Back in the groove
Aug 25, 06:42 PM by Eric Allen
Whew. After an awesome summer internship at Wesabe and an epic cross-country road trip, I’m finally back in the groove at RPI. I took four days to move in, but I got to spend a lot of that time with my girlfriend. Classes started today, and I’m already enjoying the semester! Sometimes I can’t believe how full my life is.
Only a few short months ago I started my internship at Wesabe, and boy was it an adventure! Writing Ruby for a hot Web2.0 startup in San Francisco? What could be a better experience for a college sophomore? I learned all kinds of stuff, from how to run a team to Ruby security vulnerabilities to good places to eat in San Francisco. My coworkers were a pretty cool bunch! I’m not sure dot-comming is what I want to do with my life, but Wesabe definitely gave me a taste of what it can be like.
After a week to catch my breath, I headed out on a four-day road trip with my friend Dan back to New York. We went from Oakland, CA to Laramie, WY to Bettendorf, IA to Pittsburgh, PA to Troy, NY. Check out the map to get an idea of the distances. The trip went without a hitch: Dan’s Honda Civic performed beautifully, and the two of us are still good friends! We kept an hour-by-hour blog live from the car with Dan’s Verizon card and my iPhone. The cost came out to just over $200 for each of us, which was almost exactly what we would’ve paid to fly, not to mention shipping all of the stuff I brought back. I’m not sure spending four days getting to school is worth it, but the adventure surely was.
I had no idea how much I missed home here at RPI. I have so many friends here! Everywhere I go, whether it’s errands, food, or class, I keep running into people and catching up. My room is awesome (and has air conditioning!), too. I enjoyed my life during the summer, but here I really feel like I’m in my element. I know I’ve had my ups and downs with RPI, but now that I’ve committed to this place it feels great. My clubs are in full swing, and we’ll be recruiting freshmen at the Activities Fair on Thursday. The classes I’m taking this semester are all pretty technical: Physics II, Data Structures and Algorithms, Computer Components and Operations, and Laboratory Introduction to Embedded Control. That last one is gonna be sooo fun. I love playing with embedded electronics, and the class uses one of my favorite processors: the 8051! I like my professors so far, and I have friends in every class. All I’m missing is time for lunch.
Life can take you on many paths, so I figure the best thing I can do is to enjoy the path I end up on. I’m sure enjoying this one!
Backpacking at Lake Vernon
Jul 7, 09:44 PM by Eric Allen
I decided to forgo more conventional July 4th celebration and head into the backcountry this weekend for a 26-mile backpacking trip! It was so awesome.
Mach 1
Jun 12, 11:03 AM by Eric Allen
I feel like a jet fighter: lean, fast, optimized like crazy, and efficient. Every morning I wake up at 7 am, and I’m running at mach 1 until I hit the sack at 10pm. I’m out the door in 30 minutes, and I catch up on email while I’m on the train. At work, I try to be as productive as I can possibly be, barely making time to take breaks to stretch and walk around. I listen to audiobooks on my way back to the train station, and take care of random personal stuff on the train home. I eat dinner as soon as I get home (at 7pm), and then I have about two hours to run through SuperMemo (optimized learning) and take care of tasks I couldn’t do away from home. By the time I go to bed around 10:30, I’ve been running essentially non-stop since 7 am. I use a well-tuned MacBook Pro, Tracks GTD for task management, and a multitude of scripts and hacks to optimize my productivity at my computer. I feel like I’m successfully cruising through my life at mach 1.
I’ve almost forgotten what down-time is! “Relaxation” is reading books, many of which are non-fiction and intended to expand my knowledge. I listen to music to improve my mood…while doing other things. I take time to socialize during lunch and dinner, but everybody has things they want to get to afterward. “Fun” for me is hacking on Tracks, adding code and testing features. I can’t wait to get back to school, where I’ve got a couple of website ideas I want to implement, a club I’m partially in charge of, and a club I want to revive. Oh, did I mention 16 credits of hard engineering?
Flying at mach 1 is exhilarating. I get a ton done every day, and I feel very accomplished. I get some recognition from others, but mostly I satisfy myself with knowing how well I’m doing.
An Information Diet: one month later
May 20, 06:28 PM by Eric Allen
It’s been over a month since I went on my information diet, and it is such a better lifestyle. I still read blogs, check email, and function normally, but I never read slashdot, digg, or reddit. As it turns out, this works quite well for reducing my inforporn to a reasonable minimum. Even four weeks later, I still find myself trying to check news sites once in a while, but thanks to AdBlock, the urge goes unfulfilled. I’m very productive at work (I’m back in CA for the summer), and I have a 3-day average for finishing tasks that I keep track of in Tracks. I’m even reading real books!
Paul Graham seems to have discovered a different solution to the same issue. Some other people have also found RescueTime to work well for keeping tabs on themselves.
Going on an Information Diet
Apr 16, 04:16 PM by Eric Allen
How often do you read the newspaper? Slashdot? Digg? Reddit? Blogs? Twitter? None of them?
Today’s information worker (or children thereof) is inundated with information. This problem has not gone unnoticed. For the last couple of years I’ve been borderline addicted to “infoporn,” and this week I decided to do something about it. I re-configured my web browser’s ad-blocking software to block any addresses at the infoporn sites I visit regularly. I thought I could just exercise self-control, but until this week I kept going back!
What a feeling! Without the constant instant-gratification of new information, my brain is hungry again—remember, it’s only been two days! Suddenly I’ve ended up more productive, as my information-starved brain quests for something to do. When I do consume information, it’s in the form of books (both fiction and non-fiction) and (gasp!) school. I actually want to read my textbooks because I’m not letting myself read things that aren’t worth the mind-clutter.
I will see how this develops over a few more weeks, but so far it’s an amazing success! Just say “no” to useless information, kids!
Running a small organization
Feb 6, 08:33 PM by Eric Allen
Disclaimer: This is written entirely off the cuff. I just got back from a club meeting and need a place to pontificate with no interruptions.
How do you run a relatively small organization, say a club on a college campus? How do you make decisions? How do you handle disagreements? In some clubs this is hardly an issue, but in others it is crucial to the clubs survival and success. I see two extremes of organization, with some possible leeway in between. On the one hand you have what my friend John describes as “a craigslist.” The club’s executive board is effectively nonexistent, and members simply use the club as a forum for organizing activities and discussing events. On the other end is a complete autocracy, where the club president (and possibly the e-board as well) has complete power, and decisions are made by him/her alone. Both work well in their own situations, and both have merits and disadvantages.
As it is currently configured, the Progressive Students Alliance here at RPI operates essentially as a craigslist-style organization. The recent few most successful club events were spearheaded by determined club members, and the club did little to support the events as a whole. This worked well, because the interested members formed their own committees and had zero interference. The regular meetings of the PSA are mostly random debates on specific issues. This can be quite entertaining, but rarely is a productive conclusion reached. The debates are not begun with the intent to take action as a club, and rarely is action taken as a result. For a bunch of kids talking politics, this works quite well. We have a regular attendance at meetings of around 15 members, and the discussions are interesting. It’s worth my time to go!
At the other end you have clubs in which the membership has little say. I haven’t been in any that are all the way to this extreme, but the closest was probably my high school robotics team. The policy there was “it’s a democracy, but only one person votes.” This allowed for discussion and input from the members, but all decisions were made by the club president with complete authority. It was basically a benevolent (well, at least I think I was benevolent) dictatorship. For a small robotics team, this was a wonderfully efficient organization. When hard decisions had to be made, we could make them very quickly, and only one person had to take the hit if the decision was a bad one. As long as the president (me) generally did what the members preferred, things ran smoothly.
As well as the autocracy of the robotics team worked, I’m leaning toward craigslist-style organization these days. The one problem that plagued me as president every single year was motivation. If I tried to get the group to act as a single group, it was hard to get everybody on board. Other opinions and other engagements made life hard, and we ended up with a very small core of members. Now that my organizations have no critical deadlines or goals to meet (well, UPAC Sound has shows, but they’re not that hard), it’s much easier to simply let the members do what they want to do. In the case of W2SZ, the amateur radio club, we are working on several projects as individual groups of members, and it is working quite well. When we needed to pull together as a group for the recent VHF contest, we marshaled plenty of members. Nobody’s feelings are hurt, and the club moves forward at a comfortable pace.
Club organization is an interesting topic to me because it is so closely bound to leadership. A single club president can drastically alter the operation of a club, and shift it toward one of these two extremes in a fairly short amount of time. A good leader needs to understand his or her options, and take appropriate actions. These two strategies each have their place, and I believe it is imperative for me, as a club leader, to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
