John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

Got started on my self improvement plan 1.25 months early this time. And it doesn’t rely on extreme willpower, massive routine shifts, or anything crazy. Just an under-desk elliptical, an exercise bike in front of my TV, and a weight bench in my office.

It’s not nice when you feel like the quintessential depiction of a “before” photo (even though I’m apparently not that bad looking). I’ve just taken my first progress shots: time to get that “after” physique. And then…I can buy my new sexy clothes.

I’ve already got my savings account buckets tracking money for my new shoes, my new tweed suits, chinos, and some other nice pieces for my wardrobe. I am so hype, and I wanna be walking into fall semester looking ✨c l a s s y✨

(One downside is that I basically have to buy everything new. Thrift stores don’t typically carry clothes for people my height, and they definitely don’t have my shoe size. One more reason to look forward to checking out the Netherlands: all the tall-people thrift stores and maybe some size 47 shoes 😁)

Oh goodness, I'm stuck in a difficult situation with a manuscript. I'm trying to write (and be engaging) for a journal audience who likely aren't particularly big on our topic, whereas my colleague prefers a much drier and more passive style. I'm concerned that without a good hook, our work will go mostly unnoticed, even in this relatively high-profile journal.

Of course, this is primarily for the introduction, we get on to the "boring" stuff in the preliminaries and model formulations as needed. But at the very least, I'm hoping to implicitly signal to readers "yeah, this isn't your usual programming, but stick around, grab some eggnog and enjoy a well written, engaging piece of academic literature".

I'm basing my assessment on Helen Sword's "Stylish Academic Writing" book, which is an excellent guide, even for the hard sciences (she did a huge survey across fields before writing the book). Unfortunately, convincing others to deviate even slightly from the poorly written style they're accustomed to reading is....difficult, to say the least.

Anyone willing to offer some advice?

"Life is a masquerade: many masks are opaque, some are translucent, yet only mine is glass.

Transparency itself does not vex me, yet many seem loathe to gaze upon what 'should remain unseen'.

Humbug! 'Tis better to doff garb, when its purpose does not befit its form, than suffer the psychic chafing it inflicts.

My marred form bare to behold, so unlike the impeccable, pallid porcelain worn passim. Shall I curse those who demand perfection yet only accessorize with it? Or do I accept freedom as blessing enough? Never have I been truly adorned; at least now, comfort is a welcome consolation."

Written by me, based on a quote from Kafka.

My dog worryingly looking at my wife for no reason. I think we're "doin her a heckin concern"... or she has gas from all the eggs 😂

@freemo Edit: I take it back, there is no good emacs compatibility. What curse have I brought upon this blessed instance, please ignore.

@freemo I know we have an instance of Gitlab hosted on Qoto, but I was curious if you've considered something for hosting mercurial/etc projects as well. I really appreciate the access to Gitlab, but I'm thinking of switching to either Hg or Sapling (even though the latter is made by...Meta🤢) as potential git alternatives due to many suggestions on hacker news, along with extensibility, and apparent simplicity of both tools.

I'm not sure if there would be widespread interest in such a thing since git more or less won the DVCS war, but I figured I'd chuck the idea your way and see if you have interest in making it happen like the STEM-genie I often imagine you to be 😂

P.S. I hope you're doing well and have fun plans for Thanksgiving...assuming you take time to celebrate it in Utrecht, that is 😉

Supercomputer access has boosted my productivity substantially, I might actually get my papers submitted this century 😩

I'm dead 💀😂

Okay, so that supercomputer code crashed... It hit the RAM limit I assigned at 64 GB and only 22% completion...

Good news? I can likely complete the data generation phase within 24-48 hours.

Bad news? An estimated 300GB of just tabular text data that I get to sift through when I'm done. That I sure as hell can't load into RAM anywhere.

Im not sure how to feel about this 😶

On the bright side, I can take breaks and still feel productive while my jobs run in the background! 😄

I'm finally able to run my Julia code on the supercomputer, as tech support got it working (mine failed due to a curl dependency error that I was unable to address, funnily enough).

It's glorious. Remind me to NEVER, under any circumstances, run code locally; it destroys my ability to multitask effectively when my 12 year old laptop screeches to a halt xD

Pooch Post! She was recently groomed for matting caused by her allergies, and now she's chilly and needs a vest and some blankets in her bed. She's so stinking cute, I can't take it 😍

@andrew
I noticed you're a fan of R, and I have to ask if you've played with Julia at all (the programming language, not some person 😂).

I teach a course that's mostly on R and wrote my first thesis in it+RMarkdown. Frankly, I have to say of the big data science/stats languages (python, R, julia) that julia really gets it the "most right" in most cases, though R is a decent alternative in certain cases.

The syntactic sugar and macros alone make julia super nice, and there are so many other handy tools, packages, and integrations (including with R and Python!) that I plug it to anyone else in the stats/etc space. If you want any more details, just let me know!

I'm almost done with my cryptocurrency research paper!!! I think it'll be submitted for review by the end of this semester, possibly along with one on hospital scheduling, and graph analysis, and I should be hearing back from my neuroergonomics literature review paper either this semester or early spring!

I'm so tired 😩, but it's finally all coming together, I think 😄