courses, introspection
First up: Updated course plan, hot off the OpenOffice 1.1 HTML Exporter. Assuming that I pass compilers, and that I pass the other class too. I’m signing up for classes a bit earlier, to see if I can get myself wedged into phil 303.
Second up: lately I’ve been introspecting a bit, thinking about what I want to do, what I’m doing now, etc. Also thinking about my hobbies, and whether they’ve been of any value to me, and whether they’ll be fo any value to continue. And I’m still not sure, no conclusions have been reached.
(introspective kwak follows)
A lot of my thoughts have revolved around classes and work. I want to finish compilers, and I’m going to stick to my course plan as laid out … it’s the shortest path to the degree. Lately I’ve gotten the impression that our director and bosses and such aren’t going to pursue hiring me fulltime, which is sort of a shame. But then, I’m starting to get the impression that I wouldn’t have enough to do as a full-time employee without us about tripling in size, either. Right now my user demands are low, even with a lot of people. My demand for computing time is medium … I could certainly use a couple more servers to run, but we don’t need them too desperately right now. I could train the average chimpanzee to do my normal maintenance stuff, given 3 or 4 weeks and a lot of bananas, and my “project” stuff is stalled because things are either completed, waiting for feedback from other people, or just things that I don’t really think are necessary as we stand right now. Which doesn’t mean that I won’t do them, just that I won’t do them while I’ve got anything remotely more useful to do.
Then there’s class. I got my compilers midterm and homework grades (already! quick!). The midterm, I got an 87 on, but I’m dissatisfied with that, I wanted to do a bit better. I think the LR parsing thing probably bit me… but I also bet that LL1 parse table lost some points for not including a “Nullable” column … and if that’s the case then I’m going to go argue for points back because hosking didn’t say a word about it in his in-class example. Meanwhile, I only got a 75% (41/55) on the homework, but that wasn’t entirely unexpected. Still, I’m doing WAY better than last semester. Tomorrow at work, I’m going to start updates, answer questions, and spend several hours working on the next project, just because that’s how it’ll get done. I’m comfortable (though not 100% confident, I’d give it a 90% confidence rating) with where I am in the class, and whether my partner proves useful or not, I think I’ll be able to continue on as a CS major.
But the question is: “is this what I really want to be doing”. A question I’ve asked myself over and over again since the first time I took compilers. Compiler-writing isn’t what I want to be doing. But what is what I want?
Then I drift over to work again, and I like my job, just I wish there were more “meat” to keep me busy, as it were. I’m finding that if I work 30 hour weeks, I end up chewing on the gristle to try to keep myself occupied (hence spending several hours at work tomorrow, working on CS). Is this what I want to do with my life though?
Then I bounce back to the rest of my life. The part that’s not class or work. And the time that’s left boils down to fansubbing, irc, and games.
IRC is nice, especially b-a, because I’ve got a stable network of friends (or at least acquaintances) there… but more time centers around fansubbing (and lately, gentoo). Gaming is fun, but it’s really ultimately just a time-sink. I dump time into gaming when there’s nobody to talk to and nothing to fansub.
Then there’s fansubbing. Which is where the real “introspection” part comes in. I’ve been examining what I want out of fansubbing, and what I get. What I wanted out of it, I never really got much of until Futakoi Alternative, I realized. AnimeOne was like an abusive relationship… it kept taking and taking, but giving me just little tidbits, “honeymoons” to keep me stringing along. Do 3 uncredited episodes, and maybe we’ll credit you in one. Do a couple episodes of something you don’t care too much about, and maybe we’ll say thanks. Stuff like that.
On the other hand, the AnY team on Futa Alt was nice to work with. The translators were a bit weaker, the other positions probably were too… but they’re nice people, and they make sure that the credits are right, and really made me feel like an important part of the team, where aone always sort of made me feel auxiliary, unnecessary, and at times downright unwanted.
Which brings me to the introspection part. I realized that a lot of what made me happy with FA was the sense of being wanted, appreciated and respected. That’s what made the old Naruto drama such a painful slap in the face, and what made me really bitter about the whole group. Even when I was the anchor that kept the group from getting scattered in the storm, the mediator, the projectmover, the go-to guy and the person that was reliable enough to hold foundership status, I still felt unimportant, like I wasn’t “really” part of the group. Even after fansubbing 200ish episodes of stuff in one capacity or another, I wasn’t really a team member to a lot of the people I worked with. And even when I was rewriting a third of the lines of every script or qc encode I saw, and when animeone was building the reputation for quality it’s since tried to ride into the ground, I still wasn’t worthy to have my role credited at all.
I guess, only perspective and introspection could reveal that about myself. I knew I had low self-esteem, and I guess that’s just a manifestation of that … wanting to be accepted, needed, and wanted to validate my own existence. Is this a manifestation of my own insecurity? It’s more than just a fear of rejection, it’s a need for validation, for acceptance.
Maybe it’s more recent than that though. Feeling like I couldn’t make it through CS, like I couldn’t make it through Engineering, like I can’t figure out LDAP … all of these things I see as failures, all of these aborted attempts, these half-done trinkets scattered around me. I feel like I can’t finish things I start, like I’m only good for the first 75% of anything. I can get the bike, I can put a hundred miles on it, but I can’t put the next thousand on it. I can start going to the gym, or start taekwondo, or start playing go, but I can’t stay motivated to go back to the gym tomorrow and the next day, and I can’t motivate myself to go to conditioning or self-defense sessions, and I can’t break the 10Kish barrier. I can make female friends, but I can’t ask them out. I can start a sudoku solver, but I can’t write the interface or add the driver to execute the logic. I haven’t turned in a CS project that I’ve felt was complete since CS 180. Heck, I can’t even read a whole book! I’ve got Brave New World, The Art of Deception, Secrets and Lies, Underground History of American Education, Mythical Man Month, and America the Book, all unfinished, despite all of them being really good books. And I’ve got 2 more books waiting for me after that!
Maybe it’s good that fansubbing is over. Maybe I should impose a condition on my gaming from now on … like “no playing a new game until you’ve gotten done with a book in progress, and don’t have any pending projects”. I dunno.