Most of the time, my little hacks are command line apps, without much flash. But lately I find myself doing more and more artsy side-projects.

Aside from my one at work (which is pretty cool!), I’ve been working on writing a Getting Things Done webapp here at home. I named it Sencha after my favorite green tea at Samovar, and the time when I feel most in charge of things.

After designing and implementing the data model, I’m now spending some time on the interface. I sketched this on the BART to work a few days ago. Tonight I finally got to a stage where I’m seeing some resemblance!

It’s just weird that it’s a role I’d never thought I’d like playing or have any talent for. It’s also not something they teach you in engineering school (though admittedly, I never took 160 or 169, but am not sure what level of detail they go into)

And, I mean, me? With a sketchbook?

I woke up this morning, early, for the first time in a week, to get in early, to skip lunch, to leave early, to buy Obama/Biden buttons from the SF street vendor outside the BART, to vote, to get food and to go to Katie’s election night gathering.

And you have to understand something when it comes to hanging out with Katie and Erin — they are a witty, fast, talkative pair. To be certain, their friends (many of whom I met for the first time) are likewise fun girls.

I played bartender, pizza was ordered, and a good, loud time was being had by all, until the polls closed in California

And MSNBC called the election for Obama.

I hope never to forget it. We looked at the screen like, “what?” — we didn’t know what to think. We checked Fox News, figuring that if they agreed, it had to be true.

It was.

The room was dead silent.

And we waited. A few snarky comments here and there, as McCain conceded, and waited. We were shocked; we couldn’t quite believe it. And as Obama gave his victory speech, becoming President-Elect, we collectively teared up.

No, that’s not a point of shame, it’s a point of pride.

For every election since I’ve considered myself politically aware, I have not known what it feels like to believe in my country. Every time, I get hopeful. Every time, my hopes are dashed. Prop 22, a precursor to tonight’s Prop 8, I think, was that first election; when I believed in something and felt it was wrong.

An interesting fact about me: I have never once said the Pledge of Allegiance under the Bush administration. Nor have I saluted the flag during the national anthem; I stand in respect for the latter but refuse to recite or salute. For 8 years, for a large portion of my life, ever since I was 14, I have held the firm belief that my government did not represent me. When I marched for peace on February 15, 2003, my government called me a ‘focus group’, and went to war anyway. When I voted for Kerry in 2004, my country, to my chagrin, decided on four more years of corruption and lies. I have felt my civil liberties corroded. I cried in frustration the first time I had to deal with airport security after 9/11; that my bags could be searched without warrant or cause, that I had no right to protest; it seemed that every last right I had as an American citizen was hampered, taken away, or simply ignored.

Except the right to vote.

(And let it be known that’s no cakewalk either — officially, today, I voted provisionally because my polling place moved)

And as I sat there, watching Obama give his victory speech, the tears I felt were hopeful. Which is a weird feeling to those who have never felt it. No, things aren’t perfect. No, I don’t expect Obama to fix everything with some wave of a magic wand. But I feel, for the first time, his first hundred days are going to be my hundred days. That government that I have chosen is coming to be.

That is empowerment. That is why Obama carried young voters in a landslide.

And after the tears, cheers and disbelief was over; after the cheap champagne had been poured and the party began anew, for tonight, our government worked.

As I drove home, both Telegraph and Shattuck were filled with people celebrating. I hear the City is even more crazy — Twitter tells me of spontaneous celebration filling the streets. Scott Beale (@laughingsquid) summarizes it best: “San Francisco is erupting with spontaneous patriotism”

San Francisco and the Bay Area has always been patriotic. We’re crazy, but contrary to the Bush administration, we’re not terrorists. Or communists. Or godless atheists. Or hippies. Or homosexuals. Or Asians. We are all and none of these. We are Americans.

After Obama is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, I will again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I will again salute the flag.

My country, tis of thee.

So I landed in Boston and caught the last T out from the Airport (win!) met with the Green Line over to the Red (win!)… and then watched the last T to Kendall Square leave (fail)

I’m feeling good though; I’ve been in Boston enough before to know where I am and my savvy paid off in late-night T navigation. I figure I can handle this leg of my adventure.

So, I hailed a cab, having cut the fare in half by being quick. At this point, my friend’s place in Cambridge is a pin on a Google Map to me.

So the cab lets me off and the lights are on at the place — and there are people up. I walk in the (open) front door and a tipsy fellow greets me. I ask if I’m at the right place.

A gal in the living room says “Oh, you must be Spang’s friend…”

It finally hits me that I’m not in Seattle anymore.

“What’s the story behind this place?”

“This is Pika,” I’m told.

Turns out it was a frat that went co-ed and eventually broke away and became an official MIT co-op. It’s all on their website.

Fortunately, being from Berkeley I know what the gig is. I’ve been by the co-ops. I’ve lived in a frat. This I can handle.

I’m told there are couches to crash on in the TV room downstairs. That being about what I signed up for, I head on down… open the door… and run into someone else.

“Um. Hi! I’m Barak!” I say awkwardly. And repeat my story.

“Oh, she worked out a room for you upstairs. The fellow who usually lives there is in California right now.” Fitting, I think.

I get directions. And that’s where I am now. My friend’s light is off, and she said she’d be jetlagged, so I let her be.

Am having flashbacks to my first trip to Boston, in which I crashed at Random House, thanks to a friend of a friend..

Life’s best as an adventure… had you asked me at my layover in Philly what was going to happen next, I would never have guessed…

Am writing a substantive blog on the plane. Have this weird feeling of “Aw, adventure over” and “Yay new adventure” at the same time.

Right here

Meanwhile, I have a new place to live (pretty sure) in North Berkeley! I am building a server so as to retire my current one and reduce the number of boxes I have… and life continues.

Also — Wordpress 2.5 == w00t.

And PicLens is AMAZING if you want to view photos.

My thoughts on standard nightclubs:

I’ve never been a fan. Maybe I’ve never been to a good one. Over time it’s become less of the wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy feeling that makes me distrust it; it’s just the fact that I don’t see the fun. Let’s be blunt for a second: getting drunk and rubbing up on people seems generally slimy (for men and women equally). If that’s what you’re into, sure, go for it, but take that away, and what do you have? A crowded place taking itself way too seriously with overpriced drinks and DJ Generic with his phat beatz.

(The place we were at on Friday had a particularly generic DJ. That or I’ve been spoiled by good ones (such as the one who ran the late night in Sacramento two Fridays ago))

Last night, through tutorial by a friend of mine, I figured out club “dancing” a little more, in partner dancing terms. I’d call it a drunken two-step. Oh, and the girl leads, unless you’re a real slimebucket. It’s kinda standing there and bouncing to her rhythm. Proper weight shifting optional. I say that like it’s a big revelation; of course it’s not. Maybe I had higher hopes that there was some rhythmic styling I wasn’t seeing.

So, what then to do on a Friday night, other than partner dance?

Answer: Find a small bar (like we hit up afterward) with pool tables and a friendlier, laid-back atmosphere. Going out should be about chatting and laughing; ostensibly, the reason we go to Sparky’s after 920.

I’m more Cheers than A Night at the Roxbury.

You can find them here.

I also ordered myself 14 prints, of photos new and old, off Flickr to hang on my wall.

Woot!

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten fired up about politics.

Aside from local skirmishes here and there, such as the tree sitters, I haven’t really given a damn since 2004. Even 2006 and the Dems winning back Congress was sort-of nice-but-not-interesting.

I’ve become complacent in being a Berkeley moderate. Which is to say; relative to students here I fit in quite well. The opposite was true through high school — as many of my old friends can recall, I was the one always turned to for the liberal opinion. I’d get fired up, rail on, and generally try to stand out. In some regards, it’s easy to see where I burned out; I protested war since Jan. ‘03 — and yet it happened, and only now does the majority of the country agree with me. I hoped for change in the 2004 election — and then felt shafted.

Tonight, that’s a bit different.

Since he came onto the scene in 2004, My name’s been a decent barometer to measure Barack Obama’s popularity in the Bay Area. When I introduce myself (“Hi, I’m Barak”) most people will guess it’s Eric-with-a-B, but a growing percentage have tried to remember it through association with Barack Obama. Even Prof. Zakhor last semester would call me “Obama” as sort of a mnemonic. And since he announced his candidacy, that number has been increasing slowly.

Those who’ve talked politics with me in the past may have noted I loosely supported Obama — but until tonight, I held a bit of reservation. I didn’t know if I was ready to throw my full support behind any candidate. The extremist in me liked some of what Ron Paul was saying, the pure mercenary in me liked Edwards (as an electable Democrat) but on the whole, I liked Obama the best — but was uncertain if supporting him was a pipe dream.

Tonight was very interesting, not only in that he won by a (large) 8 point margin, not only because a conservative state voted for an African-American, but most interesting was the fact that nearly twice the number of Democrats came out to vote compared to the caucus in 2004. Twice. Most of them new voters. Pundits will assert, and I largely agree, that he has the youth vote, and a percentage of the female vote; but rarely has anyone been able to convert popularity with those demographics (esp. the youth) into actual votes. The Republicans drew record numbers too, but came almost to half as many Democrats. This is unusual.

So when Obama speaks to the desire we have for change, I’m starting to believe him. When he speaks of hope, I’m starting to believe him. The rabid liberal of my youth, now tempered with some age, is beginning to get excited again.

People have been comparing the “feeling” of the Obama campaign with that of JFK. Thanks to the power of the internet, we can compare JFK’s nomination acceptance speech to Obama’s Iowa Victory Speech tonight. I see sort of what they mean now. You can feel JFK trying to break the stagnation and the fear of the 50s, just as one could say we have fear and division in the 2000s.

In that JFK acceptance speech, the following passage rings out as true today as it was 48 years ago:

Perhaps we could afford a Coolidge following Harding. And perhaps we could afford a Pierce following Fillmore. But after Buchanan this nation needed a Lincoln – after Taft we needed a Wilson – after Hoover we needed Franklin Roosevelt…And after eight years of this Administration, this nation needs a strong creative Democrat in the White House.

For me, that Democrat is Barack Obama.

I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few days since I got inspired by the MapReduce chapter in Beautiful Code. Mostly it’s a cute little project that’s trendy and scratches an itch of mine — namely, how do I utilize the full power of my little cluster of machines?

My end goal is to bootstrap this on top of the raytracer Lin and I did in CS184 as sort of a proof-of-concept, and run speed tests. Other simple ideas include MP3 encoding (split the wav file, give each machine a piece, and then mp3wrap them together at the end) or if I get really daring, video re-encoding (which would be damn cool for saving off my HD streams)

The idea on top of all of this is that: you split up a problem, you do something to the pieces (Map), you can emit intermediate values (to be further sorted or combined in Reduce), and then you can combine the problem back into the original spec in some way (or not, depends on how you write Reduce). So long as there’s a common NAS (Granted, it’s no GFS, but then, I’m not dealing with petabytes) there can be the necessary file output sharing. SSHFS counts too — it’s just slower.

It’s also cute in that it can spread other time-intensive tasks across machines. It doesn’t even have to transfer files if what you want to compute is somehow representable. Since I’m writing it all in Python (or C# where necessary) a good example is to spread minimax subtrees across machines to make a faster, smarter CS188 Pacman (which would merely return the value of the root-node move — all across TCP).

The backend interface looks something like this right now:

[02:37] michener@enjolras:~$ telnet 192.168.0.16 6278
Trying 192.168.0.16...
Connected to 192.168.0.16.
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to the PumaCreed Server on fantine.
Type 'help' for details.
> help
help jobs ls newjob stat quit shutdown
> stat
Computer Name   System  Ranking Threads Description
fantine         Linux   9000    1       2.6.21-2-686 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 03:53:02 
enjolras        Darwin  9000    1       9.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed O
> shutdown
Connection closed by foreign host.
[02:38] michener@enjolras:~$

Not much, but it’s a start. The machines know about each other, there’s networking and threads and config files going on (praise be unto Twisted) — not to mention the start of a MapReduceProgram class from which all code run on the cluster should inherit (Or at least implement the interface of).

We’ll see how it goes.

Remainder of Amazon’s gift card: -$0.84

$20 bill: -$20.00

(Rings up — Change: $16.64)

36 cents in my wallet: -$0.36

Screwing with the Starbucks cashier over exact change: Priceless

There are some things money can’t buy.

For everything else, there’s MasterNerd