Here’s the problem, that last year or two is a long time. Too long to just “grit my teeth and get through it”. After I failed my first year and took some time off, I was contemplating how many courses to take. I considered trying to “get through it” by taking more than a 100% course load. But I realized that even doing that, it would still take me three years. That’s a long time to be working that much and I would just burn myself out.

My way out of this dilemma is to take fewer courses. I take a 60% course load every year. That, for me, is a sustainable amount. By sustainable I mean I could do this for many years to come. It’s not too little school and it’s not too much school. It’s just right for me. I don’t get burned out or resentful about the neverending march of assignments and readings, but I have enough courses to keep my stimulated. I enjoy my courses a lot more than if I was taking 100% course load, and I get way better grades.

I decided I wouldn’t wait till the end of my degree for my “real life” to start. I enjoy myself a lot. I spend lots of time with friends and have lots of fun. Since my plan after university is to start businesses, I asked myself why I had to wait and I’ve already started. School is not something to “get through” hopefully with a piece of paper on the other side, it’s an intellectual exploration and development. My “real life” is now and school is one equal and important (but not too important) part of it.

The survival mindset creates a lot of procrastination, cause you come to see every assignment as an obstacle to you “getting through it” hopefully with as little pain as possible.

This post was inspired by Cal Newport’s Open Letter to students on the Danger of Seeing School as a Trial to Survive. He didn’t elaborate what a survival mindset was so I thought I would.

Edit: Consider this - while I’m in university, I have way more time flexibility than I will ever again till I retire, I can live more cheaply than I likely ever will and am thus more flexible than ever, I have some of the smartest friends I ever will–indeed some of them are the smartest folks in Canada, I have access to some of the smartest minds in the world in the form of my profs (esp. at University of Toronto which is a top-30 institution in the world), I am more carefree than I ever will be in my life until retirement, I have the fewest obligations I ever will till retirement, I am more intellectually challenged than I may ever be in my life, and I’m growing more than I ever might in my life by virtue of being at this stage in my life. This is truly the best times of your life, and it may well be downhill from here. So, ENJOY IT!

Ask yourself these questions: your profs are ok with you showing up ten minutes late but can you do that in a job? Most people’s friends end up being the people they work with, which may not be the smartest people around, will you really have much smarter friends than you do now? Will you have as much access to leaders in your field as you do now in terms of profs and researchers? How long before you get a kid, a mortgage and an ever-growing list of obligations and can’t enjoy life as much anymore? Will you really be as intellectually stimulated as you are now? Will you be challenged to grow as much as you are now?

University isn’t something to get through, it’s something to enjoy to the fullest. I like to think of it as “intellectual exploration”. Wander around the campus, wander around the courses and take courses which seem interesting to you without regard to which program they’re for. After a while of exploring topics that seem interesting to you, you’ll hit on one topic that you’re so gripped by that it’ll sustain your interest for years. For me it was psychology. You’d be surprised where this approach leads. It’s more uncertain than treating university as job education and getting a “safe” degree, but it’s a lot more fun and interesting. Plus you can always go back to get a “safe” degree. Though ten years out of school, there’s no difference in wages between people who got “useless” degrees like philosophy or english and people who got “safe” degrees like commerce. The only difference is in people with professional designations like engineering or accounting.

One of the major concerns of Americans in leaving their jobs or getting fired is that they would lose health care coverage. It is one of the major reasons people claim not to start small businesses and America cares about business. Here’s an interesting fact for you: Canada has a higher rate of personal entrepreneurship and small businesses than the States does. It may or may not be linked to having global health care, but it makes me wonder whether America’s economy would get a boost by having people start their own businesses. It would certainly be a good way out of a deep recession, and the increased tax revenue would also be fantastic.

PS I’ve been going through a lot of personal stuff for the past almost year, so postings will be sporadic at best. Sorry. Subscribe via RSS and you’ll just get a post everytime I send one.

Since I continually find myself continually frustrated with regex as well as continually in a state of wonder at its power, I found the above amusing.

Pass this link around, digg it, share it, let’s get the word out there to Google that this is something we want…and we just might get it.

This XKCD comic promoted this post:

While the logic (smarter people have fewer kids thus they’ll just die out in the face of larger numbers of dumb people) seems to hold, I don’t think it could happen for these reasons:

1. Smarter people tend to live longer, and their kids have a higher liklihood of surviving. They are also more likely to be successful breeders. Dumb men, especially, don’t successfully mate much.

2. This line of reasoning ignores the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is a gradual trend that people are getting smarter (or they are becoming more generally “scientific”). A 100 on an IQ test (the “average” population IQ) is actually a 107 fifteen years ago. Some more interesting research is that this effect holds more strongly towards the lower end of the IQ range, that is the dumb people get smart but the smart people don’t improve by much.

3. The world is getting more complicated and if intelligence has to do with the ability to handle cognitive complexity, then I’d say we’re getting smarter. Just look at an tv show like I Love Lucy vs today’s shows. Today’s 23 minute sitcoms will have three interwoven story lines that rapidly switch from one or the other, while I Love Lucy has barely one storyline.

The data seems to point at a future where everyone will be so insanely smart that the “dumb” elements of the future will likely be smarter than the “smart” ones of today. That’s a scary thought.

Note: I do not use the terms dumb/smart as pejoratives, simply as descripters of IQ stats. Dumb being under 100 by half a standard deviation (92.5ish) and smart being above 100 by half a standard dev (107.5ish).

Recently, while trying to install my Creative PD1001 webcam driver and kept getting this error:

$ sudo make
Building EPCAM driver for 2.5/2.6 kernel.
PLEASE IGNORE THE “Overriding SUBDIRS” WARNING
Remember: you must have read/write access to your kernel source tree.
#make -C /lib/modules/2.6.28-13-generic/build SUBDIRS=/media/DATA/Ubuntu/Creative PD1001 webcam linux driver modules
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.28-13-generic/build  M=/media/DATA/Ubuntu/Creative PD1001 webcam linux driver modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.28-13-generic’
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `PD1001′.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.28-13-generic’
make: *** [default] Error 2

Turns out the error was caused by a space in the directory in which the makefile was. So I just removed all the spaces in the folder name and it worked.

You can download the driver here. Instructions here.

I’m still messing aroudn with the driver to get it to work. If it doesn’t, I’ll just end up buying a different one, methinx.

Hope this helps!

This show sucked. A lot. For almost all of it. And I saw all of it, cause I’m a sucker for anything Terminator. Actually, the most annoying thing about this show was that is sucked so much for so long, but then got awesome in the last two-three episodes. It got gripping and full of fascinating twists in the last two-three episodes, right before it got canceled. Maybe the writers felt the possibility of cancellation so they just took more “risks”. Though I wouldn’t call them risks. I honestly don’t know why they didn’t just do this stuff earlier instead of endlessly building up.

SPOILER ALERT

I reckon you probably haven’t seen the show (not many people sat through it all long enough to get to the good bits–they’re not as masochistic as I am), so I thought I’d throw in a few things to give you a sense of why it got awesome. Spoiler alert for rest of post.

1. Kyle Reese(John’s father)’s brother is sent back in time. He’s killed. Pretty easily, too, without too much drama, despite being a main character for much of the show.

2. Turns out some crazy woman from an alternate future brought back a girl with her for John to fall in love with, so that when Cameron (the robot played by Summer Glau) killed her, John would kill the robot, because in the future Cameron and John are joined at the hip and she didn’t like that. Things didn’t go so well, so crazy woman kills John’s girlfriend herself. John tracks her down but lets her live.

3. Finally, in the last few episodes John stopped being a goddamned wuss. The thing that was most awesome about John Connor in Terminator 2 was that he was just a badass kid. T3 (which never happened) missed this and so did this show. Both turned him into a whiny emo bastard. But in the last three episodes, he turns more into John Connor, leader of the Resistance.

4. Turns out not all machines are aligned with Skynet in the future. Some machines are aligned with the humans and support them. One of the robots that was originally setup as a villainous robot (T-1000 unit) turns out to supporting the humans.

There were still some odd things in that show that didn’t get a chance to be explored. For example, it almost seemed like Cameron was trying to seduce John in some scenes, and there was that time Cameron told John she loved him (likely in an attempt to manipulate him) but it deeply effected John. I wanted to see how that would play out.

The show ended in an annoying cliffhanger, too. But that is the nature of the world.

Ah well. This sort of cliffhanger has nothing on Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles. That show was really good and somehow made you really connect with the characters who were fighting the bug war on four planets against newer and more difficult kind of bugs. Then they think they’ve destroyed all the bugs on their homeworld and Earth is safe. However, three episodes from the end of the series, turns out the bugs are on Earth, they’re human formed, they’ve taken down Earth’s military defenses and humans have to fight for their very existence from outer space. Then the show ended. Worst. Cliffhanger. Ever.

Pavlina tweeted: “What would your day look like if you performed at your absolute best in all areas(best work habits, best food, best communication, etc)?”

Pavlina then tweeted: “How many days can you afford not to perform at your best?”

If you think you can get away with doing things half assed…well, you can’t. You’re probably just not looking at it right. I mean, what do you and I know? We don’t know that by performing at our best today, we may serve as a beacon to a drug addict that helps him stop doing drugs. Or maybe nothing happens. Or we save the world. We don’t really know, we’re limited, finite creatures. Do you really wanna that risk, though? Of not helping others or yourself?

Knowing that we’re finite creatures, the only thing we can do is to do the best we can. The absolute best, period. Anything less and we could be risking disaster. Maybe by not going for a walk or a jog today to get fit, you spend that time doing something that will hurt you greatly ten years down the road. Maybe you’ll have that regret when you have your first heart attack.

Taking responsibility is fundamentally different from taking on the guilt and the blame. Guilt and blame may make you feel bad, but they aren’t empowering. They’re just more attempts to not take responsibility. They’re attempts to blame someone else, except you blame yourself or your past self. Taking responsibility is empowering, even if you screw up.

Say you screw up. The responsible way to handle that is to figure out the damage done, to sincerely resolve to fix it somehow. Reverse the damage if possible, apologize and try to be sympathetic and listen to the emotions of the people involved. Sure, you don’t feel good cause you hurt someone, but you don’t torture yourself. The responsible way is to accept that you will screw up and hurt people. A lot. It’s a part of life. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person, it’s just a part of living with others. It’s a condition of existence.

However, the blame way is to give up, sit down and start crying. You can then try to blame others for your mistake, including yourself or your past self. If you do anything to fix the situation, it is out of guilt, not a proactive desire to fix things and help the people involved.

Which would you rather be?