When you’re an engineer or other young professional, the figure “burning the candle at both ends” sometimes feels less than apt. A better, although admittedly bizarre visualization, is a many-spoked wheel. The simplest non-trivial form of this is the recurring notion of a three-way balance between work/school, sleep/other essentials, and fun/social life. (The joke at Olin was: Choose two.)

When an activity invades your sleep time, that’s burning your candle at two ends. When it also subverts work or displaces recreation (the former being less common, but possible) I suppose that would be three. Where was I going with this metaphor again?

Right. So I’ve been trying to be slightly better about compartmentalizing and respecting these different needs. Having flextime at work does mean they can and sometimes will trade places or be redistributed in a funny way. But it’s good for my overall sanity that some things remain anchored, particularly sleep. I’ve been making an effort to repair my sleep habits after several months of bad behavior.

Last night, though, I had to make an exception. The latest-and-greatest project at Artisan’s Asylum is nearing a hard deadline for completion (I’m unable to reveal details just yet) and everything is down to the wire. When I wandered in Wednesday night, after sitting out much of the project construction, I was immediately conscripted (along with Andrew Bressen and Avinash Uttamchandani) for the task of building a new subsystem. From scratch. That night was spent conceptualizing and buying and testing parts, so the big push had to happen last night.

I won’t be present for the do-or-die test tonight, but I’m pretty confident what we built into the wee hours of the morning will work. Sort of. Here’s a teaser:

Burning Stuff

Big thanks go to Jimmie Rodgers, who filled in on the second night and exercised his massive prowess with electronics. I no longer associate the Arduino with memories of debugging PIC assembly code.

I have to say, while I’m not as capable at fundamental building tasks as I’d like–I’m not trained on most of the equipment yet, and I don’t trust myself with the circuity–working on projects like this boosts my confidence that I’m still useful. One thing I can always do well in situations like this is simply be an engineer. I think up a lot of inline optimizations and bug fixes while I’m following people around, serving as an extra pair of hands. I solve the conceptual problems, draw diagrams, and bounce between disciplines far more varied than what I can actually implement with my own two hands. And as I do this, I keep an one eye firmly on what others are doing, maybe butting in here and there so I can try things for my own edification.

As with most things in life, the key to growth is to begin from areas of strength.

Shameless plug: I’m helping man the AANE’s WordPress blog. There’s a general call for contributions and suggestions for how to make the blog a better resource to the aspy community.

I’ve never dealt with moderating contributor-level access on an Internet-facing WordPress instance. This should be rather interesting.

There are easy times, and there are hard times. Days when I feel like a real boy living a charmed life, and days when I feel stunted somehow. I think it’s in my wiring to be… not bipolar, but functionally cyclic. Cyclic in how I respond to data and stimuli.

The pattern was more distinct and regular in college, when my work itself had something of a fractal ebb and flow, and I was meeting regularly with people in various positions in my support net and being more deliberate about self awareness. Things never got too far in a bad direction before being caught, and conversely there was way too much fun and novel stimulus to maintain good habits forever. Neither state was ever stable.

Now I work in a technical office, where projects typically have monthly deliverables. But in practice one month’s work can run seamlessly into the next. And I’m more independent at home than I’ve ever been.

I see larger patterns now, and smaller ones. Six months of head-in-the-sand server development where I become rather short-sighted and difficult to work with, followed by two months of interaction design where I’m highly participatory and best friends with everyone. Then I’ll get in a fight with a friend, or worried about my latest bloodwork, and for a matter of hours or days nothing works and I can’t focus worth a damn.

It’s particularly hard to control lately. I accept this as a natural result of medical pressures, and the poor sleep habits I am trying to fix, and I cut myself some slack.

Today was by and large a good day. I found a new housemate for us, I made calls, and started some things. I continued my recent trend of sticking my finger into lots of figurative pies, which is really a wonderful thing if I’m having a productive day/week/month. It means I actually grow as a person and get my name out there.

Then tonight, I had to deal with someone in a business context, and it was one of those situations where I struggle to plant my feet and act like a normal human being with a spine. People like that make me feel as if I still don’t understand people. Still haven’t learned, haven’t come so far since the boy with foot in mouth and hand in cookie-jar. Bleh. One step forward, one step back.

Of course, the real story behind the data isn’t the local minima or maxima, it’s the trend. And for the most part I’ve been feeling increasingly self-assured as a person, if not as an engineer. As an engineer I’m still relatively fresh, subject to increasing responsibilities and to the Dunning-Kruger effect. As a person, I’ve had a bit longer to come to grips with who I am and what I’m capable of. And recent experiences are helping to further crystallize it for me.

I’m like this:

Rise and fall, fall and rise.

The bullet points in no particular order:

• All moved in at the Somerville house (a.k.a. the Grotto)
• +5 pts to Mass RMV for making the permit process a lot easier
• Interesting AANE reads
• CML update: the treatment is working!

For the sake of getting it all out, I’ll approach this in reverse-chronological order. I just capped off the day with a long conversation with my new roommate Maya, as we were taking out foodstuffs and dishware and looking at artwork to fill a missing spot on the mantelpiece. I think I may be the one missing her the most when she leaves in Sept, although these late night conversations are the longest (and among the relative few) that we’ve had since I met her in the earlier days of the Grotto. She brings a lot of different things to the table. Things for which, I fear, we will not find any sort of continuity with most of the people applying to replace her.

Maya’s a good foil to us weird-minded geek programmers – she loves and uses tech, but isn’t “of” it. She’s an artist and a musician and a baker and a consummate aesthete. Put new [music|art|food] things in her living space, and she will gleefully examine each one before weaving it into its most appropriate location in the fabric of the nest. She really appreciates that I have so much useful stuff to bring to the grotto; I’m glad somebody does. Ahem.

I explained to her the situation vis. my cancer and meds, because she asked, and that probably because I’d mentioned I have a drug regimen that limits personal use of my rather large liquor collection. It was an opportunity to try on some new lingo for size that I received at today’s appointment.

So far I’ve been talking a lot with people about “cellular response” or “hematologic response” when I discuss my cancer. This is how doctors look at the early months of CML treatment, when cellular imbalance is the main concern. Once the density of the various blood cell populations has been restored to approximately normal levels, long term monitoring of molecular response begins.

This means using more sophisticated and sensitive (and thus lenghthier and more expensive) tests to measure the prevalence of the cancer-causing mutation in blood cells. Known as reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (or RT-PCR if you don’t like pain) the test accurately charts treatment progress until the mutation is no longer detectable within margin of error (molecular remission).

On February 18th, I tested positive for CML with almost 100% initial prevalence of the Philadelphia chromosome. Now, five months later, that figure is down by 95%. I’m on track to be in molecular remission well before the 18-month mark doctors aim for.

I was kind of thinking the news might be even better, as Dr Friedman had talked about possibly needing to confirm a remission as of this month, with an additional test. But I’m also kind of glad it’s this way for the time being. The confirmation test is a bone marrow aspiration followed by cytogenetics. Not only is it expensive and lenghthy, it’s painful and unnerving. I rely on Atavan to get me through that shit.

So news is good, and on top of that I’m coming to terms now with being a Somervillian. Getting a resident permit for parking was a big step. Did you know: the RMV can change the address of residence/garaging associated with your driver’s license, online, in less than five minutes? That’s an e-government success story right there. Plus: All of my stuff’s now here and unpacked, and I managed to assemble a fully-working power cord once again at work Monday, so I’m back to typing away happily, not worrying that my machine will vomit and keel over from sudden lack of power. I still kind of want to find a cheap-o laptop to replace the dying D600 for home use.

Anybody want to point me at a good supplier for mid-range laptops that are not factory-installed with Windows? I think I heard EEEPc. That’s on the low end in terms of power, but might be acceptable.

Also: I read the AspBlogosphere blog from AANE. The feed’s activity is really erratic, but every once in a blue moon something interesting comes up. The Body Language of Machines is a really interesting analysis of something I, like most people, take for granted: the ability to read and react to other drivers’ intent when driving a car. I would posit that this is precisely the kind of capability that defines and validates the K/A boundary between Kanner syndrome and Asperger syndrome. A psychologist might disagree, I don’t know.

I, for one, have never had any trouble making the intuitive leap between expressions of the human body and expressions of a vehicle controlled by that body. At least, not that I remember. When someone’s hugging the lane boundary, you sense their impatience to move to the left. Same with tailgating. Things like driver eye contact and hesitation are seamlessly meshed with car signaling and positioning.

But suppose you never realized that? It’s sort of easy to imagine not being able to intuit (and quickly process) that kind of information, and what kinds of anxiety and paranoid behavior the deficiency would lead to. Maybe, if you can understand that particular failure to connect the dots, you can understand the dozens of subtler failures that characterize the autistic spectrum.

So basically, in summary, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

/me slumps over and falls asleep

So, I’m asking around the office today, where Mandarin is the first language of several people, and opinion seems to be that Google China’s license renewal (described here and discussed here) was a win for both sides.

To break it down a little further and provide some context: Google decided at the beginning of this year that it was no longer willing to run a Chinese language search that complied with Beijing censorship rules. It had been doing so since 2006. The change came after Chinese agents reportedly hacked into Google, stealing information on Chinese dissidents as well as technical information on Google’s login system. Google’s response seemed clear enough to me. If you won’t play nicely, we’re taking back our toys.

But what’s actually been going on since March was a little unclear to me. The Google announcement spells it out fairly clearly, though. They’ve been working to relocate the Web search portion of their business from google.cn (Google China) to google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong), splitting it off from other applications like music search and text translation that could be provided locally. For several months they automatically redirected requests for Google China over to Google Hong Kong.

What made this a significant and ballsy move is that Hong Kong is a separate legal jurisdiction. The territory was restored to China by the UK in 1997, but it remains largely autonomous and has different political and economic systems. By renewing Google’s Web license, China effectively endorses their right to do search according to Hong Kong’s rules and suggests it will not prevent users from accessing the Hong Kong site. Google says this means their China search is no longer censored–I am told “less censored” may be more accurate–and so they will be pleased to continue to do business there.

There are caveats, of course. China’s Internet has some built-in filtering, but it can be overcome with a little technical saaviness. Much as GMail can be accessed over HTTPS to prevent snooping, Google search can be done over HTTPS to prevent network filters from seeing and blocking keywords. I understand China permits the former, so they would presumably permit the latter.

What does China get for allowing this? Well, the technicalities of the compromise may be important. As of now, visitors to google.cn are not automatically sent to the Hong Kong site; they have to click a link to google.com.hk when they want to do search. Other services are provided directly by google.cn. Wired and Reuters both suggested that this was a concession to allow Chinese authorities to save face. Mel once explained to me the concept of “face” and its importance in China. If it was a matter of face, then face was probably more important than any handicap that extra click imposes on google.cn as a Web portal.

That said, Google still arguably gets a lot more out of the deal than Beijing does. China doesn’t want to lose Google. Some industry figures there have stressed its importance, and the importance of a more open network, as both a source of innovation and a bridge to the West. What they worry about, I think, is a force for change that they can’t control. That could lead to turmoil, rather than growth and improved foreign relations. The fact that they’ve taken this first step is encouraging to me.