Joe Auricchio

Shoutouts to (in no particular order):

Paul, Ava, Ben, Kelsey, Rushi, Sheenika, Jonathan, Dan, Chris, Mooneer, Stephi, Hanna, Scott, Danny, David, Nik, Jess, Brad, Bethany, D.J., Sheree, Aaron, Lily, Eric G, Auston, Mark “The Knife” “The River” Gahagan, Meg, Chi, Amrit, Tam, Amado, Rego, James, Kim, Amy, Proud, Sharon, Christine, Michael, Melissa, Christie, Eric B-D, Billy, Cody, Dylan, Brandon, Iron Jeff, The Swede, Ryan, Cano, KG, Gabe, Cha-cha, Mary (my other mother), Bilow, Flo (”zis country would be so much betteir if it weir cohvered wis a meeteir of snow!”), Kris, Amanda, Lizzie, Rose, Brigette, Kerry, Marla, Kristjiana, Iain, Mike, Van, everyone else from HS, John and Elaine, Brian, Chris, Ted, Danny, everyone else from UCSD, Bill Clabby, Jeanette Ibarra, Professors Chu, Ord, Tullsen, Sato, Ito, Pineda, and Rhodes, Gabriele, Pat, Matsumiya-sensei (wherever you are), the Big Domy (you know who the Big Domy is), and of course Teresa, Rick, Amy, and Jessie. If, somehow, I forgot you, you know you’re on there too.

Further corporate propers to:

Apple Core OS team, 2 Dogs Coffee (Morro Bay), Eventful, Fern Canyon Press (and all their endeavours), Microsoft Xbox 360 team (all right, ya done good), Nintendo, Xilinx (I hate your software but I love your hardware), most of UCSD, Google, all the backbone network operators, OmniGroup, Matz, _why, and the Ruby core team, Linux kernel developers, Red Hat/Fedora, every single man woman and child who has contributed to Debian, NoMachine, irssi.org, Freenode, GNU Project, SureFire, Streamlight, Wes Hinkle’s San Diego Volvo (Service department), and of course Apple circa 1976, for the dream and the spirit.

All of these people touched me in 2006, almost universally for the better, and made my life what it was. I look forward seeing you all in 2007.

Garibaldi and the Redshirts would be an excellent name for a band.

Sorry for the heavy tone of this and the last few posts. Something about December always makes me a bit melancholy. It’s not Christmas, and it’s not the change of the year, and it’s not the sometimes dreary weather, and it’s not even my birthday. I don’t know what it is. But somehow this time of the year just makes me feel grateful for what I have, miss what I’ve left behind, and sad for what will soon slip away.

This is to all my friends and everyone I know, close by and faraway, whether I talked to you today or it’s been a few years, whether you ever read this or not.

Old and Wise

Alan Parsons Project

As far as my eyes can see

There are shadows approaching me

And to those I left behind

I wanted you to know

You've always shared my deepest thoughts

You follow where I go
And oh... when I'm old and wise

Bitter words mean little to me

Autumn winds will blow right through me

And someday in the mist of time

When they asked me if I knew you

I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine

And the sadness would be lifted from my eyes

Oh when I'm old and wise
As far as my eyes can see

There are shadows surrounding me

And to those I leave behind

I want you all to know

You've always shared my darkest hours

I'll miss you when I go
And oh... when I'm old and wise

Heavy words that tossed and blew me

Like autumn winds that will blow right through me

And someday in the mist of time

When they ask you if you knew me

Remember that you were a friend of mine

As the final curtain falls before my eyes

Oh when I'm old and wise
As far as my eyes can see

Life is much too short and much too long.

Last Friday night, Dylan, Brandon, Cody, and I played Hearts (a man’s game) at Cody’s. The game stretched on to the wee hours of the morning. And so it passed that I drove home at 3:00 AM.

The night was bitterly cold, just below freezing, and the moonless sky was crystal clear and full of stars. On a whim, I turned right on Hwy 1 instead of left, and drove south for fifteen minutes or so. No cars, no animals. I felt I was the only one awake in the wide cold world.

When I finally got home and stepped out of the garage, I looked up. The night sky was aglow with stars. There were the bright stars you can see everywhere but Los Angeles. And there were stars between the stars that fill in the outlines of the constellations. Details like Orion’s upraised club were so obvious - of course that’s a hunter in the stars. And then the stars between the stars between the stars, and you can’t believe how dense they are, and there really are seven sextillion of them. And then the stars between the stars between the stars, the stardust, because everywhere you looked it was never completely black. And I nearly fell to my knees, so struck was I with the beauty.

In a few short weeks I’ll be leaving for San Diego again, and with me I’ll take the memories of cold, clear nights, and the rain, and walking along the bluffs in the afternoon, and the fog in the evening.

Maybe in a decade or two I’ll come back to Cambria, just like I went back to Los Gatos. I wonder what I’ll find. I wish I could stop time and hold onto what I have, because my life right now is so amazing that I feel it can only go down from here.

Yesterday I drove up to the Bay Area, with a twofold purpose: To see Teresa, and to visit the places where I grew up.

I left at 7am and drove up Highway 1 to Carmel. 1 is a beautiful road, and I have a great time every time I drive it. I love driving on scenic winding roads; the more scenic and windier, the better. The road is so much better than my car: it’s a road worthy of a Lotus or Porsche or Ferrari. (Some day.) I made excellent time - an hour and forty minutes from the stoplight in Cambria to the stoplight in Carmel. Another hour and twenty put me at De Anza & Stevens Creek.

Louise Van Meter Elementary School is different; they’ve added a new driveway down what used to be the side of the field. The playground structures are all metal and plastic; back in my day we had wood and we got splinters, dammit! The field is so small. It’s about the size of Shamel Park, more squared-off. As a kid it seemed to take forever to run across it when that bell rang at the end of lunch.

Raymond J. Fisher Middle School is completely different; they’ve built a new administration building, with a gaudy facade of dark blue concrete and gleaming metal trim. Thanks, Dot-Com Bubble.

Los Gatos High still looks the same—big imposing quasi-Greek building with a big lawn. I’ve still never been inside.

What used to be Los Gatos Ferrari is now a Ferrari, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, and Lotus dealership. They have a Veyron on order for December. On Santa Cruz Rd there’s a Lamborghini dealership. Thanks again, Dot-Com Bubble.

I drove up Tourney Road, to the old house. The road was grippingly familiar; I even remember the way the rain runoff flowed down the roadside and pooled up at certain spots. There’s a new baby-blue monstrosity of a house along the road that was simply not there when we left. I’m surprised there was actually space for another lot; things are very close-quarters along that road. The old house itself looks about the same. It’s had a paint job (it’s a much warmer, less neutral grey), and there are more plants around the decks. I was surprised at its sheer size; it was a big house. I didn’t go in, just paused for a moment and let my mind run through it, evoking every memory of my childhood in a huge flood.

On the way back down, I caught a glimpse through the trees of the view. The old house’s biggest selling point was its panoramic vista of the whole South Bay, from the Saratoga hills across to the Coast Range. In the rain, like yesterday, it’s not so impressive, but on a clear day you can see all the way up the bay, and in the afternoon sometimes you can make out the gold sun reflecting on the office buildings in San Francisco and Oakland. Million dollar view.

I miss the freeways in the bay area. At night, they’re so much darker than those of SoCal, and there’s nothing on either side but soundwall.

Northern California rain is different, too. A million tiny misty drops, the whole windshield is soaked, a certain cadence to the rain as it strikes, washing up the windshield from the wind, wipers only slightly helpful.

It’s only been eight years since I lived in the Bay Area, but it feels like a completely different lifetime. I was a different person then. I lived in Los Gatos for the first thirteen years of my life, but I grew up in Cambria, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So my connections started getting finicky yesterday. Out of pure overlearned reflex, I popped open a terminal and started pinging google.com. The connection appeared normal, so I went back to what I was doing and left the window there.

I came across it again this evening just in time to see the sequence number cross 300. It took me a few seconds to realize what happened.

update
So I finally killed it.

--- google.com ping statistics ---
71507 packets transmitted, 69992 packets received, 2% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 94.539/111.947/1088.616/25.285 ms

Ben and I both know how much cash you get from the “Bank Error In Your Favor” card in Monopoly. We don’t know how we can possibly actually know that.

Potassium, sodium, chlorine, and calcium ions in nerve cells have osmotic and electrostatic forces acting on them. Normally they can’t cross the cell membrane, but when ion channels open they rush into/out of the cell trying to reach osmotic equilibrium, and carrying their charge with them. This changes the cell’s voltage with respect to the environment; this is how the neuron fires.

The tendency of these ions to flow is actually a chemical effect, not an electrical one: osmosis is the primary driver. But the tendency to flow in this way can be quantified and calculated exactly like a voltage difference across very high resistance. Even though the ions want to flow to equalize this so-called voltage differential, ordinarily they can’t.

It’s potential potential, in the fullest physics sense of both words.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I love cognitive science.

upd 8 nov: revised first para, sorry for bumping everyone’s rss feeds

In the general case, percent of work completed is a logarithmic function of time spent.

When you start work, you get things done at a pretty good pace. Over time, you start to slow down. As the task approaches completion, you really slow down to accomplishing almost nothing.

This is a good approximation for time significantly less than the deadline. However, as the deadline approaches, the derivative increases rapidly, following the gamma function. Immediately before the deadline, work is accomplished at a nearly infinite rate.

As the deadline approaches, you work faster and faster to get it done; the last hour before the deadline is the most productive time known to man.

I have seen this pattern in almost everything I do, and I’ve been refining this theory over the past few months. I have further noticed that the pattern applies to most of the engineers I know. There are notable exceptions: some people cannot bear to leave things to the last minute, and get as much as possible done ahead of time.
These people are silly.

The next step would be harnessing my own pattern of productivity. False deadlines, drastically inflated requirements (to keep the early logarithmic rise going for a long time), and making that gamma function kick in earlier: all these will let me get more done.

If you were a scientist or engineer working on a technology capable of launching a Singularity, or alternately destroying most life on earth, what kind of warning sign would you put on the wall behind the lab bench?

Warning Signs for Tomorrow.