If you’re reading this, it must mean that everything turned out correctly¹. I just migrated RogerHub to a new webhost, for the next two years. Why? Because competition. Fuck yeah. Not many things in this life tend to just keep getting better and better. How it feels to be on the other side of competition, you must know already.

Isn’t it great? The simple logic that better things succeed and crap fails. Let’s see what happens.

When I first saw the term gaslighting¹, I thought it referred to igniting one’s farts, which made absolutely no sense at all in context. So I did the logical thing and copied it into Google, which actually meant I wanted a Wikipedia article. Gaslighting is actually a form of psychological torture where you trick someone into doubting their memories. Click* click, and before long, it was 1:30AM and I had 4 tabs of Wikipedia articles about psychological torture open in Chromium. I don’t know about you, but staying up till post-midnight just creeps me out. I’ve got this circle of light coming from the desk lamp while through the window outside, it feels like everyone is dead. Nonetheless, there is no better time to think than during the silence of the night when everything else is muted.

Look at this here. I can imagine every bit of what’s going on. I can see the voltage applied across the liquid crystals in this screen that allow light to pass through. I can see the signals from the computer, serially transferred through the 18-pin DVI cable. I can see Chromium’s progressive rendering of responses sent over endless miles of transcontinental cables by Wikipedia’s (what appears to be) Apache with gzipping, caching, and a round-robin DNS built up by the ingenuity of engineers whom I’ll never meet, while completely ignoring the equal ingenuity of Wikipedia editors. See typically, engineers are obsessively concerned with how something works. It clears up the magic behind why things work, from electronics to how we can know the surface composition of planets a billion miles away. This obsession sometimes creates a problem that I’m sure you can relate to. Though a system may function perfectly, if the “how” behind its engineering isn’t perfect, it will drive you crazy.

Most people are most comfortable when there’s a certain degree of magic. When you hit Print on MS-Word, you don’t care about color profiles or calibration. You just want your damn copy. Microsoft doesn’t give you many options, because they’re just scary.

I wrote most of this in the morning, and it was going well until I started the computer talk. Then, it digressed into nonsense. This blog is just great, because the first thing I need in the summer is more writing to do. Pretty soon, I’ll need to transfer RogerHub to another web host and deploy Clark as well. I think I”m just going to go to sleep now.

Google? Yeah, our generous overlords. Let me tell you something about Google. When you click
RogerHub | The Personal Blog of Roger Chen.
www.rogerhub.com/you’re not actually going to RogerHub. Google redirects you to another page¹ that saves some data about your click and then redirects you to RogerHub. This page keeps track of all the websites you click on and all the things you search. It all happens so quickly, that you never notice. But hey, who’s complaining? I’m not. They’re Google. Nobody cares.

But consider this: what if Facebook started doing the same thing? This bait-and-switch tactic would spawn a shitstorm, or a pool-pah, as Bokonon² would say it. That Big Brother Zuckerberg can see all the meet-singles-in-your-area ads you’ve been clicking on just scares the shit out of people. I don’t understand.

Of course, the reason I bring this up is Google’s new Facebook, which they call Google Plus. It’s idiotic to dislike Facebook because of privacy. An intuitive one-size-fits-all solution to selective sharing is particularly difficult to implement. Now that Facebook has set a precedent, Google can copy their design and step in with a clean record. People who complain about Facebook’s privacy either have unreasonable expectations or just play too damn many Facebook games.

Disliking Facebook is partly irrational. All the credit and responsibility is shoved onto this one shady 27-year-old, whose curly hair and indifference don’t exactly scream “you can trust me”. When people slur Apple or Facebook, they’ve got a clear target, but this clarity is missing from Google, whose publicity team consists of Indian engineers and animated narrations on YouTube. It’s natural to trust the hivemind, and perhaps, this irrational thinking will make all the difference. Or maybe it won’t.

Blog post titles always sound so damn hipster. It’s a balance between brevity and “haha look! my single word titles carry so much meaning, but you probably don’t understand it because you’re so conformist and not intellectually superior like me”. Tumblr has solved this problem by making titles optional. Amazing.

So my sister has this broken laptop that nobody uses. Its screen freezes, its battery doesn’t hold a charge, and it has one too many stickers on it. One afternoon, we decided to salvage what we could from it, so I installed Ubuntu linux + SSH, so that I could control it from my own computer. On that first day, I got the wireless working and set a static private IP, and I was pretty damn proud.

Today, about 20 minutes ago, I was testing the audio card with some songs that I uploaded. So, I’m listening to Dead and Gone by T.I. and mplayer gets to this one part where he’s rapping about cardinal directions¹. For as long as I can remember, I associate certain characteristics with each of the four directions. East is the rich, excessive, and superficial society that prides itself in a cultured, structured, and sophisticated way of life. North is the forest-dwelling, mysterious and superbly awesome race of elf-like humanoids who are too self-important to share their coolness with anybody else. West is the casual bunch of present-hedonistic party-goers who get their work done, but much too slowly. South is cowboys and lazy farmers, what else? Ha, I’m just kidding². But when I was at the park today, I brought up my mental maps and the view towards each of the four directions actually reflected these descriptions fairly accurately. To the East.. was the road. Of course. The North side had this deep navy blue night sky with the silhouette of many trees. To the West were many houses with lights coming through the windows. The South had a couple of hills and dense foliage behind.

Now, I can plug in this laptop anywhere: one to the power outlet, another to speakers. I open two terminal windows: one for the mixer (volume) and the other for the command line music player.

Journals are awesome, but RogerHub is not a journal. In journals, people write about things and people in their life. In contrast, RogerHub is about ideas, not people, with the exception of our generous King Zuckerberg. All the great persons of the past kept diaries and journals. They handwrote when they had paper, typed when they had typewriters, and now, they do this weird video-log and blogging stuff. If a blog is supposed to be a journal¹, it’s not very good one. Journals are supposed to be private, so you can bash whomever you’d like and swear all you want. You can’t confess these things on a blog because they are too offensive or controversial. To correct for this, I’ve been keeping another journal on the side. I trust this journal, not to the soft earth in the backyard, nor to a key and lock, but to cryptography. I trust cryptography more than I trust myself².

Because I like to apply data visualization to everything, I have graphed³ my “happiness”, so to speak, versus time, for the past 3 months. I hypothesized that it would come out like a sine graph, with no general trend. It turns out, my cycle of nonsense does roughly follow the model.

This journal really is something else. It helps me organize my thoughts and collect memories, and because I trust it so much, it takes over the journal roles of blogging, which until this year, were handled to an extent by RogerHub as well. At one point, I had an idea for a startup that involved this journal idea. Since modern peoples are so dependent on technology, I could have a “How are you feeling today?” scale from zero to a hundred that would record your level of happiness periodically for several months. Once in a while, when you’re curious, you could see data visualizations of your happiness. You could make annotations on the data and export it to social networking. Then, I would package mobile apps⁴ and store data centrally with the same password-dependent security solutions that are involved in my encrypted journal.

But, people are rather good at keeping track of this data themselves. Eventually, all my startup ideas turn out like this:

(I’m reading Cat’s Cradle for my EE, possibly.)

I call this the Nonsense Cycle because, honestly, it still makes no sense to me. My situation hasn’t changed. My grades haven’t changed. Still, the marker goes up and down. Perhaps it’s the weather, or something like Keynesian animal spirits. Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that blogging on RogerHub makes it go upward.

In May 1996, a bunch of computer geniuses got together to write RFC1945, an informational document on the HTTP/1.0 standard¹ that was the foundation of protocol that defined the World Wide Web. Apparently, somebody noticed that referrer was spelled wrong², but by that time, it was already too late to change it. As a result, the HTTP specification indicates Referer, with 3 r’s, as the correct header, even today. I guess it shows that everyone can make mistakes.

I thought I would never find a word to describe this one thing I had when I was little: whenever I had lots of time to burn, like on the toilet, or walking home, or trying to go to sleep, I would dream up an entire universe with characters and landscapes. It would incorporate everything, from books I read and games I played to the car on the other side of a street, which would actually be a space transport in its hangar. So I’m reading Wikipedia’s article on Paracosms when I notice that their font is ridiculously small. F12 tells me that it’s 0.8em which makes for a measly 13px. For a website that’s all about sharing knowledge with the world, you’d think they’d tailor their web design to more than my grandmother’s SVGA CRT monitor¹. See, normal people would suck it up and just ctrl + to zoom in, which gets to be annoying because Chrome remembers all your zoom settings and every time you revisit, things are blown out of proportion. But not me. Armed with Regular Expressions and a background in CSS, I get a Chrome extension to inject styles to Wikipedia to get some 0.8x18=15px. Man, it must suck to be normal.

Sometimes, I notice that when people use the computer, they do this fidgeting thing. Knees are throbbing up and down. Head scanning side to side. Compulsively selecting the copy then zooming in and out. It’s not exactly the perfectly calm end-user imagined by UX¹ designers. Because most people are alone when they’re on the computer, they don’t consciously check their appearance, and these weird habits build up quickly.

Not completely unrelated, people in movies always look awesome when they’re using the computer. They’re all doing important stuff and shooting people, when some guy sits down and brings up these nice translucent terminal windows and monochromatic data visualizations with units on a battlefield and mission strategists working around. It’s always the same thing, and it makes normal people feel inferior with their boring desktops and the ridiculously small amount of work they do during the week. It takes a particular set of circumstances for this fantasy computer-superhero thing to affect people. But say, you’re handy with computers, you watch action and sci-fi, and you feel like your work is insignificant. These few people end up trying to mimic those TV and movie computer heroes, by doing all sorts of desktop hacks, RainMeter, icon docks, Linux, and feeding the insatiable craving for a new wallpaper.

Considering both observations, perhaps it would be healthier, both physically and mentally, if people were more self-conscious when they’re using the computer. Ah, see, it would alleviate problems associated with sitting at a desk for hours, and you could start keeping a wallpaper for more than a couple of days.

I was eating one of those Pirouette french vanilla cream-filled wafers and reading the back side of the can simultaneously. I thought to myself–wouldn’t it be great if they had stuff like this at school? But because the good people of the state of California hate fat people, they can’t sell anything with sugar listed as the first ingredient. And.. sugar is listed as the first ingredient. Some producers get around this by splitting sugar up into its various isomers, so that they can get something else to take the spot of the principal ingredient. Or, maybe you could dilute the can with water, and get the wafers all soggy, or maybe with milk.. ahh that sounds good.

The first-ingredient rule really doesn’t make any sense. Let’s say, I use packaging tape to bind a bottle of coke to a SmartWater. Clearly, the most abundant ingredient, both by volume and mass, is water. So, I could totally start selling coke at school like this, right? Since it doesn’t violate¹ their rule? Now, some genius will come up with another rule, like: Items that contain any component that is primarily made of sugar will be eliminated and banned from public schools. Well, if you figure out how to separate pure sugar from food, you can go get anything banned, if it contains the smallest bit of sugar.

If these guys are really so worried about the Rise of the Fat Empire, could they just impose a tax on sugary foods, equal to the social cost of growing fat people? ASB probably sells snacks at profit-maximizing prices, considering all the regulations on the types of food they can sell. A reintroduction of banned food coupled with discretionary taxing could be a better solution. I go to Target and get my vanilla cream wafers. Inefficient policy? Case in point.

This blog is monochromatic and so boring without the pictures. Here’s a nice colorful box to change things up:

I was reading the Hoofprint and I saw that Elliot wrote¹ about the appeal of summer freedom. You know, I had high expectations for this one, kind of like the feeling you get, when it’s the first ten minutes of a movie and someone’s busting out ps and grep². I was expecting the whole paradox where you realize that summer is boring and absolutely sucks because you’ve no school work to occupy your time. Instead, he writes about using your two-thousand hours to prepare for SAT or get a job, almost as if the administration jumped in, halfway through the article, and made some suggestions. Where’s the opinion in this? All year long, I never felt tired, uninspired. But now, I’m figuratively trying to light the last few crumbs of what’s still left. World Lit 2, perhaps a summer project: they just don’t give the mental high that they used to. I’ve got nothing to do, and now for the first time, I’m exhausted.

I will miss this 2-7 near-perfect schedule.

I don’t teach very well. When I’m explaining logic, my mind skips a couple of steps, and I expect the listener to make the same mental jumps as I do. In a chain of logic, I’ll only explain the linchpin leap of logic and expect that the rest is common knowledge¹. Then, my sentences just come out in short phrases that, out of context, don’t really make any sense. I supposed that some people are better teachers than others.

I used to think that mental ability was an overall measure of competency in everything. It made sense that, if you were smart in school, you could do leadership and counseling and everything just by applying logic and inductive reasoning to whatever situation. But then there are things like compassion and empathy that apparently require a great deal more reasoning than just thinking. Simply throwing logic at every difficult situation can resolve a quick solution but it’s like Keynesian economics: in the long run, the debt just keeps building. Some people say all things in moderation. And after a great period of moderation, you get sick of it and inspired to be optimistic, which is then followed by disillusionment and an overshot into pessimism, which puts you at depression for a while, until you can get back to the middle ground of realism. It’s like neurons that get hyperpolarized after the action potential passes. Does this go in a cycle? A monthly burst of Carpe Diem, followed by quiet cynicism. Or perhaps there is a definite direction in this madness, like the business cycle. Then, should we put counter-cyclic pressures on these cycles, or is it healthier to leave them alone?

We never really realize it, but schoolwork is such a great distraction to this madding cycle. It has the same effect that World War II had on the American economy. It’s essentially a mental high, and you’re consistently and comfortably close to the center arc of the cycle, forever stuck at G₀ of the cell cycle. Well, not actually forever. This high typically comes to a pause over the summer months when the distraction of school is released and the cell cycle can continue. So, we enact discretionary policy and try to fill our time with distracting work similar to what we get from school. Procrastination and passing time are especially hurtful in these months because of the effects of school withdrawal combined with the relentless movement of the mental cycle. This year was definitely more consistent a high than any other in the past, especially because of English and Biology. But it’s almost over, and these observations of past years may not apply. Maybe the withdrawal will be worse, or maybe it will be lighter. But I do know that I’ve been filling up summer with activity as a sort of analgesic to this upcoming three-month period of negative growth, until next year’s high comes.

Biology AP test: hit me already. It’s getting to my head.