AcademicalNerd @academicalnerd@qoto.org

2021-02-13, 16:10, Saturday

Teach people to be articulate, because that’s the most dangerous thing you can possibly be.
– J.B. Peterson

One of the reasons I write is to sharpen my thoughts, to better articulate what I mean to others. Because this is one of the hardest skills to learn and sustain over the years of programming and learning chemistry, physics and math.

2021-02-13, 14:20, Saturday

I forgot to charge laptop before going to the cafe, and all the tables with plugs nearby are occupied… By people without laptops. Which is sad, to be honest, and slightly annoying. However, I’m getting the hang of this thing called hugo, hopefully the cite will be up and running in a week or so.

2021-02-13, 08:31, Saturday

So this is the first time I’m trying a “sabbath”-type thing. So no lab work and no studying from Friday’s evening to Sunday morning. I want to spend this time with my family and working on my personal projects; maybe cleaning my room, although it is usually in order anyway.

There are a multitude of things I’d like to keep working on, like learning music theory for my guitar, ricing my linux, building a website (which probably can be done in a day or less, to be honest) and making youtube stuff. Maybe there will be something else, who knows.

Also, a surprisingly great channel on youtube I’d want to share:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdkkQvJoB0kGgYHCYwSkdww

2021-02-12, 20:26, Friday

The best thing you can do for your body? Healthy eating. The second best thing? Exercise. The next one? I’d say it’s walking faster. Let me explain.

Walking is mundane and boring, you do it daily, probably when you commute and sometimes when you just need to get somewhere. It’s a form of exercise nonetheless, a low-intensity cardio with some load for legs.

It’s not as taxing on your knees as running. You don’t sweat as much and don’t need to change clothes after and the weather doesn’t matter. Besides, it saves some time from your commute.

You can walk faster than you do know. Do it long enough - and it will boost your stamina and save more time. Maybe you’ll start running at some point, but even fast walking is a good thing to do. Besides, it can be referred to “natural movement”, which to me sounds slightly overrated, but worth considering nonetheless.
#fitness #walking #lifestyle

2021-02-11, 16:25, Friday

Oh well, it’s been a week of classes and I’m done. One one-and-a-half hour class of an old man rambling away about random physicists biographies is possible to survive. Two classes - no, thank you very fucking much. Fuck yoursekf with the paddle you swam here with, as my good friend says.

#russianswearinglooselytranslated

2021-02-12, 07:50, Friday

University studying screws me over real bad. There were 5 classes yesterday and there will be 5 today. I’m a morning person, so any intense mental loads in the afternoon are very taxing. I mitigate this using exercise and planning of my activities, but it’s far from optimal, unfortunately.

Anyhow, there is an hour before the classes actually start and I want to do something with this time other than mindlellsy consume content. Maybe some lab work or scrape my feed into the scraps folder I have on my laptop.

@FailForward
Good evening. I remember you mentioned exporting your toots from mastodon to local scrapbook. Could you refer me to said toot/explain the process, please? I need to do something similar for my toots (there is a substantial amount now) and doing manually looks… Oh well, boring. I know some python and probably can glue together a bash script or two in necessary.

### 2021-02-11, 08:21, Thursday

Today there will be 5 classes, 1.5 hours each. Most of them will be quite challenging, to say the least, but it's fine. I managed to get some exercise in this morning and do some work, it should be enough.

Random thought that I dug up from old notes: different languages have different traits, and knowing multiple languages creates multiple aspects of your personality. They manifest themselves depending on the language and the way you learned it.

I have two languages in my arsenal: Russian and English. Russian is lengthy, lazy and philosophical, prone to reflection, poetical mood swings and ridiculously long sentences.

English is short and sharp. It is good for practical applications, such as planning and analysis. I use it in all my personal notes, planners and public writing for this reason.

Also, lifehack: if you are spiraling into anxiety attack, rationalizing yourself out of it is way easier if you use different language in your head. I have no idea why, it just works better for me.

#thoughts #notes #language #english #russian

2021-02-10, 20:35, Wednesday
A few random quotes from today.
> Deus Ex Coffemachina
-- Max Frei, "Coffee Book"

> I like my mornings nice and slow; it's a foreplay before life gives me a rough time
-- A paraphrasing of some random tiktok I stumbled upon
#quotes

2021-02-10, 07:00, Wednesday
So my schedule this semester is very weird. Wednesday is reserved for elective courses and military cources none of which I attend, and saturday is reserved for scientific research which I basically do every day in my spare time. Sunday is obviously devoid of classes as well.
This presents me with unique opportunity to actually choose a couple days to focus on different things. This is what I came up with so far.

Wednesday: no studying at all. No homework, no revision, just working on lab projects or my own stuff.

Saturday: shabbes, or rather a variation of it. No studying, no lab work, mostly creative writing and things related to my personal projects. A day to spend mostly with my family or friends. It is not a religious ritual, it makes sense so I adopt it.

Sunday: anything but a day off. I'll use it to finish whatever assignments I have left from the week.

Hopefully this makes sense. 'Till next morning~

2021-02-09, 08:10, Tuesday
Mised things up with my morning routine. Now it's wake up at 6 am, brush teeth, work till 7 am, quick warm-up/wirkout and shower. Then breakfast, coffee and usual stuff. Feels good, we'll see results later on.
I was supposed to have 4 classes today, by this morning 1 left, other teachers cancelled their classes or straight up ignored every email. Neat, huh? At least I have enough time to work on the article.
A question for readers, both occasional and regular: do any of you use gemini? Are you interested in seeing content on that protocol?
#lifestyle #morningroutine #morning #gemini #student #uni

2021-02-08, 20:07, Monday
I guess I'll have to leave the translation work for tomorrow. Otherwise I might burn out, and it's the last thing to do in the beginning of the semester. Really, at any given point burnout is unpleasant. I know that I am extremely prone to it as I love both my major in university and my laboratory work and multiple time has reached the point where it's physically difficult to do pretty much anything other than staring at an empty screen.
And now I'm smarter than this, so here goes a cup of hot chocolate (no cinnamon today, duh; too cold to go shopping) and chill background music. I might even play some tunes on my Jackson if the mood strikes.

2021-02-08, 09:28, Monday

Let's make things clear, I am arrogant as hell. Which doesn't mean that I'm not good at things I claim to be good at. Sometimes being humble is harmful, because you can't be a professional unless you consider yourself one. Know when you are good enough at someething to step up and say "I know what I'm doing and here is the right way to make things work".

Be arrogant, be blunt; you might screw up and lose other's trust, but these are the stakes here. They aren't the reason to not do things, they are to be taken into account when making a decision.

This paraphrases "Dr. House", of course. A good thing to consider nonetheless, especially if you are insecure as a person.

2021-02-08, 07:00, Monday
The semester starts today, hooray. Except, two classes are cancelled so I'm left with only two English classes, one of which is supposed to teach me "technical translation". Ironically, I'll be translating an article about the last project for publication during the class itself.
And yes, for now we are studying remotely, I hope is stays this way.
Yesterday we celebrated my colleague's birthday in a restaurant with surprisingly good sushi. Everyone else was freshmen there and I'm in my third year. I remember being way more insecure than they are in my first year and it's been a long and tough ride to who I am now, maybe more tough and longer than I remember. Courtesy of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and, to some extent, J.B. Peterson.

2021-02-07, 08:27, Sunday

Not a standart devblog because the project is almost done, now it's necessary to finish an article and submit it. And I don't really feel like telling about work , so here goes something.

So I visited a stand-up event yesterday. It happened in a small but cozy basement bar where comedians, apparently, test their jokes before telling them to a bigger crowd. Which I never thought existed, but makes a lot of sense. One could call it "a debugging of humor"; here the equivalent of console prompt is a small bar with five tables full and three empty and two barmens sitting on chairs at the counter, cracking at jokes.

Once I approached the bar counter, barmen (26 yo woman, as I found out later) stated:
- Now, tell me.
I resisted the urge to tell her a "long time ago in a galaxy far away", but that would be cliche even by my standards. I haven't tried beer before and in this place they serve exclusively beer and cider. I asked for "something bitter" and wasn't dissapointed. The label is below, the thing even feels "heavy" to drink and almost as smoothingly bitter as coffee. Turns out a nerd likes beer, who knew.
#beer #story #life #student

2021-02-06, 09:00, Saturday
It is very satisfying to see a huge, long-time-in-the-making project come to an end. All the problems are solved, the code compiles and runs perfectly and displays validated output. Feels almost like defeating the strongest boss in a videogame, but without the bitter feeling of "ending", because there is no ending, at least not in my lifetime. Science is too vast to have one.
#stem #programming #life #coffeenotes

2021-02-05, 07:18, Friday
I realised today rhar I need to make a website this weekend if I want to have it up at all. Because studying starts on Monday and there will be no time.
Also, I seem to have overworked myself with the last project. I'll finish the last tasks today and send everything to my advisor, hopefully there will be no follow-ups and I'll be able to focus on making a website. Or a gemini capsule, I'm not quite sure yet.

2021-02-04, 07:04, Thursday
Hab to buy a new bag of coffee. The one I opened recently was a gift and the roast is very dark. Too dark, I should say, there wass nothing but bitterness in my cup.
Anyhow, I rewrote the script yesterday.
###Developer note: separating writing and editing works in programming as well as in creative writing.
I tend to launch or at least build my code very often to see if I broke anything. This at some point starts taking a lot of time, because I have to write small chunks and make them compatible with the rest of the system.
Yesterday I was working from my laptop. Wrote 2 hours worth of matlab code from vim and then debugged it from console (opengl gui breaks on xmonad for some reason).Seems like I tend to be too paranoid when programming.

2021-02-03, 07:37, Wednesday
So I happen to be a morning person. Which means I usually habe to grind my coffee the day before, because the grinder is loud and wakes up the entire family. This is why I have to resort to tea for today, sadly.
It is very important to differentiate solving a problem from creating a product, or a framework, if you will. When there is a single problem (or a set of similar problems) that require a one-time solution, one can get by using spaghetty code and non-optinal solutions without getting into much trouble.
If the code is to be maintained and expanded, then you are writing a product. Now you shouldn't do spaghetti code or omit documenting. This is not about just you anymore, so minimize your succesors' suffering by putting extra effort into cleaning your code.
This seems obvious but is important to keep in mind. I found myself overoptimizing a peice of code required for one-time use.