figuring it out

I've been pretty lumpy recently. Not like *depressed* depressed, but kind of a lump. Not like anhedonia, but like... shades of that. Getting to where I could understand what that might be like.

Need to focus. Need to get excited and make things.

Part of the problem has been the job search. I've been waiting and waiting to hear back from the Googs for such a long time. I did my on-site interviews back at the end of February, and I think those went pretty well. After the on-sites, they scheduled some more phone interviews, and those were weeks ago now. Every week since then, I've ritually emailed my recruiter to beg for updates, and I get "oh yeahh, things are coming along... maybe ..."

Maybe someday I'll get a job. This is exhausting. On the upside, I think it really *is* almost over; I think I'll get the actual good news next week. Failing that, I've been in contact with Y! Research -- a guy who I helped out back when I was a masters student and he was at the tail end of his gatech PhD is a Research Scientist over there, and he sounded enthusiastic about me maybe working with them. They're apparently growing like crazy as Marissa tries to make Yahoo! relevant.

I'm honestly not happy with the state of my PhD. I wish my advisor was more involved; I wanted more feedback from him even when he was here in person, and he's now been in California since 2012. I feel like in the right environment, I could have been growing and learning faster for the past few years. I get sad and upset when I look at the classes that people at other universities got to take, how much badass NLP and machine learning they got walked through, versus IU with its craptastic "sit down, shut up and eat your vegetables" approach, followed by... nothing. The vegetables are over-cooked and limp here anyway. (there are some exceptions; there are a few cool things going on here of course)

You know what's really cool? Running. Running is the best thing; I oughta do more of that.

Hey, but maybe soon I'll get a job where I not only learn stuff but also make useful software. I think that'll be nice. I want to make useful software.

ARE YOU ASKING FOR A CHALLENGE

We are doing a 30-day challenge. And we're doing it so hard, we're going to do it for 31 days. All of May.

Y'know, like NaNoWriMo or, more importantly, NaRoRuMo.

This month: I will write some code in Go every day.

Why? I want to get good at Go. If you would prefer some different challenge -- or think I should maybe be working to learn some other programming language -- you are more than welcome to do it your own damn self.

First project: implement a register machine in Go! I'm reading that Dan Dennett book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking and he gives this lovely introduction to computing through register machines. They have a nice little VM that they use in classes at Tufts, called RodRego (on github) ... and it uh... seems to be implemented in RealBASIC.

After that: all the Functional Programming Principles in Scala homework, but in Go, and maybe Project Euler problems or little NLP practice problems (a CFG parser or IBM Model 1 Aligner or something)... but I'ma write a bunch of Go code.