Vancouver

Well, I went to a workshop today designed to get people "back on track". Although lately i've been "on track" I felt it couldn't hurt to get a little more. And I was right. This workshop was amazing. The preseneter was fantastic, he was charismatic and encouraging. Reminded me a lot of Liam Neeson's portrayal of Kinsey (read a great review at here).

The take away point is that often times it's the emotional side of tasks that keep you from doing the next one. Things like calling people, or having meetings, or tackling a problem you don't know much about. These all feel scary, so if you can identify the specific "scary" step you can either ask for help, or just face up and do it. But left "undiagnosed" the scary steps moprh into generalized anxiety that prevent you from working on anything.

Good stuff.

For all you Office Space fans out there:

Check out: Office Friends

The lip-sync is incredible. Especially the scene about the party. "O, o, o."

So as I'm sitting here writing my thesis I think about possible distractions. The distractions are easier to dismiss now, because I'm 7mths overdue. This is one I couldn't resist though. A moment to reflect on what I've learned.

I've learned that I'm at *most* a hair above average, but realistically I'm *just* average.

I've learned that I have poor prioritization skills compared to most. I allow my priorities to easily change to accomodate the situation. This relates to time management problems and solving large-scale problems (like a thesis).

I've learned that I like to "shoot the moon", where I make the problem too complex to tackle, which also makes prioritization difficult.

I've learned I don't like to make decisions. This one is wierd, because it is the stereotypical guy, which I never thought I was, but the summary is -- I don't like commitment. I waited 5 years to marry my wonderful wife Dori. It takes me 6 months to make a significant purchase (like outdoor gear, technology, etc.) and in general if I can postpone a decision to gather more information, I will. Maybe that's why I voted for Kerry.

I've learned that I'm very critical of myself.

My sister can't view my blog. She's in China and the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to prevent the people from viewing material that is inappropriate. Seriously. They actually run the entire countries internet connetion through government servers that have data monitoring software in them. Then if the software detects an offending website it is blocked from being viewed in China.

Now you may ask yourself, what has Dustin done to offend China? Then you might chuckle and say what DOESN'T Dustin do to offend China? Heh. Anyways, the point is why would my blog be censored by the government of China? Because it's not easy to watch every single web page that comes through, so if a site has enough "bad" webpages the whole site is blocked. In the case of www.blogger.com there are at least one (if not many more) offensive blogs that triggered the detection and caused the entire blogger site to be censored. These blogs can range from Falun Dafa supporters, to anti-Chinese censorship blogs or just plain old porn blogs. (Are there plain porn blogs? If so, what's an unusual porn blog?)

Other sites China blocks.
abc.com
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) Calgary/Banff Chapter
Ice Rink Management Asia & Ice Rink Resources
The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia

The list goes on... Refer to the above link for more entertaining sites that are blocked.

THE GOOD NEWS.

Besides supporting organizations like Amnesty International who have kept track of China's human right's records like this issue you can start your own encrypted proxy whichallows people to "hide" there interent traffic. Keep in mind though: In 2001 it was found the Chinese government allowed the death sentenance to be issued for viewing "inappropriate materials" on the internet.

The other thing you can do is "syndicate" your blog by publishing an RSS feed and then allow a program (on a server outside of China) to harvest the feed and convert it to email.

QUOTE from my sister's email to me:

cool. i found a rss2email script and am running it on my cs server.
so now i can get your blog through email. :) china's firewall once
again screwed! funny that the u.s. government's mission to have
a decentralized computer network that could not be taken down even if one of the
computers was destroyed by warfare....also leads to the discovery of a network
where you cannot censor "public" information (well, even some "private" for that
matter, see hackers). alissa

The bus driver asked us for directions today. To UBC.

wow.

There's so many fantastic parts about spring.

Like walking down the sidewalk and being suprised by fresh flowers blooming.

I had a meeting yesterday with my "advisor", because he "gives me advice" as he is "not a supervisior, who tells you what to do". Who told me to write up my conclusions with some defense and submit them. So I did. I came up with eleven. I think that's good. The list is in it's early stages so it could grow (or shrink).

Now for some shameless advertising: Check out the photo of me climbing. And if you'd like an inside scoop on Chinese politics and the free software movement go to my sister's blog entry.

Kinda. Had fantastic sunday up in Squamish rock climbing. Dori and I went with two friends Brad and Mel. What a great time. Enjoying the sun, being outdoors and challenging the body. Dori and I both woke up sore today. A good sign that we had a full day.

Man. I go through these cycles. I'll be happily writing my thesis and things look great and then, bam. Stupid thesis. I just hit one of those low spots. This one stems from the realization that I understand roughly what everyone else in my field already knew. In other words, I haven't done anything new. I know that I'm not supposed to be tremendously advancing the field, that kinda of research is reserved for a doctoral degree, but still. I'd like to know that I have done something *trivial*. Further, something that has alreayd been done. So I'm feeling like I'm never going to finish at this point. Well not really. I mean I know I'll finish or give up soon. (I'm kidding about giving up, mostly...well two days ago Iwasn't kidding...for a half-hour or so).

It's wierd. I think I'm missing a major piece of doing this thesis:
I do the research/experimentation it goes slow, but I think that's normal.
I do some writing/results graphing that also happens in bursts.

But somewhere (right now) I'm missing some piece. I have a hard time going back to what I've written and cleaning it up (and sometimes adding more). I'm not sure if it's the fact that I'm unsure if my results and what I've written is even useful or if it's just a fear of doing lots and lots of work.

Well. On to tackling this. Again. Or at least trying.

Well the pickup is done. The fatally deterministic testing has been done -- we drove it across town and the brakes worked. It just feels so rewarding to clean up something mechanical like that and then put brand new shiny (or painted) parts back in. What a reward. I can't imagine what this job would have cost though. $200 just for parts. The bad news is the axle bearings also have to be done. This means either a lot more beer, or a mechnic is going to get a piece of my checkbook.

The really wierd part? I'm sore. It must be that after years of thesis writing all car working-on muscles fade into oblivion. Further, those muscles must be throughout your entire body. I'm sore. It's wierd, all I did was brakes. All though there was a lot of shoving, pulling, cursing, prying, holding, cursing, twisting, cursing, breaking, tweaking, cursing, forgetting, cursing. But why so sore?

Well I'm under the gun to write this post. I just got a call from my landlord that at 9Am the power is going off. It's 9:19AM. I got the call at 9:07AM. Heh.

Well, my March Madness ratings are dropping.... I'm actually getting hate mail from my fans now! Well, ok, that might be a bit much, but in response to the vast, loyal viewing audience -- here's to pushing that dumb hand image down to the bottom of the blog.

So this entry is a double header. I picked up a great book: How to Write your Dissertation in Fifeteen Minutes a Day and one of the recommendations is that you write. All the time. Everyday. Even just fifeteen minutes. Doesn't even have to be about the thesis. The idea is that you "exercise" the writing muscle in addition to just getting used to putting the nasty soup of thoughts down into written words.

I think her advice goes well with life. There is something motivating about writing about something, anything. It's almost like a mental cup of coffee.

Last thing. I cannot tell you how much I miss working on cars. I'm doing a real wheel brake job right now and, man, it just feels good to be getting greasy and fixing things. So if you want to support me in my pickup work today pick up a cheap beer (I recommend Pacific to my BC friends and Miller Low Life for the folks south of here) and turn up some classic rock. Cheers.