#emoStory

140 characters including hashtag, with proper punctuation. Stories may not be about me, nor about things I have experienced personally.

140 characters including hashtag, with proper punctuation. Stories may not be about me, nor about things I have experienced personally.
She doesn't love you; nor does she mind your company.

What do you want? / Just lie to me, and pretend that you mean it for ten seconds. / I love you. / Thank you.

We had a secret. I loved you. Then you let it go. So it's just a story now.

In a less civil world, I'd offer to fuck you before touching your hands, but here, I've got too much to lose, so go fuck yourself.

Wearing no makeup, in a harlequin dress, her pale smile and sad eyes make me cry inside. Outside, it's business, "morning, aunty!"

Someone left the biggest shit you ever saw, in the drain behind our cafe. We blasted it with water, then BANG a sack fell into the dumpster. "Who the fuck is upstairs?!" "It's Harry." "Harry! You piss! Stop dropping shit in the dumpster!" The irony was lost on all of us.

One day she reappeared, saying she had found friends who had her back. Good. At least she's expressly aware of them. Lucky people.

Cough. Sneeze. I am ill, and alone. But never as alone as when you, often lay beside me, playing with your phone, naked and taken.

All the times I was there didn't make up for the times I was not. Oh no, oh my. I'm glad you did nothing about it. No, not really.

The problem with living in past, present, and future all at once... is that you're with someone, you do stuff together, but you know they'll leave you, so you wonder what it'll be like; then years later, they're with someone else, doing the same stuff, and you relive the moment of melancholy. But there's an "aha, I knew this was going to happen," feeling. :)

So many conversations left hanging. I used to respect silence. Now, 3 mins triggers: "I take it you're disinterested. Good night."

Sum up the times between when she stopped replying, and when I stopped waiting for answers - it could be months. More than a year.

Waiting for food. Let's write an #emoStory. Mustn't forget to calibrate mood to match society.

She walks, hands empty, gleeful at the thought, that this would be a good day to die; and her once lover plays in a city far away.

Hrm. Dude scraped the side of his car on my mirror. Hate to be ad hominem and all, but he had two unstrapped kids in there :p

One way to forget that you like someone, is to think about ways they hurt you. But I prefer to remember the good times. I am easy.

We walked the misty farmlands and markets, and he said, he enjoyed my company. Months later, he said there were only bad memories.

Special privileges. Ones I didn't have. Some I may never have. That means she really likes him. That is good. That makes me happy.

In skin, in flesh, in fabric. Of love, and boredom, alike. Irregular jobs, irregular hours. Too much waiting. Tears tear me apart.

It finally admitted disliking folks who spoke intellectual language; there were not enough 'fuck yous' to make up for wasted time.

And then she said, "make coffee; it's what you do," and then I thought, "maybe it's time I put an end to this," and that ended it.

Girlfriends: Professional vs Un-professional

Moral: Better to blow 2% of one's net worth per month on a good relationship with a prostitute, than trying to make fuzzy headed folk happy.

So off that musing, I was thinking, after all they're all human. I'd usually have to be able to have something to talk about with each of them, otherwise they'd be less than sexy. People. In a relationship. Just on different terms and conditions.

US College Rankings by Graduating Earnings Achieved

Whee... just figured out how to approach the damn "how much do rankings matter" question at future USAPPS workshops :P I'm just going to present salary data from PayScale.

No more arguments *sic* on whether a brand is 10x better or 100x better. If you're in the x-percentile, given the data that we have, the brand is exactly 2.7562565x better, that is all. If you're median, you're a moron, fuck you, quit worrying about it. *also sic*

Sigh. :)

(THIS IS NOT ADVICE. This is just a reminder to myself to drag up the relevant data before delivering actual advice in the future. I'm thinking aloud, intuitively about some numbers. Help me out here, those of you who are/were in US colleges...)

Re-explaining US college rankings, in terms of nominal annual salary achieved by graduates, in the year following senior year (if both schools and students are ordered by such):
the 99th-percentile student from a 0.3th-percentile school may make 2-3 times more than the 99th-percentile student from a 3rd-percentile school;

but the 99th-percentile student from a 3rd-percentile school may make more than the 75th-percentile student from a 0.3th-percentile school

Lots more data would be nice to have. Above is based only my limited data/experience + intuition about this. My gross assumption is, 2005: Bates 99th-percentile $60k, vs Harvard 99th-percentile $120-180k; Harvard 75th-percentile $ 59.999k.

:P

Seriously, I should go do a degree in this or something - if only I cared much about degrees.

(Of interest: PayScale.com's 2013 top-ten private colleges by 'salary potential'.

So this is enough data to get the point across... but finer data would be nice. It's worth someone's BS or MS thesis to go find the whole dataset.

Main thought I had in mind was the the top 1% at a top 3% school probably make more than the bottom 74% at a top 0.3% school, so that got me started.)

Men's Fashion

Finally, for the first time in my life, I have a reason to read up on men's fashion. I'm bored, and it's potentially interview season again. Things are only allowed to happen in my life, if the alternative is boredom. Well, kinda.

College Admissions Interviews

I swear, college alumni admissions interviews are a legacy from the pre-Skype/Hangouts era.

Updated: 2014-08-10

Sell

TLDR: the admissions interview is a sales pitch. (Even if you're on the academic track, you'll have to sell to get grants, to into gradschool, etc.) So if you're sure that you don't like selling, then don't ask for an interview. If you think that you need help with sales skills, perhaps look here.

Do Your Homework

How to use search engines to your advantage: here is a sample query about admissions interview questions - it filters in everything under bates.edu.

1. You can replace "bates.edu" with the school website of your choice.
2. If there are too many results for graduate admissions interviews, then try adding "undergraduate" at the beginning of the search term.
3. Improvise further.

Immunology

Being sick makes me want to study immunology. But I'm a long way from being able to afford that so, first, work. Job apps. And more work.

Adaptive Immune System #dota #informationSystems

Flu

It's a good day to zone out and enjoy the fact that my life at this point in time is really quiet simple. Zzz.

Plus, so far, the mildness of this flu seems ideal - for reminding one of sickness, without being overly uncomfortable.

Some Modern Jazz

Playing designated driver for a friend and her tourist.

Hiding in a cardigan and researching an article on coffee.

This music is too loud and chirpy, for me, generally. If I was working this gig, I'd have earplugs, for physical damage control, but here, it would seem a little rude to leave and return with them. We're right at the front of the stage

Monodrama

A man sitting alone, in a corner, typing out posts on Facebook, is a monodrama. Facebook, is a stage.

Bad: too sick to write emo stories. Good: being sick is more stimulating than writing emo stories. Snarky: writing emo stories is still fun.

Careering Approached as Science

It's not about getting what you want - it's about discovering what you can get. #science #forever

Baiting

(Quote via a friend's Facebook post.)

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I agree. I want kids to go to college, so I tell them that if they want to make money, they should go to college. But I don't really care if they make money or not. Snicker.

Co-Piloting

So yesterday at a DoTA (it's a 10-player game) we had 12 people at the net-shop, and so two of us sat out, grabbed burgers, then went back and started "pair programming," with two of the newer players - one on each team. There's a reason why rally race cars are manned by two people - the amount of extra information that you can glean with an extra pair of eyes and a brain is enormous in high-speed engagements.

I think about related dynamics, and find another way to model the resource leakage in my operations over the past few years. For a chunk of that time, I dated people who preferred stable jobs, to support their relationships with unstable definitions. Whereas, it seems that I preferred unstabler jobs, and would have benefited from relationships with stabler definitions.

X: Does this translate to: "don't have a fucked up girlfriend while having a fucked up job" ?

me: Maybe. More of a general "make sure there's enough structure in your schedule, and that your partners have aligned objectives."

I was supposed to be studying during the last five years, but I definitely did some harder jobs which were related to my studies. Postponing studies at an earlier point, sometimes let me get more studying done at a later point. Like working on programming at a web startup, and taking other contracts for a month or two then keeping costs of living low so that the cash lasted for a year of full focus on studies without employment.

This decade, I'm supposed to be making money - then people ask me why I'm working for limited salary on a project that seems to be going nowhere - and it's the same. Postponing encashment at an earlier point, ought to help me increase my ability to create cashflows at a later point. To be honest, I'm not managing this quantitatively, because I'm not particularly concerned about the final ROI for this period - commercialisation is just a direction that I'm setting for my life, during this period, just as education was the direction I set for the previous decade or so.

Getting romantic interests to understand this has been a bit daunting. Still, it would be nice to have a co-pilot for the period, and possibly beyond.

Manpower, Management, & Pedagogy

(Following readings of an unofficial biography of Marissa Mayer, by Businesss Insider, and a friend's question about clones.)

Eureka. I shouldn't guess project manpower requirements in units of 'the expected number of random humans', but on 'the expected number of exact clones of myself'.

Because my knowledge of the algorithms I would apply to approach a task is greater than my knowledge of the same for a randomly selected human being. So, at least one of the systems (the set of target states) in the pedagogical gap is very well known, during micromanagement.

And yes, micromanagement and pedagogy are largely isometric concepts, in my mind. While one might say that management is not a unilateral information transfer, I think, neither is pedagogy. In many pedagogical scenarios, neither the teacher nor the student is sure of what the object of learning is, goals have yet to be refined, and much collaboration is necessary to first define tactical targets, and attack them those with known methods and methodologies, in many iterations, before forming longer-term goals and a macroscopic strategy.