Joshua's weblog

they say "all you need is a fast 50mm prime"

2013-05-09T08:16:49Z

I went to Carnival! And I took some pictures, too.

This time, I tried to get better at taking pictures of people, but I took some pictures of things, too.

On lifting weights

2013-03-03T12:10:32Z

So I started a hobby that you might not expect from me, and it's basically been the best decision I've made in a long time.

When I first moved to California in July of 2011, I was, well, to put it mildly, not in shape. Being mostly sedentary in college had not done me many favors, and a desk job where I consumed four cans of Coke a day probably wasn't helping either. At my peak, I was weighing around 200lbs., which on my (5'9") frame, wasn't a brilliant sight. I figured it was time to get in shape; around then, I started climbing. Climbing was fun, but ultimately, it wasn't getting me into shape: I was still heavy, and the muscles I never built were starting to hold me back. I added some cardio into my exercise regime, which started to help: for a while, I was indeed very slowly losing some weight. By September of 2012, I had hit a milestone that I really cared about -- 175lbs.

I became a believer in data-driven fitness (and, subsequently, data-driven living). I started to log my daily weight, exercise quality (in a subjective fashion), and some other statistics. There was a correlation:

I was starting to feel a little better about myself. But, as it turns out, all of those paled in comparison to the effects of where I went next. A friend of mine is a powerlifter, and suggested that I begin a weight training program; I decided to oblige him, just to see what would happen.

I decided to do a training program based primarily around the low-bar back squat, with a primary training goal of increasing my squat weight. Later in my program, I added in assisted pull-ups and deadlifts, as supplementary to my climbing and squat goals; the progressions and programming were (and are) loosely based on the advice of Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength. My goal was to build squat strength so that I would have both core stability for climbing, and live muscle mass working to burn off body fat. I've been training like this for just over three months now; the results have been very surprising.

I'll start, then, with some more graphs, as of a few days ago. One figure that initially surprised me was that my progress on my weight goals had stopped, and in fact slightly reversed:

I found, though, that there were two reasons why I didn't really care. One, I felt much better about my appearance: the body fat had been converted into muscle mass, so even though I was slightly gaining weight, it didn't much reflect in the mirror. Two, I had another metric that I was optimizing for, and it rather put the tiny changes in my own mass into perspective:

My own body mass had slightly increased, but my "5RM" (5-rep max squat weight) had shot up. Massive, massive improvement.

These things were more or less expected, but one of the other things that I charted really surprised me. I originally began logging daily data, among other reasons, to try and form trends about my mood: for the majority of my life (and the vast majority of the time from college on), I've struggled a fair bit with depression and all its friends. I wanted to be able to point to phases, and try and correlate them with what else I was doing in my life. I hadn't run the plot in a while, so you can imagine my surprise when I ran it recently and came up with this:

The data can be a little hard to interpret, so I'll explain why this was so shocking. The important thing to notice here is the qualitative change around 11/2012. If you look at the pure variance, instead of the trend line, you'll see that what used to be a very noisy, volatile signal becomes incredibly steady. This sort of stability is something that I can not remember experiencing at any other time in my life: events that would otherwise rock me off-center caused me no trouble at all.

I don't believe that it's a coincidence, then, that November 2012 was when I started lifting. The remarkable thing, I think, is that the stability persists. It's not just endorphins: even on days that I don't lift, I feel good. Hours before, and hours after, I feel good.

All of this is why I feel fairly confident in saying that a barbell training program has been the biggest change in my quality of life that I can remember -- and I recommend it to almost everyone. So, let me evangelize a little bit: if you have an hour available two or three times a week, and you have a gym available (CMU students, Skibo counts!), you can do it, no matter what shape you're in to start off with. Do yourself a favor, and pick up a copy of Starting Strength, and leaf through it. You don't have to follow Rippetoe's program exactly (I sure didn't!), but if you're doing a (correct, increasing weight) squat regularly, you're going to get stronger, and everything will be more awesome.

Oh yeah. You might wonder why I'm posting this today, rather than at some other time. I just hit a milestone I'm proud of -- a 225lb ("2-plate") squat working set (3 sets of 5 reps). Onward, and upward.

joshua_ @ 2013-02-04T23:30:00

2013-02-05T04:30:35Z

Dear U.S. Airways,

Congratulations. You have successfully irritated me. (Some people would say that's not terribly hard.) Luckily, I am on a United flight right now, so I have the time to type an angry letter to you.

This morning, I flew US 708 (SFO to PHL, in theory arriving at 1633, arriving gate C28). Because US Air boards people who are in the front of the airplane first, boarding took an excessively long time. Because US Air charges for bags checked, many people had large bags that they had to stick above them, which also took a very long time. (Sometimes there was not enough room. The flight attendants seemed unprepared for this situation, and so the passengers who had bags that did not fit just stood in the middle of the aisle -- or took their seats, and left their bags in the aisle -- compounding the boarding delay.) Crucially, because US Air seems completely blind to the reality of the effects of their policies on the ability to board the aircraft in a timely fashion, the aircraft departed later than expected -- and, consequentially, arrived later than expected.

This would not be a problem, but for the fact that US Air, for some unknown reason, splits their flights across two terminals in Philadelphia, which are linked by a shuttle bus that is occasionally sent between the terminals. (Sometimes a long line forms, full of people griping about how they are about to miss their flight, since there was no indication that they would have to take a shuttle bus. In such a case, the staff are either unable or unwilling to provide any information about where the shuttle bus is, or when it might arrive.) The shuttle bus is driven in an unhurried fashion, and has no provisions for informing gate staff on the other end that passengers are on their way (and has no way of informing passengers that flights are boarding).

Eventually, I and seven other passengers arrived from the shuttlebus at the gate for US 3788, to Ithaca. We arrived as soon as we could, which is to say 5 minutes before the flight's scheduled departure. As we arrived, we saw the staff outside look up at us through the window, shrug, and then raise the stairs into the aircraft. We waved in relative disbelief, but the staff outside seemed not to care. Some minutes later, a man came inside, informed the eight passengers standing there that he would under no circumstance reopen the door, and directed us to a gate agent at the end of the concourse. (A glance at the monitor at the gate indicated that the plane seated about 25 or 30 people, so somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the customers who were supposed to be on board got screwed.)

The gate agent also behaved in an unhurried fashion, seemingly unbothered by the irate passengers standing in front of her. She had no particular reason to care about their plight, and she made this relatively obvious. A passenger adjacent me had apparently had this occur three times in recent history; when she asked for a phone number to call to complain, the gate agent was unable to provide one. (My fellow passenger and I were shocked, but not surprised, that there seems no way to actually get a human to direct a complaint to. I will admit, however, that the moment was somewhat surreal when I realized that taking away the phones was a direct response to having too many complaints.)

The gate agent was able to offer me standby for a later (9:45PM) flight to Ithaca; only when repeatedly pressed did she indicate that I would be fourth standby. (She provided no guidance as to what that meant in terms of how likely I would be to get on the plane.) She offered me a seat on a later flight to Elmira, with no option for getting from Elmira to Ithaca. She was not capable of looking at other airlines to see what other options I might have, and certainly would not be able to move my reservation to a partner airline. (Eventually, I called my travel agent, who was able to book me on a United flight. The United gate agent indicated that I'd have a tight connection because of a delay, but courteously offered to transfer my reservation to a different carrier at their expense.)

You may ask why I congratulated you at the beginning of this e-mail. That's because this is the part of the e-mail where I'd come up with some statement of hyperbole like "I am never flying US Air again!", or "I'll tell all my friends about you!", or something equally ridiculous and ineffective. But, to be honest, I probably will fly US Air again, because there will be some place that will be difficult to fly to, and US Air will have a fare that's only an arm and a leg, as opposed to both arms and both legs. And, I'd tell all my friends, but they'd be able to give me a horror story right back for every other air carrier out there.

So, congratulations. You have the market locked up. You can screw not just one customer, but a third of a plane load, and essentially, you don't have to care; there will simply be no repercussions. To be honest, having your customers feeling completely powerless is something of an enviable position. Good luck.

Best regards,
Joshua Wise

I tried submitting this through their web form. It spun for about 90 seconds, then gave up and said "An error occured while fetching the URI. Please retry.". You can't make this kind of shit up.

joshua_ @ 2012-12-30T04:08:00

2012-12-30T09:08:31Z

slow down; let me be still with you; still with me

I went to another show

2012-10-19T22:53:13Z

Gareth Emery in SF, October 13th, 2012

I really need to get something better than the kit 18-55 .

On Solving Hard Problems

2012-09-10T08:23:47Z

Hi, LiveJournal!

A week or so ago, I promised at least some of you some real content. I've been working off and on for a few months on writing this, then polishing it up for general consumption (thanks to Ben Wolf for helping me clean it up!). I got the inspiration from working in what was essentially the "chip emergency room" for a few months, and then at the same time reading Gene Kranz's "Failure Is Not an Option"; I realized that over that time, I had developed a set of techniques to help systemize debugging, and I figured it might be interesting to share it with the rest of the world.

So, without further ado: On Solving Hard Problems.

Enjoy!

Above & Beyond

2012-06-28T09:45:30Z

(...and more...)

Hi, LiveJournal! I went to see a show recently, and I took some photos. By the way, if you liked Above & Beyond's previous albums (Sirens of the Sea and Tri-State), you should buy their new one (Group Therapy). It's pretty good -- a lot like the previous two, but more of it.

and the rest

2012-04-27T08:38:16Z

And the rest.

Hey! Gianfortoni!

I still think that AEPi should have done better than third.

The booth may not have been the most elegant, but hell if the timing was not poignant.

Hamerschlag stands guard over the concert.

The audience, in the words of my friend James, is "mad hype".

chrisamaphone might not be a fan of fireworks photos, but I'm still a sucker.

Previously, previously, and maybe previously.

buggy!

2012-04-26T08:52:17Z

I promised a few more photos; here's a handful of buggy shots.
I also wrote some words, too.

Strap in.

SDC's array of colorful buggies.

lookin' out on a blue sky...

BRAAAAAAAKE!

A glossy SDC buggy makes its way through the chute.

More photos of booth and concert tomorrow.

joshua_ @ 2012-04-24T02:28:00

2012-04-24T09:28:42Z

Hi LiveJournal. I went back to Pittsburgh for Carnival.

I have a few more pictures that are worth a damn. I'll post them later, yeah?

A thing

2012-04-08T09:28:59Z

(click for more different)

Hi LiveJournal! I haven't posted a picture of a thing I made in a long time. I made a thing. Well, actually, I made two things: my job over the past n months was to bring the chip in the middle to life, so that was kind of "my" thing; and, I cast it into resin myself. This is sort of a prototype, but I intend to make them thin enough that one could conceivably put them on a keychain.

I also wrote a thing, and built another thing; I have to talk to some folks at work to make sure some of the stories in the thing I wrote is OK to share with the world before I can tell you, though. I'll have pictures of the other thing I built sooner or later, but it's not done yet.

I also post things about being a human being sometimes, but actually that goes more on Twitter nowadays. If I know you, I'll accept your follow request -- I am @jwise0.

on subtitles and learning behavior

2011-12-28T10:33:26Z

I've always known that I learn better by reading than by listening, and for a while, I've suspected that that translates over to other aspects of my life. For instance, when I'm participating in a conversation, I often feel like I have an excessive amount of "dropped packets" -- times when I have to ask someone to repeat themselves, or in which an utterance that I wasn't expecting catches me completely off-guard. (I don't usually get comments on it, surprisingly, but I certainly feel like it's an issue; has anyone else noticed this in me?) But tonight, something happened that it all clicked.

I went over to a friend's house this evening to generally be unproductive, and after some hours, we settled on watching The Bourne Identity, which I had not seen before. After some time wrestling it onto a machine that could connect to the TV, we all sat down to watch it; when the first English dialogue started, however, we realized that VLC had subtitles turned on. By a unanimous vote of "can't be arsed", we left them on, and about 15 minutes into the movie, I realized something surprising: I actually had a god damn clue what was going on.

Now, this is unusual for me. I rarely watch TV or movies in part because when I do, I haven't a god damn clue what is going on. It feels like I have to pour intense amounts of resources into figuring out who's who, and what role they play; names mostly whizz past me. I mentioned this after I watched the movie, and zagarus noted, "Well, that's what the first 15 minutes are for"... but in my case, it often seems like I'm still left piecing together crucial bits of plot for the first hour and 15 minutes, and if I can figure it out by the time the movie ends, I feel like I'm doing pretty well.

When I figured this out, though, it all made a huge amount of sense to me. I remember thinking something like this when I left the subs on at some point in the past -- but this time, it just made watching the movie so much easier and so much more enjoyable. I felt like I was spending more time with the content of the film, and less time trying to put it all together. The interesting bit is that it didn't feel simply like a "missing words" thing so much as a "missing content" thing; rather than a "I can't hear" or "I can't understand", I always felt more like there was a cognitive disconnect. Even though I don't use the subtitles as a primary source of information, having them on screen in my peripheral vision, so I can scan them after the character has spoken (or while the character is speaking), just seemed to make it that much easier.

Looking back, this makes sense, too -- it gives some level of reason as to why I always just did so awfully badly in paying attention in lectures, for instance. I'd hear just fine, but the content just wasn't really meaningfully making any impact on me; and if I gave the presenter any less than my full attention, I'd get about 0% of it, just the same as if I do anything other than pay rapt attention to a movie.

I wonder if this is common. I'd immediately switch to using subtitles when watching The Wire, but apparently the authors seem to think that's a bad idea, so I guess I won't do that; but I think that from now on, when I watch movies, I'll turn the subtitles on! I also wonder what other things I can adapt in my life to work around this whatever-it-is; I bet there are probably some simple things I can change that make me substantially more functional.

joshua_ @ 2011-10-15T21:04:00

2011-10-16T04:04:22Z

Let's say, for instance, that you are debugging a program that embeds Lua, and you take a SEGV. Let's say that you'd like to know what was in Lua's head before this happened, too, since it might have been useful. Let's say also, that you're on Solaris, and you have an ancient version of GDB, so you don't have Python, generate-core-file doesn't work, and things like print some_c_function() are likely to kill your session. And, let's say that your bug repros once every 24 hours or so, so risking killing your session isn't something that you want to try.

Well, do I ever have the script for you. It's pretty arcane, but to my knowledge, nobody's done this, so I hope someone will find it useful.

More stuff I've done

2011-09-12T08:29:00Z

Recently I just released an early snapshot of my branch of naim that supports OSCAR. naim is the original text-mode AIM client; I have used it since at least 0.11.6 (mid-2003), if not longer. Recently, though, AOL disabled the (ancient) protocol by which we connected to AIM. Last time they disabled TOC, they replaced it with TOC2, which required a little bit of change from us; but this time, TOC2 is gone for good.

So, after two months of hacking, I wrote a protocol driver for the modern protocol, OSCAR, and modernized the Lua support for naim.

This was a big effort, and I'm pretty proud that I managed to make a positive contribution to a project that I regularly use. I also debugged one of the toughest problems I have faced recently, although I guess that is not saying much, since I solved it in an evening.

Except that the maintainer has sort of fallen off the planet and does not care. Oh well.

But anyway. Yeah. Stuff I've done. Woo.

joshua_ @ 2011-09-09T23:24:00

2011-09-10T06:24:37Z

It turns out that if you fight hard enough, you *can* get useful internal tools released to the world.

The MODS kernel driver is a toolkit something like UIO, but more suited for experimentation; it seems that it might make a good platform, for instance, for students experimenting with drivers without wanting to go too deep into crashing their system by writing bad kernel-mode code.

Although it was originally from NVIDIA, it is NOT an official NVIDIA release; any support questions (and patches!) should go to my personal e-mail address.

Enjoy!

Images and Words: The beauty of Israel.

2011-06-27T09:07:58Z

(previous: A visit to Israel.)

From May 18th to May 29th, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Israel as part of an program called Taglit-Birthright. Over these 11-ish days (of which 2 were really eaten up by an airplane), I visited 12 cities, spent 5 days with Israeli soldiers, ate infinity shawarmas, and shot 878 photos (after removing excessive duplicates, it drops down to about 580). In the previous post, I gave the tourist's perspective of inside Israel; in this post, you'll get something of a reprieve from my writing, since the content is dominated mostly by images.

(the sandbox; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

When you think about Israel, you probably don't think about it as a particularly beautiful place. In fact, if you're like me, you probably don't have a particularly glorious view of the Middle East as a whole; a friend of mine who served in the military refers to the U.S. base in Doha as "the sandbox". After my time there, I certainly wanted to write a piece on the conflict (that one's next); but at the same time, it would be vastly unfair (both to you, and to the country!) to do so without also giving you all the opportunity to experience the sheer beauty of this place.

(the Upper Galilees, from Kibbutz Machanayim; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

As it turns out, the climate of Israel is a lot like the people -- it's all the same in some ways, and it's very diverse in other ways. "Big deal -- the U.S. has a diverse climate, too", you might say; on the other hand, Israel is is about 263 miles from North to South, and at its widest, is 71 miles wide. To put this in perspective, you can drive across the entire country in around 5 or 6 hours; or, well, it's less than half the distance than my drive from Boston to Pittsburgh; or, it's just a hair bigger than New Jersey.

How diverse is it? Well, there is of course a desert throughout the middle of the thing (two, actually; the Judean Desert, and the Negev); but this also ranges all the way up to lush, green fields and rolling mountains. The Golan Heights get incredibly hot; but a few tens of miles away, the Upper Galilee is not a bad place to have a farm. On the third hand, in Jerusalem, sometimes they get snow!

(the Golan Heights and the Galilees; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

I mentioned before that throughout Israel, there are ample opportunities to see beautifully lush, rich, foliage. One of the things that you expect to see when you're there, of course, is the Eucalyptus -- planted by settlers, the Eucalyptus efficiently draws lots of water from the soil, and hence can drain swamps and diminish the population of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Unsurprisingly, the Eucalyptus is a pretty common tree, then; but as you'll see, there are plenty more.

Trees are symbolically important in Judaism; the Torah is sometimes alluded to as etz chayim (the Tree of Life), and once a year comes tu b'shevat, the festival (or new year) of trees. Beyond that, in general, they represent life and vitality; for that reason, a common way for Jews in the Diaspora to donate to Israel is through the Jewish National Fund through the "plant trees in Israel" program.

(in... uh... Carmiel... there is... uh.... many... trees...; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

One of the easy places to find beauty in Israel is on the kibbutzim -- communal (okay, well, of late they have been somewhat more privatized) farms, in which at least among the older members, there is a real sense of pride in the place. Since it's difficult to make a profit on pure agriculture, kibbutzim often have other ways to generate income; for instance, some kibbutzim have factories on them. Since not all the houses on a kibbutz are always full (kibbutz population has been dwindling ever since the statehood of Israel), a kibbutz may also have something of a hotel on site, or otherwise rent out housing to IDF soldiers or others in the area. (All of these were true for Kibbutz Machanayim, which is one of the kibbutzim that I stayed on when I was there.)

The pride in these extends often to how the land is kept; on one of the many sunny days in the Upper Galilee, a quick stroll around the kibbutz is more likely than not to leave you in awe of the nature we live in.

(music, us.; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

(beyond; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

(and away; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

Now, that isn't to say that it's just the kibbutzim that will leave you with incredible views. Because so much of Israel's history is in places, not things, Israel has a vested interest in making those places look good -- like they've been keeping up the land, right?

(the mountains make for a picturesque place to put the city of Tzfat; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

Well, and... as it turns out, sometimes those places don't really need any help.

(the Golan Heights aren't just desert and war; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

(the port of Yaffa; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

I want to close on a slightly different note. I've shown you a lot of pictures of things, and places, but there's something missing. I am an engineer, not a writer, so hopefully the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (Z''L) will forgive me for taking his words:

Once I sat on the steps at the gate of David's Tower. I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide, and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head, there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head." But he's moving, he's moving! I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them -- "you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It's not important, but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Nimrod expressed a similar sentiment, too. "To get to know a place, you have to get to know a people." I'll talk more about that in my fourth post, to be sure; but to wrap this one up, I have just a few more pictures for you.

(a truly joyous occasion -- a Bar Mitzvah in Tzfat!; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

(a young Hasidic man walks around Jerusalem. if you look carefully,
you'll notice that he is wearing headphones; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

(two children watch us recite the Shehechiyanu as we enter Jerusalem; 1024x768, 3648x2736)

Up next: Conflict.

Sketchin' up

2011-06-21T09:31:50Z

OK, ICFP is over, and I am making progress on more text. In the mean time,

I guess I am starting to get reasonable at using SketchUp.

Inside the Compound.

And, a quick flythrough of the layout so far.

Images and Words: A visit to Israel.

2011-06-16T07:42:26Z

From May 18th to May 29th, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Israel as part of an program called Taglit-Birthright. Over these 11-ish days (of which 2 were really eaten up by an airplane), I visited 12 cities, spent 5 days with Israeli soldiers, ate infinity shawarmas, and shot 878 photos (after removing excessive duplicates, it drops down to about 580). Over the four posts that comprise my travelogue will be thoughts, memories, and mostly pictures from my visit; although I am no professional writer, with luck I'll be able to convey *some* of the experience! I hope that you all enjoy reading these posts as much as I enjoyed assembling them.

We flew out on SwissAir (which they alternately stylize as 'swiss' or 'SWISS_'; presumably the underscore is silent) by way of Zurich. Now, I know someone who has lived in Zurich and thought it to be a wretched place, terrible to live in, etc, etc, but... well...