keithtom.com

just hanging out in the airport getting ready to head off to montreal.

reading this great living abroad blog sent my way. i particularly like this entry, which is full of cool stuff but the idea i like the most is the concept of living abroad as oppose to travel. i’m wondering if the couch surfing will be a good option for me. i’ll need to look into it more.

had some good talks with craig today about some xiki refactoring that should make it so much easier for me to get around. so i’m excited about that.

to these books, I say, I will read you


to these books, I say, your day will come

gotta catch my flight!

okay this is my 8 minute video that took me about a day to edit. i wish youtube had better quality. maybe i’ll find a better video host another time.

i gotta say, this makes me want to buy a camcorder before i goto peru again. making some nice hd videos would be awesome and its so easy to edit with imovie.

after thinking for about a day, i bought a ticket for montreal. i’m heading back for about 2.5 weeks.

arrive: feb 24 depart: march 11

which is a week before peru (march 17).

i gotta get my shit in order… cya.

crb
I went to a columbus ruby (crb) meeting this monday. Had a special guest, Yehuda Katz, so it was a real treat to hear him talk. I haven’t been keeping up on my programming stuff lately (haven’t felt motivated to read about new stuff), but it was really interesting to hear about changes coming down the pipe and made me want to start reading up again. more importantly, it was a good excuse to see people that i haven’t in a while, which was really nice. i can’t believe it’s been almost a year and a half now that i’ve been in columbus – time travels at warp speed. i was suppose to do a big 1 year-in-review blog a while back, but got caught up in too many changes going on. i guess i’ll just do it late but not now – better later than never.

happy zoe
took zoe for her follow up vaccine shots so she’s all done and super healthy and super happy. phew.

idols?
do ppl have idols these days? is that just something with the new generations? no idols? just something that popped into my head recently…

my filming debut
this is a little something that i’ve been working on a bit… it’s not done so here is the preview video.

that’s mostly what keith has been doing in ohio.

the weather is starting to get to me. gloomy days and right now, have severe wind warnings going till 5am with rain being whipped around.

i got pretty sick today from eating something bad but after a few hrs of getting it all out, i’m better. at a few pts though, i was kinda worried and hoped it wasn’t anything serious. i could only imagine what the hospitals would cost.

that is all.

went to a panera’s yesterday to do some work for an hr but ended up meeting a fellow mac user and programmer. really interesting guy, he created a bunch of databases for a lot of non-profit organizations over 15 years. so I talked to him about that for a bit. he also studied physics math and computer science, but interestingly had a minor in some business classes for non-profits. after 20 years of programming, he’s now running a restaurant, another long time passion of his. pretty cool. i’ll have to stop by the restaurant some time and ask him some more questions.

I had to run off after an hour of chatting to get to my yoga class. it wasn’t so much of an ‘exercise’ yoga, which is pretty much what it is in the west. but more of the original yoga, which was intended to unite body and mind. the class was a bit slow but they did mention that one of the yoga monks will be giving a free 2hr lecture thursday so i’m looking forward to checking that out.

I can’t say too much else has happened. i saw a family of geese crossing the street the other day on my way to get a haircut. it is something really interesting to watch. the first goose checks both sides of the street and made sure the traffic wasn’t moving or coming. then they just boldly start walking across in a line. the guys at the end of the line are the most scared, hesitant to step off the grass, especially since traffic was being held up on both sides by that point (we are talking like 30-40 geese). the last one was kinda oscillating towards the line to build up the courage, but stopped on the sidewalk. interestingly, the whole line stopped when he did, and just kinda turned and looked at him. i guess with all the pressure he just jumped on to the road and started running. and the line resumed.

quick msg from an email niraj sent to me: do not use cruise control when its raining outside. if you hydroplane, the cc will cause your car accelerate more and lose control.

I forgot to mention that two days ago I went back to the free meditation class on nithya dhyaan and had a pretty good class. since the previous weekly course was canceled due to the severe weather here in columbus, that course had to pack twice the info. in the end, i felt pretty good and was apparently successful in ‘unclutching’ or letting go of my thoughts. there are some interesting concepts in the first class that i also wanted to bring up, maybe i did in a previous entry but i dont remember.

i dont think this is the first time i bumped up against this concept, but it’s interesting how in this class they model a person as body (of course), mind and self. now at first, it was a little awkward and didn’t fit. but the instructor went on to point out some examples. i don’t want get this wrong but i think it was along the lines of your mind is responsible for your thoughts and it develops its own patterns about thoughts. but most importantly, your mind is not your self.

now this is interesting for a couple reasons and it makes sense to me independently of any meditation or ‘new age’ stuff. some common examples have to do with expressions like “be honest with yourself”, or “lying to yourself”. if you stop and think about that, it is a really weird idea that you can be not honest with yourself because that implies there is another self not being honest with your self. i actually ran into this experience many years ago when i caught myself lying to myself about video games. at the time, i thought it was surprising and ever since then learned to keep an eye on myself. probably one of the most useful experiences i’ve ever had.

anyway, going back to their model for body, mind and self reminded me of all of this because the other self was the mind (don’t know how obvious that is to point out). so, sometimes our self has to keep an eye on our mind. interesting and useful.

p.s. i almost put a corny title like ‘mind your mind’, but i thought i’d spare you all.

so its been a while since i’ve had anything useful to say.

circuit city rant
today, i went to the circuit city and it seemed somewhat cleared out already. i gotta say, for a going out of business sale, it kinda sucked. i mean at first look, the sales were okay, 20-30% off their stuff, so if you were on the fence about something, it would be enough to make you buy it. but when you consider they have to mark things up a decent amt compared to an online store, you were barely walking out with a deal. in fact, a lot of their old inventory like usb keys or memory sticks were really overpriced, and overpriced for prices back when that stuff was good, so even now when they offer a 20% discount, its a damn joke because you can find 2-4x the product at half the price. kinda sad. k, nuf circuit city bashing.

education rant
at osu again today, and i really forgot how shitty school can be for somethings. bitter, old, cruddy professor who don’t want to teach, overpriced textbooks gouging students and dumb ass tests that want you to regurgitate the class lessons and the way they taught it. (btw, that opinion kinda built up slowly over my visits to the university). i wont go into this rant too much, and i’m not saying its all like that, but there are those parts of school that i’ve forgotten how crappy it was – i have a lot of problems with the education system, and for some reason, it really frustrates me.

math site
luckily, i was giving more thought to my online tutor/textbook site. with this idea, i hope to do a little more than rant about education problems. i think i’ve come up with some more good ideas.

first, i definitely want to leverage crowd sourcing on the site. so there will be a comment/ wiki component to the site, so students or other writers can contribute too. they can create problems, provide solutions, provide their own pts of view for understanding a concept, and expand the texts. i really find everyone has a different way of seeing the same concept and to have people provide their insight is really valuable. i’ve probably tutored for probably 5+ yrs now and have learned many different ways of seeing the same thing. if one way of explaining doesn’t work, another usually does.

another good idea is that i want this online textbook’ to be of actual use in a school. i think about 2 years ago i would have been happy with conceptually good site, but i want this to be practical. which means, for a particular school and course, they’ll have a syllabus, and you need a textbook which corresponds to the taught material. so, i’ll find a way to let students (or the teacher) from a particular class make their own syllabus, which will just be an appropriate collection of links to the right material. you can think of it a textbook that is very plug and play. you can grab the chapter from calculus 1 for review, then make a link for the second chapter on continuous probability distributions. this works well with a topic like math because the fundamentals will almost certainly never change.

lastly, i think the whole thing will be released under the creative commons. i really want everything to remain free and extensible.

peru
there was a comment about peru but it seems to be broken on my site and it’s not worth it to track the bug down an fix it. this time in peru i’m probably looking at something like sandboarding, para-surfing, going to the amazonian jungle, swimming with seals and beach/seafood. if i’m luckily, we’ll get to squeeze it all in.

nothing too exciting these days. i’m almost an unofficial osu student. i have a young face and dress like a programmer, so i blend in well. it was only when i was waiting in line for vending machine and the two girls ahead were giggling at how the machine stole their money, did i truly stop and think, ‘wow, i’m old’. this and talk of the hottest band’s new music video are the reminders of how much has happened in… i guess 4 yrs out of mcgill.

well at least my tutoring skills are in shape. i get a good amount of pleasure teaching and would love to do it as a job if it paid better and i knew the kids wanted to learn. although, i feel i’m probably more useful in a 1on1 fashion. i really hope i get around to making a math tutoring website. it’s a small side project i’m thinking about putting into motion. there’s a lot of stuff already out there, but i think i can bring something to the table still. and it’ll be a way for me to feel like i’m tutoring/teaching if i can make it useful enough to reach a lot of ppl in the world.

i’ll update when i have more…

whoa… missed one yesterday. i was knocked out at 8pm or something. i spent the day running around campus and even sat in on a stats class. i guess i was tired out by the whole thing and trying to keep the sickness at bay. ended up waking up at 5 am though and getting some great work done. no interruptions at 5 am.

the day wasn’t too eventful aside from boosting my car – kinda nervous the first time you do it. but got it done no problems – aside from almost making the two contacts touch at the end. the snow is melting and columbus is going to join the vancouverites in their positives temperatures.

oh lastly i bought my ticket to peru for end of march. getting a bunch of new things lined up for that trip. no new details about anything else.

zoe on our hike at hocking hills

zoe sporting her stylish jacket

zoe on our hike at old man’s cave

zoe in the canoe at hocking hills (after jumping out of the canoe)

zoe after her haircut

i’ve been following local news and their saying my county is in a level 2 snow emergency =(. there’s like almost a foot of snow built up and icy rain. luckily, i dont think i’ll be needing to leave the house today. i’d hate to be on the road now. you know after moving just a little south, i have come to realize that canada is cold. except for vancouver, those ppl are enjoying a nice +4 celcius.

in other news, i’ve found that the man vs wild show has some parts of it faked =(. sadly i found this out after ordering the dvds online. oh well. a lot of the stuff he does is real, but i just wish they wouldn’t mislead the viewers – it is still an insane show even with some stuff faked. it just sucks that that discovery channel allow that kinda deception. btw, discovery channel is having some crazy dvd sales if you are interested in anything. up to 75% off, some really cheap dvds, free shipping and a 5$ coupon code if you buy more than 25$ (EML2009).

i’m glad to say zoe is feeling much better; tail wagging, food begging and all. today was pretty laid back – taking care of gaby, making sure i don’t get sick and some work.

i started watching man vs wild since my cousin andrew mentioned it to me. what an insane show. guy is dropped off in different places on the earth every show, and has to make his way back to civilization. pretty neato.

i’m pretty sure im going to peru again for 3 weeks this time. 2 with gaby. 1 without. that’ll probably be end of march. this time i’ll be seeing lima in summer time, so lots of beaches, more fresh fruit and tons of sea food. it’ll be sweet. I’d like to check out a bit of the amazon jungle too if i can.

i still want more destination across the pond. and i’m imagining that going for 4 weeks. who knows, maybe i’ll consider algeria.

keith out.

so today i had to take zoe to get her teeth cleaned, and man, did i feel like i was getting milked. they keep offering all these products and vaccines to help your dog feel better. its hard to say no to. so the cleaning went well and was covered by insurance, but i ended up dropping another 100$ or so on misc stuff and they have already said that the checkup in 3 weeks will cost 150$ for booster vaccinations. it was kinda ridiculous. but luckily all that went well for zoe.

a large remainder of the day was spent taking care of gaby since she came down with something pretty bad. so that was a run to the ‘clinic’ and picking up a bunch of meds.

got some okay work done in the in-between. got pretty frustrated at one point and refused to give up. i’m pretty sure this was one of those times when it would have been better to let it go, walk away, come back fresh. but i absolutely hate when something simple is not easy. i’ve probably just been spoiled by ruby making everything simple and easy. so if that frustration didn’t happen, it woulda been a good productive day too.

ended up watching an episode of the city, which is the new hills, and man, that show has to be the poutine for your brain – you know its bad for you but something just makes you want more. i was relieved when the show ended and i was able to shut it off. i can say that i’m really happy that since i’ve moved to columbus, i almost never watch tv.

tomorrow is a new day.

today was simple. study at osu campus. eat at my favourite chinese restaurant around there. and work.

trying not to get sick. as every one seems to be coming down with something.

there was maybe an inch of snow today and people thought it was bad. silly columb… columbians?

i think the only other thing of interest i did today was find these tidbit talks between seth godin and richard branson.

oh, and did you know that we have the theory in place for a time machine? like a real one. i gather they are building it and it should be able to communicate with the future. this is the short version.

what is up y’all? poker went so-so. finished 3rd. broke even. played a quick cash game, lost 20$ =(. oh well. make sure to see the video under this blog if you read nothing else!

today
today was hanging out with craig and some more house cleaning. then went to campus to help gaby with some of her stats studying. i miss a lot of things about being in school. i think i’d really like to sit in on some classes again. not to do a masters, but just to sit and learn for learnings sake – not to pass any tests (that’s crazy!). that’s when its really fun. actually, i did sit in one of her classes last week but it was stats so it was like reviewing stuff. i’d love to learn some physics again, but actually i find my mind craving some non-sciency courses.

other than that, getting some work done and chatting. you know, when i’m 50, it’ll be the year 2032. when i’m 80, 2062. insane. that combined with the thought that i’ll be 27 this year (thanks for pointing that one out today niraj) makes me think, i gotta keep moving. you don’t control the cards you were dealt, just how you play them.

ramblings on social science vs science
i find sociology, history and psychology really cool. which is a pretty big change from when i was growing up. its kinda funny but i’ve always personally found that stuff harder than math or physics because those subjects are relatively structured and strictly logical. with math, most of the time, it’s given this, what’s that. assumption, consequence. same with physics, cause, effect. input, output. granted math can be a hard language to express yourself in, but there is structure to move around.

with other subjects, there is less foothold on a problem. i find its kinda like open and anything is possible. many variables, no rules. there isn’t that floor of certainty to stand on. where as with math, you say, assume the number 0 exists and lets move on from there. i guess when i was younger it seemed too chaotic for my likings, but i’ve gotten used to navigating it now. and now that i can make sense of it more, it’s really intriguing to study.

tonight’s blog comes early as i will be heading out for some poker tonight at a friends house.

so i just finished cleaning up my room and it was reminiscent (i think i used that word correctly). i’ve managed to more or less pack all my things into a shoebox and 2 other medium sized box – well at least the things I want to keep. my clothes and shoes took a gym bag and travel bag. but i think i’ve almost wrapped it up. it’ll feel good to shed some weight so i can be even more mobile.

i wonder how much i’ll be able to sell. i have a lot to be recycled or shredded. the rest i guess will be given away.

in any case, this should help me get ready for whatever travel i have coming up ahead. i need to make some decisions soon.

travel travel
i started reading Laura/Niraj’s book, and so far its pretty good. its definitely humbling when you realize all the crazy places ppl go when they travel. the guide takes economic and political stability into account, gives you a feel for cost of living and languages spoken – and really the only thought i’m left with is , wow these guys have testicular fortitude.

i’m pretty sure i can narrow my choices down to places that speak english, french and maybe spanish. fyi, canada was #3 on the list! wewt. although most of the activities lie in montreal and vancouver. another on the list was peru, around #6 i think. i have more to keep reading though since i just read the top 10 by country – they also break it down by region and another division i can remember. #1 was algeria and they made it sound pretty exciting. but again, i dont speak the language. we’ll see what happens with that.

one laptop per child
i forgot to mention yesterday that i got to play with my one-laptop-per-child laptop. i ended up buying it over the holidays since they had a give one get one thing going. i know its a bit of a loose spending but i always wanted to get one since i heard about the program and it turns out they only sell to north america every now and then. anyway, i’m happy with the purchase and its a neat little device with lots of potential. well designed.

plants
random tidbit, but did you know that plants get a large amt of their mass from the atmosphere? i can’t remember the percentages but it was significant. anyway. that’s all.