Anyway here are some pictures. Click for bigger images.

So I’m staying at my friend’s for the week while I’m between apartments, and I’ve just been ordering dinner out. Tonight I just had a hankering for a stuffed crust pizza, so I went and ordered a large from Pizza Hut with pepperoni and extra cheese.

This is what I got (with three more slices, of course).

For one, I can’t tell that there’s any more cheese on here than there would be on a normal pizza. In fact, if there were any less cheese, you’d probably be able to see the sauce through holes in it. It is probably the least-cheesy pizza I’ve had in recent memory.

For two, the toppings are overcooked and dry, whereas the crust is paradoxically undercooked. It tastes doughy. The cheese stuffing in the crust isn’t even melty or chewy. It’s just kinda warm.

For three, the flavor is.. utterly unremarkable. It’s perfectly bland. It’s maybe a step above freezer pizza.

And I paid, tax and two-dollar delivery charge included, $14 for this.

This isn’t the Pizza Hut I’m used to. I’m used to gut-wrenchingly greasy but divinely delicious. I’m used to splurging for a pricey pizza and getting what I paid for. I’m not used to letting a slice sit on my plate for 10 minutes because I don’t want to finish it.

WTF happened, Pizza Hut?

I never put all of my stuff into one place before. I… I have too many things.

Not pictured: bed, desk, desk chair, desktop PC, dresser, small TV stand.

I could really stand to get rid of about half of this.

WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS. UGH.

I took some pics this morning when it was still snowing, and then I took some more when I went out to grab some milk at CVS. No, I’m not one of those people who buys milk when it snows. I just had the rotten luck to run out on the day of a snowstorm

And here’s a video of some people snowboarding down my street.

Until further notice, anything not school-related is on hold.

So for Christmas this year, I got Erises for my parents and myself.

Assessment so far: fukken sweet.

As a testament to just how sweet it is, I’m writing this blog post from it. Yes. So cool.

Everything is so fast, smooth, and responsive. Finding and downloading apps is painless. Nothing is locked. It comes with an 8GB microSD card. Transferring files between the phone and the PC is fast and painless and it comes with a USB cable (which you can also charge it with from the computer). WiFi and 3G work flawlessly. The screen is phenomenal and the 3d graphics are nice as well.

And the development is completely open too. Suck it, iPhone.

I’ll probably be writing more on it some other time, but for now, it suffices to say that I’ve fallen in love with it.

WHY I WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL FOR LIKE TEN MORE YEARS: I never wanted to be a worker bee. I never wanted to feel trapped at a corporation; to work 9 to 5; to have water cooler conversations about sports and reality shows; to deal with management bullshit and drama; to interact with irate customers who have no concept of what is and isn’t possible within a three-month timeframe; to always be told what to work on with little to no creative freedom. I love to learn, explore, experiment. I love knowing things. Money does not motivate me, only knowledge and interesting shit. College was pretty much the best four years of my life because I was able to learn about the things I was genuinely interested in. I enjoy teaching and helping others learn new things. I enjoy the challenge of solving problems, including those that no one has ever solved before. The real world sucks. I will take the ivory tower, thankyouverymuch.

WHAT AM I INTERESTED IN: languages, both spoken and for programming.  Grammar and syntax come naturally to me. I have a linguistic bent and love learning – and learning about – spoken languages. I know three foreign languages. I can ace virtually any grammar test.  I know several programming languages and usually have little trouble picking up new ones. I’ve written my own. I plan on writing another. I find the representation of ideas in symbolic form fascinating. I love terse mathematical notation. I love logic and logical proofs.  I like theoretical aspects of languages, from the higher-level concepts of what can be represented linguistically, down to more practical details such as type systems and soundness. I want to be able to look at “academic” languages as if they were child’s play. Most importantly, I have a beard. Draw your own conclusions.

WHY I’VE CHOSEN PITT: Small and familiar. Small is good because it means less bureaucracy, more camaraderie, and more independence. Pitt isn’t particularly well-known for its CS program, especially since it lives in the shadow of CMU, but guess what: I don’t fucking care. I’m not doing this for prestige. I’m not doing this to get a better job. I’m doing this because it’s the only goddamn thing I want to do with my life. I want to be judged on my abilities, not on whom I know or whom I paid for my degree.

WHAT I WANT TO DO WHEN I FINALLY DECIDE I’M DONE: I have been very seriously considering a career in teaching all this stuff to other people. More specifically, I want to become a professor.  I want to teach, write, assist, research. I want to continue to learn for the rest of my life. I want to make languages. No, I want to make the language, the one that changes everything. I want to prove some important theorem. I want to give back to the scientific community which has given me so much.

I don’t know where it came from. My parents certainly weren’t strict about my performance in school or anything. As long as I did my best, that was all that mattered. They were certainly encouraging and supporting, and were proud of my accomplishments, but there were no negative consequences for failure. Maybe that’s where it came from. Maybe I thought, “well if no one else is going to hold me responsible for my success, I guess I’ll have to be the one to do it.” I don’t know. Whatever the source, it’s here, and it’s negatively affecting my life.

“But wait,” you say, “how can holding oneself to high standards be a bad thing?  Isn’t that better than having low standards?” Of course. If you don’t hold yourself to any standards, that’s bad because everything is “good enough.” You never strive to be better. You never work hard. You push others away by repeatedly failing to live up to their demands, even reasonable ones. You can even get in serious trouble with the law. But as a moderate, I would say that extremes of any kind are almost always a bad idea, and holding oneself to extremely high standards can be just as destructive. It’s a weird kind of destructive, though, because nothing actually gets destroyed. Instead, nothing that could be destroyed even gets a chance to exist.

Let me try to explain what I mean by that. I have a hell of a time coming up with ideas, in general. Programming projects, games, music, drawing, term papers, vacation plans, what to eat for dinner – these are all things that I have trouble with. I don’t have trouble doing any of them once I get started. I just have trouble actually coming up with an idea for them. And I think I know why. I am paralyzed by a fear of failure.

I’m not trying to be a dick by saying this, but you’re probably surprised to hear that. I say that because, well.. when have I failed? I’ve always done extremely well in school. I’ve made a programming language. I’ve made games, helped program an operating system, learned to draw, spoken at a conference, graduated Summa Cum Laude.. and maybe it’s all this success that has made me so afraid to fail. See, I’ve set such a precedent for myself that I feel like if I try anything and it doesn’t work out, then I’ve failed. I’ve failed to live up to my own past. It’s like an author writing a bestseller and then never being able to match that success again.

So instead, I play it safe. I don’t try to program something because it’s unfamiliar. I don’t try to draw something because it’s beyond my skill level. I buy, and eat, the same food over and over again because I’m afraid I might try something new and not like it. I avoid getting a girlfriend because I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to satisfy her on a personal level. I delay anything that has a timeline until the last minute because I’m afraid I’ll commit to an idea too early, only to realize later that it wasn’t my very best.

And here’s the contradiction: I never try any of these things because I’m afraid I’ll fail to live up to my own expectations, but as a result I feel like I’ve failed myself for not accomplishing as much as I’d like! It’s a goddamn catch-22! And it’s getting worse as I get older, as the accomplishments stack up! If I hit doctoral status, where can I go from there?!

Hhh.

“There is no goal in life; the journey is all that matters.” I don’t know who said this, but I read it a year or two ago, and it keeps popping up in my head when I think about this philosophical crap. I’ve come up with a little corollary that follows from it: “if there is no goal, there are no wrong turns.” And it’s a piece of advice that I want to start following.

So from now on, when I’m about to do something and I get that tense feeling in my throat and I alt+tab to firefox and compulsively check my email and RSS feeds for like three hours, before I pull any of that avoidance shit I’m going to say “you know what, try it.” What’s the worst that could happen? There’s no reason to be afraid. The only wrong turn is to not take the turn at all.