Cerulean Cordillera

Hmm… the last entry was in February eh? Well, just some physical updates this time. I just finished undergrad, and there is a very high possibility that I’ve passed all my courses. When I confirm that, I can start wearing my Iron Ring with 100% certainty that I qualify for it.

In a few days I’ll be going back to China with my parents. We’ll be staying three weeks there, both to visit family and to tour around a bit. Our tourism destinations this time will be Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Beijing. I’ve always liked the idea of visiting Hangzhou, as it was the capital of the coolest dynasty China ever had (Southern Song, where the social aspects were very ahead of its time, with widespread trade and serious explosion of technology, and paper books, and royal examinations actually making vertical social mobility possible…). Plus, Hangzhou was the world’s biggest city back during that time. The funny thing is that I’m excited because of these random history trivia, and I have no idea what the city really has to offer to tourists today.

And food, excellent Chinese food awaits. I particularly want to have the cold noodles of my hometown. That is one particular Chinese delicacy I have never encountered here in North America.

After returning from the China trip, I’ll be selling most of my stuff and planning my relocation to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I will be starting my one-year residency position with Pixar at the beginning of July. This will be interesting. I’m doing software testing again, but this time it’s not a utility software like AMD’s Catalyst Control Center. This time it’ll be a full-sized 3D animation software, the scale would be something similar to 3DMax or Maya, although it’s in-house and runs on Linux. The platform is PyQt, which means I need to start getting familiar with Python.

An hour ago, I’ve more or less finished with studying for the midterm tonight. Yet I’m stuck in school. The cold weather and my bulky clothing (uncomfortable to move in) makes me not want to do anything, but even wasting time in the lab can be damn uncomfortable. At this point, I just want 6PM to come faster and get the midterm over with. I’m also developing a minor headache.

Oh and, Dragon NaturallySpeaking turned out to be a failure. Although it’s the best speech-to-text program I’ve ever seen, it still sucks too hard for it to be functional. I can’t really use it as a keyboard replacement when every sentence needs to be fixed somewhat.

I am currently writing this blog post using a program that I have found called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This program is pretty cool, what it does is that it basically turns my speech into text that appears on the page. If I get good at using this program. Then I should be able to enter text into a computer much faster than typing. I currently type at about 100 WPM. The average human talking speed is about 150-160 WPM. Of course the problem is that since I am so used to typing. I cannot form thoughts and organize them in such a clean way when operating at talking speed. this is also the reason why I am not very articulate when talking in real life.

This is an idea that I am going to try out. The idea is that if I do all my typing on a computer using this program. Then I would also be at the same time training myself to be more articulate in my talking. Already right now since I am using this program to type, I am stumbling over and making a lot of mistakes and having to correct them. The exercise feels difficult already, it feels as if there’s some sort of limiter to my thinking and I cannot think as freely as I usually could if I do not talk at the same time.

Nevertheless, I am very impressed at how accurate this program is. Just about everything I say is recorded with pretty much 100% accuracy. Of course sometimes the program stumbles a bit, but most of the time the trouble I have seems to be my own inability to articulate and say the meanings that I want to say. Still when the program messes up, I try to correct it. I’ll probably miss some of these mistakes at times, so be prepared for some very strange typos in my blog posts.

That will be it for now, we’ll see how this goes.

Prior to the break, I had no trouble waking up early enough to actually have breakfast. I would routinely wake up at 8AM, sometimes 9AM. When I wake up, I would feel very refreshed too, ready to hit the gym within half an hour. But these days, waking up early is more difficult, and it takes forever to start feeling alert. If I try to be alert, more often than not I would get a headache. The reason is pretty clear – I don’t go to sleep early enough anymore. I used to sleep by midnight, but now I sleep routinely around 2AM.

It’s time to reclaim my mornings!

One awesome idea about how to do this comes from this post, and it was how I did it last time. In a nutshell: I sleep whenever I feel like it, but set the alarm at when I want to wake up (e.g. 8AM), and make sure I get up. So suppose I go to sleep at 2AM and wake up at 8AM. The next day I would want to go to sleep earlier since I had so little sleep the previous night. Earlier sleep means getting up at 8AM would be easier. If this continues for a few days, the sleep cycle would settle at the alarm time.

The hard part, of course, is to make sure I get up. Last time I did it using willpower alone. There are some other techniques, so maybe I’ll try something different this time.

Man… I wish sleep is as predictable and controllable as recharging a cell phone’s battery. Or, it would be awesome if sleep is so efficient that even 8 hours is way too long. Actually, there are people who functions perfectly on 5-6 hours of sleep a day, and people say it’s simply because their sleep is more efficient. I wonder how to achieve that… Maybe better fitness or something? Worrying about sleep is such a hassle, it would be nice to fix it once and for all and never have to worry about it anymore.

Just downloaded a Viigo app for my phone to make it easier to stay updated to some blogs. So far it seems that Viigo doesn’t show old posts, so I’m making a new post here to test out that theory.

I’ve never noticed before, but taking mostly engineering classes sorta trains your brain into thinking only in terms of problems and solutions. As in, what kind of problems are there, which ones need to be solved, and what techniques we can use and how we can solve those problems. Even the background classes, like Electricity and Magnetism, were designed to drill into you “these are the phenomenons you should know and these are the equations you should remember in order to solve the problems you encounter.”

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, if most of your intellectual growth came from an engineering education, everything looks like a problem to design solutions for. Looking at the tree branches swaying in the wind, for instance, makes me think of data structures, on what branches and nodes to store what information and how we can get one place to another quickly. When I force myself to make more natural associations, I think of the wind passing by the branches like how fluid bodies behave, and in turn wonder whether this phenomenon can be exploited in some sort of way.

This gets especially bad when it comes to handling relationships. Often, when people complain about their lives, they’re not looking for any solutions, because they’re perfectly capable at coming up with their own. Instead, they’re just looking for an outlet to let out their frustrations, someone to listen so they can feel understood. But sometimes this engineering thought pattern would immediately trigger the moment someone presents a problem, and even when I am aware and know that I should not let those thoughts come out, already a part of the brain is occupied with processing and doing away those thoughts when they can be used in more constructive ways, like paying attention and actually listening.

What separates engineering from general science is the difference between solving problems and satisfying general curiosity. Scientists are only curious, they want to learn and find out. There is no end goal, and if there is learning, then it is good. Ideally, their minds would wander freely and they would learn whatever it is that they find interesting. It’s basically satisfying a natural urge to just learn more things and be entertained by cool thoughts. In contrast, engineering is usually about an initiative, an end goal to achieve, and sometimes even though the goal seems like something you would want happen, the actual steps involved are really things you have no interest in. So you’re forced to plough through things you don’t like while keeping faith that it will all pay off in the end. But this is not guaranteed either, especially if you were vague about the relationship between the goal and yourself in the first place.

If I play the violin, science is like playing whatever I want, however I want to. Engineering is like honing my techniques repeatedly through exercises in the hope of mastering some pieces I was tackling. If I try to make myself into a better person, science is like just look at myself, try different things, and see what happens. Engineering is like designing specific practices (e.g. a specific plan to replace a bad habit) and follow through while recording progress towards the end goal. If I were to blog, science is like just writing anything I want on my blog whenever inspiration hits, while engineering is more like planning and designing the blog to fit a particular audience and generate a particular revenue figure.

It’s basically being carefree versus being serious. Of course, this isn’t to say that science as a discipline is carefree. A “discipline” by definition cannot be total freedom, and since the field is a human system, I’m sure there are a lot of limitations and inefficiencies that limits what is acceptable. But this does make me think of another very confusing question:

Look at all the life advice out there, a lot of it is engineering advice. You see this in most self help books or “how to” websites. But these advice make me imagine that the best person would be this highly disciplined, overly serious person who is 100% focused on the goal, overcoming any adversity that comes his way, getting past great disappointment and grief, and continues going, never giving up.

But then, there is such a thing as trying too hard. And when you’re trying too hard, you actually make backwards progress, usually because you burn out due to human limitations, or because trying too hard is very socially unattractive, so it sets you back if your goal is anything social-related. In any case, it’s not good to be overly serious. Heck, it seems that the optimum would be to be both serious and not serious at the same time. Now all I have to say to that is… WTF?

And here, an engineered approach just doens’t work because you can’t be serious about achieving the state of not serious. I guess there needs to be some balance, and that balance point is very difficult to find.

Before midnight of New Year’s Day, I finished my first ever annual review. This is something that Chris Guillebeau suggested at The Art of Non-Conformity. It’s basically a document that is both a comprehensive review of the past year and an initial plan of direction for the coming year. In it, I’ve given myself a number of goals to achieve for the year 2011. One of them was to maintain a random thoughts blog throughout the year.

I’ve been thinking about doing something like this.

A few weeks ago, I went through some of my old stuff, and they included the blogs I’ve had back in high school, including my old msn space. Reading some of those old entries made me realize how much I’ve changed over the past few years. Back then, I was immature, embarrassing, and didn’t know about anything, but I was daring, and my mind was free to write down anything I would think of. I was not afraid to freely explore and wander any kind of thought connection, no matter how stupid and juvenile they were, and somewhere within those stupid and juvenile thoughts I could still see beauty, because I was honest.

Now, I come to my blog, and I can’t think of anything to write. My mind has become rigid, and I feel my imagination and creativity waning. I’ve become much too safe with my thoughts, thinking only good, normal, everyday thoughts that anyone could have, being locked in those thoughts. As I look at my old blogs, I feel envious of my former self for being able to have those thoughts, and being able to express them on paper in such a clumsy way and yet so elegantly.

As a person, I used to be much more spontaneous and flexible, I could be incredibly emo at times and yet positive at other times, and I would say that life is worth living because all these rollercoaster ups and downs make things interesting. I wasn’t afraid to do anything, because I didn’t know what it means to be afraid. But now I find only two things that define how I live. The first is to keep myself safe, and the second is to systematically undergo conscious self development. How boring and predictable a life that leads!

I remember blogging used to be a place where I simply release my thoughts and have them pour onto the paper. It used to be a very good release. I was thinking that perhaps it would have some effect on my life if I start doing that again. At the very least, it would break down barriers and allow me to be honest. So I guess from now on, this blog will be a personal blog, a place for me to sometimes rant about everyday problems or talk endlessly about insignificant details. Anything can go here, if I feel like writing and posting.

I may be reviving this place very soon. I have started another blog, but that blog has a rather specialized purpose and does not serve as an outlet of thoughts for me.

Ah, long time no blog. Well, there were a few reasons behind the long drag for me to update again. The first was the fact that after we moved in, we didn’t have Internet for a few days. After we got Internet, it was still quite inconvenient for me to blog for not having a stable computer that I’d always use. A week later, I bought my $1500 computer and managed to put it together, though it took another week before I managed to add in a memory card reader unit in order to download photos from my camera, and after that, I started writing an entry.

The entry was basically a discussion of my current views on how to live a life. It turned out to be quite a sizeable entry and it still needs quite a bit of work before it’s publishable. Meanwhile, I have something else to tell you guys about today, and that is my deck project.

You see, our house came with a deck in the backyard, but that deck must have been built at least a decade ago, for now it is structurally rotten and covered with dirt and grime. At certain places, the boards would sink down the moment you step on them, thus making it so that if you ever put your full weight on such boards, you’d stumble and likely crack the wood. Yes, it’s a safety hazard, and that is the most important reason why I wanted to do something about it.

New Deck Boards

But what to do exactly? One thing we could have done is basically to tear it down and redo the deck, but that would require a budget outside of what we can dish out at the moment. So instead, what we decided to do is to get pressure treated boards and pave a new layer of deck surface onto the existing boards. If the original deck board orientation can be called horizontal, our new boards would now be vertical. This way, each board would be held up by a few inches from all other existing boards. Considering that out of all other existing boards, about 80% of them are pretty good in terms of strength, this vertical alignment should be very stable.

Initial Materials

So, what did we need?

• Pressure treated deck boards
• Deck Screws
• Hand Drill

After hunting on craigslist, I managed to buy 30 pressure treated deck boards (2″x6″x8′) at half the price stores like Home Depot would’ve charged me. It still costed me about $120, plus ten more bucks for shipping. Nontheless, the wood got here. We moved it into the house to protect them from the rain that lasted several consecutive days.

Measurements

The deck is about 10 feet wide and 12 feet long, and the boards we got were 8 feet per board, so either we’re not going to do a good covering job, or we’ll need to cut the boards to smaller pieces. I drew up the plans for the new deck covering, it will be 11 feet along the shorter side, made up of 8 foot boards 3 foot boards, and we will use about 20 boards across the long side. It will not cover the entire deck, and instead will leave a lower walkway from the basement deck steps to the stairs toward garage. Perhaps pictures are better for illustrating this design:

What The Deck Used To Be

What The Deck Was Going To Be

Final Materials

Since we needed 3 foot boards, we definitely needed a way to cut them, so the final list of materials are below:

• 20 2″x6″x3′ pressure treated deck boards
• 20 2″x6″x8′ pressure treated deck boards
• Deck Screws
• Hand Drill
• Any saw that can cut the wood

A Mitre Saw

Thanks to my friend Charlie, I managed to borrow both the hand drill and a mitre saw. I didn’t take any pictures of the mitre saw, but it looks awfully similar to the saw to the right, so you can get an idea of what it is. I then drove to Home Depot and got a box of 3 inch deck screws. There were 250 screws in the box, which should be just a little bit more than enough if I plan to use six screws per board.

Cleaning The Old Deck

The first step was to clean the old deck. As I mentioned before, the old deck has been lacking in maintenance since forever, and most of the surfaces are either rotten or covered in dirt and grime. To make sure that the new deck surface is long lasting and nothing disgusting builds up underneath, we decided to clean the old deck surface. To do so, we connected our water hose and started blasting water onto the decks, and scrubbed it with an old broom that we found. After about an hour of work of both scrubbing and blasting it with the water hose, we managed to get rid of all dirt and grime for the surface that we were going to work on.

The effect was amazing. What used to be a mostly black and dirty deck all of a sudden turned into a deck with almost white wood. The wood actually didn’t look too bad. We waited for two more days for the deck to completely dry, before starting to add new wood.

Wood of Various Sizes

Cutting The Wood

Setting up the saw we borrowed from Charlie went less smoothly than we first envisioned. The box came with no instructions, so we screwed on the lose parts only by matching with the whatever marketing picture we saw on the box. It took us a while to figure out how to turn the saw to the right angle and to move the sawblade up and down. We eventually figured it out, and from then on, cutting the wood went very smoothly. We now have our wood ready.

It is now time to do some calculations on some fine details.

Calculations

In the rough plan, the boards are going to be placed right next to each other. However, any deck project should leave at least a quarter of an inch gap between each deck board to allow for wood expansion and to drain water should it rain. Hence, we did some calculations on precisely how wide the new deck surface should be. We came up with the number 117 and a half inches. However, when we actually laid down the boards, this number wasn’t used at all.

Screwing Down The Short Row

Clamping Down The First Board

In order to ensure that the boards are strong, the short row of 3 feet wood should be closer to the root of the house, whereas the longer row of 8 feet wood would cover the rest. This way, the (roughly one foot) overhang at the end of the old deck would have more support. Since we planned it this way, it would make sense for us to start from the root of the house, and thus we would first prepare the short row as opposed to the long row.

The very first board is very important, as its positioning is what all other board’s positioning will be relative to. To make sure that the position doesn’t shift, we clamped it down onto the old deck before hammering and drilling the screws. Afterwards, we left roughly a quarter of an inch of space between the next board, and aligned it with the previous board/end of deck, and continued in this fashion. After about two hours of work, the short row was finished.

The Pipe

Dealing With The Pipe

There was a water drainage pipe that leads from the roof of the house, down its walls, and slanted onto the ground. This pipe prevented us from laying long wood on the leftmost edge of the deck. As a result, we had to raise it. It turned it to be easily raised.

Screwing Down The Long Row

After that, we started working on the long row. By this time, it was already the middle of the afternoon. Working in the sun was really tiring, but after two more hours, we finished the entire deck.

Some parts of the new deck surface needs some more screws, but for now, it feels very sturdy and strong. I even tried to jump full force onto the overhang at the edge of the old deck, and it held like a rock – nothing shaky. The safety hazard from the previous deck has now been entirely solved.

What would we do with the uncovered deck? Well, right now I’m thinking of getting some outside carpets and just put it over that part, but we’ll have to wait for the Landlords to remove the grill first (I think they want it back), so that’s all left for after September starts.

Meanwhile, here are the finished pictures:

Final Result: From The House

Final Result: From The Garden

Hey guys,

I apologize for the lack of activity recently. We’ve just moved into a new rental house, and Internet is kinda iffy at the moment. When things stabilize, activity will continue on this blog.