Journal Tuesday 09 May 2016

My laptop screen’s hinge lock broke today. It being my only lifeline annoys the hell out of me. I have to buy a laptop soon but I don’t want to do it right away.

My chair broke last week. It wasn’t the best chair in the world but it was working fine. Now the back support is all expanded and the hydraulic pipe underneath is busted. Lack of a good chair for someone who gets paid to sit all day in front of a computer is no fun. I now have acute pain in my lower back when I get up.

Not the best day in my life.

Game of Thrones’ season 6 episode 3 came out today. I am not impressed. I am not sure where the story is going.

Government may not renew RBI chief Raghuram Rajan’s second term.

I was trying to avoid travel but I will have to now.

I hope to do these daily posts.

So, how did you get here?

My path to Google wasn’t a typical one. I don’t have a degree, I wasn’t involved in the invention of the internet, I didn’t pioneer the use of MapReduce, and — confession time — I have no idea how TensorFlow works (but I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of sorcery involved).

While reading his story I can’t stop to think about my own journey. I have started on the path. I am nowhere thought but I hope to trek the same path. I always wonder how people from completely different backgrounds make it to places like Hiroshi did. How my journey would be different if I had a conducive environment which promoted stress and goal free learning and mentor who had a 10,000 view over me to scold me when I am wasting time and appreciate when I am working in the right direction. Wherever I am it is because of the guide free learning. But where I want to be requires eagle like focus. An eagle who hasn’t eaten in several days.

Hiroshi Lockheimer write in “So, how did you get here?”.

Constraints

I was working throughout the vacation yet I feel I have lost handle of horizontal view of all the things going on in my life.

For sometime I have stopped using anything digital for managing myself. Digital can be easily added or deleted or changed. That’s too easy and distracting. I went paper and pen. I now have maybe over 20 pages describing everything I want to do.

These daily random musings from now on will hopefully be tied in a hundred words. Constraint is a beautiful phenomena. You lack it and you won’t make progress or you have too much of it will end up in same rut.

Remote Working

My app which was working just fine suddenly started misbehaving. It looks like an architectural bug to me. I have tried every possible way to mitigate the issue by moving around the code but none turned out to be a correct solution.

I am at home and am working at a speed of 512 kbps or 256 kbps. I am able to work fine except a few things. Watching videos is a very problematic. You can only do one thing at a time. You are never sure if your app is slow or its just network. At least a speed of 1 or 2 mbps would be nice. Mobile internet is very expensive to be used with work machine. I need to look into more offline coding tricks.

Today for the first time I referred to source code of Android to figure out my problem. I wanted to know what happens when one sets an adapter over and over again. I referred to the code and that was enlightening.

As I am working from home I have realized that one of the important things is that you need a stable place where you can setup things to do your work. A space that doesn’t change. The way my current house is designed makes it hard to do that.

Next time I plan something I will try to look for these things. If there’s a power outlet or not. What about table and chair? And the elephant in the room, Internet.

March 11th 2016

Technically it’s March 12th but the hasn’t ended for me yet.

This year’s weather has been weird. Scorching Sun is already upon us.

I read some things about HTML, XHTML, and HTML5 today. I am still not sure the difference among them. Especially XHTML stands for Extensible Markup Language which can be XML too. Maybe there’s a `hyper` that I can’t remember.

Not much app development today. System is yet not in working conditions.

I tried Kubuntu 14.04 which has previous generation of Plasma which works very well but is old. I am not sure where the real problem is. In my head or the system. Ignorance is the key.

No walk either. I did end up cleaning the flat. It’s always a nice thing to sit around in clean environment.

Pam Selle wrote about working remotely on her blog thewebivore.com. I do wish if I could do similar experiments.