Basically watched a bunch of StarCraft this weekend.

For some reason I’m feeling really low on energy and motivation right now, so I’ll be focusing on regulating my sleep schedule and eating properly for the next few days to get back on track mentally. I’m not worried or anything – just slightly down and out for a bit.

Short post today due to trying to get to bed on time. Quick weekend recap:

Friday: Played an awesome D&D campaign with Alisa, Matt, Ian, Martin, and James. They raided a trapped treasure hall and beat up on kobolds, even killing the giant spider that I had put in specifically to be too tough for them. Good job I guess 🙂 Fell asleep on the couch at Hacker School, then went out to a bar with a bunch of Hacker School people for Yael’s birthday, a place called the Bell House in Brooklyn. It was neat – hung out mostly with Martin, Sebastian, and Sam (I think). The music was super loud though so I left after about an hour and a half.Had a nice but shouty conversation with Mary and Sonali – two of the facilitators. 80s vs 90s. Drinks were incredibly expensive as well, and I actually ended up owing someone $11 since I didn’t realize how much a drink was going to cost before I ordered it. Had a nice talk with Greta on the way back to my apt. Decided I very much like quiet bars, although those seem to be hard to find?

Saturday: Spent the whole day sitting around watching StarCraft. Woo.

Sunday: Took the train (actually two trains) to Mineola, NY, where I sat around and watched StarCraft with other people. The bar was called “Eleanor Rigby’s”, and was, of course, Beatles themed.

Eleanor Rigby’s Front Door (Snapchat :P)

The organizer and his girlfriend were super nice but some of the other attendees were making kinda mean comments about the players. Even so, I enjoyed myself and had a great time rooting for the Terran player, Polt. There were probably about 30 people there throughout the night, and about 12 of us who stayed until 9 or so to watch the finals. Ended up taking kind of a roundabout way home, so I didn’t get in until 11:30 (?). Got a Barbarian in Nethack all the way to the Castle before dying because I had no way to cross the water, and my instrument had burnt up. Still a great run.

R.I.P. Erty the Barbarian

P.S. I realized just now that all of my “Day n” on the HS posts are off by one after day 3. Maybe I’ll fix that soon. Maybe.

Short post tonight because I’m tired and it’s a bajillion degrees in my apartment right now which makes it hard to write. Plus I wrote a lot of technical/life posts over the past few days so hopefully that makes up for it?

Aaron messaged me last night and asked me to help him with an installation of a particle simulation program called VBFNLO. Problem being, it came as uncompiled C and FORTRAN77 source code, and he needed some help installing it over ssh. I did a write up of the process involved this morning and posted it here on my blog.

Walked to Jazzy’s for an early lunch, and spent some time working on a small python name generator for my dad. I’ve posted the code on GitHub: namegenerator.

Played cards with the guys again, which was fun. Afterward I walked to the Unopressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Bookstore to see if they sold D&D stuff (they sold comics so I assumed…). They didn’t. I took the R up to Union Square and shopped around at Barnes & Noble for a while, but they didn’t have anything either. So, I don’t have a campaign for tomorrow, yet. Talked with Greta for a while about wedding stuff. We might have a color scheme 🙂

Wedding Colors!

Ate some sausage and eggs which I made back at the apartment. Sleep nao.

From Brooklyn which is really hot 🙁

–Erty

Slept in, again. This time until around 3pm. I wasn’t even up super late – I went to bed around 2am, which normally means I can get up around 10 and be totally fine (that’s 8 hours!). I think I need a better alarm sound – the one I’m using currently is super soothing and probably puts me to sleep more than it wakes me up.

Chatted with Greta for a while about the memorial services for my grandmother – it’ll be in August, so no need to worry about it for now. I’m a little worried that Greta won’t be able to fly out here for a weekend since she won’t want to miss two weekends of work. I really want to just walk around Park Slope with her and look at all the cool little shops and gardens for a day. I should be able to visit her at the end of Hacker School, though.

Ate lunch at a Vietnamese place across the street from my apartment – very spicy but delicious sandwich and a honey-green tea bubble tea. Answered emails and derped around on the internet for a bit.

Planning on going to bed around 11pm, to make sure I get up at the right time tomorrow.

Another not-very interesting day, but hopefully tomorrow and this weekend will make up for it.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

I received news this morning that my grandmother, Lila Rhen, had passed away around 5:30 a.m..

Hacker School was deserted this morning – a lot of people were at a Git tutorial somewhere else in the city, so morning meetings were skipped entirely. I spent a few hours chatting with Daniel from Lawrence, and writing a eulogy for my grandmother, which I posted on this blog. I spent a while working on my website, ertyseidel.com, adding the twitter and blog feeds to the front page.

I took the rest of the day off and went home – my Adventure Time Season 2 disks had arrived at the Amazon locker down the street, and I spent a few hours watching through those. Next, I went to the sandwich shop down the street and got their special for the day, a pork and asparagus sandwich. I ate it at the garden across the street from my apartment. There were fireflies for about 10 minutes!

Click here if the embedded video doesn’t work

Talked to Greta about wedding plans, played some StarCraft with Julian and Mike, then went to sleep.

Not the most exciting day.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

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:

Photo Booth!

These are their “Creative Labs”, so they have a bunch of lab coats!

Big ol’ wall of craft supplies!

Arriving at Etsy!

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

Woke up around noon and walked down to the Staples, where I had a delivery waiting in an Amazon Locker. Locker is pretty sweet – you walk up, put in your code, and one of the many doors pops open to reveal your delivery. Very easy, and way more secure than having the delivery left on my apartment doorstep for days. I can imagine that it only really works in densely populated places like NYC. Boulder apparently doesn’t have any.

From there, I walked back to my apartment through a pretty small farmers market. Bought some mint tea since it was hot. Ended up buying some cloth and a comic book, Ghost World, at a thrift store, and some duct tape at a bargain shop. Taped the cloth over our apartment’s skylight to try to manage the heat a little more, and got a brilliant shot of sunset in NYC:

NYC Sunset!

I grabbed that shot as a snapchat to send to my friends, so I didn’t really think about the composition or anything – hence the giant metal frame in the middle of the picture. I’m thinking of trying again in the next few days with a nicer camera.

Sat at Venti Cinque for a while (coffee shop), and watched the finals of HomeStory Cup (SC2).

Walked back to Staples and bought a sketchbook and some pens – I’m hoping to get back into sketching and comics, at least a bit. Right – Ghost World – I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, since it’s part of the canon of Graphic Novels, but I really think I’m not disillusioned enough to connect with any of the characters. So from a production standpoint it was well done, but I didn’t really identify with the story.

Played and mostly lost at some SC2, derped around on the internet.

Sleep time.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

Short post today, because I am lacking motivation for some reason.

My dad and I spent the afternoon today at the Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.. We ate lunch at the museum, and wandered around the exhibits. Some highlights:

– Walked through a genome exhibit. At the end, they have you write down some of your physical traits on a map, which gives a number. My dad and I ended up pretty much opposite (which is more a feature of the way the maps were designed – one difference at the beginning sent you quite far away), whereas my dad ended up with the same exact number as another lady whom we had never met before at the table.

– Saw the Hope Diamond, which wasn’t nearly as cool as most of the other gems. The Hope Diamond is owned by the Smithsonian, which is owned by the Govt., which is the American People. So technically I own the Hope Diamond 😛

– Tried to visit a butterfly pavillion type thing, but there was a huge line. 🙁

– Found out that one of the rocks my dad has from Antarctica might be a meteorite.

We ended up parking in a parking garage which went at least four stories into the ground with a really steep, narrow, two-way ramp. Pretty scary.

Got dropped off at Union Station an hour early because we mixed up the time zones. Got a Jamba Juice and a really weird Minecraft T-Shirt that obviously wasn’t properly licensed.

The train was delayed by another train that was stopped next to it, and we had to wait an hour for them to transfer over all of the people who had been stuck on the other train.

Got home, played some SC2 with some people I met at the Team Liquid NY LAN earlier this month, and went to bed.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

Thursday night I arrived in Washington D.C., at Union Station, around midnight. My dad met me at the terminal, and we drove from there to our hotel in Chantilly, VA. I’m still getting used to the idea of doing things in more than one state on a given day. The west is really big you guys.

Woke up the next morning and drove with my dad to the National Reconnaissance Office headquarters, basically the guys who build spy satellites. It was their “All-American Family Day” – kids running around among bouncy castles in front of large government buildings, surrounded by 10-foot fences with barbed wire. We went inside some of the buildings, and looked at old cold-war satellite footage, satellite parts, etc.

It was fascinating. I also very much enjoyed the chance to hang out with my dad. Lunch was $15 for overcooked burgers.

Three parts of the exhibits really stood out to me. First – I got to touch an actual Enigma machine. Like, one from WWII that had been used to encode messages.

The second was an exhibit on Satellite materials, with various golden alloys and molybdenum meshes, each with a tiny blue “declassified” sticker.

The third was a satellite picture of a concentration camp from the holocaust. Black and white; grainy. It was marked with tiny letters and arrows on the photograph, “gas chambers”, “prisoners en route to chamber”. I wanted to reach through time and space and help them.

We left the NRO and drove around the campus for a bit. My dad doesn’t work for the NRO – he works for a contractor to the government, but he was able to attend their picnic. I don’t have any pictures – they make you leave your phone at the door. I do have this brochure, though:

All-American Family Day at the NRO!

We went from there to the Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in D.C.. Wandered the floor for a while. Apparently I forgot to save all of the pictures properly, so, text only?

I have this one of a UNIVAC computer:

UNIVAC

Old computers are cool. They had the Enola Gay at the museum. Not just any B-29, but the B-29. A piece of history there (albeit a controversial one). I sent a pic to a bunch of people, including Mike, who happens to be Japanese, and then wondered if that was appropriate. I hope I didn’t offend anyone.

The Discovery shuttle was there as well, which was super cool, especially seeing the ceramic heat tiles, all marked up from re-entering the atmosphere. I wanted to play some Kerbal Space Program or maybe Artemis.

Like I said, I forgot to save the pictures properly.

Oh, I have one picture of my dad in front of the Air and Space Museum!

My dad in front of the NASM

We went up in that observation tower for a while or so and watched planes take off from Dulles.

My dad had to drop off a badge at the NRO building, so he dropped me off at Target, where I bought the first season of Adventure Time, a DVD-Burner/Blu-Ray Player, and the new album by The XX (it was on sale – cheaper than buying it online!). Stopped by the hotel for a quick rest, then

My dad at American Tap House

My dad got a cider and I got a wheat beer, but the server mixed them up when she delivered them, and I didn’t notice until my beer tasted really really weird. We chatted about my upcoming wedding (probably in about a year), and associated plans.

Then we went to see Now You See Me, which was not particularly deep, but enjoyable and certainly fun. Here’s me right afterward:

Hanging out in VA

Went home afterward and tried to watch Adventure Time with my dad, but ended up watching it on my own because the new Blu-Ray player wouldn’t cooperate for an hour.

I was going to rush and put the next day in here as well, but it deserves its own time, so I’ll catch that up tomorrow.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

I seem to have a problem with Thursdays – I woke up around 1pm today and didn’t get in to Hacker School until 2:30. I had planned on actually being social and joining some people for lunch today as well, which I was sad to miss. Nobody in particular, but I’ve been eating a lot of lunches on my own and I want to start hanging out with people a bit more.

Speaking of, Javier is into SC2 (although he watched more Brood War), so we’re going to put together a little party for the MLG spring championships next weekend at Hacker School. We’ll see if anyone else ends up showing up, though. I’m not sure how many fans of SC2 there are at HS, since it’s kind of a specific hobby.

I spent the afternoon putting together the technical blog post for LACE, the Latency-Aware Collision Engine, which you can read right here on my blog! I came up with the acronym  this afternoon as well 🙂

At 5:30 I gave a 2 minute presentation on the engine, and then after everyone else’s presentations, gave a short demo of the tag game I’ve been working on implementing.

Hung out and talked StarCraft with Javier afterward, then played some SC2 on my own and surfed the web until 8:45, at which point I hopped on the 1 to Penn Station, where I got on an Amtrak to Washington D.C. to visit my Dad for the weekend!

From an Amtrak train somewhere on the East Coast,

–Erty Seidel

Started the day on time at Hacker School, in a new morning meeting group: Russel, named after Steve Russell, the inventor of Spacewar!, one of the first videogames. He also did some of the first implementations of LISP, way back in the day.

Thomas, Nina, Carl, Tom, and George will be the new faces I see every morning, although I’m sad Jimmy isn’t in our group (Russell, Jimmy, get it?).

Spent the morning working on the collision detection library. I feel bad, because I kept telling Jade that I wasn’t going to work on it anymore, then I would start doing something else, and then I would suddenly know how to fix the library and would go do that. Then I would show Jade, and she would be, good job not working on it.

Went to Pret for lunch, then took the subway home, because it’s internet time! I’ve been tethering from my phone for the last 19 days since there’s no internet at the apartment, but since I had some room in my budget, I called up Time Warner and had them install internet today! The guy was super nice and the setup was very fast – It was a bit offputting, since I spent the last year battling TWC’s YouTube throttling practices at school – so I was ready for a battle which never came.

We had to climb around the building quite a bit to find the cable input, and it turns out whoever remodeled the building last cut a bunch of the cables right at the wall so that they’re unusable anymore. Luckily, the one cable they left happened to be the one that connected to Imogen’s room, so there’s a router and modem on her window now.

But yeah, 15 MBps internet at the apt, woo!

Took the train back to Hacker School and worked with Jade and Mary on the collision library. Actually – it works! Mostly! It crashes every once in a while on a corner case, but the basic functionality is going strong and I was able to implement a simple game of tag using it! I want to finish the technical blog post about it tomorrow so that I can present it and have the details online for people to look at.

I called Greta on my way to Chipotle for dinner, and she convinced me to try somewhere else. Probably 50% of the meals I’ve eaten so far in NYC have been Chipotle.  I tried a cafe that I had been to before, but it was closed. I tried a cafe that I hadn’t been to before, and it was closed too. So I went to Chipotle.

I also really want to do a non-technical presentation for everyone (on “why do we make tech”) but I haven’t had time for it (too much SC2, testing out the new internet! )

Went home around 6, finished the second draft of a résumé, and played a bunch of StarCraft with Mike! It’s nice to be able to play instead of just watch (since my phone has good throughput but bad latency.

Blogging, Bed.

From Brooklyn.

–Erty