I set up an appointment with the university optometry clinic. Took the eye exam. It was the first time in years, the first exam since I was in the Air Force. I was happy to learn my vision wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. The eyedoctor inserted a pair of lenses and it was awesome: I could see perfectly, no glasses! Suddenly I felt like the glasses themselves were training wheels that I’d just graduated from. Then the lenses came out and it was my turn to try inserting them on my own.

They say girls have less trouble with contact lenses because they’re always dabbing makeup around their eyes. The closest I’d ever come to putting anything in my eyes was removing sleep crust when I woke up in the morning. It was terrible. It took all my willpower to force my eye open while delicately trying to apply the tiny pieces of plastic onto my protesting iris. At first, despite the doctor’s detailed instructions, I tried inserting the things backwards. My struggles continuing, the doc started getting impatient: “I can’t prescribe these for you if you can’t put them in right…” Finally, at the last minute, they slid into place!

I had picked up a new skill, but if it were a video game, my skill level would be at that 1% level where you technically know it but can barely use it in practice. I took my shiny new prescription to the ordering room, placed an order for a year’s worth of dailies (you can either get disposable daily soft lenses, or harder reusable ones; I prefer the dailies because I’d hate to do all the work of carefully storing hard lenses every night and remembering to keep them moist!) They gave me a handful of temporary lenses, it would take a couple weeks for my years’ supply to arrive.

Nowadays I can get the lenses on without too much trouble– usually. I’ve come a long way from 1% skill, but I’ve got a lot of practice ’til I reach the 100% level my girlfriend seems to have with her reusables The main thing is to wash your hands thoroughly, shake-dry your fingers without touching anything, quickly slip one lens in, then repeat the whole process with the other one. Do it any other way, and a stray dust particle is likely to get in there, and that’s not fun! With practice, though, even a klutz like me is getting the technique down!

Anyway, wearing contacts is great, once you get past putting the things on. I get noticeably nicer treatment from everyone around me. People open up more easily, and trust you more. It’s a world filled with double standards, and looks count for everything! Look good enough, and you can get away with anything. But more important by far than any objective impact on my appearance, those little discs made me feel more attractive. And that’s priceless, no matter who you are.

FURTHER READING

My Time in Air Force Boot Camp
My Time in the Seduction Community
My Time at the University of Arizona

Friday Night at Dupont Circle

We touched down in Ronald Reagan International Airport pretty late in the evening. Took a taxi to the city, not yet familiar with the awesome subways. Checked in for our first two nights at the St. Gregory hotel on M Street and 21st. The Marilyn Monroe statue in the lobby was cool. After dropping off our bags, we took to the streets for some Hashigo– or barhopping as it’s better known.

On a Friday Night, the downtown DC area is hopping with youth. To a city boy like me, it was fantastic. We wandered randomly, letting fate play tour guide. Our hotel was near Dupont Circle, a kind of town center where a bunch of state-named roads intersect. The whole surrounding area was happening. We ate and drank and were merry like we might die the next day, but we could hardly scratch the surface of Washington DC cuisine. We retired to the hotel.

Saturday Around the White House

The next day we headed southeast toward the White House and the area around it. To our surprise and delight, we stumbled into Lafayette Square in the middle of a medium-sized demonstration. It was quite fun walking around watching the protesters, who generally put on a great show. The White House itself surprised me: it was so small, and the security was so casual! The gates were guarded by the same security guards you’d expect at your local mall. I’m sure there were snipers hiding on the roof and death-ray satellites peering down from space, but for all appearances, it looked like the executive office of the United States could be overrun by a villain from “Die Hard”.

We headed south to the Washington Monument. It looks skinny in pictures, but you have to stand under the thing to appreciate its true magnitude. Straining your neck, you can barely make out the upper reaches of the monolithic tower. Next time I roll it up in “Katamari Damacy” I’ll appreciate it more

Turning east we set our scopes on the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Before we’d reach it, we got in a minor scuffle. Some guy was very enthusiastically handing out fliers for the Holocaust Museum. I accepted one to be polite but kept walking, the man was very insistently trying to stop and engage us but we weren’t really interested. Seeing we weren’t likely to turn around right there and go straight to his Holocaust Museum, the guy turned hostile and demanded his flier back. He charged after us and grabbed it from my hand when we ignored him. “Leave us the f— alone” I snarled at the attacker, he was trying to intimidate us not unlike a brownshirt thug, I wasn’t about to be the pants-wetting tourist he was used to, I flipped him the bird and cussed him out as we walked away, that set him in a righteous outrage. I really hope the guy works out his issues before someone hurts him.

The Air & Space Museum was pretty cool. No doubt the most poignant part was the area devoted to air warfare in the WWII Pacific Theater. The battle-hardened aces of that era would be astonished to see an American and a Japanese walking hand-in-hand looking at Japanese and American fighter-planes side-by-side.

After the museum closed, we wandered the town continuing the bar-and-restaurant-hopping of the night before.

Sunday in Georgetown and The Capitol Building

We moved hotels to the Four Points Sheraton. It felt odd casually walking K Street, where Tom DeLay and his army of corrupt politicians subverted so much of our government in the previous decade. It wasn’t sinister like it seemed from reading about The K Street Project from a distance. Just another ordinary street, same as Pennsylvania Avenue and probably Wall Street.

Because I’m such a university campus nerd, we hopped a bus and headed northwest to Georgetown, home of the old catholic Georgetown University. The campus is built high up on a hill and overlooks the Potomac River, and the ancient architecture is really sweet. Ever the Urban Explorer, I helped myself into every nook and cranny I wasn’t supposed to go to. No, I didn’t find the steam tunnels, unfortunately While the university was fun to look at, I’m glad I don’t go there, far too religious for my tastes. Based on the pictures in one of the halls, it seems it gets a lot of graduation speeches from presidents and cabinet-members, a benefit of being a stone’s throw from where the nation is run.

We returned to our room and rested for awhile. Checking the internet, I suddenly discovered that at that very moment, the eyes of the entire nation were on the city as Congress engaged in the final debate on Obama’s Health Care Reform bill.

We decided to head to the Capitol Building to get a closer look. My girlfriend suggested we take the subway but I veto’d her, “It’s not that far, we saw it from the National Monument, it’s just down the street!” What I didn’t realize was that the Capitol Dome is ridiculously huge, making it look close from just about anywhere! An hour and a half later, our trek finally took us to the steps outside the Hill. We could hear the Tea Party protesters shouting on the other side of the building, but by then we were both pretty tired from walking and decided to return by taxi. Still it was cool being within earshot of the action. (Literally minutes after we got back to our room, the bill passed, by 219 to 212)

Monday at the Art Gallery

Next day, we retraced much of the previous night’s steps to visit the National Gallery of Art. I thought to myself: “The stereotype about art galleries is they’re just a bunch of sterile rooms with paintings on the walls. I’m sure that’s inaccurate and outdated. I’m sure they’ve upgraded the gallery with cool new innovations I can’t even imagine.” Turns out the old stereotypes are dead right. It was a bunch of paintings and statues you’re not allowed to touch

Since the art gallery was already 9/10ths of the way to the Capitol, we decided to revisit it, this time in daylight. There was a lot more to see by the light of day, and this time we went all around it, unfortunately they weren’t letting visitors in. I saw the Supreme Court from across the parking lot but it was starting to rain so we decided to head to Union Station.

If you go to DC, don’t waste time before learning the subway system. It’s awesome. Not quite as awesome as the Tokyo subway system, but still pretty good. If I could do the trip over again, I’d spend a day just riding the metro all over everywhere

After spending some time at the hotel (I quickly penned an article for the website), we went out barhopping again, this time hitting up a very authentic and high-quality Japanese place, Kaz Sushi.

Tuesday at the Zoo

Our last full day in the city, we headed to the National Zoological Park up in the northwest outskirts of DC. The subway made the journey easy. The coolest part of the zoo, by far, was the panda exhibit. Did you know that a grown panda spends ten to twelve hours a day eating? And they eat almost nothing but bamboo. While the pandas were the coolest, there were other thought-provoking exhibits, like the molerat colony, displayed like an antfarm. We saw a pair of wild ducks in the tiger enclosure– I wonder whether they survived the day! They probably didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into when they chose that place to migrate to!

We kind of got lost trying to find the exit from the zoo. Wandering around the outskirts of the park, near the parking lots, we suddenly felt soft ground underfoot. We were on a freshly-laid sidewalk of wet cement, with no warning tape or anything. Maybe some annoyed worker smoothed them over, but there’s a chance our footprints are left in the city forever

My girlfriend was enchanted by the previous night’s authentic Japanese food, so we did some research, found all the good Japanese places nearby, and headed out. We settled on what seemed to be the best one, Sakana, near Dupont Circle. Sushi rolls from heaven

Wednesday at the Pentagon

We signed out of the hotel but we left a part of our hearts in the city. My girlfriend asked me where I wanted to go and I jokingly suggested The Pentagon, thinking it was unreasonably out of the way. She pointed out that it’s actually right on the way from DC to the airport So we took the yellow line metro and got off at the Pentagon.

The thing about the Pentagon is that up close, you can’t tell it’s a pentagon at all. It looks like a big rectangular building. If you look from an angle so that a corner is visible, then it looks like a big rectangular building with a corner. Kind of disappointing in that sense. I did see a lot of officers, though– if I were wearing my old Air Force blues, I’d've had to put my arm in rapid-fire salute mode. Seems like full-bird colonels are to the Pentagon what regular grunts are to any other military base. I guess if you deploy to the Pgon as a “mere” colonel, they probably make you mop floors and peel potatoes “Hey colonel, scrub these toilets!”

We didn’t have very long before our flight, and the nation’s central fortress wasn’t accepting walk-ins, so we decided to explore a little around Crystal City, a small town two stations away. It was ok. Then we took a couple wrong subway cars and ended up God-knows where But we were able to find our way back to the yellow line and back to Reagan International Airport in time to make the return flight to Columbus.

Stepping foot in the capitol city, I’ll never look the same at politics again. Washington DC is no longer some distant concept to root for or against, it’s a real city full of real people, it has a lot of awesome bars and restaurants, it has pandas and subways and boring sculptures and crazy flier-giver-outers and coffee shops and everything else you can imagine. It was a blast and I’d recommend it to anyone with a few days to spare. I’m glad I went.

FURTHER READING

Pictures from Washington DC (Not Online Yet!)
My Florida Trip
Pictures from Japan
My Trip to the Fujitaisekiji Buddhist Cult
69 Things I Did In Vegas

There’s no RSS for the webcomic yet. I’ll have to teach myself the RSS protocol and build one from scratch. Shouldn’t take too long, just depends how much I can keep myself from procrastinating

I have absolutely zero experience with any kind of graphic design, and very little with humor in general. I’m starting at the absolute bottom of the learning curve– which is awesome, means I’ll learn a ton.

I pulled out some PHP ninjitsu to make it so the URLs for the comics reside in main space instead of in some subdirectory: “www.xamuel.com/blah” instead of “www.xamuel.com/webcomic/blah”. Of course that’s in direct conflict with the fact that my written articles (like the one you’re reading now) *also* reside in main space. I believe this is a better reflection of the future of the web. There’s no more need to clutter URLs with subfolders upon subfolders– especially when the contents at those URLs don’t even exist as real physical files anyway (all my articles and webcomic and, basically, everything on the site, are virtual files stored in databases).

So go check it out! My First Webcomic.

1. Having a great dream, and remembering it vividly after waking up.
2. Sharing a smile with a cute stranger.
3. Getting invited to a party.
4. Making new friends and hanging out with old ones.
5. Publishing a great article.
6. Solving a tough math exercise I’ve been stuck on.
7. Making passionate love.
8. Eating the delicious curry cooked by my cute girlfriend.
9. Rediscovering an old song I used to love and somehow forgot about.
10. Getting links to my website from other people.
11. Taking a nice luxurious shower.
12. Working out ’til my muscles can’t take it no more.
13. Singing karaoke (Japanese style).
14. Wearing a good-looking new shirt for the first time.
15. Getting presents for no particular occasion.
16. Drinking a cup of good tea.
17. Finishing a big project and having the sense of a job well done.
18. Seeing cool sites out the window of an airplane.
19. Autumn.
20. Drinking with friends and loved ones.
21. Watching someone beat a video game in record-breaking time.
22. Reading anything which revolutionizes how I think about something.
23. Texting with friends/girlfriend.
24. Playing Katamari Damacy (and its sequels).
25. Watching Urusei Yatsura or any other great anime.
26. Climbing trees.
27. Exploring places I’m not supposed to go
28. Watching technology/civilization/the world advance over the years.
29. Kissing my girlfriend and getting kissed by her.
30. Finding coins or other money laying around.
31. Getting/giving a good massage.
32. Wearing clothes which are still warm from being in the dryer.
33. Seeing the politicians win that I voted for/supported.
34. Showing public displays of affection.
35. Lucid dreaming.
36. Getting an A on a hard test.
37. Seeing my friends succeed.
38. Snuggling up before bed.
39. Stereographs.
40. Getting to the bus stop right exactly as the bus arrives.
41. Riding the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) in Japan.
42. Getting so caught up in a novel that I can’t put it down.
43. Being blown away by a great movie.
44. Telling a joke and making people laugh.
45. Being present.
46. Driving around with my girlfriend.
47. Seeing a cute girl checking me out.
48. Helping a student understand a math question they were confused about.
49. Giving a good public speech.
50. Looking good in a picture.
51. Getting complimented for my shirt/hair/smile.
52. Discovering a great new band.
53. When a warm front suddenly comes through and ends a week of cold weather.
54. Getting fan mail.
55. Seeing a prediction I made come true (provided it’s a good prediction).
56. 5-Second Films.
57. Seeing my webtraffic grow over time.
58. Dancing at 80s night at the club.
59. Waking up to teach and finding my girlfriend made lunch for me.
60. Going out on a date.
61. Eating fantastic Italian food and sipping fine wine with my girl.
62. Going to watch a great movie at the theater.
63. Five-, six-, or seven-day weekends.
64. Computability theory, ordinal analysis, large cardinals, etc…
65. Going to the beach.
66. Discovering I have something unexpectedly in common with a friend.
67. Pulling off some wicked tight computer programming.
68. Seeing a big new update to an open source project that seemed dead for years.
69. Cool poetry (like Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Kubla Khan).
70. Going somewhere with a clear sky and seeing bajillions of stars.
71. Introducing friends to other friends.
72. Breaking all the rules and getting away with it.
73. Seeing my students kick butt on the final.
74. Writing a really hard kanji and getting it perfect.
75. Finding an elementary proof for a math theorem that nobody was expecting.
76. Seeing my critics go crazy when I publish a particularly revolutionary essay
77. Writing positive affirmations.
78. Getting a great new haircut.
79. Being accepted for who I am.
80. Loving and being loved.
81. The general weirdness of reality
82. Reading about cool scientific breakthroughs.
83. Looking around underwater with goggles.
84. Relaxing in a hot tub.
85. Stowing away in youth hostels.
86. Discovering new things I never knew about myself.
87. Finding cool/weird/funny sites online.
88. Discovering crazy glitches in popular video games.
89. Swinging on a swingset.
90. Drawing pictures together with a partner.
91. Getting huge bursts of traffic from StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites.
92. Lounging around the apartment without a care in the world
93. Being healthy.
94. Brightening up someone’s day.
95. Hearing a foreign language and effortlessly understanding.
96. Knowing that I had a good productive day.
97. Thinking about how awesome the future is.
98. Growing my knowledge.
99. Seeing other people being happy.
100. Being alive!

What are 100 things that make you happy??

FURTHER READING

An Invitation to Hedonism
The Law of Beliefs
One Hundred Reality Escapes
10 Metaphors For Love

There’s a lot of work I still have to do to complete the move. It’s not just a domain name change, but a whole brand change. Hundreds of articles mention the old name and will need to be updated. Half a dozen projects have the GFM brand hardcoded into them and will need to be updated. Fortunately, the old address hasn’t gone anywhere, and all queries to glowingfaceman.com will continue to go through, most being redirected to www.xamuel.com.

Since I’m already moving every page on the site, I figured there might never be such a great opportunity to do some other URL restructuring. Articles will no longer have “/blog/” in their address, and will instead be located right at the root. It looks so nice now, I love it

Traces of the old domain name will probably linger for quite awhile… just like a lot of the older articles contain links in the old Blogspot format Eventually, sitings of the old domain name will become more and more rare, until they become priceless “internet collectors items” Meanwhile, xamuel.com will rise to unprecedented success, eclipsing Google and Facebook and Wikipedia! Errr, or so I hope!

FURTHER READING

Blogspot vs. WordPress
Blogger Static Frontpage Generator
Moving From Blogspot To WordPress
How To Improve Blogspot

One of the main reasons for going to forums was, I was never quite satisfied with how blog comments work. They work alright on very new posts, but I’m a writer who writes for the long term. No matter how old an article may be, lively discussion is still welcomed and invited. With the classic comment system, if someone comments on an older article, the general readership probably won’t notice. But with forums, the commented thread will get “bumped” to the top of the list, putting it back in the public eye

So from now on, comments will be closed on all the articles themselves, but every article will contain a link to the forum where it can be discussed. In fact, in a short while, the comments currently existing on the article pages, will disappear. But don’t worry, no comments will are deleted: they’re just moved to the forum. Even now, all the existing comments have been loaded into the forums. That includes all the comments from when this blog was hosted by blogspot. Finally, all the discussion which was lost in the transition from Blogger to WordPress, has been restored!

Right now, the forums are a little bare bones. I’ve got a lot on my plate, but it’s proving a lot of fun, so the work is more like play. My next major goal will be to incorporate BBCode so that you can discuss things with fancy, high-tech things like bold and italics

Something awesome happened which I take as a very good sign. When I submitted the initial forums sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, it turned out the number of URLs was exactly 311. That’s a sort of lucky number for me. I tend to see it everywhere, similar to how some people report seeing 11:11 everywhere.

One of the areas where I’m really stretching my muscles is in the visual design department. The current layout at the forum isn’t carved in stone at all, in fact that’s another one of the big goals I have, is to revamp it to make it really look good. I’m just grateful we have CSS nowadays and I’m not having to manually insert style instructions all throughout the html!

I’ve already had some requests for moderator status, and I’d gladly knight some mods, except that moderation isn’t actually programmed in yet Right now, we’re talkin’ about the Wild Wild West of boards. There’s gold in these hills, I tell ya!

I’ve noticed a pattern from this latest endeaver and from the Connections Project. When I start a new Web2.0 project, I have a fairly clear vision of how it’s going to work overall, based upon my current knowledge of PHP/SQL. And that bird’s eye vision is pretty right-on, but I inevitably run into all sorts of technical details I didn’t see, and which force me to stretch and expand that knowledge I started with. By the time the project is reaching public launch, I’ll inevitably have discovered some new tricks which I wish I’d known about from the very beginning. The next program I whip up, I’ll be starting from this stronger position, but the pattern will inevitably repeat itself. That’s how learning goes It’s how I mastered C, and it’s how I’ll master anything. I might have to go back later and completely rewrite some of the original code from scratch =P

Now that I’ve got discussion boards set up, besides fleshing them out (and fleshing out the other things I’m running), it’s time to consider what build next. I’ve got so many great ideas, the hardest part is just deciding on one and running with it. I really feel like I’ve discovered a new set of wings or something, which I had all along but somehow failed to see. The only thing more exciting than the future, is the present

FURTHER READING

Announcing: The Newsletter!
Blogspot Static Frontpage Generator
The Halting Problem
Computer Programming In My Life

The page to subscribe to the newsletter is here.

I’ve been wanting to set up a newsletter for awhile and I’m glad I finally got around to it. Now to start thinking about what to publish in the first issue…

FURTHER READING

My Experience with Computer Programming
Moving from Blogspot to WordPress
Invitation to Hedonism

We gathered around as Dad experimented with typing commands into the system. It was no mere computer strewn out on the living room floor, it was the bridge of the NCC-1701, the control panel of the Millennium Falcon, the enormous black obelisk from 2001 Space Odyssey. Shrieking we raised our ignorant ape fists and beat at the monolith’s keyboard; it responded again and again with one cryptic prophecy: “Bad command or file name.” A flash of inspiration gleamed in my father’s eyes, sparked no doubt by some accelerated Kubrickesque evolution, he hoisted a crude bone and pounded the letters “B A S I C” into the machine. The click of the enter key, and the stars suddenly swirled into a blur as our Millennium Falcon leaped into hyperdrive.

If you’ve done much work with a real programming language, you’d quickly realize how primitive GW-Basic was. It had no pointers, no classes, no functions. It was the closest thing to a raw Turing machine short of pure opcodes, and that’s probably a good thing because I’d go on to study Turing machines in university much later. My parents watched in awe when I made my first “animation”, a spaceship taking off: the spaceship was ASCII art and the “animation” consisted of printing lots of blank lines underneath to make the screen scroll down.

My older brother and I programmed together in the early years. Our great magnum opus (sadly never finished) was a project to convert an old Choose Your Own Adventure book into our very own home-brewed video game. We spent hours assembling a faithful ASCII art representation of the map from the inside cover. Gradually, my brother’s interests wandered away from IF…THEN and GOTO, and coding became a solo trek.

What I wanted most was to create my own in-depth RPG, something like Seth Robinson’s Legend of the Red Dragon. Looking back, I can honestly say I made pretty great progress. I could eventually cobble together a basic text-based action game, but without functional abstraction, there’s only so much you can do line-by-line. I had a vague awareness that there were other languages out there, names like C, Fortran, and Pascal were whispered like hushed rumors of some clandestine underground movement, but back then, higher programming languages were not cheap or easy to get one’s hands on. Especially for a little kid!

Computer programming was gradually demoted to a much lower priority in my life as my interests diverged toward other things. Besides, even the slight enhancements in QBASIC weren’t enough to let me spread my wings like I wanted. I continued to write the occasional flashy screen-saver, but mostly the art of coding entered a dark ages for several years of my life.

TEACHING MYSELF C

By the time I was in my mid-teens, compilers had become accessible to the general public. I was very much into MUD games, with their scrolling text and extensive virtual worlds. I was a regular player of Realms of Despair, which was kind of the ancient text-based ancestor of Everquest and World of Warcraft. As I put in more and more hours into RoD, my character there (Valcados the Druid) grew in fame until I was one of the most elite players in the game. In order to make further progress, it was necessary for me to unravel the very physics of the universe. I swore a pact with Satan, I devoured the fruit of the knowledge of good and buggy, I downloaded the game engine source-code. Valcados the Druid had just discovered the human genome code of the universe, the fundamental theory of everything, God’s own blueprints– and they were written in C.

Teaching myself C was very easy, in part because I had the primitive skills from BASIC (as well, by now, as the abstract cognitive strategies of higher math), and in part because I had this whole world that I was already intimately familiar with and which was written in C. I needed no manual and only the occasional glance at online reference materials. Most of my C literacy grew passively through peering into the metaphysical laws of SMAUG. Valcados the Druid transcended his material world, becoming like Neo from The Matrix, no longer seeing dragons or evil wizards but instead pointers and structures. Eventually his exploits drew the ire of the gods themselves, who nuked him utterly, casting his entire order from its position of dominance. Satan had called in his debts, but not before I’d made some connections with my new-found code prowess. I’d been recruited as the head programmer for The Lands of Aethar.

I’ve been programming in C ever since, and I’ve gained a profound appreciation for the language. Where object-oriented programmers attack C the most vehemently, I see the subtle and inspired reasoning behind every quirk in the C Standard.

OTHER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

After my experience with C, I can learn new languages with almost no effort. The question is no longer “What can this language do”, but “Where can this language do it?” On the nailed-down workstations in the U.S. Air Force weather forecasting hub, where nature abhors the unauthorized executable, the non-compiled, scripted lines of TCL were perfect. In a certain sense, that was a step back to BASIC, since both languages are interpreted as they go. On the early version of this website, hosted on blogspot which had no support for server-side scripting, JavaScript was the language of choice, another scripting language but this time a language which I would not run myself, one which my readers would run for me. On the new Xamuel.com, professionally hosted, I’m slowly beginning to stretch my wings out with the awesome combined power of PHP and SQL. Thus, for example, my recently launched Connections Project.

ABSTRACT COMPUTER SCIENCE

Late in my Air Force career, when I was frantically teaching myself higher math, one particular branch called out to me, as though it was what I was born to study. It was mathematical logic, and especially computability theory. In computability theory, computers are treated as mathematical objects. Logicians like Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, Stephen Kleene, and Alonzo Church had been laying the foundations of computer programming decades before anyone would sit down at a BASIC terminal! This was the next step in my computer programming experience, for no longer was I messing with the nuts and bolts of individual programs, now I was exploring the very limits of what can and cannot be programmed. My heart was halted by the beauty of The Halting Problem, my eyes were opened by the magic of oracles. To this day, I continue to study this awesome Turing Legacy, indeed I’m pursuing a PhD in logic from the Ohio State University right now.

FURTHER READING

My Time at the University of Arizona
My Time in the U.S. Air Force
The Defragmentation Metaphor
Three Applications of Higher Math
My Anime Story

I began going to community college full time while working full time as a USAF weather forecaster. A kind of passion for knowledge and education had been kindled in my heart. The local Pima Community College went out of their way to make it easy for servicemembers to take classes, and I’m deeply indebted to them for making it possible for me to complete my gen ed’s while still enslaved by Uncle Sam. But attending community college was like climbing on a small hill, in the shadow of a giant mountain. The giant mountain was the University of Arizona, tugging more and more at my heartstrings as I become more and more restless wearing the Uniform.

Ever since junior high, I’d been passionate about mathematics. During my later teens, that passion smouldered down and almost disappeared, but between issuing tedious weather watches and warnings to bases around the western U.S., the old equations and theorems began dancing through my head once more. I’d browse the U of A’s math department webpage idly while I was supposed to be watching radar screens. Reading the descriptions of advanced high math courses filled me with the same wonder and awe that I experienced so many years ago gazing at the profoundly beautiful illustrations in Euclid’s Elements.

Ever the autodidact, I began teaching myself some higher math. I taught myself the basics of abstract algebra out of Herstein’s book, which a sympathetic mathematician sent to me when he heard about my plight on a math newsgroup. The clerks at the tiny base library got to know me as one of the few airmen taking advantage of the free inter-library loan system, requesting obscure tomes on Galois theory and topology. At work I was that guy who’s always reading a textbook. But I wasn’t satisfied, my hobby was incongruent with my lifestyle.

Suddenly, I was set free, when Congress decided the Air Force was overmanned. I volunteered to turn in my stripes, getting a super-rare honorable discharge from the AF after only 2 years of service. The timing was such that I was barely able to register for the Autumn semester. In fact, I didn’t even make the deadline, but by working with the office of admissions, I was able to get in. They needed my transcripts from community college, but because I was taking classes there until the very end, the transcripts wouldn’t even be ready until after the official deadline. I ended up biking all over Tucson so that I could hand-carry my transcripts from the community college to the U of A admissions building, just because snail mail would be too slow.

First Semester

Before my first semester even began, I was busy running all over campus on various errands. First, they had me enrolled as an out-of-state student, meaning the tuition, instead of being around $2000/semester, was more like $10,000/semester. I had to go through my voluminous Air Force paperwork and find all my paycheck forms indicating I’d been paying Arizona state taxes while I was stationed there. I was very relieved I’d payed my taxes to AZ– in the military, you have some leeway to pick what state you pay taxes in. Lots of people try to claim Alaska, to cash in on pipeline pay. If I’d done that, I would’ve ended up screwed As it was, for awhile I was afraid Uncle Sam was rewarding my service by making me out-of-state in all 50 states. When I finally got cleared for in-state tuition, I was so happy I was walking on clouds.

Similarly, I had trouble initially with the financial aid department. I filled out the FAFSA application, checking “prior military, honorable discharge” where it asked how I could prove my independence from my parents. I guess the people at the finance department thought that must have been a typo or a lie, cuz how could someone as young as me be prior military with an honorable discharge? And have two years worth of community college to boot? They had so much trouble believing it, I had to bring in paperwork proving my status. It’s a good thing I was able to prove myself independent, because I’d end up getting quite a lot of free money from Pell grants later.

Because I’d done so much community college, I was entering the University of Arizona as a junior. My gen ed requirements were totally taken care of, putting me in the very wonderful position of being able to pick classes based on my major and on whatever made me happiest That first semester, I took real analysis, numerical analysis, nonlinear dynamics, graph theory, engineering physics, and just for fun, an upper level history class about the art and architecture of ancient Crete. Initially, the math department put me in an “introduction to proofs” course, but after talking to the professor, he decided I should skip past that class and go straight into the real analysis class. All the self-teaching paid off: I managed to do all the intro-proof homework (the whole semester’s worth) in one evening, giving the professor all the confirmation he needed to bump me up.

That semester, I made some close friends who would remain my closest comrades throughout all my time at the university. All math majors of course, people as passionate about mathematics as I was. We would hang out and joke about math. Or do homework together. My “reality” was very small, my whole world consisted of proofs and theorems and equations. Perhaps it was my body’s way of recuperating after the stressful couple years I’d spent slaving away wearing Air Force blues. If so, it was a much-needed recuperation. My interests wouldn’t start to open up again until my last months at the school. For a long while, I would live, eat, and breathe the abstractions of pure math.

I continued the precedent I’d set at the easier community college, managing to pull in straight A’s despite being enrolled in almost double the full-time course load. Interestingly enough, the most difficult class to ace was actually the lowest-numbered class, the only “freshman” class of the bunch, the engineering physics class. Taught by a really demanding physicist, this course was totally intense. I think only seven or eight students out of the whole auditorium managed to pull off an A, so I was more proud of my A there than in, say, the real analysis course I tested into. I would later realize the counter-intuitive pattern holds more generally: the higher level the course, the easier it is to ace, as you rise out of the “filter” classes and into stuff in your major.

Straight A Student

After getting that first semester’s grade reports, I kind of “locked into” the straight-A path. In other words, I was deteremined I was gonna graduate the University of Arizona with a 4.0. Looking back on it now, I think this was ultimately negative. The intensity with which I studied and performed assignments prevented me from working much on my social life, which was very much stunted. Besides, I’ve come to suspect that a 4.0 isn’t even the best grade to show to grad schools or potential employers. Whereas, say, a 3.7 or 3.8 would suggest a very intelligent applicant, I think a 4.0 actually sets off alarms: “Who is this guy, doesn’t he have a life, is he autistic or something?” What’s more, in the later semesters, I actually ended up dropping a couple classes to maintain my unspoilt GPA, including a work-intensive course on Game Theory, a branch of math which is very popular in popular culture these days. It would’ve been better to sit that course, even if it meant eating a B or something. In short, my high grades would eventually cause me to lose sight of why I was attending the University in the first place.

There was one definite benefit to my high grades, though: after the first couple grade reports came in, full of A’s, Uncle Sam suddenly couldn’t stop giving me money. Thanks to financial aid, I barely had to pay any tuition at all after the initial semesters. I guess someone in Washington saw me and thought, “This guy is headed straight for the NSA!” Good thing they didn’t know I’d end up lazy and hedonistic

Urban Exploration

In my later semesters, my interests finally loosened up a little. I got into the highly non-mathematical hobby of urban exploration, the art of going where you’re not supposed to go. Suddenly, the world became much more full of wonder, as every door, every window became a possible portal to adventure. I’d spend evenings wandering the gorgeous campus, finding cool places to go: I saw many a mechanical room, many a rooftop, many a construction site. Near the end of my time there, I even found an entrance to the steam tunnels, a system of really awesome tunnels that served to provide heat to all the different campus buildings from one central steam plant.

Urban exploration was important in my development as a person because it represented a certain opening up, a certain reality expansion, which widened my world beyond the narrow realm of sets and numbers. While not strictly necessary, this no doubt helped me to pick up some of the other diverse interests I’ve since acquired.

Homeless By Choice

When I first got out of the Air Force, I took up residence in a very cheap studio half an hour’s walk from the school. However, because I was so devoted to school, this proved to be basically just a place for me to sleep and eat, and less and less even a place to eat. During the Winter, when I had an 8 AM class in the physics building, I grew rather tired of waking up at 7AM for the morning “Hell march”. Though Tucson doesn’t get all that cold relatively speaking, I’m a San Diego guy, and those early Winter mornings seemed cold as the gaze of death. Besides, I usually stayed on campus very late, working in the computer labs or hanging out with other math majors. The homeward trek seemed totally pointless: I’d spend half an hour walking home in the evening, sleep, and then spend another half-hour walking back to school. So, I experimented with sleeping in the physics undergraduate lounge on the nights before the early morning physics class. Oh no!, isn’t that like being homeless or something?? Well, all I know is, it was a whole lot more convenient!

I gradually became aware of how little point there was to having my little studio apartment. If I could sleep on campus when I wanted, and if I spent most my waking life on campus anyway, then why was I paying a highly non-significant amount of my savings to some landlord somewhere? So, quietly and with little fanfare, I went homeless by choice, and started living on campus. You can read the main article here: Homeless By Choice.

Taking Graduate Classes

In my senior year at U of A, I began taking graduate level classes, having pretty much already advanced past everything the undergraduate mathematics courses could offer. My first graduate level class was a very advanced linear algebra class. When you hear “linear algebra” you probably think matrices and vectors, but I’m talking more about tensors, universal diagrams, Clifford algebras, that kind of thing. I was a little nervous filling out the paper to get in the class as an undergrad, wondering whether I’d be able to handle it. Well, it was definitely a big step up from the undergraduate material in terms of difficulty, but I really liked it and learned a lot.

In the next semesters, I pretty much took exactly the classes I would’ve taken if I was a first-year grad student. Pretty much the only differences between me and a first-year grad student were that I wasn’t teaching and that, well, I was an undergrad. There were three core grad level sequences: real analysis, algebra, and topology (the latter which was split into differential topology one semester, and algebraic topology the next). If I’d thought that the mathematics was challenging in the first semesters at the university, those bygone days were nothing compared to what I had gotten myself into in senior year. And still, I loved the classes and aced them.

Undergraduate Research Paper

Though it wasn’t required, I published an undergraduate research paper during my senior year. Around that time, a deep thirst came upon me to publish, publish, publish. Since I was still technically an undergrad, I submitted a paper to the Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal. The topic was computability theory; I dispatched a question which had been interesting to me since long before I even enrolled at the university. The problem of finding a formula for an arbitrary function. I handled this using machinery from the field of computability theory, as well as a lot of machinery I came up with on my own. The big result, in English, says: “Any function that can be programmed into a computer, has an explicit formula” (with lots of qualifiers on what “explicit formula” actually means).

This paper would foreshadow the path I would later take in graduate school: mathematical logic. The work I put into that paper seemed to confirm that I’m born with a knack for logic. Not only that, but I also love logic, so much so that I want to do some work to further the field as a whole. That’s where I’m at right now, in grad school.

Graduating from the University of Arizona

Based on my GPA, I was chosen as the outstanding graduate from the math department among my graduating class. But I would not end up “walking” at the official graduation ceremony. Here’s what happened. In order to crunch the last week of the year down as much as possible, because grad students generally don’t attend the undergraduate commencement ceremony, some graduate courses at UA actually have their final exam scheduled during the big event. Such was the case with the graduate algebraic topology class I was taking. Now, I could’ve gotten permission to take the final at a different time in the professor’s office, but honestly I didn’t care that much about the ceremony, and didn’t really mind missing it.

But then when some of the staff at the undergraduate math department were asking me about it, I didn’t want come out and say all that. To this day I dunno why I did it, but I told a rather ridiculous lie, saying that I wasn’t going to attend because I couldn’t afford the cap and gown! Before I knew it, the staff had chipped together and gave me the $20 necessary to buy the outfit. That put me in an awkward position, and I really regretted saying what I did. It was kind of too late to ask the professor to give me a special exam session. I hoped that I would be able to hit the ceremony, walk up and shake the dean’s hand, and rush off to take my algebraic topology final. There was about a half hour of ceremony time before the final actually started, and my last name starts with ‘A’, so I figured I had a pretty decent chance. Unfortunately, some guy noone ever heard of was giving some big speech, and I had to rush out to catch the final without ever using the robe the math department staff had paid for. As far as I know, the robe and cap I bought are still tucked away in a corner in the physics undergraduate lounge

I graduated with a four-point-ohhh, though it didn’t end up being as big of a victory as I imagined it would be. The requirements to graduate “summa cum laude” were only a 3.8 or 3.9, and there wasn’t really any other kind of special distinction to mark the perfect list of A’s. I had sacrificed some of my social life for, essentially, not a whole lot.

After Undergraduate

The math department offered to let me continue toward my PhD with them, even offering me a very generous stipend (one of the perks of majoring in mathematics is that you never hurt for money during your grad program). But there’s a kind of community wisdom that you shouldn’t do your undergraduate degree and your graduate degree at the same institution, and I ended up going to the Ohio State University instead, which is where I’m still enrolled as I write this article today.

At the University of Arizona, Tucson, I learned a ton of mathematics, and I also grew and expanded as a person. The rarefied environment of the mathematics department was the perfect place for me to recuperate from my long tenure in the military, and I when I emerged blinking in the sunlight, I was a healed man. I met some really awesome people on campus and I had a lot of fun in the wonderful city of Tucson. All in all, my time at Arizona’s oldest university was one of the most fun times in my life.

FURTHER READING

My Experience in Air Force Boot Camp
5 Ways to be Better At Mathematics
Become More Intelligent by Doing New Stuff
My Time in the Seduction Community
Training Self-Discipline
Pictures from Japan

It turns out I really rocked the ASVAB. I ended up deciding on the Air Force instead of the army, though I can’t remember why that was exactly. It was probably a good thing, though, because otherwise I might be dead right now: this whole story takes place in the early 2000′s, and I’d be doing in-processing to my first duty station right about when marines were doing “in-processing” to Baghdad.

I took advantage of the Delayed Enlistment Program, which let me put off shipping to boot camp for a few months. During this time I made some effort to beef myself up: unlike a lot of recruits who were struggling with being overweight, I was actually underweight. I actually bought some kreatine powder and forced myself to swallow the foul stuff, though I wasn’t really using it right (it’s supposed to supplement a good weightlifting routine, and back then I’d never walked in a real gym in my life). When the time finally came when I would ship out from MEPS, one part of the all-day-long paperwork process was a physical examination, and I’m fairly sure the airman lied when recording my weight so that I would pass.

I hadn’t thought about how they’d transport me to basic training, but I was expecting something military; instead, they sent us off on a civilian aircraft. Handed our orders to report at Lackland, we were bussed to the airport and then we were on our own: surprisingly, no sergeant would accompany us on the trip. We could’ve easily gone AWOL, and when I misplaced my ID in a food court, it almost looked like I was gonna miss my first flight out! But we all made the flight to Texas alright, and when we stepped onto the busses to the air force base, boot camp officially began.

I did bootcamp with Wolfpack Squadron, and it was a transformational time in my life. In fact, you can read about the boot camp experience in its own separate series: My Air Force Boot Camp Experience. Six and a half weeks spent in Lackland under the tutelage of irate drill sergeants feels more like six and a half years; I was like a soft piece of metal put through a merciless forge, and I emerged hardened and wizened. My time in the Air Education and Training Command would actually extend to a half-year, for after boot camp, I attended a very long tech school in weather forecasting, where conditions were only marginally improved over boot camp.

After I graduated and officially became a weather forecaster, I was able to take some of the leave I’d been accumulating during all those grueling days of training. I flew home to San Diego and enjoyed life back home like I’d never enjoyed it before, no longer taking for granted the long days spent idly around the house. I got a few extra weeks of leave by participating in the Recruiter Assistance Program (RAP). Theoretically, this means spending a couple weeks working regular work hours at the recruiter’s office. In actual practice, I went in for a couple hours a week, sealing envelopes of recruitment propaganda. It was pretty much just free extra leave days.

Perhaps because of my great academic performance in Tech School, I was granted my wish when it came to first duty station: Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona. I should mention that I’d made my preferences while still at Lackland, when my judgment was hardly at its clearest: overwhelmed by homesickness, I’d cast all my bids frantically for safe, stateside bases in the southwest U.S. where I’d grown up. For brand new weather forecasters, there are only a handful of bases, and DM was the most southwestern stateside one of the bunch. Looking back on it now, I wish I’d been more bold and made a grab for Yakota AFB in Japan, or maybe Sembach Airbase, Germany. But then who knows where I’d've ended up, where I’d be now? At the time, I was jubilant at my fortunes, and this was reflected when I arrived at the base with enthusiasm.

As if I hadn’t been through enough BS or enough classes in the past half year, it turned out my first duty as a weather forecaster would be to undergo even more training and more menial work. The base did its best to make welcome newcomers from the pipeline by assigning everyone two weeks of general base-cleaning duty. Uncle Sam had provided me with months and months of intense meteorological indoctrination so I could sweep floors and pick up trash. Next came a week or two of base-specific classroom briefings, most of which were repeats of briefings we’d already sat through once in Lackland and again in tech school. Yes, I’ve seen my life’s quota of suicide prevention powerpoint presentations– it’s enough to drive a man to suicide!

When we finally got through all the base-wide welcome party, and I finally fell under the jurisdiction of the actual weather squadron, that was only the beginning of my post-training training. For a couple weeks, we literally had no assignments, as we were simply waiting for the next in-squadron class to begin. During this limbo period, we showed up at work just to warm the seats. We were told to study our CDC packets, thick books of rote trivia tangentially relevant to our jobs, which we’d be tested on. I managed to pass the tests before I even got official copies of the packets, working instead out of xerox’d copies.

Finally, our class launched, and I spent the next couple months learning how to forecast the weather. This sounds all well and good, but it made me resent the whole time at Keesler Tech School: why did I suffer through six months there if they were just gonna train me again at my duty station?

The enthusiasm that followed me off the plane at Tucson International Airport was rapidly evaporating, and then came a turning point, before I’d even published my first real weather forecast. Someone wrote something on one of the bathroom stalls in the squadron. “Weather Sucks”, or something. When nobody stepped forth to claim responsibility, the entire day shift from that day was punished with a day of hard cleaning duty. If the squadron’s intention was to shatter whatever morale the unit had, they were quite successful.

Finally, I graduated from the 25 OWS training flight and proceeded to “the floor”, where I would actually produce operational forecasts, work that would actually have some effect on the world. It was close to a year since I’d packed my bags and left my parents’ home. There was a little more spring in my step for awhile, but my destiny was neither to be a cloud jock, nor any other kind of “normal” worker. On the operations floor, I began encountering little gripes that exist in any job. Bosses who punish you for being only four minutes early for work when you’re supposed to be five minutes early. Meetings with no real purpose besides fulfilling the meetings quota.

What really got to me, though, was the gradual horrifying realization that there was nothing I was doing that couldn’t be automated. To the extent that my job was creative, it was in creatively coming up with justifications to copy whatever the automated models were predicting. I was an expert at this, and if the models predicted the holy apocalypse, I’d be there justifying it with plenty of scientific-sounding verbage. I don’t know how unique I was in this. Maybe some of my coworkers really strained to “beat the models”, but ultimately you could copy them and nothing would happen.

I was so confident that parts of my job could be automated that I actually began the automation process myself. It began with the realization that one of our main pieces of software was programmed in TCL, a scripted language which isn’t actually compiled into machine code. I could just open the appropriate folder and casually browse the program’s original source-code! With only a little trouble, I was able to modify the program to add new functionality that would help us out a lot with our watches and warnings. My immediate supervisor was very nervous, so I had to undo the changes. But from that experiment I took away the realization that I could write my own scripts, as long as they weren’t interfering with the ones the Air Force had bought from civilian contractors.

In less than a week, I whipped up some scripts which reduced my workload by a good 25-50%. Suddenly, I had a lot more free time on the job! That should have made me feel really good, but it just made me resent the job even more. And with resentment came deeper, more disturbing feelings. I began feeling paranoid, that my coworkers were conspiring against me. My body was rejecting the USAF like a disease, and I had to get out. Thus began my darkest days in the service.

I was stuck in a kind of negative feedback pattern. I complained bitterly about everything around me, and in turn, that caused things to deteriorate further. In short, I had an attitude problem. At some point, any objective justifications for my complaints became irrelevant, it’s like I was flying on autopilot. I spread cynicism everywhere I went, openly badmouthing the service. This of course rubbed lots of people in exactly the wrong way and accomplished nothing constructive. I think that my very ego itself was rejecting the world I was in, and it’s like I was subconsciously sabotaging myself at every turn. I’d forget to salute a colonel, or sleep past a flight meeting, and find myself in a world of sh–.

Despite all this, I was the perfect airman in many ways. I was about the only guy in my flight who didn’t secretly drink underage (in fact I wouldn’t drink alcohol at all until years later). I hardly even left the base, living in the dorms long after a lot of my peers had taken advantage of off-base housing allowances. I saved money like Scrooge. Perhaps most remarkable of all, I was taking college classes full time. I requested night shifts specifically so I could spend my days in classes (conveniently held right on the base, some of them five minutes from my dorm room). Sometimes, I’d work a 12-hour night shift, go crash in my room for a couple hours, and then wake up and attend classes til the next shift began. When I first registered, they were hesitant to let me take so many credit hours, and warned me the Force wouldn’t pay if I failed a class. Somehow I ended up acing every course I took.

When I’d left my parents’ home, I didn’t appreciate college. Being an enlisted man gave me a deep new appreciation for education. The U.S. military is split into the enlisted ranks and the officer ranks, and the main thing separating them is education: an officer’s commission requires a 4-year degree. The difference in status was enormous, such that in theory, the lowest ranking second lieutenant was higher than the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. At the same time, my childhood love affair with mathematics was re-emerging, and I longed to escape the drudgery of meteorology for the abstract theories of higher math. There was, however, a limit to how advanced of classes I could take while constantly working. It’s like I was trapped in a cage, and I could see this vast wonderful world all around me, but I had no hope of escaping. My resentment grew until I despised every terminal aerodrome forecast, every METAR, every shift-change briefing, every watch and warning.

A fleeting beacon of hope shone forth from Washington: Congress suddenly decided that the Air Force was overmanned, and it had to cut its ranks. Thus was born Force Shaping 2005, and across the service, volunteers were sought to leave early. I volunteered immediately, and then I waited while the applications were processed. I waited and I waited, suffering in anticipation, and then I was denied. There was too much demand for weather forecasters, they said!

I’d relished this desperate hope for release, only to have it snatched right from my hands. I decided I would try to malinger my way out; I met with base psychologists and told them I couldn’t cope. But I never had the guts to go as far as I’d really need to to get out this way. I didn’t have the balls to run naked around base raving about aliens, or declare myself Napoleon, or go catatonic. All I managed was to add shame to all my other troubles, shame because I knew that I was perfectly healthy and yet there I was trying to get a shrink to give me a medical discharge.

There came a turning point when I felt like I was about at rock bottom. In a moment of clarity I perceived the negative patterns I was stuck in, and I consciously decided to fix my attitude. I’d known since junior high about the importance and power of positive thinking, but I’d let my thoughts sink to the most negative state of my whole life. Reluctantly, I forced myself to acknowledge sole responsibility for where I was. Nobody made me sign the contract, swear oaths of allegiance, or choose the career I did. Whatever creative energy I had to alter my life, I was pouring into the dead-ends of blame and resentment.

I began intentionally working to be more positive. I resumed writing daily affirmations, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Immediately, a dark blindfold was lifted from my eyes. I began to see my workplace more realistically, no longer clouded by paranoia, cynicism or hatred. Although objectively I had no new powers to escape my surroundings, a kind of calm came over me, an unexplainable foreknowledge that powerful forces were at work and that all would be set right.

I was even beginning to take action to move my productivity TCL scripts up through the proper channels, to try and get them officially accepted and acknowledged. But suddenly all that became less important: a new round of Force Shaping applications were being called for, and it seemed that the AF was becoming more desperate to get volunteers. I submitted the second application the very first day possible, then I let it go and put my energy into improving my immediate surroundings. Dressing a little better, keeping my room a little cleaner, avoiding complaining. I wasn’t even thinking about that application, and early one morning, my flight master sergeant called my room. I had two weeks to out-process; I was accepted for Force Shaping!

My last two weeks in the armed forces were a little surreal. I was no longer going to the floor to forecast storms, I was going to various buildings on base and filling out paperwork. I was ecstatic. Suddenly I had new things to worry about and prepare for. I was going to be a math student at the University of Arizona!

Due to how the minimum contract length in the Air Force is four years, people tend to be a little surprised when they hear I was there for only two years and got out with a fully Honorable Discharge. I’m probably one of very few to have pulled that off. My experience as a soldier was one of constant mind games, ceaseless degradation, endless meaningless work, and for a long time, resentment and hatred. But would I have been better off if I’d gone straight to university? Who knows. The thing about life is, you can’t regret anything you do, cuz you never know how things would’ve been if you chose differently. My life is totally awesome today, but if I hadn’t taken the path I took, I’d certainly not be where I am now. The main thing is, I learned and grew from the whole experience, and the bad times might have been exactly the pill I needed to hammer home the power of how we think.

FURTHER READING

My Time in Air Force Boot Camp
My Time in Air Force Tech School
Air Force Core Values
Become More Intelligent by Doing New Things
My Anime Story