A few weeks ago, I was a little hungry late in the afternoon at work. I wasn’t hungry enough to even eat a granola bar, but definitely needed something to nibble on. While wandering through the mini-kitchen, I spotted a single fortune cookie sitting on the counter, left over from lunch a day or two before.

It was the perfect snack. I unwrapped it as I was walking to my desk and thought about the story my sister once told me about fortune cookies. If you grab the two halves and snap it along the major fold, the fortune won’t come true. Open it any other way, however, and your future presumably will be set in stone. Well, seeing as most fortunes nowadays aren’t even fortunes (how does “Jealously is a useless emotion” predict anything about my future?), I now snap my fortune cookies in half. I did so, popped half in my mouth, and happily chomped away. I set aside the other half for later as I had by that point gotten back to my desk and was back to coding.

A minute or two later, I reached for the other half of the fortune cookie. Before putting it in my mouth, however, I noticed a corner of a piece of paper in it. Remembering the “fortune” part of the cookie, I tried to pull it out.

And all I found in there was that corner of the fortune.

I spent the next few minutes wondering whether I actually had a papery feeling in my throat or was just imagining things.

Story 2

Over this past weekend, the weather warmed up tremendously, and I swapped out my pants for shorts in honor of the spring. Although shorts are fine during the day, I wondered whether they would be appropriate for my bike ride to work. I leave relatively early: the sun is up, though it’s usually still cloudy, and pretty chilly in any case. Seeing as I was already wearing shorts, however, I determined that I would retire my jeans and velcro pants clip in positive thinking for a warm spring.

My ride in on Monday morning was nice. My legs didn’t feel cold, and my fleece kept my core just warm enough. It was colder than it was last summer, when I could get away without even a jacket, but I didn’t mind it at all. Having bike through wind, rain, and temperatures cold enough to see my breath, this was no problem. My bike ride went smoothly, and I arrived at work without a sniffly nose and on schedule. As usual, I put all of my non-working supplies into my helmet on the shelf to retrieve at the end of the day, then brought my backpack to my desk for a day of work.

Monday came and went, and at the end of the day, I went to my helmet to get ready to go. I stuffed my gloves in my backpack since I wouldn’t need them, then put my backpack on. I then noticed my velcro pants clip in my helmet, which I clearly didn’t use while wearing shorts on my bike ride in. Thinking back, I often leave my pants clip in my helmet at home for storage. Now, I only wish that my helmet didn’t give me such bad helmet hair so I could have observed a different indentation in the shape of my hair that day.

For the unfamiliar, Diablo 3 is the 3rd installment in a fantasy hack-n-slash RPG. It’s set in a medieval world full of magic, where you wield swords, bows, fireballs, and more in a series of dungeons to defeat the Lords of Hell. The basic gameplay involves killing lots of monsters, which, to an inexperienced observers, looks like running around and clicking on monsters until they die. The slightly more observant will note that the game takes place from an top-down 3rd person view, and to defeat the monsters, you must run up to them and click them until they die. The final component to the game is roleplaying: you focus on developing a single hero over the course of the game and becoming stronger (by killing monsters) so that your character has more skills, better statistics, and better equipment, so you can kill more monsters.

Despite the relatively simple premise, the game is tremendously addictive. Although there are major quests to complete, the world map transitions you from one area to the next, where hordes of monsters have nothing better to do than to wait around for you to walk past. Moreover, the game is constantly rewarding you for playing: every monster killed means more experience (to get you stronger) and possible dropped items that make be useful to you.

As I mentioned, Diablo 2 had a large influence on my development, so I sprung at the opportunity to play this weekend. In the beginning, I was hoping to play through all 5 available classes (Barbarian, Monk, Demon Hunter, Wizard, and Witch Doctor), though I fortunately had better things to do with my time. I started with the Barbarian and quickly became comfortable with the format. Thanks to things such as reddit, work, and email, my clicking skills remained top notch despite being out of the game for years, and I had no problem with that.

Blizzard tweaked the gameplay to make some things easier: gold is automatically picked up when dropped by nearby monsters, statistics about your character are presented in a useful manner, and potions are largely replaced by health orbs that appear from dead monsters. They also changed gameplay aspects to focus more upon gameplay choices: skills are automatically gained (with builds being dependent on “loadouts” of  currently available skills), the environment like falling chandeliers can be triggered to deal damage, and crafting items has become much more relevant. Overall, Blizzard has done a good job of cleaning up the game and making changes that may seem detrimental, but actually really improve the experience.

But let’s face it: most of the time is spent clicking monsters, and in that respect, this game is a solid follow-up to its predecessors. And it’s for precisely that reason that I think I’ll pass on playing Diablo 3.

Unlike in “MacGruber”, the game is the same, but the players have changed. As snobby as it sounds, Diablo just doesn’t have quite enough to it to make me feel that it’s worth my time. Among my current interests, video games should be a low priority. And among video games, it doesn’t have the plot line of other RPGs like Mass Effect or the strategic depth that makes you feel like you’re learning like StarCraft. Out of Diablo, I get slightly better stats on my character and a worn-out mouse. Walking away from a game of Diablo frankly feels a little worse than I started because I’m only left with the desire to keep playing and feel the incremental improvement of a game that is purely grinding (that’s video game “grinding”. You better hope there’s no dancing grinding in this game).

The one thing that might convince me to jump back in is if there’s sufficient desire from my friends to play: it’s a half-decent social experience. But given the choice, I might push to do something else.

Overall, well done, Blizzard: you’ve improved the experience of a tried and true game. Sorry that I’m no longer part of your target audience.

In terms of planning, I think the most important thing is to have a theme. This might range from something conventional, such as “Chinese food” to something quirky, such as “food that looks like other food.” Great potlucks often involve a lot of discovery, and constraints often generate very creative results. Otherwise, potluckers may fall back onto their tried-and-true recipes and not take advantage of the opportunity to explore their next big dish.

Second, it helps to either assign or publicize choices for courses. Horror stories of potlucks usually involve little diversity in food, and unless you were planning a lasagna cook-off, you might get tired of lasagna by your 4th serving. My friends and I used a Google Spreadsheet, where we could record location, time, theme, attendance, and dishes in advance to help out with organization. Other than the token amount of trolling that must come with the internet, it worked well to keep the meals diverse.

Once the logistics are out of the way, you can focus on your personal contribution to the meal. Although you might be shooting for creating the perfect meal, potlucks have unusual constraints that make some meal choices better or worse than other. Specifically, you want to serve food to many people after carrying it to the desired location. Depending on your choice of dishes, these constraints may be detrimental.

First, you need to be able to feed everyone who attends. You might have a great recipe for creme brulee, but when you only have 6 ramekins, you might end up a little short. On the other hand, remember that everyone will be bringing food, so you actually don’t need to contribute that much. The rule of thumb to make as much as you could eat personally doesn’t really work, since at least I don’t have a good sense for how many a meal’s worth of cocktail shrimp is. It all depends on what the distribution of courses is, but factor that into how much you make.

Second and furthermore, your meal should be easily distributable to those who like your meal more and less. Even if you have enough to feed everyone, personal-sized portions may leave many bread bowls half-eaten and burger-loving stomachs partially sated.  In general, food that requires a serving utensil are good, and food that is taken whole is suspect.

Third, your meal should be okay if left to sit for an hour or more. Between transportation, late arrivals, and general merriment, it can often be a long wait before your dish gets eaten, and that shouldn’t be a problem. I myself have failed this test many times, and although I feel industrious cooking while others are chatting, it’s a bummer to not be involved in the party that a potluck is. So, things that can get cold and can’t be revived by the microwave, such as most things crispy or a lot of meat, may not turn out very well by serving. You’ll get sympathy for your meal, but wouldn’t you rather have a delicious dish. The rules here obviously vary, depending on what the kitchen situation is at the potluck location. Most salads are fine if plopped in the fridge, it’s usually not a problem to bake something on the spot (as long as it doesn’t require too much checking), and soups can be kept at a simmer.

So those were a lot of rules, and I haven’t given you many good choices. Here are a few that I think work well:

• just about any cold salad. Leave the nuts, other toppings, and salad dressing to mix in just before serving
• soups and stews. You’re supposed to let them sit anyways, and most can be warmed on the stove or nuked at the last minute
• cookies. I’ve found that by dessert, most people are usually stuffed, and cookies are a small enough offering that everyone will take at least 1
• do it yourself foods of any variety. Offloading cooking to the consumer makes your life easier, allows everyone to customize as they desire, and usually means that the components can be left to sit for awhile beforehand

Happy potlucking!

I’m a big fan of Jonah’s work, and as hipster cred, I was reading his blog, The Frontal Cortex, since before he published his first book, “Proust was a Neuroscientist”. His work is everywhere and is serious enough that I got a reference to it from my cognitive psychology class. We were talking about cognitive control, and psychologists love to use the marshmallow test as an accessible example of its importance. The test is simple: put a child in a room in front of a marshmallow and tell them that if they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they will receive another marshmallow for 2 in total. Then, leave the room and see what happens.

They recently replicated the experiment, and you can watch a fun video of children squirming and sometime succumbing. Jonah had quite a good, albeit somewhat long, article in the New Yorker about the marshmallow test, where he goes into further detail for why people still care about a study done decades ago. Walter Mischel, who conducted the original test, surveyed the participants decades later, and discovered that those who could keep themselves from devouring the single marshmallow had higher SAT scores, better social skills, and a bunch of other presumably good traits. For a 15 minute test, it had incredible predictive power.

Upon analysis, they determined that the key was self-control. The ability to delay gratification and resist temptation was how those children avoided the trap of the marshmallow and kept up their study skills years later. Although these lasting effects from a young age may sound like a genetic predisposition, psychologists (last I heard) didn’t have a conclusive answer on whether self-control could be effectively trained as well. For the children in the test, the trick to success was some tactic other than sheer will. That might be imagining a glass box around the marshmallow or sitting on one’s hands.

A few years ago, self-control was the chic, super-finding in cognitive psychology that would make us all geniuses. All we had to do was figure out how to teach self-control. But psychology, being a common topic in popular science, has its own fads. Being a fad doesn’t necessarily make the finding any less true, but it may mislead the casual reader. For example, I think bilingualism was a psychology fad awhile ago: it’s still good for you, but it just isn’t the big new secret right now.

Right now, I think Jonah continues to lead the charge, and grit is up and coming. Grit is the fixation on a difficult goal, the will to overcome failure many times over, the constant push to learn against adversity. Jonah discusses it in “Imagine” as the flip side to classic notions of creativity. Exciting creativity is the moment of insight, like turning falling apples into a theory of gravity and burrs in clothing into velcro. Prosaic creativity is Beethoven rewriting the same bit of music dozens of times and Steve Jobs iterating through many designs of Apple products. It’s the latter case of single-mindedness where grit produces creativity.

So Jonah argues that grit is good for creativity, but he cites Angela Duckworth‘s work on it. She started in grit by trying to find the best predictor for the retention rate of West Point cadets through the first 2, very intense summer months of training. And as you might predict by my setup, grit best predicted success. It was a better predictor than SAT scores, self-control, school rank, leadership potential, and physical aptitude. These measures, which intuitively seem like the exact talents one needs to be successful, somehow don’t pan out as well as the ability to just “stick with it”, and further research by Duckworth has extended this finding into other domains.

This finding, at first glance, sounds like psychologists again telling us something we already knew. We’ve all heard the story of Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school team, practicing hard, and becoming the greatest ever. But even as we all agree, we still determine college admission by SAT scores, NFL draft picks by the Scouting Combine, and job offers from short technical questions in an interview. Clearly we need to refocus our society towards grit, and teach children to become grittier. Grit and self-control sound so similar; we should be able to roll it all into one.

But they’re not quite the same. Duckworth found a correlation of .66 between self-control and grit scores in National Spelling Bee contestants, which is strong, but not perfect. The difference between them is time. Self-control keeps you from reaching for an extra scoop of ice cream. Grit keeps you on your diet for years. It’s subtle, and I myself didn’t quite believe the difference until I reflected upon myself and saw them come apart.

I think I’m a pretty disciplined person. I don’t have any difficulty waking up with my alarm in the morning and don’t mind doing chores before it becomes critical. Like the children who best resisted the marshmallows, I use tricks to keep myself honest. My general approach is to be cynical about my future self. Today, I want to be productive tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll want to be lazy. To avoid falling into those traps, I put a lot of effort into tying my hands on things. I’ll make plans for a meal to force myself to go grocery shopping, put reminders all along my path, write extensive to do lists, or simply do things ahead of time. Overall, it works to keep me on-track day to day.

As proud as I am about that fact, it was a somewhat disappointing realization that I’m not a gritty person. I’m fortunate that I have been successful and happy with a lot of things that I do, yet I have let myself drop many passions after encountering adversity.

I was naturally gifted at tuba when my band director asked to consider switching freshmen year of high school, and I had a good run. I almost immediately got promoted to 1st chair in the top band and subsequently made region band the next 3 years, narrowly missing area my senior year. But then I came to college, auditioned for both the orchestra and wind ensemble, and made it to neither of them. I dallied around with jazz bass trombone, vaguely kept practicing tuba, and even played in the orchestra for a summer. But I mostly gave that up after those auditions.

In high school, I studied for the AP psychology exam out of interest and nailed that one. I came to college interested in psychology, only took my first psychology course junior year, then did research that summer. I applied for PhD programs the following winter, and was rejected from either 6 or 7 different programs. Now, I’m a software engineer who loves psychology but can’t really imagine enduring the same grad school application process again.

In a better life, I would be a grittier person, and even now, I feel as though simply being aware of this problem makes me better prepared to deal with adversity in the future. I know that this trait is a weakness of mine, and when things get tough, I just need to steel my mind with the discipline I have to do push through.

The close to this post is going to be somewhat awkward and may seem like a rationalization, but it’s mostly just rage at the half-truths of science journalism.

I gave you an amazing story about the importance of grit. Particularly, the West Point part had grit triumph over the classic winners (smarts and raw talent) as well as the recent incumbent (self-control) as the best predictor for success. Well, the study actually said that it was the best predictor for getting through the 2 months. The rest of the story takes a little more explaining.

In the study, Duckworth et al. measured performance not only on summer retention, but also on GPA the following spring and Military Performance Score, or MPS. MPS was aggregated from performance ratings on military-related activities, both academic and non-academic. The 3 different predictors used were grit, self-control, and Whole Candidate Score (or WCS, an acronym that unusually was not used in the original paper), which combined school rank, SAT scores, leadership potential, and physical aptitude.

As reported, grit best predicted summer retention, with self-control coming in next, and WCS being non-predictive. On GPA and MPS, however, grit was not the best predictor. WCS, which aggregates measures of aptitude, was substantially more predictive of these 2 measures, with self-control coming in 2nd on both (but not very strongly), and grit not correlating for much.

This isn’t a deathblow to grit: there are several other studies in the paper that demonstrate the importance of grit, and nothing said so far is untrue. The point here is that it’s important not to compare apples and oranges, and if you do, not to overstate what the results mean. Grit predicted retention because that’s what grit is: it’s hanging tough. WCS predicted MPS and GPA because that’s what WCS is: a weighted measure of past GPA and other performance ratings. Whether one result is a better definition for “success” is beyond me, but it’s important to know what the science says.

This post has wandered a lot, but I guess the short version is to be gritty, but don’t get too excited about it. It’s a funny feeling for me to find out that it took science to convince me to be a better person. Although I had questioned my persistence before, I only really believed it to be important when I read a paper that gave me specific results. I guess the self-help section dominates the popular psychology section in bookstores for a reason, but I think I’ll keep telling myself that I’m just in it for the science.

As of a week and a half ago, I’m done with school. I took my last final, graded a ton of exams, and promptly got on with all of the things that I didn’t do because of classes. The most concrete of those was that I started work at Zanbato the following Monday, but more importantly, I’ve been playing lots of games. I played Magic: The Gathering for the first time in perhaps a year, and Friday night, several friends and I met to spend 4 hours losing horribly at Arkham Horror, yet absolutely enjoying it. It’s a slow game, but let me give you the pitch for why you should come by to play with me. Simply, Arkham Horror is a cooperative, adventure board game based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft where you fight monsters, close gates to other worlds, and try to avoid going insane before The Ancient One comes to devour Earth. Let me break that up.

First, Arkham is a town in Massachusetts that’s at the center of many of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories. If you don’t know Lovecraft’s work, you are perhaps familiar with the Cthulhu, which has become part of pop culture since he was writing in the early 20th century. His style is somewhat hard to describe, but in his world, there are horrors beyond the ability of humans to comprehend, and the characters of his story often encounter extraterrestrial and fantastic creatures in the course of their adventures. My friends and I often joke about how unoriginal he is between his works, with his descriptions at best being as explanatory as “eldritch” or “non-euclidean”, or more typically of the “horrors beyond all description” variety. Even so, he developed a rich mythos that should capture your imagination and shouldn’t leave you scared out of your wits if that’s not your preference. All of his work is now apparently free and available online or in ebook format.

This mythos gets compacted into a board game, where the monsters you fight are all Lovecraft classics, and various encounters are pulled straight out of his stories. I played Arkham Horror before reading his work, and now having read it, I find the game much more amusing as I recognize the references.

Second, it’s a cooperative board game, which means that all of the players are working together to “beat the board.” Unlike many other board games that require you to go after and knock other players out of the game, this game has a common goal for everyone. This makes it easier to get into the game as there is no conflict of interest in players helping newer players to learn. Like in Craps, everyone around you is on your side as you roll the dice, and at the end of the game, there’s either a sense of shared triumph or shared humility.

Third, it’s an adventure game, so you play as an investigator running around between various locations in Arkham and temporarily through gates into other worlds. Every turn, new monsters appear on the board as gates open from Arkham locations to other worlds, and your goal as a team is to close all of the gates by traveling to other planes, hopefully before the Ancient One comes for the final showdown. Along the way, you have encounters at each location, typically inspired by actual Lovecraft stories. The game can be very capricious and is typically very cruel, where you must roll a dice to determine whether you receive the pretty bad or very bad outcome. Although the rules are quite complex, the actual choices can be made without needing to think too hard about it. On the other hand, it requires a lot of coordination of actions, and you’re welcome to strategize as much as you want.

Once, Arkham Horror might have been categorized as a serious board game, but I get the sense that it’s become a bit too mainstream for true board game snobs. But that’s probably for the best, and it’s at least a good vote of confidence in the accessibility of the game. The main downside to the game is that it is slow. Games can easily take 3-4 hours, especially if you’re either new or not playing particularly quickly. But even 4 hours of crushing defeat can be fun as a shared experience among friends. If you’re around, let me know if you want to try it out. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.

Like most things I do, I simmered on the idea of buying a mouse for a few weeks as I found more and more reasons to do something about it. My current mouse is a Logitech MX700, an apparently decade-old piece of hardware that I’ve used for just over half that time. I got it as a peripheral to a computer I was supposed to fix up and reallocate, and it was a great change. Previously, I had used a cheap, dependable Microsoft optical mouse without any particular concern about how it felt. This mouse, however, felt much better: it was larger to fit my hand better, it had a thumb indentation for better grip, it was much heavier, and overall, it was just much more comfortable to use. I’m using it for this post right now, and it still feels good.

But I also use a Logitech Performance Mouse MX at the office, and it’s also awesome. Found in a random pile of peripherals, its shape has the same indentation and feel that I like about this mouse, but it’s better in other ways, too. I thought I liked the heft of my MX700, but it turns out that the much lighter Performance Mouse also works: the size was more important. According to Razer, I’m a palm grip guy, and I like tall mice that fit into my palm. And while I have to charge my mouse every few days, I used the Performance Mouse on low battery for 6 months. And it also doesn’t have a huge dock/receiver, like my MX700. So given how many hours a day I use my mouse, it’s time to upgrade.

It’s honestly been awhile since I’ve needed to do serious shopping research. I’ve been contemplating my next computer setup, but since I’m a Mac user, there are actually very few choices, and the deciding factors are larger usage questions. In looking at mice, there are tons of small questions: optical or laser? Wired or wireless? How many DPI? What about the shape? Ultimately, most of these choices aren’t going to matter too much to me, and as overwhelming as it seemed, I think I’ve figured it out in about an hour.

My primary concern is to get a comfortable mouse. First, it should be a full-sized (not a mobile/compact) mouse. Second, it should be shaped for my hand, which would include a mouse indentation. Finally, it shouldn’t be light, as I have developed a preference for slightly heavier mice. Oddly, I discovered that this meant that I need to look at gaming mice. Nowadays, the best computer peripherals are gaming devices, and although I certainly do get my game on, I primarily want a good mouse for daily use. I’m already an emacs user who will develop carpal tunnel from how I need to use the keyboard anyways, so I might as well be as comfortable as possible with my mouse. So, all the details about DPI and extra random buttons weren’t particularly important.

Research went relatively quickly. I had previously accumulated a few links from random browsing, so I put all of those into a spreadsheet. In total, I had 11 mice with some basic spec and price points. From there, I used Google product search to find reviews for each and sorted them according to my preferences given all details. This narrowed me down to a list of 3 mice that seemed roughly equivalent and worth buying: the Logitech G400, the Razer DeathAdder, and the Logitech G500. All of them appear to have roughly the shape I want, aren’t too expensive when on-sale ($30 or $40), and are well-reviewed. At that point, I googled direct comparisons between them, which yielded a ton of forum threads on exactly this choice. As I figured, the preferences there were a wash as various people spoke up for personal preferences and mentioned their own particular malfunctions with each device.

I think this is where I call it a draw and let price and chance decide for me. I have deal notifications on slickdeals setup for each mouse, and when a good deal comes up on any of them, I’ll be upgrading. Sadly, I saw the G500 come and go less than a week ago while I was still deliberating whether to researching buying a nice mouse or not.

Anyways, that’s about it. This post ended up being a lot drier than I was shooting for, but that’s okay. I have 2 takeaways from the experience, which you might consider as well.  First, a lot of shopping research is really easy nowadays. The number of choices and unimportance of most of them can be overwhelming, but a combination of a well-deliberated system and a ton of opinions from others got me through the process in almost no time.

Second, it’s worth thinking about computer and desk peripherals if you spend as much time at a computer as I do. At the beginning of college, my desk was my Macbook Pro 15-inch screen, its built-in keyboard, and my MX700. Now, I’m on a 23-inch LCD screen and an external keyboard, looking to buy a new mouse, and more comfortable than I’ve ever been before. So if you haven’t thought about your mouse much until reading this post, I recommend it. Even if it makes you feel like a tool or a nerd, I recommend looking at the Razer Gaming Mouse Advisor, which can help you think through what you should look for in a mouse.

Or if you can wait, there will be a Logitech MX700 coming onto the market as soon as one of my deal alerts fires. It’s in fine condition, will come with rechargeable batteries, and may be more comfortable than any mouse you’ve ever used before. There might even be a blog-reader’s discount.

* not actually written this evening. I backlog and space out my blog posts nowadays. As of this evening, I have already bought the G400. Anyone want a MX700?

Each quarter has also been a different class with a different professor with a different system for problem sets. I certainly don’t have the years of experience that they do, but in my limited experience, ease of grading can vary tremendously based on the system. Here is my proposal for the perfect setup.

First, all problems have page length recommendations and maximums (e.g. the solution to problem 1 must be less than a page). There are definitely forces pulling in opposite directions for proofs. For students, it’s best to write as much as possible so that the right answer might appear somewhere. For graders, it’s best for it to be as short as possible to reduce the amount to read. Moreover, many problems are intended to have relatively elegant answers. To work towards this, all problems should have a maximum page limit as well as a recommendation for how complex a problem generally is. This forces students to be concise and construct good proofs.

Second, there are no late days allowed on assignments, but the lowest score will be dropped at the end of the quarter. Dealing with late days is a mess. It’s one more thing to keep track of. There are inevitably problems determining exactly when students submit. And you can’t grade all of the assignments early in one sitting if some are still out there. Hard deadlines are easiest, but there are always tricky circumstances, so it’s best to be flexible. And the hard deadline even benefits students, as it guarantees that graders can return assignments sooner.

Third, all assignments must be written up in LaTeX and submitted electronically. Bad handwriting is bad news. It’s frustrating for graders and hurts a student’s grade if something is indecipherable. Typesetting gets around this problem quite easily as anything short of Wingdings is easy to read. To make it easier for students, a problem set template should be offered, as well as the .tex for the problem set itself, so they can easily copy the necessary symbols and formatting. Typesetting is a good skill for academics to have, and especially in a theory class, it’s the closest that many, often programming-oriented, students are going to get o code.

Fourth, all assignments are submitted electronically via a site that accepts the .pdfs generated by TeX. We’ve done submission via email for the past 2 quarters, and it’s a mess. It’s annoying to deal with the flood, and there’s a surprising amount of ambiguity in pairing up students and their work (especially when splitting grading by the alphabet). To get around this, the script should automatically identify students by their school ID and route the assignments appropriately.

Fifth, some application exists to grade easily. Optimally, it allows the grader to click through assignments and pull up the pdf in turn. Graders can easily flip back and forth between that, the problem description, and the solution. Annotations can be made directly into the pdf, and the grade can be inputted on the same page. Those get compiled into a database/spreadsheet, and problem sets are returned by a click of the button: students are emailed back marked up versions of their assignment with the score also there. Somebody do this: it’ll be awesome.

Sixth, each grader is responsible for grading a different problem, not a subset of problem sets. This ensures consistency in grading and is easier for the grader to not have to switch mindset between problems. I’m somewhat ambivalent on the use of error codes or rubrics: I have one in mind when I grade, but I like to be able to ding more or less points depending on the severity of the mistake made.

I think that’s about it. Given my current workflow for problem sets, I think this has a few small improvements over a pretty good system now. It might seem like a very grader-biased process, but remember: happy graders are nice graders.

Over time, I grew up. A little. I could stand to shop with my mom when she was looking at pants for me (instead of her needing to find me after having scouted out the prices). But now, I rarely go to malls. I’m of the impression that they aren’t quite as important here in the Bay Area as they were back in Katy, Texas, but on the whole, I don’t do much shopping in-person anymore. Part of that is not having a car to get to such places, but even that’s okay, because the internet lets me do all the shopping I want from home.

Apparently I’m not alone, according to this article. Shopping malls, once thought to be the great center of commerce, have been dying around the United States. The article doesn’t focus too much on the reasons why this has been happening, but it does point out 2 main reasons.

First, we apparently rediscovered our roots in stores and restaurants that can be entered from the street. I think there’s something classy in imagining ourselves poking into independent boutiques, looking through storefront windows on a sunny day, and living it up in the city. That’s something I can get behind.

The second reason, however, is the bigger culprit in this situation, and that’s online shopping. It’s so easy. I remember coming down for breakfast on Sunday mornings and seeing my parents trawling over ads, trying to pick out the best deals. My mom had her stacks of coupon clippings that would get sorted into piles. And for important things like big electronics, this could go on for weeks. Now, it’s really tidy. All available products are easily found via search engines. The search engines even compare prices for you, making it easy to find the lowest cost seller. And in moments of confusion, there are many forums and buying guides to help out.

But like a lot of conveniences, there’s something lost, and I think it’s the whole “shopping” thing. I don’t think of myself as much of a shopper, but I do enjoy looking at junk. I’m sure that attitude is frustrating enough to storeowners, but I’ve managed to make things even worse for them as I see things in stores that I later by online because it’s cheaper and gets me out of impulse buys. Yikes.

Somewhere in the economics of purchases, I’ve lost the value of the shopping experience. Sure, I can buy the exact same book on Amazon for $5 cheaper than at Barnes & Noble, but I didn’t spend a half-hour perusing books, walking through ranges of shelves, and discovering new reads online. For myself, the economics as is work out perfectly: I can browse in-person for free and buy for less online. But the physical store deserves the final price I pay for the book for having helped me find it, as well as the retail premium above online prices for the shopping experience.

Honestly, this will be a tough fight. My mom’s coupon-clipping ways and exhaustive (and exhausting) deal-hunting make it hard for me to believe that it’s right to not go for the cheapest option. I’m sure I’ll lose it many times, but at least I’m conscious of it. I won’t suddenly buy more than I do now, but when I see that kitchen gadget in-person, I’ll try not to let myself out of the purchase because I’ll buy it online later.

And I’ll try to do that everywhere. I have enough elitist, yuppie guilt to support the mom & pop shops and small, unique businesses, but I think I need to push to keep it in mind for the big retailers, too. I have too much nostalgia for Fairview Mall, Katy Mills, the Target at I-10 and Fry Road, and other to not give back for some of it.

Using computers securely is a big battle for experts and users, and the best practices really depend from person to person. Every person needs to decide what their tradeoff between security and convenience is. On the completely secure side, one can remember long, random, unique strings of characters for every account. This, however, is extremely inconvenient to remember. On the completely convenient side, one can use “password” for every password. This, however, is extremely easy for hackers to break. Everyone’s practices lies somewhere in-between, using known methods and a little bit of personal construction.

That personal construction, however, is where we really get ourselves into trouble. Security is very hard, and most methods of compromising aren’t good. For example, I know that I should have long, unique, hard-to-guess passwords for everything. Because I couldn’t remember that, I decided it would be okay to record them in an easily accessible place for me. Unfortunately, that happened to be a really awful practice.

Most people aren’t security experts and don’t know the best way to use computers securely. Given that, I think that a lot of bad practices can be rooted out with a quick 2 question quiz:

1. If a hacker knew where you store your passwords, could they guess your passwords easily?
2. If a hacker knew a subset (none, one, a few) of your passwords, could they guess any of your other passwords easily?

The first question mostly deals with people securing their passwords by obscurity. This is mostly how my old system worked, and it’s a bad idea. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) thinks it’s a bad idea. It’s unlikely that you’ll come up with a method on your own that no one else has thought of, and if you’re borrowing someone else’s system, you’re already screwed. And even if you hide things, they can be found easily.

The second question deals with bad security design. In a world where you create passwords for many different services, some of which are well-built and some of which aren’t, it’s not hard to imagine that one of your passwords might be leaked to a hacker. That itself is somewhat unavoidable. If knowing that password, however, allows them to determine the rest of your passwords (either as a straight copy or by design), you’re in trouble.

Let me walk through a few common methods I’ve heard from friends recently (and a few trivial examples) and point out the possible problems with each of them:

1. Use “password” for all passwords. This password is very common and not hard to guess. By question 2, a hacker could guess your password knowing a subset of size 0 of all of your passwords. This is an awful idea, as you can imagine.
2. Use a small set (maybe 3) of passwords for everything. This is also a problem for question 2. If a hacker gets 1 of your passwords, they can now guess 1/3 of your accounts fairly easily.
3. Store passwords in a (unencrypted) document on your computer. Even if you name it something other than “passwords.txt”, it’s not hard for a hacker who gets read access to your computer to find the file and copy it. At that point, this method fails on question 1.
4. Start with a base password and modify it slightly for each service. For example, Google might be “abc123GoogleRocks” and Facebook might be “abc123FacebookSucks”. This ensures that each password is unique and somewhat long. Unfortunately, this is still a problem for question 2 because other passwords are deducible from a single password. In the example above, even though “Rocks” and “Sucks” are different suffixes that you can remember, it’s still a systematic method that doesn’t ultimately leave that many possibilities.

As you might have guessed, some of the above are better than others, but assuming you’re okay with the level of security each will give you, they’re all fine if they work for you. You should just be aware of the risks associated with it.

Given all this talk, I need to support my claims, so my new method is using a password manager (specifically, 1Password). Essentially, I have a single master password for an encrypted database that stores all of my other passwords. With that, I only need to type in my master password, copy the specific account password into the box (or use the auto-fill feature), then lock my manager again. Like other methods that aren’t memorized, random, long, unique strings, it’s not perfectly secure, but it’s good.

It isn’t susceptible to the flaw of question 1. Because the database is encrypted (using tested methods), it is presumed to be secure*, so even though I have announced that I’m using 1Password and the file is not hidden on my computer, a hacker shouldn’t be able to get my passwords without knowing my master password. Question 2 is a problem: if a hacker knows my master password, my world is open to them. Otherwise, my passwords can be arbitrarily complex.

The caveat to all this is that I trust that the creators of the password manager are honest people using secure methods of security. If they’re sending all of my passwords out to their secret server, of if they screwed up the implementation of some security protocol, I’m in trouble. But that’s the line I draw for myself between convenience and security: I believe that my master password cannot be guessed and that 1Password is honest and secure, and this is the furthest I’m willing to go to be secure.

So maybe a password manager is a solution for you, or maybe it isn’t. I just wanted to write about it since I had thought about it so much recently and think it’s worth it for everyone to evaluate the ways that they are being secure. Again, it’s a tradeoff between convenience and security. Just be aware and comfortable with the consequences of your method, keeping in mind these 2 questions:

1. If a hacker knew where you store your passwords, could they guess your passwords easily?
2. If a hacker knew a subset (none, one, a few) of your passwords, could they guess any of your other passwords easily?

* I say presumed because even security experts don’t know if any construction is completely secure, but it’s the best that anyone knows. The limit of that is whether P=NP, for the CS literate among you, so it’s pretty certain.

Hi Kevin.

Hi there.

Now that we’re introduced, I would like to hear a bit more about how you got started blogging.

I started blogging probably about 6 or 7 years ago during high school. I caught the tail end of the Xanga fad and instead started posting on Blogger. I started out doing a mix of anecdotes from the day and some fiction, but fortunately, I’ve moved away from that.

How has your blog changed?

Dramatically. At some point, I moved into a longer form where I would focus more on a particular idea instead of just random events. I’ve gone through some ups and downs with my blogging, including a few quarters where I didn’t post much, or just posted stuff that I was writing for class, but I’ve never taken a long enough break to say that I ever stopped blogging. Along with that, I’ve also had some periods where I felt like my writing was really good, and others where I was pretty embarrassed about the stuff I was writing.

Why would you post something that you don’t think is good?

Because it’s a blog, not a book. What you see usually comes from me sitting down for a half hour and typing until I run out of more things to say. That means that it’s unedited, and the topic and material often drifts very far away from where I thought it was going. For example, I thought my last post was pretty bad for exactly that reason. In any case, if I’ve taken the time to write it, I’m going to post it.

So how does that evolution of the topic happen?

Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I’ve noticed a few things about my style of speaking that affect how I write. First, I often explain things by explaining other things. If you ever hear me start a sentence 3 or 4 times, that’s me adding a new level each time to explain the previous start I almost had. After I’m done with each, I’ll get back to the previous idea I had, kind of like a stack of topics. I think my writing has that quality too as my writing usually has a more circular instead of linear quality to it. I start somewhere, go deeper and deeper, then find my way back to where I started.

Second, I’m also really bad at explaining what I consider my more thoughtful ideas in the moment. I apologize if you’ve ever been in a discussion class with me, because I’ll have a spark that turns into the first sentence of my comment, then ramble and repeat myself for another 3 or 4 sentences. By that point, I’m lost, everyone else is lost, and my original point is lost. Sad times.

Given that, I think my writing style is overall very different from my speaking style.

So how do you come up with topics for your blog that go through this transformation in writing?

I usually have a few thoughts on my mind as I’m going about life. Truth be told, my life isn’t that exciting. In fact, most people’s lives are that exciting. There’s certainly a bias for writers to have amazing lives as the basis for stories, but that’s not me. Instead, I like to observe life as it is and think deeply on everyday things. If you take a moment to think about any of my posts after reading, you’ll probably find that you can summarize it in one sentence. The rest is just essay.

I’m really impressed. I don’t think I would be able to keep writing a blog for so long.

Okay, so first, that statement is confusing, because you, the interviewer, are me, who has managed to write a blog for exactly as long as I have.

Getting past that, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a reason that I personally have not gotten past in keeping a blog for so long. One reason I’ve heard is, “My life isn’t that interesting.” I think I covered that above: my life isn’t interesting, either, but that doesn’t stop me from expanding a detail into 1000 words.

Another is, “I don’t write very well.” I have 2 responses to that. First, writing gets better with practice. My blog was awful at the beginning, but over the years, I think it’s improved enough that I’m not actively embarrassed by it at all times. Second, I don’t think I write very well either. Were I to spend some time editing my work, I would feel better about it, but that’s not the style of it. I emailed back and forth with Grandpa Leslie Whipp (former English professor) for awhile, and we talked a bit about one point where I spent 3-4 days revising my blog. I mentioned that I was still dissatisfied with it, and his response was simply that it was only as good or bad as the context. A blog isn’t supposed to be amazing if it’s just a bunch of random posts, and the writing itself is a learning process regardless of editing. So you kind of get a pass based on the context.

I think those are the main 2 reasons I’ve heard. I’ve also had similar conversations about journals: a lot of people have had journals for maybe a few weeks, then failed to keep it up. I’ve kept a journal for a very long time, and I strongly believe that it’s been very important to my personal development. Some of the content is blogworthy (those are the few posts that receive any editing as I move words around while transcribing), but most of it is definitely not for wandering eyes. It’s healthy and is another good way to keep up with writing.

Aren’t you worried about posting so much about your personal life online?

Not really. In fact, I think my blog might be some of the least personal stuff that I have put on the internet. At least in its current form, my blog is observations about life around me without too many specifics. Compared to my facebook friends lists, resume, and various profiles, this is pretty risk-free.

So what do people usually have to say about your blog?

As I stated in the intro, it doesn’t come up much, but when it does, usually it’s been someone who’s been excited to have been mentioned in my blog. That’s about it. And just to keep the game afoot, let’s throw out a mention for RJ since he’s the next friend I’m going to see (as of when I’m writing, not posting, this post)

How are you so sexy?

I get this a lot, especially from random people in the grocery store and crashing their cars as they turn their heads distractedly when they see me on the sidewalk. I’m not really sure. I guess a childhood of computer games and math competitions just builds a physique like this.

Do you have a favorite blog?

I think the Dilbert Blog by Scott Adams is pretty good as he takes crazy and extreme positions on random issues and ideas, just to make us think. Gigi, a blogging colleague from TUSB, has a personal blog that I happen to like a lot as she find a really amusing way to reflect on daily life that I wish I had. There are a slew of other blogs that I really like, but in the interests of staying close to the call for a single favorite, I’ll finish it at that. If you’re sad that I didn’t just blogroll you, remember: you can’t be my favorite if you don’t write regularly for me to enjoy regularly.

Any last thoughts, since you’re prone to rambling?

Blogging in general has been a really great thing for me as it’s spared me my pride in my ability to compose English sentences. After a few years of writing essays for high school and college courses, I was very close to “giving up” writing as much as possible having been thoroughly thrashed for the quality of my writing in multiple classes. Despite that, I’m still blogging and am very proud of the fact that even if it doesn’t really stand up to critical analysis, I am capable of sitting down, starting with nothing, and writing 1000+ words on a topic in a pretty short time. In-class essays and papers started the night before never got me to that point, so I guess this is how I got the education I really wanted.

And finally, blog! And by that, I mean “blog” as an imperative, not an exclamation. I enjoy reading almost as much as I enjoy writing, and the utility per hour is definitely way higher, so take a stab at it.

Thanks for you time, Kevin!

No, thank you. Or me. I’m kind of confused.

Me, too. In fact, I think this artificial interview was a bad structure for this post.

Really? Since when did the interviewer become the critical blogger?

Well, I blame it all on you, because I as the interviewer exist only as a construction for this post. But I’m also you. Is it possible to talk imaginary people to death via paradox, like Kirk did to supercomputers in the original “Star Trek”?

This interview is over.