crschmidt | Recent Entries

I guess I don't remember what the old create entries page looks like, because this seems very similar to me. but that's fine. I didn't stop using dreamwidth because of that. (I mean, I guess I never _used_ dreamwidth; by the time LJ was well-and-truly-dead, I had already moved on to other things.)

oh, i guess i do get to use URL slugs now. that's nice, I guess. Though it feels strange.

2018, you were kinda shit for a lot of people, but good for me. I hope that 2019 will be better for everyone else, and continue to be good for me.

So, I support creators via Patreon. In particular, one of the things that I do is run *my own* patreon, and I set aside the funds that I make from that Patreon to support other creators. (At the moment, I get $50/month from various folks, supporting for a variety of reasons; in return, they get early access to some of my video content, access to notes I take, etc.)

So, I have $50/month that I spend on other creative types. For this month, I've decided I'm going to support 5 new black creators at $10/month each, celebrating the "BlackWomensEqualPay" day that just passed. (Black women have to work 20 months to make the same as 'their peers' -- I think 'white males', but I'm not sure -- do, which is why Black Women's Equal Pay day is 7/31.)

So, I posted a twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/crschmidt/status/892555976389406720

"In Honor of #BlackWomensEqualPayDay (7/31, yesterday), I'm going to start supporting 5 new Black Women on Patreon: So far, I have:", with some names, and why I was doing it.

Now, this has a couple points:

- I chose to include an amount. I did this sort of as a shout out to my patrons, who tend to keep an eye out on what I'm doing with my Patreon funds, but I shouldn't have in the more public thread.
- There's a little bit of the "White Knight Hero Complex" thing going on here, but this is honestly an attempt to educate and inform others of some black women who are creators I follow.
- I'm calling this out as "I'm trying to do my part", but the reality is that any shift of money from me to other people isn't really changing much.

On the whole, I hope that the thread is in moderately good taste.

It's so nice out, I just want to be outside all day. Maybe I'll go sit on the roof deck and see if I can get some work done after lunch.

I will never succeed at the things I want to do as much as I want.

Whether it's work, personal life, or hobby; whether it's the main thrust of what I work on, or the smallest corner of it, I will never succeed as much as I want.

I will never be the father I feel I should be; never be able to spend as much time with the kids as I should, never be as able to listen to their stories or remember the things that I should, never be able to be the parental role model I should be.

I will never be a well-respected creator: Whether it's open source, or videos, or blogs, I will never be able to draw a large audience compared to those who I admire. When I say something, it will always be lacking a key aspect which would make it be said better; when I give a speech, I will always walk away feeling like I forgot the most important argument (which I will then try to immediately forget so I don't feel bad).

I will never be a model employee. I will never be effective as a coder as many people I work with. I will never be as able to concentrate and achieve as those around me. I will never be as dedicated or devoted to getting the job done.

I won't be a success. Because to be a success in any one of these requires me to give up time on one of the others, and I can never figure out which one I want. So maybe it's okay that I will never succeed: I will do my best, and I will achieve some things, but not all these things. Because the world is too big, and I am too small.

I may never succeed as much as I'd like. But all I can do is try.

I'm busy using my relatively slow GPU at home to train a character-based recurrent neural network to speak like my LiveJournal content. I would say that it is so far somewhat incoherent, but in the process, I looked at some of my older LiveJournal entries, and that claim seems a bit silly in that context.

At our old house, we always ran out of candy, so I live in perpetual fear of it.

At this house, we were totally ghost town one year, and we ran out of candy the next.

It looks like tonight is gonna be ghost town again.

And I made Jess not give away any of our candy just in case and now I feel bad because we're going to have like 20 pounds of candy.

Someone at work does a "Candy for the troops" buyback arrangement every year, so I definitely need to make sure to bring (most of) ours in.

Happy Halloween.

Overall, I have a handful of projects I'm working on.

- Livestream Alerts: Website for generating alerts during Livestreams. Most recent work: Adding support for donations through the Extra Life charity drive. Open source project at https://github.com/google/mirandum
- ytgvoting.com - a quick, me-only (at the moment) voting tool for use in livestreams. No open source code yet, but the intent is to provide something simple to use so that a third party (e.g. a production ops person) can set up polls remotely from the streamer, inspired by some features in Primtetime with YouTube Gaming.
- My own Livestream channel - I'm now taking on a more podcast-style format, with different planned topics and an intent to be covering "recent news" as well as general topics. (for example, tomorrow I want to talk spectrum scarcity -- from spark-gap radio transmissions through spread spectrum and hedy lamarr through to the spectrum battles of now; as well as more weekly topical things like Twitch's recent announcements at TwitchCon.)
- Patreon-related work for channel: I now have a patreon with some supporter-only content every month, and I'm working on building up the size of that community.
- Tutorials about Livestream Alerts: I manage another YT Channel with tutorials about Livestream Alerts that I'm maintaining/attempting to create content for as well.

I guess I have a few projects going on.

For the last 36 hours, I have been unreasonably upset by the simplest, stupidest things that people do. Why can't people just be more smart and less annoying? God.

Also, Julie actually walked with me to Central to get a donut this morning. On the way, she caught a Bulbasaur (mine got away); on the way back, we both caught a Scyther. (There's one on Lopez Street near the playground in Cambridgeport, if you're interested.)

My 2007-2009 tweets are a lot more true to life today than I would have expected a decade. Some things have changed (I no longer think I should go to Burning Man); but many things have stayed the same.

- I still work on open source code.
- I still get upset about the people who treat me as their personal work mule because I try to be supportive/helpful.
- I still sometimes take efforts to step away from the computer, and pride myself on short term goals like "not using it for 24 hours".
- I still freak out and change plans at the last minute when anything gets in my way.
- I still feel bad about going to the fireworks on my own, even though Jess hates crowds and loud noises.

It's interesting to see the things that stay the same, nearly a decade on.

When I was 8 years old, I got brought to the local library, where sports writer Sam Smith was doing a book signing for his recently released book The Jordan Rules. This was the time of Bulls (and particularly, Jordan) mania: I was a huge Bulls fan, and although the book -- a 333 page non-fiction tome -- seemed massive to me at the time, I was in love with it, and read it repeatedly.

In the front of the book, the inscription that Smith wrote -- in between all of the others in line, to what must have been at the time a somewhat odd-seeming 8 year old presenting this book for a signature -- an inscription that I still haven't forgotten: "Maybe I'll be writing the Schmidt Rules next?"

Until looking it up just now, I had no real memory of what the Jordan Rules were. ("a defensive strategy employed by the Detroit Pistons against Michael Jordan in order to limit his effectiveness on offense" -- Jordan Rules, Wikipedia) Instead, what I always thought was that these were a set of rules that I could make: Like, they'd be writing about the rules that I wrote to bring order to ... whatever.

Recently, I've found myself making a handful of joking references to rules about me within the YouTube Gaming livestreaming community: things like "Chris is always watching", or "Chris should always cheat." And I just realized: it's something like the first time that I can think of when there has been something that I could realistically think of as the Schmidt rules has been written down.

I'll never be the kind of offensive basketball player -- or player of any sport -- that requires a professional team to generate a set of rules against me. Nobody will ever write about the Schmidt Rules. But that doesn't mean that they're not there. And then can be whatever I want them to be.

at the end of a long shitty week of work drama and debacle, I had both a lovely pre-birthday livestream -- with more than 150 visitors stopping by to say hello -- and a lovely birthday party, with more than 30 people coming over, from old friends like

volantwish and

pezstar to newer coworkers like those from my Nokia days.

Thank you all so much for making this a special day. In a lot of ways, it turns out that turning 0x20 (32, as represented in hexadecimal) was just a reminder of what it was like to be 20 in decimal.

Thank you to everyone.

I am so sick, and it so sucks.

It's not really sick. It's just an upper respiratory thing I can't shake. (And really, I've probably been suffering from it all week; I was sleeping 2-3 hours longer than usual, unable to focus, etc.) But it just keeps ramping up and getting worse and worse.

Thursday, I was coughing -- more like allergies than anything else -- but not feeling crappy. Jess was like "You're sick! You should stay home!" and I was like "I'm not even sick!"

Friday, I was feeling crappy, but didn't actually start coughing until I was on my way out the door to work. I was still thinking this was somehow allergies or something. Spent all day coughing unproductively, doing a number on my throat. I messaged Jess around noon and said "You're right, I'm sick." Still stayed at work, which I feel bad about in hindsight because at least one of my coworkers will probably end up sick, which wasn't really my intent :/ When we got home last night, Jess was like "You're probably wishing for sweet merciful death. Go to bed."

This morning I woke up, and said "Last night, you said I was wishing for sweet merciful death. I wasn't then, but I am now."

Today's been a nap/take meds/grump type of day. It's not great.

Plus side: 3 day weekend, so at least I'll probably be better by the time work rolls back around.

I object.

Instead, I've sat at home for the past hour dicking around on the internet. But I really should go to work one of these days.

It is rare that our house is actually quiet when I'm home. (Well, super rare, I guess: our fridge is pretty noisy.) But even if you discount that, it's very rare that I have much in the way of alone time when nothing else is going on.

Living in such a small apartment with 3 other people -- even people who are relatively self-supporting -- just leaves so little psychic space for anything else.

I dream of an office for myself; a small studio for photography and video; a sunroom of some kind; I dream of large bathrooms, I dream of high ceilings.

It's not what I get, but maybe someday.

Until then, I just sometimes sit back and just enjoy the quiet times. Like now.

Being intentionally obtuse when someone is genuinely asking for help bugs the crap out of me.

Or maybe... I don't know. As I write this out, I can see how some people would consider they're being helpful, and I probably use this technique at times. But this morning, I saw someone asking a question in the UAV Legal News and Discussion group: "I have done x, y and z as I believe the law requires. What next?" and someone saying "What law?"

Dude. You know what law. You've been in this group for years. The law in question is the June 2014 Interpretation of the SPecial Rule for Model Aircraft, originally included in the FMRA of 2012. You describe it as "recommendation", which is not actually true, and you know better.

Yes, it's being challenged in court. Yes, it's questionable that the FAA passed it at all, as it is a promulgation of rules as prohibited by Congress, but don't just play pretend: describe why *you* think that it's not law, or explain what you would do in answer to the person's question. Don't just sit there and pretend you don't know *exactly* what he's talking about, because you do. I know you do, you know you do, and this poor fool who came to this group to ask a question just wants some freakin' help.

So I guess it's not about being obtuse, in this case, it's just about being a bit of a dick. So, rule #1: don't be a dick.

I am currently upgrading my work laptop to El Capitan. Hopefully this doesn't break anything fundamental with my computer. I did have to clear up 20G of space on my hard drive in order to do it. Which is a bit difficult when I only have 128G to begin with. But I did it.

Go little computer go! I want to go home, gosh darn it!

I have never really done resolutions well, but some things I'd like to try to do in the near future, which I haven't been doing well.

- Keep better track of finances.

This isn't even a "Change our spending habits" yet, just a "Okay, really, keep track." I tend to do this for about two weeks and then get bored; this isn't a functional approach. Before we can change our spending, we need to know what we're spending, so this is a goal for the next 3 months with a longer term goal of coming up with a sustainable plan.

- Do a load of laundry each day.

With our family, we go through about a load of laundry each day. Our washer is very small, so for example, I can only wash three towels at a time. This means I tend to fall behind on laundry and catch up on one giant laundry weekend... but then the folding/putting away is a horror, and everyone is down to wearing that Pair of Pants that Doesn't Really Fit But I Keep It Anyway, which is ick. So I want to do a load of laundry each day.

- Go back to walking to and from work.

I used to walk to and from work. I've gotten lazy, and started not doing that - in part because I've felt short on time with family, so I've been trying to be at home earlier by taking the T. But I think that this is a mistake: I'm cutting out the time that I previously used to recover my mental energy after work during the walk, and instead I'm coming home still in a mindset of work. I'd like to change this.

- Establish a better structure for spending time.

Right now, I'm spending a lot of time not being very productive, both at home and at work. I'd like to get more done, which means committing to spending less time goofing around, and thinking more about how my day is structured. This is especially important at work, where I've been somewhat unproductive for a few weeks. I've taken a vacation from work for the past two weeks, so now it's time to come back, renewed, refreshed, and take a good solid look at improving my work habits and home time management habits.

I'm feeling more than a bit out of sorts; I've been failing to achieve much recently, it feels like, so I'm down on myself as a result. There are a lot of things that I want to accomplish, and I"m not accomplishing them. In some cases, this means that they're not actually happening; in others, it means that *other* people are doing them -- and if there's one thing I like less than not getting around to something, it's other people getting around to it in a different way that pisses me off. :p

Holiday party at Google was fine, but frankly, I don't think I'll go in the future; the office is just too big to make it fun for me. It's impossible to find most of the people you want to see.

I put together a list of the games that I have played on my newish YouTube channel so far:

Game List

There's a bunch of them.

(I'm still sort of thinking what I want as a web presence other than the YT channel itself.)

why is it that people who claim the left is "obviously wrong" on anthropomorphic global warming seem to mostly be just repeating logical fallacies over and over?

Look, only 97% of studies agree that anthropomorphic global warming is a thing. I assume some of those other 3% claim that global warming isn't a thing at all. If these studies are so right, why won't you just cite them and be done with it?

Anyway, after arguing back and forth 6 times on Facebook, I just started quoting the Logical Fallacy Referee. http://imgur.com/a/QDbyt#0

So far, I'm on 4/32 in one Facebook thread! And I've learned about a funny name for a logical fallacy:

- Appeal to the Stone
- Ad hominem attack
- Argument from silence
- Not really a logical fallacy, but Echo Chamber effect

I also pulled out the Historical Fallacy card, though it's only tangentially related; a Reptition Fallacy is really close to happening; I think it would be fair to call an Illegal Proof Reversal if I really wanted to; A No True Scotsman foul is almost certainly in play; and the whole conversation is basically an illegal use of Ergo Decedo.

So really, we're at 9/32, and they just keep racking them up.

Why? Just find the study that supports your point and link it! I'd do it *for you* if I could freakin' find the thing! This is the banner you are waving. This is the flag you are flying. If you're going to do it, do it with data! There's enough out there to support any position, just find it and use it!

Christopher Schmidt

i am beta-testing the new create entries page

Goodbye 2018!

i did a thing, and i don't know if it's bad

today, i just want to be outside all day

i will never succeed

oh hey i have an account here now

candy

Projects

sigh, humans

tweet history

schmidt rules

happy birthday!

oh jeez being sick sucks

It's wintery.

Quiet

obtusity

go el capitan go

Happy New Year!

feeling emo

why

Profile

November 2022

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