whaack

I owe my interests in computers in part to James, a boy I met when I was about eleven. James brought me from the boring censored world of myspace and facebook to the exciting land of 4chan, rich with tits and gore. He put the word hacking into my head. Not hacking in the lame meaning of "let's build a (mobile) app" but instead "let's fuck up someone's computer." I can't say he taught me to do anything interesting/impressive, but his eagerness to take a walk outside of the fence of allowed thought and action opened up my world view.

James transferred into my middle school¹ at the beginning of sixth grade. Friendships and cliques had already been established so integrating was difficult for the annual 1-2 new kids. And the integration of James, who severely lacked charisma, was no exception. He was a scrawny pale kid who lived in a small apartment with his single mother.² I can't remember why I went to his house the first time or started hanging out with him. I imagine my mother organized some play-date, she has always been the soccer mom who makes sure no kid sits lonely in the corner.

I remember distinctly that his bedroom had a motherboard glued to a wall. This was probably just some good 'ole green on black hacker signalling, but the site of someone's exploration into the inner workings of a computer caught my eye enough that I remember it today. I disliked my time hanging out at his place. He spent the time looking at YTMND,³ a website for a meme generating community that has since shut down.

Although I only went to his house once or twice, we continued to hang out during and after school. James constantly received detention for pissing off teachers. There was a period where he would bring into school this device that emitted a high frequency noise that went in and out of human hearing range. The sound was so fucking annoying and it destroyed any possibility of learning. Since it went off irregularly, it was impossible for the teachers to find the small little gadget.

James pulled me into one of the other ways he liked to be annoying: prank phone calls via Skype. Instead of speaking ourselves we used soundboards, redirecting our audio output into the microphone input. My favorite soundboard had soundbytes from the thriller Phonebooth, a movie where a gentleman picks up a ringing telephone and finds out the person he's speaking with is a sniper aiming a rifle at him. The soundboard had a clip of the villain calmly saying, I have a highly magnified telescopic image of you. Now what kind of a device has a telescopic sight mounted on it? ... A 30-calibre bolt-action 700 with a Carbon One modification and a state-of-the-art Hensoldt tactical scope. And it's staring straight at you. *cocks gun.* At least one prank call recipient threatened to call the police.

James died suddenly in his sleep from an aneurysm a couple of years ago. I hadn't seen or spoken to him since the end of middle school. Our friendship fell apart because I started spending all my time with my first girlfriend. James almost went on a date with her friend, but she stood him up. He took revenge by calling her mother with a fake caller id - 911 - pretending to be a police officer investigating his own suicide. Speaking as the police officer, he said that he saw the girl's name mentioned in the suicide note and asked do you know why that might be? They bought it; the girl called me in tears. I learned about caller id spoofing that day, Jame's diabolic schemes usually contained a lesson.

1. A small, private, catholic all-boys school on the upper east side of NYC [↩]
2. This was quite a different situation than some of the other kids in my middle school, some of whose parents had the "oh there's no flights to our three story house on a ski resort in Utah this weekend? Let us get you a private jet then so you can make it out anyways" type of money. [↩]
3. You're the man now dog! [↩]

A nice aspect of meeting an individual with a blog and a key registered in deedbot is the relationship begins with trust. I can't say I've ever shook hands with someone and immediately after taken their cash and phone and put it in my backpack. This felt quite natural, but is it? Can those outside of a WoT do this?

After Adam and I met and put our stuff away at Surf Culture, we lugged two boards to the premier beginner surf spot in Tamarindo. As luck would have it, billymg recently took a picture that contains the location where we surfed.¹ Thanks billymg!

On our walk to the beach we talked about previous times we had met with others who read the logs.² I was surprised to learn that Adam had twice met gabriel_laddel. Adam had recognized him at a lisp conference in California and later bought one of Gabriel's computers.

When we arrived at the surf spot, we paused our conversation about tmsr matters to go over how to stand up on a surf board. I tried to use what I learned about athletic instruction from reading The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey to instruct the pop up. The book says to explain technique by giving a visual feed rather than a verbal description. I did a few slow motion pop ups on the beached surf board for Adam to copy. After a few attempts, Adam started to land with his feet in the center of the board.

As we got in the water I left my surfboard on the beach so I could help push Adam into some waves. He stood up on the first attempt.³ I pushed him into two more waves that he successfuly road as well. After that Adam suggested I get my board and surf alongside him.

When I got back in the water with my board we were half-surfing half-talking. It's one thing to engage in some chit chat in between waves, but its another to try and surf when talking about life purpose. Half-surfing and half-conversing hurt the quality of *both* activities. Sometimes we missed perfectly good waves because we were engaged in our conversation. Other times we abruptly paused our conversation to attempt to catch a wave.

It would have been smarter to have surfed with full focus for less time. We would have had a better surf session⁴ while leaving more time for uninterrupted conversation later. That aside, surfing was still a pleasant experience. There were a few tourists swimming near us, but no one surfing the waves we were riding - a rarity in Tamarindo.

One of the many topics we discussed while in the water was leading a double life. Adam and I had spent time reading trilema and the logs while not participating in the affairs of tmsr nor conversing with those in our meatwots about what we read. It was comforting for me and probably for Adam as well to be able to discuss that rather awful problem in person.

We shared having experienced quite negative reactions when discussing trilema articles within our meatwot. Those adverse reactions caused us to see it prudent to keep reading the logs a secret. I mentioned to Adam that something he wrote recently helped me fix my double life problem: "I would rather be alone and aware of that than delude myself that I have actual friends." It is ridiculous to make the effort required to hide a part of yourself in order to hold friends whose friendship depends on you keeping that part hidden!

After we finished surfing we walked back to drop off our boards. Then, on our way to Adam's hotel, Adam mentioned he was traveling with a lady friend, and politely asked if she could join us for dinner. I said of course and that I'd be happy to have her along. But throughout the evening it was difficult for all three of us to be engaged in the same conversation.⁵

After Adam changed in his hotel room and picked up the SSD + thermal paste he generously brought for me from the states, we went to go check out the sunset. We arrived at the beach just a few minutes late, the bugs had arrived and the sun had left. So we immediately turned around to go find a place to eat. I had three recommendations: a sushi restaurant, an Argentinian grill, and a food court. We decided to go to Patagonia, the Argentinian grill.

Well I must say I felt a bit embarrassed for recommending Patagonia. The restaurant that appeared delicious and fun a year ago to a stoned 24-year-old perhaps doesn't live up to current standards. The first problem we had was they sat us on the edge of the restaurant, next to the road. I asked the hostess to seat us more towards the center. She smiled and said ~'no puedo, esas mesas son para cuatros.' (Never mind that the restaurant was half empty.) I was not assertive with my request,⁶ and for that we paid the price of having to sit at the table next to the road. Adam mentioned and I agreed on the pleasantness of the outdoor atmosphere of restaurants in LATAM, but still I was bothered by our proximity to the occasional passing car. I also swear there was a hint of some odor...but I may have imagined it from being annoyed at the seating arrangement.

The next problem with the restaurant was that they permitted some hippies to come and busk. I had seen this shit before in Patagonia and was hoping it would not occur during our meal. But alas it did. After jumping around and singing chanting for 15 minutes they came to our table and brazenly asked us for money. Where they get these ridiculous notions that we would PAY them for disrupting our conversation, I have no idea. Maybe their parents paid them off to stop their temper tantrums when they were younger. At least the food at the restaurant was decent.

After dinner I had some lag time before my cab driver was going to come pick me up. With the spare time we decided to go to the nearby casino. I have no interests in gambling, but I was curious to see the inside of a casino for the first time. The only game I would have played is poker.⁷ But Adam and friend didn't know how to play hold 'em, so instead decided to lose some money playing black jack and then lose some money playing slots.

Truth be told I found this last part of our meetup less than ideal. I had wanted to spend the time I had left speaking more with Adam. We did get to talk at the casino, but sitting sideways on a slot machine stool is, ehm, not the nicest setting for conversation. After about an hour we said goodbye and I walked around Tamarindo before heading back to Playa Junquillal.

It was a pleasure to meet with Adam, but I wish we had setup a better environment to converse. It is rare and quite nice to be able to speak to an individual who has a key registered with deedbot, has read the blogs and the logs, has built their own computer⁸, has written articles that have influenced you, and has the potential to turn out to be a real friend. So as much as I loved surfing, I would have traded our time in the water for time in a quiet coffee shop. I'll keep this in mind for our next meetup and meetups with others in the future.

1. It's right where the beach begins to bend to the right in the photo. [↩]
2. I have met billymg once for coffee in New York and funkenstein_ a couple times for beers in Boston. funkenstein_ iirc submitted a patch to the bitcoin foundation's mailing list a while back. [↩]
3. Nice job Adam! [↩]
4. After Adam's initial success with me pushing him, I don't think he caught a wave while paddling for it on his own. That is much more difficult, and requires more attention to do on the first day. [↩]
5. Adam and I could only communicate meaningfully with English, and she only spoke Spanish. Also, there were many topics that I wanted to discuss with Adam where she could not meaningfully participate - even if she did speak English. We made the dynamic work as best we could, switching the conversation back and forth from English to Spanish. [↩]
6. I have a problem of being too adverse to small conflict. [↩]
7. I hardly know the rules, but I would have been okay with paying my_wager * (1 - house_odds) to play a few hands. [↩]
8. At a much lower abstraction level than I am currently doing. [↩]

To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine.

-Joseph Conrad, An Outpost of Progress

Having followed the logs for a few years with a computer science degree from the "premier engineering and science institution in the world", writing your own version of V should be a simple task, no? You've already escaped the clutches of society, having left the US and all its bureaucratic pantsuitness behind as you arrived in your new home in a new world. You can read the blogs of men to learn about the first time in history when text was deliberately structured with due consideration given not only to its meaning, but also to its source, and to its context. No one is there to look over your shoulder and ask you why you are not on one of the Approved Websites. You have all the time in the world!

But before you open emacs or vim and get started on your ~371 line program, there's a few tasks that your new environment demands you take care of. You'll have to figure out the erm..plumbing issue. The cheap apartment you found came with a beautiful view, but some of its inner functioning is out of order. And while you're fixing the plumbing you may want to consider removing the electrical cables sticking out of the heating device on the shower head.

First things first though - you need to get yourself a good meal. There's not exactly a deli right on the corner nor a seamless service where you can just click click click and food appears - you have to cook yourself. I mean you could walk in the hot sun to the local soda¹ 20 minutes each way and order a casado,² but the whole point of moving to a new country was to build up some goddamn independence!

Well now that that's done - and you're slightly sustained although the food wasn't really the greatest and there's a mess to cleanup because when you washed the pan you left water droplets that later evaporated blasting hot olive oil on you and nearby surfaces - you can get to handling the plumbing issues. So you reach for the wrench you realize you don't have. You've never needed one since you could always make a phone call to some magician - the super - to deal with these kind of issues. So you decide okay you can live with the plumbing problem for now.

The next morning would provide a great window of time to handle the V task, but there were a few disturbances that prevented a good night's sleep. You learned your apartment's membrane is rather permeable. Some mosquitoes found their way in through the tears in the screens or the cracks in the wood or the gaps in the doorway. So you had to fall asleep to the buzzing of a flying syringe that probably did wind up stabbing you after you gave up spending time trying to kill it.

Despite the lack of sleep you should get started on that task, but the morning came with all the previous problems and more. There's the basic chores: take out the trash, sweep the house, do the laundry, wash the dishes. There's a cut you got on your foot you absolutely must clean thoroughly. There's a trip to the store you need to make because you managed to forget salt on the extensive shopping list you wrote for the previous trip. And worst of all, there's an ant invasion to deal with; you tried your best to clean up all the food but you live in a ~jungle and billions of years of evolution made the little guys energy efficient. That one crumb and the moist sink was all they needed.

Annoyed by these overhanging problems, which also includes un hongo³ that has found refuge in the sweat of your labor, you to decide to put your troubles aside for a minute and go surf. It's what you call a hobby and maybe sometimes it is that but right now it is an escape. An escape from dealing with the aforementioned problems but also from thinking about the ones surely to come.

Society has always taken care of these problems for you - not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs.⁴ But society did not teach you how to solve problems for yourself. Instead all it did was give temporary solutions or solutions that make you dependant. For example, society stocks its stores with Raid, a chemical that kills the ants in front of you but not the queen that hides in a cavity respawning those ants you just killed. Society will sell a call to pop() on the stack of your problems, but it has no incentive to help you stop the processes that push() shit onto that same stack.

Effort spent manually popping the stack is almost always effort wasted. Fixing a surface level problem - such as killing male ants - may temporarily ameliorate your situation but it is not the type of action that will improve your standard of living. If you only spend your time fixing what's right in front of you, you'll either arrive at some push() pop() equilibrium point or become overwhelmed.

The serene mind must reason to find and remove the sources of problems. They are always hidden from sight. Because if the evil processes were out in the open, one would already have killed them. And as the mind meditates on how to find long term solutions, it's okay to temporarily let the stack of problems grow. The mind needs to have confidence that the patient search for larger, longer term solutions will yield results. And once those results have been realized one can finally pop the stack down and use the time freed to create beautiful things such as a working V.

1. A soda is a small home-cooked style restaurant (sometimes w/ only 1 table) that serves typical Costa Rican food. [↩]
2. A casado is the typical dish served in sodas. The specific ingredients vary, but the template is rice & beans + a salad + a choice of meat or fish. [↩]
3. The Spanish word for mushroom is also used for the general term fungus. Costa Rica has a few hongos that can cultivate themselves in the creases in your elbow / behind your knees. It looks like an eczema and is easily treatable with anti-fungal cream. [↩]
4. The full quote:

   To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society - not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom. They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable of independent thought.

   [↩]

I have spent the past few days pondering why I tried to create links conforming to the new the html selection method before investigating their proper format. The first reason I came up with was I had thought it best to forgo investing time on understanding the new mechanism in order to get my work done quickly. But I discarded this dubious explanation because I am quite aware of the importance of learning before doing.¹ The cause of my error comes from a deeper problem: I trick myself into believing I understand that which I don't.

When I read mp's comment

"Please use the ?b&e=#select selection mechanism instead."

I thought "huh, mp must have a new way to avoid having to use javascript for selecting text by passing in the flags b&e as query params."² I "confirmed" my theory by verifying my malformed links selected their intended text.³ My bullshit experiment gave evidence to support my hallucination that I knew how to create urls for the new selection tool. Having falsely convinced myself that I understood what I was doing, I thought it okay to move forward and thus proceeded to produce the broken links.

There are two bad habits I've identified from this fiasco. One of them is inferring what tools do/how to use them. Instead of guessing their operation, I must RTFM. The other bad habit is duping myself with faulty experiments that are just the mind's way to convince itself what it already believes is truth.⁴ I need to find the rest of these bad habits, kill all of them, and be suspicious of my understanding when I learn something new.

1. The explanation is also dubious because a mind's first answer to self exploration questions is often a trap. [↩]
2. I was correct in guessing the new selection mechanism did not require javascript, but I could have just as likely been wrong. [↩]
3. I viewed the links on a javascript enabled browser, so my test gave me no reason to think I was using a new selection mechanism. [↩]
4. This process of minds duping themselves into believing what they want to believe is easy to see on a macro scale in America with all the "A new study shows __" articles that get printed everyday. But it is harder to catch when looking into the mirror. [↩]