Woke up this morning at 6am, which was only three hours after I finally fell asleep around 3am. It’s not that I’m trying to stay up super late – I blame caffeine, boredom, and the bright light of my computer screen. I was up playing and watching StarCraft and sketching in my new sketchbook. I found a script on reddit and did a page of storyboards for it, just as an exercise. I have a lot of things to remember about anatomy especially – my human figures are particularly blocky and static after being away from pen & paper for so long.

I debated going back to sleep, and actually got back in bed for a while, but my body had decided that it was time to be awake. I took the R and N trains, arriving around 8:30 a.m.. Alex was the only other one there. Zach, the previous night, had mentioned to me on Facebook that my comics weren’t showing up correctly on ertyseidel.com, so I spent the morning re-building the comics display system for the site. Since I had already organized and tagged all of the comics, it was very simple to import the metadata (saved as .xml), and include the proper files, with whitelisting for security.

By the time 10:30 rolled around and it was time for morning meetings, I had finished that project entirely! I am pretty proud of that.

Worked on Node.js tag, pairing on and off with Carl. I’m down to the last bug or two before it’ll be done and I can put it online. If I can figure out how to run node somewhere – I know there were some AWS credits for HS students but I think I missed the sign-up for them. I’ll ask tomorrow.

Lunch was at Pret with Joy, Nabil, Willson, Javier, and a few others, talking about pandacodium, a 48-hour hackathon which I was interested in doing. I’m not entirely sure what the details are yet, but I guess that’s some of the excitement?

Worked on Node.js tag until 5, then went and got a Chipotle burrito, which seemed like a dumb idea (there’s food provided on Mondays and I totally forgot) but the food ended up being pizza, so it was probably good that I ate something healthier and more filling.

Took the train to Etsy with a crowd of Hacker Schoolers. Their office is in DUMBO (something like “Directly Under Manhattan and Brooklyn Underpasses”, which it really is – they are covered by the enormous bridges). They have really crafty offices – some shots:

There was beer and pizza. Truly the startup life. The talk was on robots and Clojure – mainly, controlling robots like roombas and quad copters using Clojure, which was pretty neat. It also introduced  (or rather, referenced the idea invented by the computer scientist John McCarthy) the idea of “beliefs and desires”, which is basically a fancy way of talking about states and transitions. Perhaps it’s more useful if one is thinking functionally. For example:

“I believe I am on the floor”
“I want to fly” (Engage rotors)
“I believe I am starting to fly”
“I want to hover” (Tune rotors to hover)

etc. It’s a neat idea, mainly philosophically.

Walked around DUMBO for a while trying to find a rather well-hidden train station, and eventually gave up and took the C  to the F, which wasn’t the fastest way to get home, but it worked. Sat around and chatted with Levi, Imogen, and Imogen’s mom (“mum”) about british clothing for a while (apparently what we call underwear, they call “pants”).

Did some tech support for my grandfather and uncle, took a cool shower, now on my way to bed. I was really hoping to have my Node.js tag done today, but I think I’ll have to settle for the end of the week.

This weekend is MLG. I plan to consume SC2 starting Friday and not do much else.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty