Dear APD,

Weekdays it is common from APD units to do radar checks on SB 183 access road between Oak Knoll and Duval. The officers tend to sit in the median at Pavillion, or before or after the Catfish parlor.

I appreciate the desire to keep speeds on the access road under control, but this their presence in these particular spots induces more danger and erratic driving.

The problem is that people are coming off of 183, while others are entering 183, while others are trying to cut quickly into the Academy driveway. This is normally a pretty dicey move, but then you have people noticing the radar gun officer and the reactions vary.

Some coming off the ramp hit the brakes, some in the access road hit the brakes, all while those about to enter the freeway are trying to enter the ramp and accelerate to meet traffic.

All this because we don’t know if we get ticketed for 5-4-2 mph over.

It’s a really dangerous situation made worse by the APD presence. If APD were to move the control point slightly past the catfish parlor, you could catch the most egregious speeders and ease the danger.

If you want a sure thing, patrol Riata trace on the other side of the highway, people at the office park use that like a drag strip getting to 183 NB.

Regards,

Steven Harms