Blog - /Personal

I will be an associate software engineer at a company with good open source intentions in LA, as of next month. It is a very exciting time.

It has now been approximately one year since I decided to identify myself as a "positive" atheist. I have spent today reflecting on how I came to this point, what I prioritize most, and how I want to proceed in the future.

It feels good to be rid of a text which contains many ideas that can be used for great harm, and only a minority of which contain good. Justifying the preeminence of a (self-evident) selection of moral ideas over others from the same text is tedious, and leaves room for error.

The claimed exclusivity of this text is also a problem. It aggravates one's senses to be contained inside of a monoculture, a walled garden of thought. "There is something here which doesn't love a wall" — Robert Frost.

When I went to a local non-theists meeting at college, there were a few young members who were openly rude in conversation to some of those who had theistic beliefs. I don't like that. As a general rule, I think it important to be respectful and to respond thoughtfully to what people say. The American Atheists talk show can sometimes have that same sort of hostile feel (though to a lesser extent, and much of what they say I enjoy hearing). The Minnesota Atheists podcasts and radio show, on the other hand, are more even-handed.

The most recent works by authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are excellent reads — both were once theists, and have some understanding for the positions of their opponents. It is neat to hear about the unexpected popularity of these books when the authors went on tour to promote them.

One of the perks of purchasing an OLPC laptop was that T-mobile offers a year of free Internet access at their hotspots in Borders and Starbucks. When the OLPC foundations send you the "order has shipped" email, you have to click on the numeric IP address link in that message to activate the account.

I tested this access briefly today in the Borders and Starbucks locations in West Lafayette. The hotspot access worked quite well, though I had to use the normal login via HTTPS web form through an unauthenticated access point, rather than WPA, since the OLPC can't yet do username+password authentication to an access point. While in Starbucks, a girl asked me some questions about who made the laptop and what it was. This is definitely another benefit of ownership :^) .

I thought I'd jot down a few of the things that I did for the Commencement ceremony today. None of the 4 family members that I invited were able to make it, due to heavy snowfall during the night, and lots of ice on the roads, which was disappointing.

We had to be there an hour early to get in line. While in line, I enjoyed a few of my favorite things. I read part of the most recent issue of the Linux Journal magazine. I played my very own port of NetHack on the GP2X. I'm still very proud of the user interface that I rigged up for that port of NetHack — moving around in the game using the directional pad is a very fun experience, and "clicking" the directional pad to repeat the last action also feels good. I was wearing my "+20 shirt of smiting" T-shirt underneath the commencement robes, since the colors matched, which added to my own satisfaction of the experience.

I also played a very recent port of OpenTyrian to the GP2X, which I blogged about earlier. I contributed slightly to that project, along the lines of reporting a few bugs, offering some suggestions, and fixing a few #include lines.

I reflected on my own college experience. It was really more about doing interesting things than excelling academically for me. I became involved with contributing code to Free Software projects for the first time while at Purdue. Until Fall 2004, I had never worked with anyone else on these kind of projects.

I wanted to take the interesting and challenging classes, even though one of them bit me in the ass and had the effect of keeping me here for another 6 months. Computation Theory was a novel experience: it was a class that really helped me to be able to talk-the-talk around CS people. In particular, I was able to understand what the inimitable MC Plus+ expresses in his rhymes. Collaborating with Ryan on a nearly-exhaustive 12 page study guide and distributing a printed copy in the guide to each person in our small class was a poignant memory.

Taking the grad-level programming class was a trip to CS Mecca for me — it helped me land a interesting Scheme research project, provided me with a very first mention of Lisp in the classroom (huzzah!), gave me some small experience with ML, and got me excited about continuations, order of evaluation, and the scope of let-bound variables with respect to inner lambda forms.

Switching focus back to the nearer past, we were lined in groups according to our "school". In my case, this was the school of Science. As we prepared to walk to the place where the ceremony was held, our advisors yelled "Go Science!" and gave us high-fives. To hear "Go Science!" totally made my day, and made me glad that I had opted for this particular degree, and glad further that I transferred away from my previous college.

The ceremony itself was a mixed bag. I was disappointed that they were playing Christmas songs that had religious content (though without lyrics) while the diplomas were handed out. Keep that cult-of-the-majority shit out of important public events, I say — I expect a proper secular ceremony which evokes higher sentiments than religious mythology when I attend a public school. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony would have been a decent fit here: I'll settle for music espousing deist Enlightenment values in a commencement ceremony. They also had a minister on stage to give some vacuous let's-all-love-mystery sort of words near the beginning and the end, which was annoying: I most emphatically (and symbolically) kept my "thinking cap" on during his appearances. On the plus side, the band played better tunes at other times during the ceremony, and some of the music had parts where the oboe stood out.

After the ceremony, I treated myself to some chicken strips and southwest dippers at Buffalo Wild Wings. I really dig their Asian Zing sauce. After that, I saw The Golden Compass in the local movie theater, and ended the day with a Wendy's frosty. I enjoyed some of the values presented by the movie, though the talking-animal hero-story really doesn't resonate with me anymore. It would be interesting to know what the target age group of the movie thinks of The Golden Compass, compared to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Some weekends are just like this.

I took my very last final exam as an undergraduate student tonight. It's hard to believe that the day has come, but I am finally done with all of this tediousness. Bring on the rat race: it can't be any worse than sitting on my ass in uncomfortable chairs getting lectured 10 times a week :^). And it certainly should not intrude into my non 9-5 hours like school has done.

I have a particularly interesting job opportunity in California that I hope to evaluate in a few weeks.

After doing some scouting of the place yesterday, I tried the Lemongrass restaurant tonight. It is located in the basement of the Union Building on Purdue's West Lafayette campus, and just recently opened a few days ago. I wanted to try their Pad Thai, since that's the usual dish that I order at Thai places, but alas, they did not have the ingredients at hand to make this dish.

I then ordered the General Tso's Chicken, which they apparently added to the menu today, since I don't recall seeing it yesterday. Before I express my enjoyment of their preparation of this particular dish, I must lay out the metrics for what (in my opinion) makes a good General Tso's Chicken meal.

1. The chicken must be crispy, and yet paradoxically soft inside.
2. The meal must come with slices of pepper and onion.
3. The seasoning must be spot on: a little sweet, and yet salty enough to remind you that this is not a dessert.

In each category, Lemongrass' offering excelled. It was quite simply the best General Tso's Chicken that I have ever had. It was reminiscent of the cafeteria version of the dish that I would eat when I first came to Purdue, but with better seasoning.

The meal included my choice of white rice or fried rice. I opted for the white rice. They gave me my choice of between two sauces. The soy-like sauce was not really "soy sauce" per se; it was more salty and had a slightly different and nonuniform (though delicious) flavor. The peanut sauce I can't really judge comparatively due to lack of experience, but it tasted quite good. The guy at the counter was generous and gave me one of each.

I can recommend the Thai sweet tea that they offer. It's self-serve after paying for it. There was a pitcher of what looked like frothed honey beside it, to add flavor. Ice cubes were also available. I enjoyed the drink; it reminded me of Horchata, but with tea rather than rice milk as the base.

Given that General Tso's Chicken isn't even a Thai dish, I eagerly await the exercise of their culinary masterwork on some real Thai meals.