fdmts

09:35 pm: Automockery
I had to get passport style pictures taken in order to apply for my visa to visit India. The result, the worst picture of me I've seen in a while.

11:23 pm: Mockery
So, capital_l was here, and she used my shiny new laptop. This was what was left on my screen:



Notes:

1) 5k messages? RLY?
2) "Yes Master?"

08:59 am: A few of my favorite things

12:05 am: Questions
1) A djinn appears and tells you that you must give up your rock-star life and technological prowess, but in exchange can grant you a small, local, successful business doing anything else you want. What do you pick?

I've got to work for a living? No caging out and cheating? I would open my holistic healing center. Healthy food, homemade beer, physical fitness, art, music, and self defense. Talk therapy available from the owner at any of these.

2) If you had the time and resource to produce one musical concert of your own that everyone you knew could come to see, what would you perform?

I would play all of Bach's cello suites. I would love to have the time to work all of them up.

3) H. H. The Dalai Lama and a 2-year-old child you don't know are dangling from a cliff. You're certain you can only save one. What you do you do and why? (Sorry if that's a little hardcore, but i had to balance the fate of humanity again raping and killing Sarah Palin, so i know you can handle it.) :)

Made me pause. There are merits to either, but I think that the odds are pretty good that even the 70+ year old Dalai Lama will help more people than a small child. Put it this way, change the question a little bit: I have to give my life to save one of theirs. I would save H.H.'s in an instant - but I would hesitate to throw myself under a bus for a random 2 year old.

4) You're being sent on a mission to a remote place for 10 years. You will have adequate food, water, shelter, power, and a high-speed sat-link to the internet. Specify the computer system you want along with you.

Let's get this out of the way first. You suck. No system that can play movies right now today is likely to function well for 10 years.

I want something that will be cast iron reliable and let me VNC into some system back in Boston. I'm gonna do as much as I can by remote. That probably means a nice linux server, underclocked, with three solid state disks in RAID 1, dual power supplies, all 16 RAM slots populated (so I can pop them out as they fail) and so on. I'm not chancing a laptop. I want a long display cable so I can leave the beast in a hermetically sealed vault and type from out in my lair.

Failing that, I want a DEC Alpha. Big blue pedestal. I know a few of those that have been running for 20+ years now.

5) In your feeling, what stands most prominently between you and Enlightenment?

Habituation. I feel like I've got the best luck / karma that money can buy. I'm healthy, bright, and have all sorts of opportunity. I know basically what I'm supposed to do. However I have these *habits*. I keep looking up and saying "yeah, that thing that I just did - I should do less of that."

It's just practice. Word is that it takes "numberless eons" to develop the stores of merit required from where I am now. I've got to let all the previous karma from previous numberless eons dissipate. That will take some time.

A wise man once said to me: Don't worry about enlightenment. Enlightenment will come. Time is long. Worry about doing the best you can today. Today is nearly gone already.

11:13 pm: Resistance is futile
rossja had this thing about questions in her journal. Basically, reply to this and ask for some questions. I'll ask you questions. You can reply to them here or in your own journal. It's a party game. Everybody play.

Here's what she asked me:

1. At what point did you realize that you were in love with your wife?

If it wasn't love at first sight, it was darn close. We met at a party, and wound up stalking each other over the course of the next two or three days. She hacked the umich mail server for me! By the end of the third or fourth day watching the sun rise together - I think we owned up to the fact that we were in love.

The second time it happened was when she beat up a gypsy who tried to rob me in Pisa. That's just hot.

2. If someone made a movie of your life, what would it be called?

"Often in doubt, Very seldom wrong."

3. Who would you cast as the main characters?

I've been told that there's an actor who looks a lot like me. I say: "screw that." I want Pierce Brosnan to play me. Actually, no, I want Hugo Weaving to play me. redmed wants David Bell of District B19 to play me ... and she wants to play herself.

4. What appeals to you most about judo?

Good one. Buncha stuff. At core though, I think it's that it's difficult, worthwhile, and I'm bad at it. I can see myself working really hard to become competent over the next decade or so. I find that I lack good long term goals right now ... so it's filling that role.

I like the fact that I can go full force. This was the disciple that was invented, in part, to civilize the samurai. A whole caste of men were being made to put down their swords - and they found meaning and structure in judo. I like the raw insanity of having a structured way to pick a fight. I love the single point nature of the matches. One point wins. It can happen 3 seconds in, or in the last seconds of the match. It forces an explicit balance between caution and aggression. You just have to make up your damn mind about how to stand and what to do. For a career compromiser, that's refreshing.

Fine, I love washing other men's blood out of my gi. Is that what you wanted?

5. Of all the places you've traveled or lived, where is your favorite place & why?

Home is where the cat is. I love my current house, and I hope to live there for a very long time.

04:56 pm: Portland Memories
Ate last night at Jake's Famous Crawfish, a pretty spectacular seafood restaurant in Portland. When we walked in, something started tickling in my brain stem, but it took until I saw the cedar plank salmon on the menu to realize what it was.

I had been there once before.

The year was 1996, and I was graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. These were the good old days when any idiot undergrad could come to the West Coast and command $80k. My friend Seth had made the trip in 1995, and settled with a testing group at Intel. He encouraged me to come out and interview. I resisted, since I was happily dating redmed, and she had four years of med school in front of her in Ann Arbor. Also, I had a job and a Master's degree lined up. Seth kept pestering, and eventually I asked to talk to his boss. I explained the situation to the boss, who replied "give us a chance to convince you."

Game on. As long as everyone knows the score, I have no compunctions about being wooed.

So I flew to Portland. They put me up in a decent hotel downtown, and I had a day of interviews. I hit it off with the boss immediately, and the rest of the team as well. It was clear to me that I wasn't going to stay, but it was fun. Towards the end of the day, the boss called me and Seth to his office and said something along the lines of: "fdmts, we all like you a lot. You would do well here. Seth, here's a corporate credit card. Go out, have some fun, and convince him that he wants to live in Portland."

Bad thing to say to a couple of 22 year old college buddies.

As I recall, we went to Jake's and put our names in. Told that there was an hour or so to wait for a table, we found a nearby bar and settled in for a couple of pre-dinner drinks. We got back to the restaurant and absolutely gorged ourselves on - if I recall correctly:

* A dozen oysters
* A dozen crawfish
* salads
* dinner entrees (I had the cedar plank salmon)
* Two bottles of wine

My recollection gets fuzzy around dessert. Did we have dessert? I don't think that we did. I recall that we spent a few hours at some nightclub where in scanty dresses would dance in cages that were up on pedestals. I'm pretty sure there was more drinking there too. I'm relatively certain that Seth made use of my hotel room rather than trying to get home. At least, I hope we were that smart.

I didn't take the job, and I'm astonished that I remember that night in as much detail as I do. Who knew that all that detail was still in there?

02:17 pm: Portland
I'm out in Portland for the Supercomputing conference. This is my favorite conference of the year for a number of reasons:

* Everyone is here. I can stack up face to face half hour conversations with a dozen people in my industry
* The right people are in the booths. I can talk to the project manager and the VP of sales for a the products that I care about
* I'm known here. I walk around and see a decade's worth of colleagues, customers, employers, professors, and so on.
* The best technology is on show. I just took a picture of a completely water cooled motherboard.

It's also annoying as all hell:

* Grad students are terrible presenters
* Sales and Marketing types give me hemorrhoids.
* Certain buzzwords are tied to the stake and flogged mercilessly (Grid, Cloud, Green).
* Thousands of geeks plus free beer = massive ass-hattery.

Having a good show. Thinking big thoughts.

02:47 pm: HELL YEAH MECHANICAL BULL

05:05 pm: Positive experience
I just had a really positive experience, and I want to share:

redmed and I were taking a walk around the neighborhood to enjoy the unseasonably gorgeous weather. We stopped off at the local coffee shop for a pair of hot chocolates, and settled on the bench out front to sip them and watch the cars go by.

Sundays are slow, and they usually have either one or two employees in the afternoon. Today both of those employees were sitting on the other bench chatting when we arrived. The man got up and came in to make our chocolates, and then returned to the benches after we were set.

After settling in, he looked at me and said "hey, what's your name? Chris? I'm Matt. It's nice to see you. You come here a lot, right? Hey, just wanted to say - we're happy when we see you walk in the door. A lot of the people around here can be a pain - rude and all that - but you're always considerate and nice. We appreciate it. Thanks."

So apparently I'm (a) a regular, and (b) nice.

I'll take it. I'm totally fine with being the nice one. All I do is try not to walk around snarling, and remember that the people working behind the counter are human beings. Apparently that's noticeably more than most people around these parts do.

10:29 am: Judo
I took second place in my division at the Pam Ams yesterday. I was in the M1 (30 to 35 year old) novice (non black belt) under 81 kilo (< 178 lbs) division. There were three of us. One Canadian (green belt) and one other person from the US (white belt). Here's how it went down:

The other two guys fought first, and the white belt beat the Canadian pretty handily.

Fight 1: Next it was my turn to go against the white belt. He was a lot stronger than he looked. Easily as strong as me. We moved each other around for a while, and he threw me twice for a half point each time.

Fight 2: Then I had to go against the green belt. That match lasted 11 seconds. I came out, got my grip, moved him where I wanted him to go, and hit an o-uchi-gari (major inside leg reap). I hauled down and forward really hard on his left shoulder. That made him step forward with his left leg. Once the leg was there, I hooked my right heel behind his left heel and drove forward and to my right as hard as I could. Observers said that I "laid him out."

Fight 3: Our bracket was a "true" double elimination. That meant that at this point the green belt was out, having lost twice. I, however, was not yet eliminated. So it was back out with the white belt. This one I won in about a minute, using a combination we've been working a lot. It's a shoulder throw into an outside leg reap. Me any my long legs like the sweeps and reaps. I stepped in and pivoted counterclockwise so my right side under his right arm - as if I was going for a shoulder throw. Actually, I totally *was* going for a shoulder throw. He blocked me by hunkering down and pitching his weight backwards. At that point I hooked my right foot around the outside of his right foot, clamped on to that right arm, and spun back clockwise to face forward, throwing my weight forward. He couldn't step or block, and down he went. A second ippon.

Fight 4: At this point he had beaten me once, and I had beaten him once. So, it was back out for a third fight with the guy. He hauled me to the ground and choked me until I tapped, giving him the win.

Turns out that the white belt had cut weight down from 195, which explains the "unusually strong for our size" thing.

Overall, I'm totally happy with my performance. I achieved my goals for the tournament, which were:

* Win at least one fight
* Use the techniques we've been working on
* Throw combinations rather than just single attacks.
* Win or lose, but not on points. Play good judo.

I also learned some stuff: My endurance was still not where I want it to be. I feel like if I had more gas on the ground, I could have taken the gold. Also, my ground game needs work. I still get too defensive and wait for the referee to stand me up. Instead, I need to attack. Again, win or lose, but attack.

One more thing: A woman from my school brought her son, a curly haired 5 year old with bright blue eyes. As I was leaving the mat area, they congratulated me and said that they had taught the boy to cheer for me. On cue he said in a piping little voice: "Go Chris Go!" It was just about the most adorable thing ever.

Then technolope and capital_l came over and we all stayed up until stupid late (like, 4am) watching the Watchmen movie. They're still asleep, I think. redmed on the other hand, got up early and made apple crisp.

08:34 am: Physical fitness
Woke up crusty this morning. I've had what we used to describe as the "creeping crud" for about a week now. Started out as a runny nose, then moved to an itchy throat, and now it's become a nice productive cough. All of these have been relatively mild - but it's annoying as hell. In addition, we're now at a point where I fear H1N1 (hamthrax) when I stub my toe ... so there's that.

Really looking forward to the judo tournament tomorrow. I'm hoping that the crustiness doesn't affect the competition. If I feel contagious, I'll pull myself out of the tournament. Infecting a bunch of international athletes just feels rude.

I went ahead and did the experiment of going into full "training" mode like a real athlete ... and it's been instructive. ( notes on training )

05:54 pm: A variety of thoughts
No real theme here - just trying to not let the days trickle by un-sung.

Played a Judo tournament this last weekend. Oddly, at 170 lbs I was the lightest person in the entire masters (over 30) category. They wound up combining the novice and expert divisions, and spreading my division up to about 195. A 25 pound weight difference is pretty significant - and coupled with the expert / novice thing ... I didn't last long. Okay, I didn't last at all. It was a double elimination bracket, and I lost my first two fights. Good times. Worked the scoreboard for the rest of the day and, as usual, learned a lot. I may never actually be good at this sport - but I feel like I'm getting better at something difficult. That's all I ask, really.

I've been invited to a couple of online arguments recently. I've got a pretty ironclad policy on arguing about things like abortion online. There's no point. It *never* works out well. I'm happy to talk about these things in person, provided that there's a bit of give and take to the conversation. Online, particularly in some dumbass comment thread on facebook - just "no."

I've given up on the health care reform package being passed by congress. It skips all of the truly important changes that we might make in order to really improve our system. While it might represent a decent set of evolutionary steps, it falls well short of the *revolutionary* change that I thought we might see.

My cat is sitting on the desk, leaning up on my chest. She is warm.

06:47 am: Train
Here's a new one: I missed the last train to Boston from Philly last night, so I got to chill at the station, with the homeless, until the midnight regional arrived. I piled on board with a bevy of disappointed Yankees fans, who shared a raucous hour up to New York and debarked. I spent the next 6 hours curled up in a variety of uncomfortable configurations until now - 7 in the morning. I'm sipping insta-coffee and watching one of the most glorious fall sunrises I've seen in a long time, over the still waters of costal Rhode Island.

The man who served my coffee remarked on my Michigan sweatshirt. Turns out that he grew in in Detroit - he's a little older than my mother would have been. Where she was a high school student for the riots of 1967, he was a police officer.

While I sorta got burned on this schedule, I still swear by the train for travel in the Northeast corridor. I think that Philly may be the southern limit of "dead simple one-day travel" by train though. Even with the standard mantra about "you save an hour for security, and the seats are so much more comfortable," a seven hour midnight ride is pretty clearly inferior to an hour in the air.

12:50 am: Descriptor

11:00 am: A useful abstraction
I've been doing a little trick that redmed taught me, and it works, so I'll pass it on.

I'm a big fan of lists. Everything needs to be on a list. I will go back and populate a to-do list with things I've already done ... checking them off as I go. That's my broken-ness.

So here's the trick. I run one to-do list for any given day. I set it up in the morning. I add to it as things need doing. In the evening, I check things off and review.

In the morning, I look at yesterday's list ... and then I throw it away. Every day gets a clean sheet of paper. Perhaps yesterday's tasks don't make it to today's list. In fact, that's the big trick - figuring out the things that made the list yesterday but aren't really important.

11:24 pm: Amped up
Just got back from my second appearance on Freethought RI. This is a radio show that my good friend Dan started a year or so ago as part of his work with the RI Atheist Society. I find myself all amped up and excited about free speech, broadcasting myself, and so on.

The show itself is a bit rambling. Dan and Neil and I just sort of talked for an hour. I have no idea how many people actually listen ... except that I know my little sister was one of them! She called me right after the show ended saying something like (ironically enough) "thank god that there are smart people able to access the airwaves and broadcast this stuff! liberty is not dead!"

So yeah. Free speech is not dead. Long live free speech.

And, more to follow, but get off your asses and use your freedoms before we lose them forever.

Seriously. If you're not screaming, you're not paying attention.

--EDIT--

Wow, listen to me free form it at around 23:00. I didn't plan any of this, but it came out smooth like buttah. The topic was that the Pope has recently extended a friendly hand to the Anglican church, offering them the chance to come on back to the fold - bring your straight, male, married priests ... but ditch those gays and women. So I said:

"The question to me is: if you're really serious about the essential nature of communion and confession and the sacred nature of these rites - that if you don't do the ritual correctly then it's not pleasing to God, and God will punish you forever - if that's at the foundation of your belief: How does it make you feel that the pope is willing to pitch some of that just to get a few more bucks?

And one wonders how far we are from that here at BSR radio, from the pope calling up and saying "hey, do you guys want to be catholic?" Is that different in some way? Different from people who for 500 years have practiced a different religion? Hey, I light incense at home."

--EDIT 2--

We get loopy at 51 minutes in. Scientology fraud.

12:02 pm: Pan Am Masters
I just registered to compete in my first international Judo tournament. The Pan Am Master's. It's worth noting that "masters" in judo means nothing more than "more than 30 years old." We jokingly refer to it as either the executive or the geritol division.

This is a tournament exclusively for us old guys. However, it is also a Pan Am, which means that competitors will come from North and South America to kick my ass. Fortunately, I'm still a novice. This means that the 31 year old former world champions will not be in my division.

I'm totally psyched, because all the guys from my club who never compete locally are going to come out. This includes my coach - who I've never seen go full speed before. I know for a fact that even when we do 'free sparring,' he's just working with us and being nice. I'm quite excited to see him *not* be nice ... to someone who is not me.

Also, I get a "USA" patch for my gi. Oh precious "USA" patch ...

Tags: judo

06:54 pm: I read the news today, oh boy.
Man, the hits came fast and hard as I read the news today. For whatever reason, I seem to be taking it personally today:

* The last meal

The chef, who has built his professional life on a devotion to precision, analysis and control that borders on the obsessive, came to understand in new ways that life is messy, friends and colleagues say.

* Changing the world

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

* For runaways, sex buys survival

“Give me some time,” Mr. Garrabrant pleaded as he handed her a card and asked her to keep it handy. With no time left, he released Roxanne back to the local police, who took her to the youth shelter.

Four hours later, she disappeared. Seventeen days after that, according to the F.B.I, she was found stabbed to death by the pimp she had so adamantly denied existed.

In one of her pockets she had Mr. Garrabrant’s card.

“Two days, that’s all I needed to get her to stay away from her pimp and I think things would’ve ended up differently,” said Mr. Garrabrant, shaking his head in frustration. “I still don’t understand how these guys loop these girls in so far.”

09:08 am: Travel
No:

10:05 am: Shiai
Competed in the tournament yesterday, and it went really well. My division was three men, and they ran single elimination - so I got two matches.

I'm actually prouder of the match that I lost. This was the first one, against a young brown belt - a bit smaller than me. We went back and forth without much incident for about 3 and a half minutes out of the four minute match. He caught me early on with something or other for a small point - and we went briefly to the ground. Thought I might get him to tap on a choke (a friend in the crowd was shouting "it's under his chin, PULL" but to no avail), but it didn't happen. With 30 seconds remaining, down on points, I went for it and attacked continually. He took that as an opportunity to toss me with a beautiful, high shoulder throw. It was one of those ones where the room goes silent and everybody is like "ooo," while one guy sails over the head of the other. Apparently I tucked and rolled like a champ - and I got complemented by several people on doing "good judo."

The second match was against a blue belt, much younger than me and probably 20 pounds lighter. We went maybe 2 minutes before I caught him twice in a row with the same throw (tai-otoshi). Honestly, even though I won that one, I thought that my first match was better played. I didn't have the leverage or position to make the throw work really well - I was just bigger and stronger than him and so I made it work.

Perhaps more important, while I was sore afterwards - both my knee and my shoulder held up well.

I'm BACK!

Tags: judo