I'm working to reclaim myself. That might sound silly, but..

During the two years I was working at Google, I was going to both work and school full-time. I had no time to do anything I liked during those two years. I also spent most nights either trying to finish schoolwork or work on projects for work (I would stay up all night working on projects I was totally unpaid for, just because I wanted to learn, to prove myself, and to do good for the company). Overall, I learned a lot, and of course both my experience at Google and my graduation are both invaluable. But there have been other problems.

I gained an unbelievably large amount of weight, to the point that people who knew me several years ago often can't recognize or believe that it's me today at first, or people who know me today can't recognize pictures of me several years ago. I have a picture on my desk of myself and my siblings taken three or four years ago. One woman at my work came up to my desk, pointed at me, and said, "Who's that?" I explained, that's me before I worked at Google. She kept coming back and staring at the picture saying "No way..." One of my other coworkers I showed the picture to said, "Wow, Google can do that to you?"

Of course, it wasn't as much Google that did it to me (though the daily lunches we had seemed to increase the weight of almost everyone on our team over time) as much as the late nights drinking energy drinks, eating snacks, etc, just to survive the crazy schedule I was working through. (Also, I actually had started gaining weight just the year before they closed Barat... during that year they closed our cafeteria but maintained that all residents on campus had to invest a mandatory 1000 dollars every 3 months into a meal plan that we could only use at the coffee shop, where they served greasy muffins, chicken nuggets, etc. But the weight didn't really pile on until I joined Google.) As I said in a previous post, I also had stopped biking entirely once I got my car and moved into the city. This certainly didn't help either, as I pretty much was stripped of all forms of exercise, other than the daily busywork of the datacenter.

The sad thing about all this is that, due to image issues I have with myself that date back to my teenage years, I have a very hard time looking at myself in the mirror. I gained most of the weight in just a few very short months, and hadn't really realized it until I stepped onto a scale. After that point, numberwise it appears that my weight gain was not quite as quick and drastic, but until I got out of the work and school cycle, I kept putting on weight.

It's been nearly a year since I graduated from school and started working at Imaginary Landscape. During that period I haven't gained any weight, but I really haven't lost any either.

That is, until recently. I've begun biking constantly (I have a new schedule where I bike a little more than ten miles every morning before work... today it was raining, I am totally soaked), and I feel much healthier and have less desire to snack so much. I'm counting calories and eating a lot of spinach salads. And I'm seeing the effects: the weight is peeling off. I lost a lot of weight very quickly the first week and a half, and it's been slower since, but its going down. I am slowly adding more exercises to my schedule. I can feel the effects of this. Surprisingly, I'm even enjoying it.

It's going to take at best a year for me to get back to my pre-Google weight, and hopefully I'll succeed in that as I'll then be in shape for our wedding.

And so begins part one of reclaiming myself: reclaiming my body. I'm now also trying to figure out how to handle part two, reclaiming my mind.

So on my second day of biking in Chicago, I was doored for the first (and hopefully last) time. It wasn't that bad in my case... I saw the door opening, yelled "Hey!", and both braked and swerved out of the way. The driver was very apologetic, and I told him not to worry too much as at least nothing bad happened, but that he should be more careful. Recovering from his shock and embarrassment he said, "Man! I thought that stuff only happened in the movies!" I found his comment funny, but the whole situation could have been very tragic; I got away with nothing but a few bruises on the knuckles (which bounced against the edge of the door), but there was a bus about ten feet behind me. If it were closer when I swerved, things could have been much worse.

But perhaps this situation is all for the best as it has served as somewhat of a wake up call. Since then I've done a lot of research both on how to avoid being doored and on bike safety in general, with a lot of help from some bike-savvy friends. I now know that you should always keep yourself at least three feet away from all car doors to avoid being hit (four is better, five is ideal). I've also found a nice essay on the subject (including some examples of people who have died or been seriously injured by being doored) as well as advice from the City of Chicago. These are good reads, but nothing compares to Bicycle Safe: How to Not Get Hit by Cars. Seriously, it's a must read for any urban biker.

Anyway, I'm glad that I'm biking a bit better informed. But I'm definitely going to keep my alertness level at its highest and stick to neighborhood roads. My sister just told me about how she was a passenger in a car when the driver parked and doored a bicyclist, knocking out the guy's full set of teeth. To be honest, I don't take the best care of my teeth, but I sure would hate to lose them all at once.

Before I got my job at Google, I was reasonably fit. I also didn't have a car, and traveled everywhere via biking and public transportation. About three years later I'm quite overweight and haven't even owned a bike for some time. There's probably a correlation there.

Besides weight gain there's also just the feel of biking that I've missed. Well, since now's the best season for it, I decided to go out and get one. I went to a place called Working Bikes in Chicago; they recycle old bikes to create new working ones. I had no idea how furious the selling of bikes is as soon as the location opens. Well, I got one, but the decision was somewhat rushed. Its cheap, it works, but its pretty small and my butt sure does hurt sitting on it.

I figured I'd just bike it home. That was a huge mistake, as it actually took me several hours as working bikes is about thirteen miles from my apartment, and I'm totally out of shape. (In my biking prime that would have taken me no more than an hour and a half.) To top it off, I had no phone on me, I forgot that you can take bikes on public transportation here, and I was only wearing a t-shirt and it started raining (at least closer to the lake on the bike path).

But in a way I've been thrown fully into the world of biking again and I've forgotten that while the experience isn't fully unusual, the full experience of biking takes a bit to get readjusted to again.

Interestingly enough, I've begun learning lisp again, partly due to some frustrations I've had with Emacs and the realization that I just don't know how to debug and extend it well enough. I was never super great at lisp, but I wasn't bad either. Even for the parts I knew well though, I'm finding that you never totally forget how to bike or code lisp, but there's always a bit of relearning to do.

It's nice to return to these things again.

I've been writing a lot on the go lately. Thus, I have a whole backlog of posts to put up here, including some stuff from Flourish. I'm going to be posting them a bit sporadically as I clean them up, so just be aware the dates I'm posting them on aren't necessarily when I wrote them, in case that becomes confusing.

In the future I'll try to be more timely about posting just after writing.

A bunch of people have sent me links to an article about a programmer who proposed to his girlfriend through a video game, and have noted the similarity to my own proposal using PyStage.

It's not quite the same thing. The system I wrote was an animation system I wrote from scratch, and not a game. This other programmer hacked a pre-existing game. Both are interesting feats in their own ways. (Interestingly enough, the original plan was for me to propose with a full game, but then I realized that the cutscene was complex enough.)

Still, there are certainly similarities in the nerdiness of the proposals, but they're not really surprising. Good programmers take pride in the nerdiness and cleverness of programming, and what better way to propose than to make full use of your craft?

A while ago I gave a summary of the huge number of projects I have going on. I've been struggling to figure out what my primary focus should be.

Well, over the last several days I've been going on a lot of walks. Walking is one of my favorite activities, and this weather is the most perfect time of the year for me to take a stroll. I find that I do my best thinking on walks, and over the last few days I've been walking until I accumulate enough thoughts, then I sit down, pull out my laptop and type them all up.

Well, one of the things on my list of projects in progress was my old comic Lingo, which never really got that far in the first place, but which I've always felt very attached to anyway. But I really couldn't continue developing the comic. First of all, I want to take the comic in a different direction than I was originally planning. Second, I really regretted attaching myself and my friend Jay to the two main characters; it felt both egotistical and limiting. I recently had a nice talk about this with one of my friends, and she gave me her assessment that it's alright for the characters to be based off of real life people but to develop in their own directions.

Well with that in mind I went on another walk today; this time the focus of my thoughts was how to bring Lingo back to life. I sat down on a bench and typed up an outline of the story, and I think what I wrote should keep me going for at least another thirty comics. Afterwards I sketched out some new character designs for some of the forthcoming characters and drew out some layout drafts.

I'm glad to say that not only do I now know where I want to bring the comic, I wrote the script in a way that allows me to continue where I left off (even though I didn't get too far) without having to start from scratch. This is a huge relief, and the decision of what to do here was one of the major roadblocks I was facing.

So, I've decided that for off-work hours projects, Lingo will take number one priority. I'm going to try to turn this into a weekly comic.

By next Friday there will be a new comic up. I hope you look forward to it as much as I do.

This will be my final post regarding the Eee PC for some time to come, I promise. I got Ubuntu installed on the Eee, and I thought I'd give my impressions about that.

First of all, the results from a number of Google queries on how to do the installation pointed me to some interesting and well written articles, but I was having a lot of trouble until I actually visited the Ubuntu wiki. The steps you want to take are definitely these:

• Make a bootable Ubuntu Live/Install USB key. This is worth doing even if you aren't using the Eee, especially if you follow the instructions on how to create a persistent USB installation. However, its critical for the Eee, since the Eee lacks any sort of optical drive.
• Then follow the instructions for actually installing Ubuntu on the Eee . I found the install to be pretty normal, but its definitely worth following the instructions on this page to optimize the life of your flash disk, for installing the wireless drivers, etc.

But yeah, it was all very, very easy once I found the right resources. And now I've got a real operating system on here! It's way, way better than running the default Xandros install.

The only problem I'm having is how apparent it is that many applications just aren't developed to run at a resolution less than 800x600, and since the model of the Eee that I have has a maximum resolution of 800x480, I sometimes have to to hold down alt to drag windows around.

Here's a list of applications I've tested which work really nicely on the small resolution:

• Firefox
• Blender
• zsnes
• Emacs
• GNOME Terminal
• GIMP (had to modify the docks a bit, but once I did so all fit very nicely)
• Pidgin
• OpenOffice
• Aisleriot Solitaire
• Mines (minesweeper clone)
• Chess
• Ekiga

Applications that were unusable:

• Gnome Blackjack: Required an unnecessarily large window
• Wesnoth: While I could start this up in windowed mode (fullscreen would not work) it was totally unusable as I could not access the buttons from the main menu. Constantly moving around the window to play this game is just far too obnoxious of an idea to even seriously contemplate.

Other than that, a number of applications had preferences menus or graphical wizards which required a lot of manual positioning to navigate, but nothing too frustrating, and since these are things that one needs to access very rarely, I don't really find myself bothered at all. Now, the next generation of the Eee is both more expensive and more powerful: for 400 bucks (50 dollars more than what I paid) you can get a savvy 1024×600 resolution screen. My suspicion is that this will be good enough for most people, though I think the current system I have is still Good Enough For Me (tm).

Conclusions: Asus has definitely done the right thing here. Sure, they could have shipped with a better distribution, but the fact that this machine actually ships with and was designed for Linux means that I knew I could buy it already knowing all the hardware would work with my operating system and distribution of choice. Since the resolution is good enough and not too unusual, and since it ships with a keyboard and a touchpad, this means that finally Linux users have access to an ultraportable device that isn't trying to reinvent the browser, email clients and feed readers because of limitations or peculiarity of the screen or input. For the most part, you know you can run the distribution and applications that you already know and love. And not reinventing the wheel is a great thing. And despite how great these devices have done for the proliferation of free and open source software, this just can't be said for the Nokia handhelds, the Zaurus, or even a project I'm still a huge fan of, the OpenMoko phone.

So, first post written from the Eee. As usual, I'm using ViewSourceWith with emacsclient to type it up.

There hasn't been a person whom I've shown it to today who hasn't been both impressed with (and jealous of) the device. I must say that it manages to fit expectations totally and completely... hardware-wise anyway.

Yes, the keyoard is still really small and feels pretty cramped. But I'm typing with both hands pretty well and with a fairly low margin of error. There actually are two problems I've been having with the keyboard, but they aren't the ones you'd expect. I end up pressing the enter key a lot when I actually intend to press the apostrophe key. Also, and this is what actually irritates me more than anything, the keyboard doesn't feel totally fastened on the right side very well. It sounds fairly springy when I type on that side in a way that it doesn't on the left. Does anyone else have this problem, I wonder? It's annoying me a lot, especially when I press the arrow keys. Maybe I'd feel less annoyed with it if someone confirmed that this was normal.

The resolution's pretty low, and the screen's pretty tiny. The next version of the device looks like it's going to improve on that greatly, though actually... it's still a lot nicer than I expected even in its present incarnation. You forget just how much of the web is still pretty doable at a tiny width of 800 pixels. Yes, Penny Arcade fits nice and snugly within the browser window, framed so close and perfectly that you'd almost think that maybe they designed their comics with this resolution in mind. And maybe they did. But probably not.

I'm actually rather surprised at how nice the speakers are, as I'm fairly certain they are quite better than my thinkpad's.

So, as for the hardware, its all pretty good excepting that keyboard springy noise, which is getting to me a little. Funny thing is that I had this same issue with another laptop I owned, and it irritated the hell out of me then, too. I'm not sure if this justifies a replacement. I'm thinking about it.

As for software, the version of Linux that's installed on here, some Xandros derivative (which is in turn a derivative of Debian), is pretty lame. Some people have actually complimented the desktop, but I think it's an irritation. Ubuntu, from all I've read, runs just fine on here, and I plan to install that shortly. But why install a stripped-down Linux in the first place? I've found that Ubuntu is really easy to use already, even for people who have had no prior experience with Linux.

That being said, its not terrible, and once you know that the terminal can be started with Ctrl-Alt-T, it's survivable. It comes with OpenOffice, FireFox, and Pidgin, and really for most people that's all they really need. However, I'm not most people, and I'll be installing Ubuntu on this thing shortly.

One last note, which is really a curiosity more than anything. I was a bit surprised to see that the system came with some games, but all of them (with the exception of Sudoku, which is such a lame game it almost doesn't count) are games that have been around since I first started running Linux. I'm not sure if that's a commentary on the state of Open Source gaming or not, but it was kind of disappointing to realize.

Speaking of which, I tried installing Wesnoth on here out of the Xandros repositories and it segfaulted. And that's almost reason enough to switch this thing over to Ubuntu. When I get around to doing that, I'll have more details here.

I'm bubbling with excitement. It just arrived. Oh man oh boy oh man oh boy!

Morgan and I drove by the office and saw two UPS trucks passing to the next house. I parked and bolted out of the car, bubbling with questions about whether any packages for me arrived. The man calmly explained that, yes, he left a few packages inside, as someone (Ric Lee, the company founder) had let him in.

Sure enough, there it was. I've opened it and haven't played with it that much, but let me say that even having seen it before, I didn't realize how small it is until I actually held it in my hands. The keyboard is indeed tiny, but manageable. My WPM was hindered a bit by the size as I tested it out, but its definitely doable. Overall, the design feels totally solid. My only regret is that I got a white one. (White? I always prefer black technology, or at least something cool like deep blue.) That's OK, I have a bunch of python stickers from PyCon that I'll plaster it with. The Linux distribution it ships with has a very Palm OS-like desktop by default, which is pretty lame, but since I can install Ubuntu, I'm happy.

Now I'm off to meet Doug Napoleone to talk about next year's PyCon site. I might be volunteering more this time around. We'll see how things go.

More impressions later as I continue to play with this thing.

I stayed late at work today. No, I mean really late. I guess I felt bad about how many times I pressed refresh on the UPS tracking page today waiting for that damn laptop.

And what the hell did I do at work staying so late? Oh, watching goddamn anime intarwebs memes. What the hell is wrong with me?

Well, at least tomorrow should be interesting. The Eee will arrive, and I'll be meeting a couple of people from PyCon.