Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I’m sitting in Coffee to the People after having just picked up the keys to my and Jim’s new apartment, 1298 Haight St. #6, San Francisco, CA 94117. Next up, moving.

So. I finally got my brain to shut up long enough for me to figure out that I’d found someone special back in Texas. She’s visiting California over her spring break.

In other news, Johari and Nohari are pretty clever.

Edit: We’ve broken up, amicably.

Over the break, I’m visiting Phoenix and Austin. This entry is here to help me keep track of everything, and partly to beg rides, and lodging from Austinites.

I’m hoping to hang out with the wondrous Sunshine on the afternoon of the 28th. I’ll probably be calling people tomorrow to ask for places to sleep and rides to and from Pallas (Friday to Sunday: won’t be in Austin then). Volunteers for the airport rides would be appreciated.

On presents: (Yes, this is very late.) If there’s anything in particular you want, ask for it. If not, I may have seen something recently that struck me as perfect for you. If so, I probably got it. Otherwise, sorry, I’ll keep my eyes open (KMEO) specifically for you. (It’s silly to give gifts only at Yule time.) On the other hand, I’m going to San Francisco on Thursday for the specific purpose for K-ingMEO, so if there are any shops you know of that I might particularly want to KMEO in, please comment. Suggestions for a better acronym are also welcome. Don’t get me presents. It will be enough to see my Austinites.

In the next few weeks, you have several chances to see me before I leave for California:

• Pagan Caffeination Night
• First party celebrating my leaving, on Monday, July 11 at Aphrodite’s. Come over some time in the afternoon; leave later.
• The Priest Salon
• Second party celebrating my leaving, on Saturday, July 16 after the priest salon, also at Aphrodite’s. If you just want to come for the party, I’m guessing you should show up around 8-9:00. I’m having two parties to accomodate people who work either weekends or weekdays, not because I’m greedy for attention. Or it could be that too.
• I go to College Station on the 18th, come back on the 22nd, and then leave Austin for California on the 23rd. I will spend the night of the 23rd in El Paso, the 24th in Tucson, the 25th in Phoenix, and then either drive straight to to Mountain View, or stay the night of the 26th in Los Angeles and arrive in Mountain View on the 27th. If you want me to visit you on the way, or want to come with, comment or send an email.

As most of you know, I start working at Google on August 15^th. I will be programming (sorry, Software Engineering™) for them, but I don’t know yet what project I’ll be working on. I move out there in the last week of July, which gives me time to settle in before I have to start work. I’ll be living at 40² Villa St. #14², Mountain View, CA 94041. (Do the math.) That’s within biking distance from Google, so I won’t have to use my car much. I also live in walking distance from Castro St., Mountain View’s downtown. I’ll have a full 1-bedroom apartment with a sofa bed, so if anyone is passing through the bay area and needs a place to crash, give me a call/email.

I wrote this speech differently from the way I’ve written most essays. I obviously put more effort into getting it right than I usually do, but the techniques I used were also different. Most of the time I put a lot of effort into each paragraph as I write it and then barely revisit my earlier paragraphs as I finish the later ones. If I revise them, I usually only reword the sentences. This time, I treated it more like a program. I wrote a draft of each paragraph as quickly as I could, to get something readable quickly. Then, I went back and rewrote whole paragraphs at a time. It seemed to work at least as well, and I wound up with something of a history of what I wrote.

Since I’ve been studying Category Theory recently, I procrastinated by thinking of a mapping between essay-writing and categories. Sort of a category of essays. To specify a category, you have to say what the objects are and what the arrows are. The objects are audience mental states. Or maybe sets of audience mental states. The arrows in the essay category are sentences. They compose into paragraphs. This is true because any given sentence or paragraph needs the audience to be thinking certain things in order for it to make sense, and leaves the audience with some new thoughts. We can replace one sentence with another, or one paragraph with another, as long as they still type-check. Effectively, when we write an essay or a speech, we have some audience we expect, giving us the source of the arrow, and we have some new thoughts we want the audience to be thinking afterward, giving us the target. The work of writing an essay is to find an inhabitant of that type.

I also sent drafts of the speech to a lot of people to critique. Comments that I agreed with, I accepted immediately; ones I didn’t, I argued with. I worry a little that my arguing makes those people less likely to give me possibly-negative comments in the future. On the other hand, I don’t think I could do anything differently. If I don’t argue, I can’t simply accept the proposed changes since I don’t believe in them. I can’t just ignore them because they might have been correct. So the net result is that I argue strongly with some suggestions, I may finish the conversation with the other person thinking I’m annoyingly obstinate, and then I may very well wind up accepting the suggestion the next day. I’m happy to hear suggestions on how to do this better, but it may just be how my brain works.

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As I announced a few weeks ago, I was asked to give the student speech at my graduation. Here’s what I wound up saying. You’ll notice that the punctuation and capitalization isn’t always correct. That’s because I used the grammar to give me cues on how to say it. Thank you to everyone who helped me write it, even or especially if I seemed to resist your ideas. It wouldn’t have been nearly this good without you.

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I have been selected to give the student address for the 2005 College of Natural Sciences graduation at UT-Austin. Wow. I get five minutes to say whatever I want to the entire college. Now I just have to figure out what that is. Suggestions are welcome.

• General platitudes about what an exciting time we live in and how we’re the future of America, etc.
• Doom and gloom about the direction of America. The coming theocracy, why it’s bad, etc.
• Anti-consumerism, Adbusters, Slow, Voluntary Simplicity, etc. Make Sunshine proud.
• On Greatness. Draw from Richard Hamming’s talk. Encourage graduates to be great rather than just good. Warn them about the perils of getting stuck in a job they hate. (drains your energy; makes you not want to work on anything you love; makes you an American.) I may be able to combine this and the previous one…

Well, I’ve started a blog to replace the old one on LiveJournal. Several of my old posts have migrated over here. This blog runs on WordPress, a free blogging platform. I’m still working out some kinks, so if you see anything that seems wrong or broken, please tell me.

I had two requests, now just one:

• I’m looking for a good title as Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog is a little boring. Suggestions in the comments for this post please.
• rakksi was kind enough to make a feed at jyasskin. Unfortunately, it got the wrong time stamp for all of the posts I’ve moved over there, so they’re all at the top of my friends page right now. You may want to wait a bit before adding the new feed to your friends list.