I remember a time before we were all on Facebook and Twitter and Buzz and the internet was just webpages - I'd regularly check maybe the three or four sites I cared about most, and I'd spend a lot of time....doing other stuff! like making things. or doing homework without checking my email every five minutes.
Okay, there were still some distractions - sometimes I'd do homework while chatting on IM, and I'd occasionally check to see if any friends had a funny new away message, or I'd while away a few hours reading random websites, but the constant stream of updates was less pervasive.
Occasionally I'd find a website I had forgotten about and think, "hey, I missed all this stuff, I wish I could remember to check this site more often." That's exactly the reason I love Google Reader. However, it's become a bit of a burden - I don't want to *miss* anything! That would be terrible! And I keep adding feeds, because, hey, this site's cool, maybe I should follow it too.
...And then all of a sudden I've got 200 unread items, and aahhh! I must clear them out! it turns into something like whack-a-mole. Given some free time, I'll read my unread items instead of, I don't know, doing something productive. it's become a bit of an excuse for procrastination, too: "oh, I'll start that project, but after I read all my webcomics." I'm not even sure how much I remember of what I read.
But it *is* hard to miss anything. I'm certainly more informed now than I was a few years ago, if less attentive. That's because I get all the news from Facebook.
....Okay, maybe things are not so different. Let's compare.
Before and After: A Retrospective.
Before: IM away messages.
After: Twitter updates.
Before: saving sites that updated frequently in a folder in my favorites, obsessive-compulsively checking them to see if they had updated, being disappointed when they didn't, and eventually forgetting about the site if it didn't update often enough.
After: obsessive-compulsively checking Google Reader, and then not knowing what to do with my life after I've read everything ever.
Before: OCD email checking and constant IMing on AOL.
After: OCD email checking and constant IMing on Gmail.
Before: spam about vjjjAgRA and c1Alis.
After: spam about events that I am not going to go to.
Before: coding up my own webpage and comments section.
After: "Wahhh I'm too hosed to do anything awesome and also my old website died in a fire." (no really, it did, and I didn't even have anything to do with it)
Before: power outage = no computer = go play outside or something.
After: laptop = moar internet = don't go play outside or something.
Before: goldfish-like attention span
After: goldfish-like attention span
Before: desire for attention and positive feedback via writing articles for my website that no one ever read. (should have made an RSS feed apparently)
After: desire for attention and positive feedback via writing Twitter/Facebook status updates that occasionally get a "like" or a comment. (yay)
Before: "I wish I knew [foo]."
After: Wikipedia!
Before: OMG LEMMINGS
After: HEY LOOK I CAN DOWNLOAD LEMMINGS I REMEMBER THAT GAME
Before: obsessive-compulsively checking the wording of all my emails.
After: meh, whatever
Before: I was a carefree child with lots of free time.
After: I am a carefree grad student with lots of free time. (what?)
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
Continuing Adventures at MIT
Oops, I kind of forgot I had a blog. A lot has happened in the past semester and a half....
I'm living up in Davis Square at Sluglabs with Femtomatt, Jake, and (last semester) Ben. I have a nice little room, it's only ~20min. on the Red Line to campus, and Davis Square is pretty nice - there are some good places to eat nearby.
Also I've been TAing! Last semester I was a TA for 6.034, I was a lab assistant for 6.189 over IAP with Reid and Jackie (it was an intro Python programming course during IAP for mostly freshmen), and this semester I am TAing 6.004. it's been fun/interesting/educational, especially trying to teach intro programming because it forced me to think about how to explain many of the concepts that I take for granted as a course 6 person, to people who had never seen them before.
6.034 and 6.004 are pretty different classes to TA. For 6.034 I only had to prepare one lesson per week, and I didn't have office hours, so I'd mostly answer questions by email. For 6.004, we have two lessons to prepare each week, but they're pretty well-defined from previous semesters (i.e. the tutorial problems that are the same each year). We also have to staff lab hours (8 per week) which seemed like a lot in the beginning, but mostly they've been pretty quiet (I anticipate this will change once the Beta assignment goes out!) and also it means that students bring their questions to lab instead of sending a lot of emails, so it all kind of evens out. It's also been really fun to basically take these two classes over again - Winston's lectures are still awesome, and it's really good to review 6.004 stuff as well since it's not really my area of exprtise, but it's definitely stuff that every course 6 person should know.
Last semester I took Machine Learning with just about all of East Campus. Over IAP I had an enlightening meeting with Anne Hunter where we determined that if I switched to the "new" M.Eng. curriculum, that I could be completely done with classes right then. This was great news because it's meant that I've had more time to work on my thesis this semester. However, I thought it would just be too weird to be at MIT and not take any classes at all, so I am taking 6.345 (Automatic
Speech Recognition) as a listener, and the lectures for that have all been really great so far.
Speaking of my thesis, it's going alright at the moment, and it looks like I just might have a chance of finishing it this semester if I keep up the momentum I have on it. I'm working with Boris and Sue at Infolab on a question answering system
(http://start.csail.mit.edu) and my project is to make the system able to detect and correct the kinds of errors that happen when the webpages we rely on for our answers change their format.
I've also been trying to figure out what I will do next year! Back in the fall, I got a full-time offer from Google in NYC, and I also applied to grad schools. I've visited Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins already, and I'll visit Columbia in April. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet (I want to visit all of the schools before I decide), but I know I really like this speech and language stuff, so most likely it will be grad school. I'm a bit sad to be leaving MIT, but after five years here, I definitley feel like it would be good to spend some time somewhere else - yay for new places!
I'm living up in Davis Square at Sluglabs with Femtomatt, Jake, and (last semester) Ben. I have a nice little room, it's only ~20min. on the Red Line to campus, and Davis Square is pretty nice - there are some good places to eat nearby.
Also I've been TAing! Last semester I was a TA for 6.034, I was a lab assistant for 6.189 over IAP with Reid and Jackie (it was an intro Python programming course during IAP for mostly freshmen), and this semester I am TAing 6.004. it's been fun/interesting/educational, especially trying to teach intro programming because it forced me to think about how to explain many of the concepts that I take for granted as a course 6 person, to people who had never seen them before.
6.034 and 6.004 are pretty different classes to TA. For 6.034 I only had to prepare one lesson per week, and I didn't have office hours, so I'd mostly answer questions by email. For 6.004, we have two lessons to prepare each week, but they're pretty well-defined from previous semesters (i.e. the tutorial problems that are the same each year). We also have to staff lab hours (8 per week) which seemed like a lot in the beginning, but mostly they've been pretty quiet (I anticipate this will change once the Beta assignment goes out!) and also it means that students bring their questions to lab instead of sending a lot of emails, so it all kind of evens out. It's also been really fun to basically take these two classes over again - Winston's lectures are still awesome, and it's really good to review 6.004 stuff as well since it's not really my area of exprtise, but it's definitely stuff that every course 6 person should know.
Last semester I took Machine Learning with just about all of East Campus. Over IAP I had an enlightening meeting with Anne Hunter where we determined that if I switched to the "new" M.Eng. curriculum, that I could be completely done with classes right then. This was great news because it's meant that I've had more time to work on my thesis this semester. However, I thought it would just be too weird to be at MIT and not take any classes at all, so I am taking 6.345 (Automatic
Speech Recognition) as a listener, and the lectures for that have all been really great so far.
Speaking of my thesis, it's going alright at the moment, and it looks like I just might have a chance of finishing it this semester if I keep up the momentum I have on it. I'm working with Boris and Sue at Infolab on a question answering system
(http://start.csail.mit.edu) and my project is to make the system able to detect and correct the kinds of errors that happen when the webpages we rely on for our answers change their format.
I've also been trying to figure out what I will do next year! Back in the fall, I got a full-time offer from Google in NYC, and I also applied to grad schools. I've visited Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins already, and I'll visit Columbia in April. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet (I want to visit all of the schools before I decide), but I know I really like this speech and language stuff, so most likely it will be grad school. I'm a bit sad to be leaving MIT, but after five years here, I definitley feel like it would be good to spend some time somewhere else - yay for new places!
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