Episode 13, Box

Episode 14, Sunset

Zero relevant sources identified? Please.

Oh, wait, that was a misread. Zero, which in Capstone land means “you did okay finding relevant sources” (where the hell else does a zero grade mean neutral? F’ing engineers). At any rate, I’m still running up against this annoyance:

In this otherwise dutifully do-learn, interdisciplinary academic environ, I am *not* going to read a book on how to explain clearly and write persuasively on technical subjects when I could be taking my cues from The Cathedral and the Bazaar, from Free Culture and my own long experience rendering things as esoteric as, say, immunological synthetic protein constructs, or the pros and cons of retaining terza rima in English translations of the Commedia. Isn’t it a fundamentally broken assumption that mastery in the humanities revolves around reading books about the discipline?

Maybe I should have pegged the project as ethics? Then I’d at least get to read cool stuff like Aristotle.

UPDATE: I rest my case. To be fair, however, I was perhaps wrong about .NET class incompatibilities being a dealbreaker.

After a hard weekend spent doing battle with IronPython over the team’s first code deliverable, I think I’ve finally grasped the root of the problem. Took me long enough.

I’m declaring victory (after a fashion) but at this point it feels a little bit hollow. SCOPE meeting tonight made me very cognizant of just how badly we are wanting for a direction. Now that I’ve got some inkling of one, I’m not exactly thrilled where it points. It comes down to a choice between abandoning one of Visual Studio’s central functions–the compiler and debugger–or reimplementing a small but complex piece of the standard Python library as a native .NET class so that we can use it inside VS. Once I understood this choice, it was easy to adapt the relatively small amount of code already written in VS to run interpreted rather than compiled. But then, right now I’ve got things decently close to the minimalist aesthetic which tells me I’m using .NET classes as they were meant to be used. As the code grows, and gets the whole team’s fingerprints all over it, it’ll probably become more complex and somewhat harder to manage. Even if I’m not sure I’d make good use of the debugger, it’d be nice to have it up my sleeve.

At the least, it would be a thorn in my side knowing that glorified WYSIWYG editor is not a particularly deep utilization of this software we’re throwing an obscene amount of money into, money which would be better spent financing a team trip to the beach I might add.

Last night, somewhere around 6AM, I awoke with a start. For some reason, I’d bit my tongue while sleeping. Hard. It hurt. I already wasn’t getting enough sleep, so the temporary interruption was hardly consequential; but what the hell was I dreaming?

Got up in the morning and managed to drag myself to breakfast, to the shuttle, to Pendleton West for Drawing I. The teacher liked my piece and seems pleased with the progress I’m making, though I occasionally get the impression this is one of those “you’re a credit to your [social group | ethnic group | profession]” type things. Yes, I’m an engineering student. Yes, I am analytical by nature and occasionally to a fault.

But I would argue that engineering students, and Oliners especially, do know when it’s time to stop trying to measure out the precise angles and proportions, set down the other pencil and just go on instinct. To get friendly with the medium. To play, sketch, scribble, meddle, hack, whatever. What better tribute to that whimsical tendency (lost on the non computer geeks though it might be) than a pair of delinquent D600’s reposed in bed, engaging in software exchange via Cat6?

In the afternoon I wandered over to Allen’s office for our first capstone advisor-advisee heart-to-heart. It was quite a morale boost that he didn’t immediately tear my proposal a new one. In fact we seem to be in agreement that the current version of the plan is both sound and potentially impactful, albeit underdefined and in need of fine tuning. Wonderful. Now comes the hard part: with Allen’s help, and Caitrin’s blessing, I have to figure out in what discipline I’m claiming this capstone is located.

If I understand Caitrin’s criticism rightly, the capstone syllabus has an underlying assumption that the thing being done is the thing being studied. At first glance, perhaps particularly because this is Olin, nothing about that assumption seems radical or troublesome. We learn, and demonstrate our learning, by doing. But the closest approximation Allen and I could come up with for what I’m doing and what the authors I’ve cited were doing is “journalist” or “political columnist”. Most of them are academics or engineers by vocation, social critics and armchair anthropologists by avocation. Just because I’m citing their anthropological arguments doesn’t mean I want to read hardcore anthropological papers on the Open Source movement (which IMO muddy the water by superimposing yet another layer of jargon); then again, neither do I need the hardcore lawyer or engineer stuff right now. I simply need fuel for a convincing series of arguments about free and proprietary information, and for that I’m pretty confident in my chosen sources.

Since the insomniac days of freshman year, I have always thought Olin was immune to any kind of circadian conformity that would cause a general lull in the school’s measured vital signs (Facebook activity, mailing list activity, AIM messages from classmates, faces entering and leaving my suite, decibel level in the suite and floor lounges, and so on), excepting maybe the 3-6AM window when in accordance with local tradition most of us try to at least have a nap. But I’m noticing that the potential energy well restraining me to my desk chair is particularly strong Monday nights this semester, as a dearth of warm bodies palpably changes East hall into some kind of seratonin hell. Where the fuck is everybody?

Capoiera lessons and the like may account for part of it–offhand I don’t recall the schedule for that. So might lab classes, professor and TA office hours, co-curricular meetings, etc. Also, Mondays in mid-winter here are more of a drag than at other times of year, so if there’s a take-home test or late night ModCon hacking session that needs to be done and you just know it’s going to suck up your attention for five straight hours, you might prefer to do it Monday evening. But all told I’m just not sure that’s enough, and even if it were, it’d still feel like the twilight zone in here because my conventional wisdom dictates Olin never rests.

As for what I’m confident is not responsible: problem sets and other generic coursework (the students mired in these still generate a remarkable amount of e-mail traffic, and many of them nest in the suite lounge); wild parties (I’d say most of us only feel free to do that on the weekend); video games (on Monday night? shame on you. those are your reward for making it through to Wednesday); getting play (same as with the parties?); disease outbreak or undead plague (I wouldn’t have lasted this long). It’s possible that I’m just overreacting, because I’m always a little tight-wound in the winter and moreover am procrastinating too much tonight. Sigh… okay, FAFSA, you win.