Fawkes News

This weekend I was on retreat with the MIT/Wellesley Toons in essentially the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. The house we stayed in was in a very pretty location and was pretty nice, but it lacked certain things to which I have grown accustomed. It lt lacked, for example, centralized heating, relying instead on two wood stoves. It also lacked plentiful power outlets and (gods forbid!) Internet Connectivity of any sort. Thus, while I brought my laptop, I did not, in fact, power it on. For the most part, retreat is pretty blocked-out schedule wise, but it does block out more time for sleeping than what we MIT (and apparently Wellesley) students are accustomed. Thus, rather than go to sleep as soon as we could, we followed our natural impulses to waste time in whatever convenient way was available. For a lot of the the Toons this involved having a dance party in the kitchen powered by the aux-input on Buck, the Singing Deer, and while I did do this some, I soon sought alternative entertainment. Having no Internet, I switched instead to the time-honored tradition of writing, with ink, on paper while sitting by one of the wood stoves. I basically followed the “free-writing” paradigm, meaning that I did not so much have an idea of what I was going to write about as just kind of do a stream of consciousness flow. I present below the results of this exercise. By the nature of the method, I make no guarantee about the coherence, pointedness, or even correctness of what I say. In any case, I hope it gives an interesting insight into my state of mind and thoughts of late. Enjoy:

It’s an interesting thing, in the modern era, to be cut off from even some of the trappings of modern life– trappings: a simple word that alone denotes the accessory, the non-essential, what you think you’d like to have, and yet hidden in it is that notion, that so of our generation associates with the squidly head of Admiral Achbar that “it’s a trap.” Is it? In these non-essentials do we lose sight of the things that truly are important? Caught up in the escapism of the modern, digital, mass culture do we seek, and do we find a way to forget about harsh realities? Things like like love, like family, like accomplishment and caring. Making something of ourselves and finding worth. IT is oft’ quoted by American Historians that the notion of ‘mass culture’, of expression through leisure arose in the 1920s — that as work became industrialized, regimented, and unskilled, as people stopped being fulfilled in their work that they stopped finding fulfillment in producing and they started consuming — consumer culture was born. And thus it has been borne, borne by society ever since. Finding value in what you know, what you saw, chatting about the recent movie, the recent reality show — the “regular” lives put on display that people attend to rather than their own. It is natural in such a world to lose a sense of personal importance, to be reduced to a “nobody” rather than a “somebody.” And that’s the norm. Not everyone can be important, but in delocalization the proportion of the pertinent rises and the practical percentage that can be seen as “special” drops. You can’t be as unique when there is more to compare to. And the standards change.

Microcosmily, there is a similar experience in a student going to college, in moving from a place where the people are localized, perhaps all their lives, to a place that draws from the entire state, nation, or the entire world. Surrounded by other, by new others, the individual has to rediscover themselves in a sense of their identity in this new context. Such has been my experience in coming to MIT, a university of global distinction for bright minds, bright ideas, and presumptive bright futures. The standards change. Moving from a realm of high school where I was exceptional to here where I am at best average and probably not quite there. Meanwhile, there are a lot of new notions of leisure and a lot more trappings — freedoms to make mistakes, or make discoveries, often both. Trappings like labs, servers, network bandwidth unparalleled in most of America, and other such fun toys. Important toys, but “toys” that come with an air of expectation.

And, thus, the cycle begins. New context, new trappings, and above all, new standards. Higher standards of average for intelligence or accomplishment, MUCH lower standards for such seeming non-essentials as amount of sleep, nutrition, keeping a normal sleep schedule, hygiene, healthy living, and standards of conventional morality. but that’s what it’s supposedly about innovation, discovery, charting new waters and fighting the good fight. Yet, at the same time, its one of the greatest feats of abstract consumerism. You are expected to absorb history and facts, methods and traditions, realities as conflicted as con reasonably coexist. Along the way, people consume substances they wouldn’t have before, experiences they couldn’t even conceive of, and somehow, in this torrent of reality, they are expected to emerge not only coherent, but better then they went in, ready to change the world for the better. but its hard to see a way out. Drenched in the fire-hose you are trying to drink, the spray stings your eyes, and if it brings tears they are mixed in the water and washed away before anyone can see they were there, but the pain isn’t [washed away]. It’s only when you step out, drenched and deflated, sodden and sullen that you recall reality. And you are supposed to reach out your brass-ratted hand, grab a cup, and squeeze the waters of knowledge from the clothes of your experience and from that, distill some new drought to take the world by storm, but before you get there there exists the ever-present risk of being swept away in the flow. There exists the possibility that you had the necessary, but not sufficient prowess and ability to arrive and succeed.

At this point I got distracted by something or other, or simply noticed that my arm was quite tired, and gave up, did something else for ~an hour, then went to sleep.

This week is likely to be very discouraging.

Oh well.

Good luck everyone,
~Donald

If you actually care about this issue (unlikely if you read this blog), there is substantially more discussion by me and people on the other side of the issue here: http://www.rhymetorrents.org/Home/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=6314

The time that I reasonably should have spent writing a blog entry was used instead catching up on things in a rather obscure area of my interest, specifically, in the ongoing controversy about self-proclaimed “Post-Punk Laptop Rapper” MC Lars and comments he has made about the subgenre known as “Nerdcore” hip hop. Since I spent a lot (really too much) time weighing in on the mclars.com forums about my opinion on the issue, I am going to here just attempt to give context and then quote my response on those forums.

For the context:
I imagine many of you have heard of neither MC Lars, nor nerdcore. I am a huge fan of the former and sometimes a fan of the latter. The short version is that MC Lars is a Stanford grad in English with a deep love of hip hop who decided to be a professional rapper for awhile. He is an altogether cool guy and I highly recommend his three most recent solo albums (the Laptop EP, the Graduate, and This Gigantic Robot Kills) and collaborative LPs ( “The Digital Gangster LP” with YTCracker and “Single & Famous” with K. Flay). Nerdcore hip hop is a subgenre of hip-hop coined by MC Frontalot and generally focused on nerd and geek culture. It’s definition is unclear and debated. It’s major practitioners are MC Frontalot, YTCracker, and a lot of small time rappers who hang around internet forums like Rhymetorrents.org. Because he is a friend and collaborator of many nerdcore artists and has made appearances at events like Nerdapalooza, MC Lars is often folded into nerdcore. This isn’t really wrong, per se, but MC Lars has never considered himself nerdcore and doesn’t like having the label applied to himself.

The major controversy began in a blog post last July where MC Lars declared that “Nerdcore is Dead“. While this title was largely in deference to Nas’s 2006 album “Hip Hop is Dead”, this went way over the head of most of the nerdcore community (myself included truthfully) and he caught major flack for both the fanciful assertion and the actual content of the entry. There was a lot of flaming on both sides (nothing compared to the old school hip hop feuds, no one got shot), but eventually MC Lars apologized for the misunderstanding and things quieted down.

That was until the San Jose Metro published an article about Lars’s 10th anniversary show that contained the rather inflammatory remark by Lars that

“Nerdcore shouldn’t be kids’ understanding of hip-hop. It’s cool as an anthropological extension of how hip-hop has evolved,” says Lars. “The whole political component of the African American experience in the Bronx in the ’70s, and the financial disparity under Reagan in the ’80s, is kind of what hip-hop trades on as its old-school genesis. I think nerdcore’s really racist, because it takes that underdog thing of an underclass judged by their race, and uses it as this big, ridiculous metaphor to be like ‘the nerds are being persecuted.’ That turns hip-hop into this weird minstrel show to me.”

This put the community back up in arms. MC Lars stayed largely quiet about the issue, addressing it mostly in a UStream webcam session of RealTalk with MC Lars on February 13th. A couple weeks later, last Wednesday, he released a track with Random named “Nerdcore Died” announced here. It’s worth a listen: MP3.

In general this is the context I was catching up on and what I was commenting on, drawing from in my long forum post of this evening that I will reproduce below. In particular I am responding to a comment by mCRT phrased as both an open letter on his site, some comment on RhymeTorrenst, a commenton the MC Lars forum, and a diss track. I am directly responding to the latter two. I responded thusly

The post:
—-
For some reason I wish to reply to mCRT (and by extension some of the other critics), despite the fact that I really have better things to do.

The point on what is an appropriate way to start a dialogue is a valid one, but if you look at the RealTalk session from the 13th it’s pretty clear that launching a media attack is not what the racism comment was about. As for the original “Nerdcore is Dead” comment, it was a blog entry and was very clearly not meant as a personal attack on anyone. It also I think falls closer to the definition of an appropriate way to start a dialogue. It was an open letter more than anything elese. It was, and Lars’s comments have consistently been, about not limiting yourself to a stereotype of a genre.

That’s what Lars’s verses on this song are about too. The first is about the blog post and the following discussion. The main point is really found in this quote from the blog entry:

Look at these artists and then look at some of the lesser known peeps in the scene and you’ll see why some transcend and some are doomed to obscurity. My point is this: if you want to make music, make amazing music and don’t try to be in a scene. Don’t limit yourself. [...] Kids who are ONLY listening to MC Frontalot and mc chris sound like lo-fi versions the Lonely Island guys…. and if that’s what you’re going for, more power to you… but true music fans would rather listen to artists who make great albums and move us emotionally than listen to a novelty act looking for their fifteen minutes in a genre that has come and gone.

As for “picking a fight”, as for “how complaining about bullying is somehow racist”… it’s possible that I am missing a reference to a specific quote, but if not, then you are grossly conflating reflections on a class struggle with reflections on a personal struggle.. Modern discussions of race are full of controversy and often miss the point. The African-American population was systematically oppressed for a long time, as were the Chinese, as were the Irish (for a shorter) time, as are many immigrants and people of various sorts still today.

These people were and are born into a culture that is built to prevent them from succeeding and are faced with a titan unfairness. The modern trope of the nerd is strictly one of personality, indeed one usually built out of privilege. Does it lead to personal struggle? absolutely. Is that fact lamentable? absolutely. I, personally, went through bullying in elementary school, but I still ended up at MIT and have access to bright future so long as I don’t personally do anything to screw it up. This is the exact opposite of the situation of an oppressed class whose members only can hope to succeed through substantial personal fighting of these opinions and, realistically, the luck of finding progressively-minded people in power along the way. People getting picked on for not being into the same things is regrettable, but at the core it is not the same as a pervasive prejudice. While I agree that to some extent Lars has had some less than ideal phrasing at times, I think this is fundamentally what he is saying.
From the 13th video:

Nerdcore though, in my opinion, can, doesn’t always, but sometimes has this tendency to take on this mantle of the oppressed African American, you know, the oppressed group of people who were the same people who in the bronx started DJing and having parties cause their whole neighborhood was destroyed by the Bronx Expressway that was built in the middle of their neighborhood [...] Nerdcore takes on the asthetic of the opressed person and uses it to express the politics of “how hard it is to be a nerd.” [...] What I meant to say maybe was nerdcore is classist, not racist… someone from the suburbs writing a rap song about how they are gangsta because they steal quarters out of the vending machine and they are so gangsta because they beat super mario in ten minutes for me that’s kinda weird.

or more succinctly (at 12:33, excerpted for clarity) :

Only listening to one genre of music that is closely identified with a certain culture is classist in the sense that you don’t understand, you don’t listen to the whole political history [...] and it’s racist [...] when people use this [originally] African-American aesthetic to express something that makes a mockery of it.

Now for your rap:
I learned how to deal with bullies … SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK I JUST SAID THAT WAS RACIST?!
I think I adressed this above. In short: nothing. It’s only classist if you think this entitles you to feel on-level with some sort of civil rights movement. I don’t think you do, so this has largely devolved into a squabble over nothing

MC Lars you’re full of empty bars … I resent the bars you’re launching at my friends … It’s not dialogue unless you do it to our face… I HOPE YOU NEVER SELL ANOTHER RECORD NOT FUCKING EVER
That seems unreasonably vindictive. I appreciate that its in the context of a form (the diss-track) that is designed to be unreasonable. But, what I really take issue with is the notion that “Nerdcore Died” is a diss track. It’s really mostly just a restatement of the blog entry that started this whole thing. It’s a call to not be limited. The only negative vibe to it is basically saying “try harder”, not “you suck.” there is a big difference. To shell out to the article that started this whole recent racism debacle:

Instead of the typical hip-hop (and nerdcore) assertion that “I’m the best,” Lars’ attitude is “we could all be better,” and he is constantly pushing his listeners, his generation, to embrace that possibility for evolution.”

… We’ll go into this more after the next verse

Do you remember last year … when you encouraged me… I WANT THAT LARS BACK. I want the Lars that was supportive, that had love for the green, I want the Lars that wasn’t bitter and could run with the scene, I want the Lars that gave a hand instead of a slap, I want the Lars that wasn’t shoving knives in our backs … FUCK YOU LARS, WE REALLY DON’T NEED YOU
Dude. What universe are you living in? Lars has made a consistent effort to be a help to individuals. He has not, that I’ve seen, put anyone down, only challenge them to be better. The existence of http://mclars.com/books.html and http://mclars.com/gear.html are persistent examples of this. He is trying to make people better. In fact, both MC Lars and Random have more encouraging words than not in Nerdcore Died. Consider these verses, excerpted, emphasis added:

Random:
I know a lot of rappers or people who claim
To be deep in the game, but are secretly lame
And when I hear their records, I start laughing it up
and I want to tell them “Please stop rapping. You suck”
But I don’t, cause who am I to crush the dream
cause I love hip hop, I got love for the scene
[... here he complains about low production values, I personally am not sure how I feel on this issue]
I make good music that folks want to listen to,
But don’t get it mixed up, Random ain’t dissin’ you
[It's] not that I’m too big to hang out or get with you.
[...] Think of who you listen to,
imitate than innovate. Become original, than I’ll get with you

MC Lars:
I’ve got love for the kids with their laptops,
Up in the lab, making crunkcore rap-rock
Writing rhymes with the straight flow, nonstop
[...] putting styles in a headlock
[...]
Look all I want to see is amazing art.
Invest your heart! Play your part!
Prefect your craft and straight do you
If you don’t do you than whose going to?
Just push it, push it, make it awesome
[...]

Random:
[...]
Success is a journey, not a destination
I’ve never been down with this type-cast nonesense

Consistently it’s about continuing to push the art and rejecting your limits. I distinctly feel like by falling into the trap of the dis-track and cursing heavy asthetic, you have caught the “imitate”, but you are missing the “innovate”. And you’re missing the point. MC Lars doesn’t seem to hate you or anyone in the genre. He just is asking for you to keep pushing yourself.

As for your “spoken word” section. It’s a straw man argument. MC Lars is not the one in the above track dissing low production values. He encourages the DIY mentality, but he wants results. He has made some comments on the subject that come across a little hypocritical, but the central point is still there. Don’t be satisfied with a shitty sound. Sure, it’s a step on the journey, but keep going. Approach it with some humility and don’t overestimate yourself. Don’t send him a demo that’s a waste of his time.

I think I adressed the racism thing. While I don’t like country music, you are hurting your credibility on the “fucking your sister” bit… but to go on to my next point … there is nothing wrong with parody. But that’s just it really, the problem is in taking yourself too seriously. MC Lars’s entire point in this is “don’t convince yourself you are hardcore when you are not.” Parody’s are light-hearted by definition. That’s not what I perceive Lars to be taking issue with.

Let’s look at your rap here as art. It has pretty good production values. It has a vocal tone very reminiscent of Eminem in some places and of MC Frontalot in others. But it is cast in the light of a dis track that makes it hard to appreciate as … well, art. If you are really so antagonistic that you want to see MC Lars doomed to failure over this, than it seems like you have some issues on understanding what’s up. If it was parody (like Monzy’s “Drama in the PhD”), I would appreciate it more. But it isn’t. and yet it doesn’t come off quite as from the heart. The effect is ultimately inauthentic and that undercuts the artistic value, for me at least. But you got talent there. Like MC Lars apparently already told you, keep trying, but don’t limit yourself.

There’s more to say, but that’s all I have time for. And probably more than anyone actually cares to read.

tl;dr MC Lars has good morals. Some nerdcore is classist because it lacks historical consciousness. Don’t limit yourself. Be authentic.

Back to real life,
~Donald Guy
—–

So that is what I spent most of my evening on. If there are any of you in the readership of this blog who find that remotely interesting. I am glad. I do.

I think that this discussion is important to the future direction of underground hip-hop, and it brings up a lot of important societal issues in general.

Now actually back to real life,
~Donald

I am again short on words… but pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words… so have the worth of several thousand words:

The aforementioned Fawkes cake.

Apparently I have a face

There was also going to be a picture of “the best gift ever” / “the best dollar [Karen has ever spent” … but I can’t find the person who took the good pictures of this… so, maybe I’ll add it later.

Another cop-out,
~Donald

I have now gone almost three weeks without blogging. And it’s not for lack of remembering to… I’ve just either a) not had anything to write about or b) felt like the subjects I wanted to write on deserved more time and development than I’ve had to give them. This post is mainly just to fill space and not pay $5. It is lame I admit it.

Just so it is not devoid of content, I will at least inform you on some random points of news from the last week or so:

• I got interviews with Amazon and Facebook. I hope at least one of them leads to an offer. I really want to have a more productive summer than last year.
• I joined the pika meal plan on Wednesday. On Saturday, I got a bid. My bid took the form of an awesome Guy Fawkes mask cacke that Jess made. Piper took pictures, but she has not sent them to me yet >_<! I was thrilled to receive the bid. I do really like pika. In the short term, however, I expect I will stay on 5E (though last night’s party until 8:30am certainly wasn’t encouraging …). If nothing else, I will seriously consider pika for my MEng year (though I understand the house really needs less grads and more undergrads…).
• There were auditions for the Toons on Thursday. We got three new members. All three male. One from EC (41W), one from ADP, and one from Baker. The ADP guy is nicknamed 8-ball because he supposedly once threw an 8-ball at a bear.
• Ring premier happened. I am pretty happen with the design, which can be found here: http://twentytwelve.mit.edu/ring/site/design. The event itself was also pretty fun, if only cause we took it not-so-seriously and were kind of obnoxious.
• I played Masquarade (the guild game) today. It was fun. My mechanics were kinda broken, but it was fun anyway.
• Today was Valentine’s day. I’ve never really been a fan of the day, but it made me kind of sad anyway. *lonely sigh*.
• I am SUPER hosed this week.

Thus ends the filler piece.

I need to sleep.

Night world,
~Donald

Several people doing this Iron Blogger thing are writing technical blogs rather than the more classical, perhaps less interesting “here are some things I did this week.” I’ll split the difference: “Here are some technical things I did this week…”

Web Design: myquestforcollege.com

Two weeks ago, I wrote an entry about the web, design, and my relation to it. In it, I stated my intention to make a site for my mother’s college consulting business. This weekend, in the midst of shifting from dayshift to nightshift back to dayshift, I, in fact managed to get it done. I started it over the summer. The sites design was based on playing with both the notion of the college search process as a “quest” and the logo which my mom designed and had designed—partially inspired by my signature

she took the Q and the C from Quest for College and made this:

I thought this looked like an X. Between these facts, I decided to run with the notion of a treasure map, treasure hunt, etc. I made this:

I am happy with how it turned out. My goal was to make it as professional as possible and I think it turned out well. What do you think?

Site Specific Browsers: Hiveminder

I was recently introduced to the notion of Site Specific Browsers. The idea is that with the increasingly blurry line between web apps and desktop apps, it is useful to abstract the former into the latter. In addition to giving you a quick shortcut into running an app, it gives you a sandboxed execution environment which will prevent one site from crashing the rest of your browser (much like the model in Chromium). I recently, copying Evan, used Fluid.app to roll a Gmail app that lives in my dock where Mail.app used to live. Thanks to some nice functionality that Fluid packaged in, it also has a nice badge label that shows the number of unread messages. I was trying to think of other use cases for this. The one I came up with was Best Practical’s to-do solution, Hiveminder.com. I rolled it using the standard Fluid procedure and got this:

This works, but isn’t ideal for such a site in my opinion. I thought this was a perfect change to play with another nice feature that Fluid threw in … the ability to convert it to a menu extra:

This gives this, in my opinion better, interface to activate it:

It was my opinion that the sidebar was kind of unnecessary for this interface. Luckily for me, Fluid has yet another feature that lets you add a user stylesheet for any site. After throwing this in:

#info-wrapper {
	display: none;
}
 
#headers {
	display: none;
}
 
.dropshadow_left_wrap1 {
	float: left;
	position: absolute;
	left: 0;
}

I got this:

I set it as a StartupItem. Hopefully this will encourage me to use hiveminder more consistently in the future.

Window Managers: XMonad.app

For a while now, more and more of my technical friends have been using the XMonad tiling window manager in their linux distros. I use OS X as my main OS these days, but I still spend quite a bit of time playing with command lines and wanted the ability to have full screen or split screen with terminal emulators. Given OS X’s BSD underpinnings and the XQuartz project, running XMonad on OS X is perfectly possible. There are nice directions on the XMonad wiki for using XMonad on OSX. But these directions are set-up to always use XMonad as your window manager when you are running X. Since I use things like Gimp.app , Inkscape, and Wireshark that are not really suited to a tiling window manager, I wanted an easy way to switch it on or off in a nice way. To achieve this I first, rather than using a .xinitrc, made a system-wide xinit script. I originally tried switching on an environmental variable, but this was not getting passed through the right way. Ultimately, I decided to use the app’s plist. So, in /opt/X11/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/97-xmonad.sh I wrote:

if [ $(defaults read org.macosforge.xquartz.X11 UseXMonad) -eq 1 ]; then
    export USERWM=$(which xmonad)
fi

(if you use Apple’s X11.app rather than XQuartz.app, you’d want it in /usr/X11/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/97-xmonad.sh instead and you’d use org.x.X11 rather than org.macforge.xquartz.X11).

Then I created an XMonad.app by setting up the standard directory structure:

XMonad.app
|-- Contents
|   `-- MacOS
|       `-- XMonad
`-- Icon

In XMonad I wrote:

#!/bin/bash
defaults write org.macosforge.xquartz.X11 UseXMonad 1
/Applications/Utilities/XQuartz.app/Contents/MacOS/X11
defaults write org.macosforge.xquartz.X11 UseXMonad 0

Finally I whipped up a niceish aqua-style XMonad icon:

and … ta-da:

(It is worth noting that normally I plan to use it mostly with my second monitor, so that the dock and menu bar won’t be in the way).

So, there you have it, other than the ruby class I taught (slides and example code at http://sipb.mit.edu/iap/2010/caffruby ), and the Google phone interviews I had, those are the technical things I did this week.

I hope you found them interesting. On to the last week of IAP ! (:-/)
~Donald

It is approaching the Iron Blogger deadline, sort of. And more importantly I want to go to sleep soon in (yet another) attempt to dayshift (mostly cause I have a couple phone interviews before noon on Wednesday). In the interest of not completely laming out an just paying the $5 (which I seriously considered), I thought I’d throw in a filler piece. So … here it is:

Did you know that in addition to being a burgeoning programmer, singer, bboy (lol.), and web designer (see last post), yours truly is also a mildly-talented poet (in his-own-clearly-not-at-all-biased opinion)?

In case you are curious, I thought I’d throw up a couple of old(ish) poems to fill this space.

Here is one I wrote shortly after getting into MIT:

A Scholar’s Aubade

An ode seems appropriate
To the classical style
Of the columns and the domes
Above the green court.

Many things have adorned that dome:
Squad car, fire truck, droid, and phone
But today, viewed in a mind’s eye—sunlight.

But as were that phone booth still apparent
From afar it now calls, and now I shall answer.
Over the river, and through the urban jungle,
Through the sky, 400 miles, as the airliner flies
But worth every inch, rod, meter or smoot.
It beckons to the mind and to the heart;
It beckons to the soul of a scholar.

Were I less knowing I might think not
That light fell from above onto that dome.
But rather, that the hemisphere
Gave forth the blazing light
ebullience of photons, amidst
Torrents of knowledge.

Its hallowed halls, numbered precisely,
Soon no longer a forbidden temple shall be
Instead, I shall tread there, such as I am
Learn from efforts I effect and others I see

O Halls, I shall greet thee, O Tunnels in winter
Traverse and find warmth to keep body to task
For knowledge, always, comes with a high price
In joules, dollars, cents, days and hours of rest
Long nights turn to dawns, nose to the grindstone
Maybe just one more tool; okay, maybe another.

But brother meets brother, and sister meets sister
On both sides of the river, and the work gets done.
Whether Greek or not, there is community here
A problem, or a set of them, is always seen through.

As the sun now rises, a new day sets in. In a few
hours of my life I will rise to these challenges.

With a chirping, I shall cross the paths that I come to,
Enter the halls .. and my journey shall begin.

~ D. B. Guy (December 2008)

and here’s a sonnet:

A morning dew sits on my dearest rose:
A shadow of evening’s coolness stands still.
How gleeful I’d be to remove that chill—
That accursed blight, I yearn to dispose.
Not in my powers, no warmth from me flows
Not matter the measure of my goodwill.
Only the sunrise this quest shall fulfill
And light, my dear efflorescence expose

Always that morning seems ever unsure,
Yet surely it comes as the world still turns.
Finite be the hours my rose must endure;
Nothing this must be allowed to obscure!
For surely as in the sky our sol burns,
Warmth still exists for my rose to make pure.

~ D.B. Guy (November 2007)

There are, in fact, more (though not a lot more) where that came from. I imagine a lot of the audience of this blog doesn’t particularly care. But if you would like to see more then you can let me know on zephyr or something I can forward you a link to where I post these things.

If you’d like to discuss or critique either of the above in the comments here, that would be cool too.

IAP is half over (!!!). I’ve had a pretty decent first half. Here’s looking forward to a good second half and a good term.

~Donald

The web is an interesting thing. It has its pros and its cons. It has fundamentally changed the way the entire world works. While connecting people and creating flows of information on an unprecedented scale it has also developed new and different fringe cultures. Its use has grown rumors and memes aplenty, helped organize revolution, launched careers, ruined lives and it has ruined them.

It has been observed that it managed to revolutionize the world in ways that only the printing press had managed before it. And yet, the web runs on deceptively simple technologies. And enough abstraction is stacked on top of those that pretty much literally anyone can add to it given the inclination. If they use many of the tools freely available they can even arrive at a relatively professional-appearing (if formulaic and/or poorly marked-up) site with minimal skill. It is because of this fact that a lot of Computer Scientist / Software Engineer types these days tend to scoff at  people who aspire to be a web designer or web programmer. It is so simple to get off the ground and do the basics that we begin to fail to see it as worth of our time. I know that at times I have taken this prospective, and I know I am not alone in it. Add to that elitist perspective a tradition of gross misuse of tools, glaring design flaws in some of the cornerstones, and hairy privacy issues and its no wonder that many veterans in the field shy away completely.

Yet, there are many, from the proverbial man on the street to some of the world’s largest corporations who are betting on the fact that the web is THE future of computing, and that all the rest will fall by the wayside. Take Chrome OS as an example of this mentality. And as time goes on, more professional standards develop better tools and platforms which allow the writing of better code and the field eventually looks at the core like most other software. Decentralization provides convenience and (potentially) redundancy. Be it in the strictly technical concepts of the move towards “cloud storage” and the rising success of distributed version control systems or the social development of “digital nomad culture”, it is apparent that whether or not the web is becoming THE platform of computing over time, it is certainly becoming a major one.

It is for these reasons that I can’t actually afford to ignore the web as a platform. And I haven’t. Throughout middle school, high school, and up to the present, I have learned and used at least the basics of most key technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, relational databases, PHP, Adobe Flash). But my grasp of how much I cared about the field has always been tenuous. Though I have owned donaldguy.com for a number of years, and utilized a number of its subdomains for complete simple projects, I have never gotten around to writing up the main pages. Since arriving at MIT I have gained access to the websites for almost every group I am involved in (sipb-www was the first SIPB list I was added to after being prospectivized,  I have webmaster bits for the Toons, for East Campus, and for Fifth East), and yet have not made any of the major redesigns or overhauls I have considered (though, thanks to biyeunand price mostly, SIPB’s, got done without me). This IAP, I was signed up for the 6.470 web programming competition (and attended almost all the lectures, picking up at least some new info from the Flex and GWT lectures, and reading about HTML5 during the rest), but dropped the class because I didn’t have a team and had no excitement about or good ideas for this year’s challenge.

And yet, I am spending a good portion of my newly created downtime reading The Samshing Book and the canonical text on the Ruby on Rails web framework. While in the later case, this is largely because I can’t be a well rounded rubyist while remaining ignorant of Rails, it is not as though I don’t intend to use it… at some point. Last week, for example, I attended a hackfest held by Boston.rb which as usual was held at the offices of Rails development studio thoughtbot. After seeing their offices, some of their work, and meeting some of the people there (though I was perhaps a little more shy than I’d have liked), I think I may want to apply for an internship there, if Google doesn’t work out.

The up-shoot is that I am quite conflicted regarding the web. I am curious why this is and wish to briefly examine here, if you’ll indulge me, dear reader. When approaching creations for the web there are a number of mentalities, mostly addressing the relative importance of content and form. It is indisputable that good content is essential for a website to be considered good, by any reasonable standards. The difference in mentalities is whether good content alone is enough or whether good design is essential as well. There are further differences in what constitutes good design. Some people are satisfied take a minimalist approach: Edward, for example, has a nice minimalist layout over at ezyang.com. I could whip up a similar site at donaldguy.com or dguy.org in under an hour (though truthfully — I have less interesting (to others) material to talk about). And yet, I would never be satisfied to use such a design. For some reason my design sensibilities want a much more graphically attractive design. The problem is that my design sensibilities seem to currently outstrip my design skills… and I’ve never been quite sure how to fix that. Or even if I can. I like to think of myself as both an artist and a scientist. But my arts have always been wordy– singing, theater, poetry. Though I can look at a design and decide if I like it, I don’t know that I really have the ability to create a design I like from scratch.

I suppose I really need to practice to find out. During IAP, despite dropping the web design class/competition, I really need to make sure to get some web work done. Ideally, I probably need to finish the site for my mother’s college counseling business that I was asked to do more than a year ago and actually got around to working on mid-summer before I got taken down by mono.

If and when I manage this, I will be sure to post the results here.

In the meantime, if anyone has any specific thoughts on how to settle my relationship with the web, to improve my design skills, or just wants to reflect on their relationship with the web, feel free to discuss it in the comments.

Thanks for reading,
Happy New Week,
~Donald

CAMBRIDGE, MA — It’s 2010. You may have noticed. Since it already seems to have been a trend amongst some of my friends, I have decided to also do a resolutions post before doing it becomes just silly. So without further ado:

Philosophical Resolutions:

• Adjust my philosophies on work. Less perfectionism, more kaizen.
• If things aren’t to my liking in ways that matter, make them better.
• If things aren’t to my liking, and I can’t make them better, don’t be afraid to walk away. (especially if it will make my life better to do so). Don’t be afraid to say no when doing so is reasonable.
• Be happier with my life.
• Be true to my self. Care less about others’ opinions.

Practical Resolutions:

• Have a substantially less shitty summer. Get an internship that I am happy with, and follow through.
• Take better care of myself. Get nutrition better. Try for regular meals, but failing that … just more and healthier than now. Exercise more (swimming regularly maybe. break-dancing workouts after the IAP class? Getting my DDR pad up here and doing that regularly?)
• Do some research. Find something UROP-like for if not this term, than at least by the fall.
• Actually follow through on a personal project or two. Improve my follow-through on ideas in general. These can be of the technical variety (e.g. ruby athena libraries, some barnowl extensions I’ve thought of) or of the social variety (e.g. “the burger crawl”, bringing back ΣΠΒ shirts). Ideally both.
• Get some of the web designs I wanted to do done and up.
• Follow through on responsibilities I already have. Always be dependable.
• Forgive. MIT gives me enough to stress about without holding grudges.
• Be happier with my life.
• Listen more. Maybe talk less.

I’m sure there are some I have that I can’t think of right this second. Maybe I’ll update this post if I think of them. Maybe I won’t.

Anyway, Happy New Year! Just a few more minutes until its been a new year for a whole day!

Good luck all around,
~Donald

CAMBRIDGE, MA—I received this video/song via the toons social list the other day. I have taken quite a liking to it. It’s a (very good) mashup of the top 25 billboard hits of this year. I think it has the distinction of being a mashup that is better than several of its components:

It is an interesting way to look back at the year. Even though a lot of the music I listen to doesn’t hit the Top 40, and some of the songs in here I’ve simply never heard before, some of the component songs still manage to have quite a number of memories attached to them.

Three of the tunes I am intimately familiar with, for obvious reasons.

Others have sillier memories or associations. Karen, as well as a few innocent, bystanders can tell you all about “My Life Would Suck Without You” dance parties. And anyone who spent time near me and a computer in mid-Semptember to mid-October can tell you that no matter how much Katy Perry was there first, in my heart, “Hot N Cold” will always be best sung, in Ukrainian accents, by Los Colorados . I won’t ever be able to hear Lady Gaga without first thinking of the innumerable versions of Poker Face I had to endure driving to NYC just after spring break last spring. Then, thanks to katclar, I will be immediately like “LOL. Bluffing with my muffin.” And none of these memories stand alone. I can’t think of Hot N Cold without thinking of 18.03 tooling sessions on 4th WAR; I can’t hear Single Ladies without thinking of Karen making fun of me for watching Glee, or the yackity sax version played by Kathleen in the 5E lounge. I can’t help but think of this year’s freshman and watching how they’ve changed. And thinking about how I’ve changed.

Music is an interesting tool for reflection. All these memories come to me associated with those sings that I didn’t even listen to that frequently. For me the true songs of 2009 range from Third-Eye Blind and innumerable other 90s songs from the Fifth East of last spring, to the Anime Themes and Blink-182 of the summer, to the Mika and Owl City of this fall. And when I think about these, when I think about what they make me think of, when think about the simple number of songs that were sung, I realize just how long a year 2009 was.

And in many ways it was appropriately a mash-up. A mash-up of the exciting confusion of a freshman IAP, the challenging spring, the disappointing and disease-filled summer, and the somewhat bitter but acceptable sophomore fall. The constant refrains of the song of me now simply weren’t conceived of a year ago. I wasn’t nor was I planning to be in the Toons. I hadn’t yet been elected a SIPB member. I had different (and fewer) friends, different thought patterns, different ambitions. But those songs have been sung now. The melodies of our lives float on the air of the year and the notes fade from our ears, eternally pressed on our minds. And at this time of year, we reach a grand pause. We take a few measures rest to pause and reflect.

And then we move into composing our lives for the next year.

What were the songs (literal and figurative) that permeated 2009 for you? Will you forget them and here them only when your mind or your iPod is on shuffle or will they continue to be the anthems of your life for years to come?

We will all just have to wait and see… and hear .

~Donald

P.S. I blame the life/song allegory that permeates the latter part of this entry on Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, which was heavy with this mythology and which I just finished today on the plane ride back to Boston. It was an enjoyable read and I recommend it. It is a followup in the universe of American Gods. A bit of a simpler story, and a bit more upbeat, but a nice whimsical read. MITSFS has it. Or at least they will as soon as I get around to returning it.