Days of Summer >> 6/30/16

1. 6/30/16
1. One of my best working days today. Spend the whole day working on a command line interface to our build setup.
1. Found a command line parser library that was very well documented.
2. Figured it out, did a basic test.
3. Then fleshed out the whole interface structure. Took me a long time to get my parsing classes the way I wanted them, but once I finally did the library handled all the usage screens for me in a really nice way.
4. Went out to lunch with Adam and Ross. For some reason, we decided to go to a new burger place in Fairhaven. It was expensive but good (aioli sauce ftw!) and the vintage road warrior memorabilia was entertaining. I think the waitress had a group-crush on us fresh young interns :)
5. Returned to Alpha, scrunched in the back seat of Ross’s pickup.
6. Worked on my custom error-checking and reporting code. I really think I came up with a beautiful framework for doing this, so that when I get back to work Thursday it will be all go-time!
7. Ended up working late, got home around 6 :D
2. Hung out with Dad for a bit, ate a mango :D
3. Took a bike ride. Tooled around some interesting neighborhoods between Northwest and Marine. On the way back, hugged the water-side boundary of the hoods and ended up down a road leading to Birchwood!
4. Boneheadedly posted a photo of my shiny new visa to Instagram. Took it off soon after to ward off identity thieves. Looks awesome, but you can’t see it.
5. Dinner with Dad and "I".
6. Mom picked up Isabel for the third night in a row (Monica and Beth are chillng in Cabo) and we watched an episode of Pride and Prejudice.
7. Spent basically the rest of the night doing research on flights to China, hotels (may have a night of layover in Shanghai, which would be crazy!). Pretty entertaining stuff. The price disparities between relatively commensurate hotels are striking; there must be a wide range of elasticities among different groups on the demand side. Hotels.com came through--no other hotels site was even close! Found a sweet room for $14 and booked :)
8. Wrote this log and I’m out of this state of consciousness! Let’s blow this waking popsicle stand gentlefolks!

Days of Summer >> 8/25/16

1. 8/25/16
1. Wake early on my lovely new mattress, inherited from M. Break the fast, a quick shower, and it is off to Alpha.
2. We have a promising lead with the Freescale reps. So I abandon my quixotic process to automate the build with a drag-and-drop mouse driver, and start working on the user interface with Ross.
3. He’s figured out some stuff, like how to use asynchronous tasks while keeping the UI responsive, and reading real-time output into a box for monitoring.
4. But his code is utter spaghetti. Methods spanning 50+ lines, random flags floating around, conditioning on the text! Of UI labels.
5. I spend some of the time actually editing the code, and more time arguing with Ross about how it should be done. He’s receptive to my ideas but doesn’t seem to understand the basis for my objections.
6. Bike to lunch with Mike, Ross, Adam. The ride is exhausting but fun, the sandwich at Avenue Bread is awesome.
7. Get back to coding drenched in sweat. Make an enumeration to represent all the possible states of the UI, get rid of all the flags, etc.; but when I have Ross on board with that idea, I realize I have no idea what the macro-purpose of the whole UI is. Is it a walkthrough so that the user can input default config details? Is it set up so that the user can do custom builds? Discuss this with Ross for a while, arrive at a basic strategy.
8. Am about to leave when I see an email from the Freescale guy. He says he’s solved my problem! Incredulous, I recreate his solution. It works! I’m astonished and embarrassed I hadn’t tried the exact thing--maybe I had but had messed up a detail. Maybe Ross and I can finish after all.
9. Reply and bike home in a cheery mood.
10. Shower and ship out to golf with Dad and “I”. Good fun! Talk with Joseph about UW application essays.
11. Return, make delicious melt for dinner. Good conversation with Dad, then dig into the Feynman lectures. Dance to some K-pop videos with M, more Feynman (super interesting, I love Feynman’s explanations so much, #psychedForQuantum now that I know what an operator is :)
12. Watch last episode of Firefly :( with Mom and Dad. So good! Then we start watching this show called Bloodline with the great actor from Friday Night Lights. It’s kinda depressing so I sit outside and write this log to classic Uncle Bonsai songs. Night all!

Days of Summer >> August backlog, in brief

1. August backlog, in brief
1. After Iowa:
2. Been stressing out about China prep. Turned in materials for visa.
3. Went to fair with Grace and the Coopers!
4. Went to Seattle, hung out with Eleanor, Brandon and Eric, then went dancing with Brandon’s sister Emily. After the dancing, went on crazy excursion to drive random person back home, observed the throbbing Seattle nightlife, ordered a gyro on the way back to the apartment, very entertaining :)
5. Mike and Jill visited! Several hikes and a ferry ride. A bit tricky with M but very nice overall.

Days of Summer >> 8/24/16

1. 8/24/16
1. Woke, had breakfast, ate dry (with no reading).
2. Off to work. Ross struggling with issues I didn’t even think he should be working on (fortunately he agreed to move to the Deploy phase of our project and stop nitpicking the interface).
3. Myself, not faring much better. Made what seemed to be good progress, getting C++ Visual Basic set up so that I could call the Windows Window Message API to drag-drop the workspace description file of much infamy into CodeWarrior. Contended with awful C++ string conversion to get Unicode, finally got the window handle for CodeWarrior and for Notepad. But the DragDrop API refused to work. No informative error, just didn’t do anything. Plugged away for an hour past lunchtime with no results.
4. Went home, wrathfully made lunch. Unwound over some random articles (and pastrami was tasty).
5. Went back. Still made no progress. Finally gave up and switched back to mouse driver strategy. Found a great automator scripting app that can handle both mouse driving and keyboard driving at the same time, wrote some notes to self, and went home.
6. Dad and I commiserated about our frustrating days. He argued I should go bust some heads about CW not having this stuff built in, demand from Freescale I talk to a competent rep (since the license Alpha owns is several thousand dollars).
7. Hung out with M a bit (“I” was a floppy noodle and refused to do anything). Biked outside with Secret in the driveway.
8. Then Dad came home with Neto’s and we ate. Super delicious. Dad and I picked apart the pop-psych idea that “one shouldn’t care what others think”. Seems like a) overly blanket, we shouldn’t care about the thoughts of people not closely connected to us, people trying to manipulate us, etc. for self defense and b) when taken to its logical extreme, very misleading, since we can’t help caring what others think…
9. Took a long bike ride down Northwest.
10. Danced with Mary to some Korean music videos.
11. Practiced the guitar.
12. Watched a Ribbonfarm video--Venkat walked through his map of the thought universe. Weird to see him talk--seemed so amateur compared to his writing, kind of fun!
13. Watched Firefly with Mom and Dad. Super good.
14. Wrote this log and hit the hay! Looking forward to hanging with Monica tomorrow, plus Park Day :)

Days of Summer >> 8/9/16

1. 8/9/16
1. Finally ate one of those delicious cinnamon bagels for breakfast.
2. Ping pong with Noah.
3. Lunch, awesome steak sandwich, the Markhams come over. End up playing Zombies with the cousins, kinda fun, last game I end up playing really well.
4. We go to the Railroad Museum! Never been there before. A group of enthusiasts somehow assembled a comprehensive collection of train cars and artifacts, on the site of a repair hub for the old Milwaukee Road railroad. They had an operating roundhouse, a rotating traincar-sized platform for routing trains into working bays. Plus a model-train replica of Sioux City. My favorite part was the bewildering array of valves in the engine car. Lots of fun!
5. Early dinner, burgundy beef :) Been a bit plagued with anomie for the past couple of days, some of it stemming from the slow environment, but it was oddly comforting to watch the cousins digging into egg noodles :D Good conversation with izzy on what, exactly, the think-therefore-I-am argument allows you to conclude.
6. Blew up all the bike tires but got sucked into a game of Carcassonne before I could ride. Then we watched olympics for a while, interesting soaking in commercials, etc.
7. Took a lovely shower, had some good ideas. Sent email to business advisers, goofed around with Dad a bit. Wrote this log and hit the hay!

Days of Summer >> 8/6/16 (A Good Return)

1. Wake up early in the morning, car clock reads 6:01. I see orange on the horizon and think I’m going to, finally, see the sunset. Nope! Turns out the sun rose at 4 :P. Go back to sleep.
2. Rest of the drive is uneventful. Lots more differential equations. Cool formulations of reversibility and conservativeness. Get to chat with Izzy about math, show her a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, what differential equations are, and more! Conversation with Dad about how to mobilize people, like the refugees in Greece, who are bored out of their minds, to better their own circumstances. Is it bureaucracy holding them back? The nature of the social structure? Also, a bizarre podcast about a guy who records himself, whose life appears to have no real significance.
3. Get to Iowa. Feel very relaxed and comfortable in everyone’s company. Delicious dinner, chicken piccata. Grandpa tells some goofy stories and promises more to come when he’s less sober (something about a hog-containment contract?). Libby and Rosie are both much grown, Libby has a boyfriend, who I barely get to meet. Quincy comes back late in purple scrubs, looking a bit affected by a traumatic car accident whose aftermath he’s just seen in the ER--had to put a kid across from where his brother had died :(
4. Play ping-pong with J&N for a long time. Good conversation with Joseph about the Magic neural net :) Write this log, shower off the dust of the road, and hit the hay!

Days of Summer >> 8/5/16 (24 Hours to Iowa)

1. 8/5/16
1. Lots of prep for Sioux City trip. Make sandwiches, clean, pack. Take M to Grandma’s to exercise Secret in the water, and I get to swim  into the bargain.
2. We’re off around 2. I wolf down a delicious sandwich and begin reading. Get out my clipboard and go Leroy on my differential equations book.
3. Also podcasts, chat with Mom, Dad, I. Write email. Long conversation end of day about psychology of romantic attraction and nature of 4-ness.
4. Fall asleep, lots of weird dreams. In one, a zombie attacks the car, sprinting and leaping on from behind, then edging around to open the side door. I react too late as it spits and screams in my face. As I wake, I think, “Why didn’t I use my big, heavy metal water bottle?” A strangely realistic thought.

Days of Summer >> 8/4/15 (Systems and Sisters Programming)

1. 8/4/15
1. Work early in the morning. Scramble to prepare demo and finish presentation, which Ross had awesomely reorganized according to my suggestion. Skip lunch.
2. Presentation goes well. Tom, VP of Engineering is surprisingly friendly and seems eager to have basic build functionality.
3. Work a bit longer, but we’re exhausted and leave around 4.
4. Eat some food, take a bike ride. Go to Whatcom and explore around the area--lots of places I still haven’t seen! Alex sends an awesome reply to my email, very entertaining and literary.
5. Off to Golf! Hitting like a pro, now that I’ve fixed my hip motion and swapped bent knees for bent back. Beautiful day (did I mention?)
6. Get into a minor fight with I on the way back home. She is super indignant at the idea of me eating cat or dog in China and demands that Mom makes me promise not to do it. I’d gladly abstain for my sisters’ sake, but I’s bald appeal to authority and disrespect for my own moral code really gets my goat. So I blow her off, saying rightly that she can’t compel me to do any such thing.
7. Back home, dinner, conversation with Mom and Dad about I and the incident. Dad thinks my action was justified, since the sisters demand so much that when they ask something serious I should really accept, they’ve used up all their social capital and all my patience. Discuss strategies for turning back this disturbing trend. Dad argues Mom and he have not been consistent enough with things like chores, b/c their constantly changing, evaluative mindset. We try to work out some consistent chores “I” (you know what, let’s make it “Z”) can do.
8. Dad’s found the properly dubbed Totoro. We watch it. So cute. The voices are really, actually much awesomer than in the newer dubbed one. The art is amazing. And the movie is cheerful and has no evil/bad guys/cynicism. :) :)
9. Responded to email. Did something I’d been procrastinating on for a month and it took 5min (why wait??).
10. I don’t know why I did this after doing systems crud all day, but I decide to back up all my photos/upgrade my phone/backup my machine. Process actually goes pretty well. Our wifi uplink speed is incredible. Do this while blowing up an air mattress--I’m so tired of my flattened IKEA mat :D
11. End the day by looking up inoculations for China. Looks like I only really need two, and both are feasible in a two-week timeline. Got lucky, wasn’t smart, Future Spencer learn from my laggardness even though experience didn’t slap me!
12. Hitting the hay at 2:25 :P Good night!

Days of Summer >> 8/3/15

1. 8/3/15
1. Work in the morning, relatively productive. Give Ross some presentation pointers.
2. Park Day. Big game of CTF with boffers, then Flyers Up and a small-field game of amoeba I organize in parallel.
3. Off to Risk Party! Delicious pizza courtesy Blair, who works at Westside now, plus awesome cobbler from Carolyn. Spend most of the day just getting to Hank’s skill tree abilities. I write a proportional dice roller (attack strength proportional to army size) remembering a neat trick to write less code, and get distracted trying to figure out complex eigenvalues.
4. Home, watch a bit of Totoro :D

Days of Summer >> 8/2/16 (Alex meets Bellingham)

1. 8/2/16
1. Woke up at 7:20, went downstairs. Alex’s door was closed, and with a sigh of relief went back to sleep. Got back up at 8:10, went down, same result. Messaged her to call me upon arisal and went back to sleep again. Had a dream about getting woken up, then awoke to the news, not entirely unexpected, Alex had been awake for awhile.
2. Hustled downstairs and started prepping oatmeal. Alex chopped apple at our absurdly high tall-family counter.
3. Oatmeal was tasty, sat outside and chatted for a bit. Quick shower, then we were off.
4. Alex drove to Galbraith and we set off through twisted trails curving dustily through verdant forest. After a steep climb, sat on the overlook to Bellingham.
5. Wandered, near-aimless, through more paths; somehow we came out near where we’d entered (after braving a tight gauntlet of blackberry). Talked of many things, Alex’s attempts to reclassify relationships and rethink marriage among them. The new Israeli desalination plant came up in passing.
6. Walked back to the car through neighborhoods, talking houses and recalling moves past.
7. Downtown to the Bagelry! Yay for vegan cream cheese and soup (though my salami sandwich was excellent). I stifled the small part of me that wanted to go meta, try again to understand our past relationship.
8. Went to Henderson’s. Found a really neat architecture book “I” would like. Think Alex enjoyed it.
9. Thence to Grandma’s house. Played a little tetherball while we waited for her to come back from Walgreen’s. Then went out on the paddleboat. Went almost all the way around the coast of basin 1; at the end, we started singing :)
10. Two hours later, arrived back at Grandma’s. Parked the paddleboat and took a plunge. Swum for a good half hour. Alex taught me better floating form--I think I might actually be able to float now, despite being densitally challenged. The lake was serene. Ended up being the first time Alex had gone swimming this summer.
11. Walked along the Fairhaven boardwalk. Super pretty. Somehow the conversation never really faltered, the inexhaustible back-and-forth of our messages not drained by the faster pace of face-to-face. Made it to Fairhaven, stopped at Rocket’s (two donuts, one vegan, for $1.15, which Alex paid with a 80% tip :)
12. Returned along the boardwalk, stopping to stare into the orange clouds that fringed the treetops of the Lummi land in the distance. Eventually pulled Alex from the sight :D and we went to dinner at a half-vegan place I’d never been to before. The food was OK, paid the 4’s price :D
13. I finally had to go meta. I found a good framing and went with it. I had known it inadvisable to start that conversation so late, and we analyzed into the evening. I tried heroically to acknowledge the oversimplifications of all the models I tried to fit; Alex stepped carefully and gracefully to save me from my own questioning, and in the balance there was conversation. Drove back to home, but I realized that Alex also had some questions, some understanding she hadn’t quite worked out yet, so I directed her Subaru around some of the country roads I’d been biking on and we finished the conversation in satisfactory manner (no crisp models, sorry, but we went one step more meta and reached the wider Perspective, which, in a complacent sea of context, envelops both detail and fleeting consternation.
14. Alex dropped me off at home, I waved her off to Seattle in traditional homeschool fashion.
15. Returned to family, goofed off a bit, watched an episode of Once (confusing and chock-full of relational oversimplifications). Watched some sweet Primitive Technology youtubes (guy makes a forge bellows from clay and sticks).
16. Wrote this log and hit the hay. Going into work tomorrow because we just got surprised with a presentation to the engineering VP on Thursday (two days notice??). Night all!

Days of Summer >> 7/31/16

1. 7/31/16
1. Wake up bright and early.
2. Clear out the car.
3. Bike off to work. Arrive with enthusiasm and help Ross with a few things early.
4. The slog begins, as we’re stuck trying to communicate between C# and linux command line over ssh connection.
5. Lunch! Good lunch with I, and I return to work refreshed.
6. Day oscillates between frustration and productivity. We have an odd meeting with Mike, which is sort of like prep for a presentation, but he doesn’t grill us or anything. I guess our progress is satisfactory...
7. Day ends on a good note, as some incisive reasoning cuts through unnecessary code and bridges all three layers of our build onion.
8. Return home, scramble to clean and shower.
9. Alex texts me to say she can’t find the driveway, but when I run out she pulls up but two minutes later.
10. We go in, chat with Mom and Dad over prepping dinner; M is off at Isabelle’s. At first it’s pretty awkward/stressful for me, for no reason whatsoever.
11. Eat dinner. Izzy comes down, makes Alex laugh with silly cynical comments. Dad grills Alex ceaselessly by way of conversational strategy; she responds unfazedly.
12. After dinner, head downtown and get ice cream at Mallard’s. By this point, the atmosphere is lighter. M is around but seems content. We get our ice cream and the conversation continues. I get this crazy very strongly flavored rum chocolate ice cream, whilst Alex enjoys the lemon mint ice I used to love (still do, I discovered!).
13. Return home. I grab the guitar and goof around for a bit, then we watch Dr. Horrible. There’s so much I don’t remember :) Really great. Alex and I sing through the evil in me / some kinda harmony duet.
14. Write this log and hit the hay, relatively early.
15. Real quick update on what’s been going on:
1. Camping on Oregon coast Monday-Friday. A bit disjointed--too much driving. Get to ATV through sand dunes though!
2. Meet with Dad’s childhood friends Russ and Penny Okamoto on Saturday. Super nice people. Talk about physics and CS, eat homegrilled pizza. Catch up with their daughter Chloe, who’s going to Texas for nursing school and doesn’t know how to throw a frisbee.
3. Friday before this, I drove to Seattle for the Friday dance, ended up giving Eleanor and Ryan (who went on a date!) a ride to Eastside. Also met with Jannel, talked about personal philosophies, nihilism, etc., she has a very similar personality to mine :) Aalso, got into dumb conversation about Lutheranism at 3am, one of those yes-I-can-convince-you-it-makes-sense-if-I-earnestly-converse-long-enough deals. Then went to Farmer’s Market with Eleanor in the morning, she bought all sorts of expensive veggies, talked ancient history :) Met Emily Allaway from Math there.
4. Before that, I get into a really productive philosophical conversation with Dad. He argues that I should think of myself more as a generative engine than a clearly-defined-worldview builder, that there is something I accrue by living, a wisdom, even if it is not crisply defined. Because the world is complex beyond imagining, and crisp, hewn-in-stone definitions are often counter-productive (why the Supreme Court bakes flexibility into our legal system). Then I start reading Meaningness, which basically argues the same points, in a very clever framework, exposing my harsh utilitarian ideals as a perfectly natural emotional trap, a form of eternalism; it also offers an antidote to slipping into the counterpart of nihilism. Very, very apropos :)
5. Before that--gosh, I think Julie and Ken go to Hawaii and I watch the cousins.
6. Ok, past my bedtime, gotta wake up and give Alex the Bellingham tomorrow. Good night!