Pursuit of Happiness Leads to Imitation

Since school started, I've had no motivation to update this website. Not that I ever had the motivation to update a site I never expected people to read, anyways. The posts on this web log were never the sort of thing I would write in an outright personal “blog”; rather, they were stream-of-consciousness mind-to-keyboard gibberish in approximate essay format. The trouble is cognitive load. The more difficult it is for me to get a post up, the less willing I would be to do it. My website, with its long loading times and its many, many options for even the simplest task, is not really conducive to writing. So, this post will be simple. It will, as all other posts have been so far, be a set of notes for my future self to look at. This site is a notebook for me. Why don't I keep a real notebook? I prefer typing to writing by hand.

So recently, my friend attended HCSSiM and met some people from TJHSST. We already both knew that there were better schools than Stuyvesant; we just didn't know how much better. We saw their success and saw the need for change at Stuy. Long story short, we ended up imitating them. One of the things I love about TJ is TJbash.org. It is a bash.org-style quotes database for everything TJ-related. We loved it so much that I ended up starting Stuybash.org for the Stuyvesant community to enjoy. Shockingly enough, even with minimal exposure and advertisement, the site gets 100 or so visits a day and a steady stream of quotes submissions. I really should get it better known…

A lot of people don't like school, reasoning that they learn nothing, or nothing useful. Few of them take action about it. I am a person who constantly feels the need to learn and to better myself. For example, to prepare for Science Olympiad in the summer, I don't actually do Science Olympiad stuff. I like to do open-ended engineering projects like the quadrotor helicopter or the walking robot I've made in the last few years. I have learned so many more skills that I can apply to competitions the next year this way than I would have by building and improving robots from previous years.

I'm also really bad at writing. I don't really like writing and my skills are not really up to snuff. However, I am also bursting with ideas all the time, so I've decided to get a pocket notebook and write down all the quirky things I think up of every day. I write down useless invention ideas like the “keyboard fan” as well as oddball comments about politics, the economy, and such. The notebook I have chosen is a Moleskine Squared Pocket Notebook, a durable and robust notebook with nice looks and features in size that I can comfortably cram into my pants. I use two MonAmi Plus Pen 3000's from Korea to write in them. The ink does not bleed or feather, unlike many other “quality” ink pens. Many people are surprised, because they are not familiar with such felt-tipped pens (not “markers”). Suffice to say that they are fine writing instruments which I prefer over ballpoints, pencils and inky pens for writing and spinning.

Also, I am exceedingly bad at putting my ideas into drawings. It's not so difficult to sit down in front of a computer and CAD my ideas into shape (I use SolidWorks), but give me a pencil and paper, and you'll have no idea what I'm trying to communicate to you. I am now studying some superb books by Edward Tufte in order to be able to represent my mental images in more concrete form. His definitive guide on making graphs and charts, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is simply awesome. The book itself is self-published, and so its typography and design actually follows the ideas laid out in the book. It's not only nice to learn from, but also easy on the eyes and nice to touch (seriously). I have also bought Visual Explanations, which I feel will help me with representing changing data on paper. The books were (indirectly) recommended by ZekeBud on #scioly. They are just beautiful.