What does it mean when two people from different parts of your social network say the same thing at the same time?

Hypotheses:

• People are more similar than different.
• There is a limited vocabulary in English for expressing post-birthday gratitude.
• Facebook is just noise.

Folsom St. was steep, but I made it to my new temporary pad.

Feeling a little lonely. For the first time in awhile. Reminds me of my first night at USC. But so far, everything has been positive. The people in my new apartment are friendly, there’s a wonderful hill/park in the backyard, and I ate a real burrito for lunch today. I can’t tell if the knot in my gut is from the nervous anticipation of tomorrow, or from the strange feeling of being alone in a new place, or that burrito.

Tomorrow is orientation, and I can’t wait to see where I’ll be working.

Oh, and my room has a giant window overlooking the city. My nearsightedness makes the city look like silver and gold confetti. It’s pleasant.

Tomorrow the adventure begins.

The idea came from this page. Turned out fine, a little overcooked. I’m surprised at how enjoyable the lentils were though. As a side note, does anyone else enjoy reading the Wikipedia articles on the ingredients they’re using while they’re waiting on things to cook? That has to be part of my top five use cases for my iPod (among other things: remembering office hours, reading HN, and playing Katamari). Interesting tidbit: Lentils and rice make a complete protein dish.

This is what it feels like when you’re starting college. Uncertain, unbalanced, silly. But you can’t say it’s not fun!

I hope over the next few days, I’ll have remembered most of my list. It’s mainly for my sister, who is going to college soon. Apologies for the total lack of structure.

• Figure out one special thing about yourself and brace yourself for endless icebreakers.
• The more honest you feel when you tell a stranger what your major is, the closer you are to the right one.
• Do things for your friends. They will do things for you. If they do not, reconsider the friendship.
• If you were waiting for a chance to do something exciting and unexpected, now is the time.
• Organize and store every digital document you receive and complete from class. They will occasionally come in handy if you forget something you’ve learned (which will happen often).
• Along with the above, backup your files regularly.
• Buy a backpack that can fit a week’s worth of groceries.
• The grades you get in your first semester count the same as the grades in your last.
• Buy two locks for your bike, lock the front wheel to your frame and the frame to a fixed object.
• Get two bank accounts. One at a national bank and one at the university credit union. Use the national bank for the ATM’s, and the credit union for all other services.
• Get into museums for free. Feel good.
• Learn basic life skills. Like how to feed and clean yourself. (You would be surprised at how many people refuse to do this).

I was watching some videos on YUI theater when I came across an inspiring talk on the future and on Disneyland by Douglas Crockford. Who knew that the man behind JSON was a big Disney fan? And who knew Disney was a big fan of combating urban sprawl and suburbanization? So much so that he was in the process of constructing an autonomously-governed experimental city? I can’t wait to go to Disneyland again to appreciate a dream that was all but forgotten, but is in the process of returning. If you have a spare lunch break, grab some food and watch this lecture.

I enjoyed this snippet:

Main Street is the first thing you see when you enter Disneyland, and when the park opened this only appeared to be about 50 years old. It wasn’t an ancient city, it wasn’t a fantasy city, it was meant to look like something that we had recently lost. Most cities still had buildings that looked like this except now they were in serious disrepair, or boarded up, or failing, or collapsing, or may have already been replaced by ugly post-War buildings. He was trying to set this up with some gentle nostalgia — remember just a few decades ago how wonderful cities were? How you could walk around and do lots of things? There’s shopping, there’s entertainment, there’s retail. It’s all there and you can just walk around, and it’s really pleasant.

More reading:
Wikipedia – Reedy Creek Improvement District – the land that Walt bought in Florida
Wikipedia – Urban Sprawl – a very rich entry on the problem
Douglas Crockford’s Homepage – Super retro!

So, after having recently read “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin, I was inspired by her attempts at “living in the moment” to take a walk around my neighborhood. I think there is something to be admired in the ability to savor seemingly insignificant moments of life. And how there are a lot of aesthetically rich things that on first glance seem too obvious to be noticed.

So let’s start at the start: The House

This is where I currently live. Built in 1909, it is an American Craftsman Style home with an appraised value of $282,000, which I currently rent a room out of for about $700 a month. There are actually a number of these homes in the neighborhood, about evenly spaced out, indicating what the original plot sizes were. It takes some imagination, but it’s fun to think about what this neighborhood must have been like in the early 20th century.

Today, there are many other styles of architecture that fill in the gaps. Spanish colonial stucco boxes, the occasional Victorian, and even Neoclassical White House replicas. It all reflects Los Angeles’ motto: Built whatever you want, wherever you want to. Other LA Themes: Poverty embellished in luxury, in-your-face diversity, eccentricity.

The distrust of the city seeps out in exclamatory signs people post in front of their homes. Warning! security dog. No trespassing! Thankfully, an occasional guard chihuahua sheds a comical light on it all.

These very scattered grid of houses are actually very dense with nature. Comparing the size of the trees in front of each lot is an easy way to gauge the age of a house. What’s very pleasant is the frequency of citrus trees. Although, maybe not after watching the Godfather.

Although at first it feels a little unsafe to *not* be surrounded in complete McMansion homogeneity, the uncouth nature of the neighborhood makes for a great walk. Seeing the diverse textures of different ages of paint, all coated in with the stains of city grit. You never know what you’re going to see next.

One example is the literal animal house two houses across from where I live. Their property is home to a number of ducks, rabbits, exotic birds, and chickens. Something you’d never find in typical suburbia.

Of course, some parts are off limits. The occasional restricted alleyway adds to the mystery: What has this alleyway seen in the past century?

My experience living in South Central LA has been mixed. Among many things, I have returned home to:

• An old car parked in front of our house, in flames
• Four individuals being arrested by LAPD against our fence
• Homeless people looking through our trash

But, a couple of nights ago, I returned to something pretty neat: LED Streetlights. For once, thumbs up, LA!

I made one of these widgets for Ryan a couple months ago, but unfortunately didn’t have any time to play with it myself before shipping it off.

After a winter break of back-of-the-mind curiosity, I finally caved in and bought a kit for myself.

Here are some notes on my experiences with it.

What is it?

The brain machine consists of two LED’s that rapidly flash into your eyes and an apparatus that plays binaural beats through headphones. It claims to

Although the claims bring to mind the days of the snake oil salesman, the machine is actually mildly entertaining. According to the build page, the program in the chip lasts for 14 minutes. Here’s a brief narrative of my 14 minute experience:

Glasses on. So here I am, typing this out while this thing flashes in my face.The first thing you notice is how annoying the sound is, but it works in keeping out most, if not all, outside noise, which I assume helps you focus. Every minute or so, the tone of the sound and the frequency of flashing changes. What I see is akin to the sensations when you press your fingers gently against your closed eyes, but without the feeling of physical discomfort. The flashing causes red and blue checkerboards that quickly alternate. To focus on the visual sensation is a little fatiguing, so after awhile you notice that you start to zone out so much that you don’t even realize that there are colors t all. And I think that’s when you start to relax the most. But so far, nothing revelatory. Just feeling a little disconnected from the world, with the only thing tying me here the sensation of the keys against my fingertips.  Turned off the machine. I hear strange artifacts like the sound of a garbled bubbling. This lasts about 10-20 seconds, but then everything’s back to normal. Glasses off.

Related Links:

• The Adafruit build page.
• A commercial version on Amazon.
• An old Engadget article about original Make kit.

I read this article in the NYT this morning about a man who built a small house in the desert. Using increasingly affordable renewable energy, a myriad of online resources for the DIY crowd, and his fists he’s slowly built a life mostly independent from the human nest we build around our daily lives.

He asks,

Have you ever thought to yourself, “How would I do it if I had it to do all over again?” Usually this thought only pops into your head when you are about to die or your life is in ruin or perhaps during a midlife crisis where family and job stress suddenly takes its toll. This feeling is usually accompanied by mounting debt and an overwhelming feeling of being trapped in the life you have chosen. -The Field Lab Homepage

There is something about this that is so attractive. There’s something about his life that I just want. Maybe independence, freedom, time. I don’t know. But, now the seedling idea is planted. I want to come back to this thought someday. After financial independence.

Also, his blog.

After getting a ton of emails yesterday, I became overwhelmed by my cluttered inbox of 1000+ read messages. I had to archive them all. There was a sigh of relief from the artificial clarity gained in having whitespace where there was once text.

I remembered the day I set up my Gmail account in 2004. Back when I emailed friends just to get them to reply so I could indulge in the pleasure of seeing unread emails in my inbox.

I decided to find out how much my inbox has changed since then.

From the daily counts, the difference is harder to see, but the monthly counts make the difference more visible.

Methodology:
1. Downloaded Gmail backup and started pulling my emails down from Google. Changed my password because I read that the program phones home.

2. Wrote some simple python scripts to look for keywords and count all the numbers up.

3. Excel

Graphs (click for detailed view):

Daily Incoming Emails

Daily Incoming Emails with Trendline

Monthly Incoming Emails