Musings

I'm just sitting here waiting for a compile to finish... Yes it's 12:30 on a Monday night and I'm doing work. It almost feels like I'm at school except it doesn't. Hitting feature complete will actually make a significant difference for the company (this isn't just some silly assignment) and I'm definitely full of creative fervour whereas school usually kills every last ounce of creativity in me. Usually by this time in the term I'm beaten down to a pulp of a monotonous drone not sharing heartfelt laughs with co-workers because we're completely exhausted and the architectural diagrams we're drawing on white boards make an odd amount of sense but are littered with silly mistakes. By this time in the term I'm definitely never pondering the future of computer science and what breakthroughs we need to make to improve productivity by yet another order of magnitude just to turn around and discuss the notion of rationality with one of my friends and it's philosophical implications (he's an anthro major with surprisingly little background in communication). University out-right stifles my creativity and I get terrified at this point in every term that I've actually lost it (both my creativity and sanity). Of course shortly after the term ends and I get a little rest my mind slowly begins to wander and soon enough... BAM! a flood of new creative ideas.

Maybe it's just Waterloo taking it's toll on me. For as long as I can remember I've longed for a taste of a more liberal arts view of education; pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. I was still young and naive when I was shaped by movies like The Dead Poets Society. Oddly as discouraged as I am with how little Waterloo has brought me what I was looking for in a university education I feel compelled to make the best of my last 9 months there; to try and leave some sort of lasting impression and maybe improve the situation a little. That's one of those situations where I feel like I can't completely change things but I can do my part. I've also started reconsidering a masters for the first time in about a year. I may also just drop in on classes that I find interesting instead; even masters are starting to become mainstream now-a-days. Of course hoping to find liberal arts in an institution is at least slightly oxymoronic. This is especially true of trying to find that fulfilment in a more engineering oriented field; I'm able to find that fulfilment but through my own personal experience and my mind's meandering not through the structure of a school. I was always a loner and I suppose being an artsy engineer means I continue to be one in some ways even though I'm able to talk with so many people about so many different things.

Where is all this coming from? I just watched Art School Confidential with Alex and Tony. If anything it made me realize how much of an artsy guy I can be. I've watched lots of very different and just messed up films but this one I found to be quite normal. This was after Alex made a mention about how strange the movie was. I found it odd at first but then thought it made perfect sense for an engineer. For me though it resonated perfectly; the issues are those that I deal with every day. How do I lay out this code so the glyphs of type ebb and flow with meaning and visual grace? How do I word functions and variables so they have an economy of style worthy of E. B. White? How do I lay out, name, and refactor the methods so that any one reads with the grace of a Shakespearean sonnet? How do I make the components and modules come together echoing the minimalist yet passionate architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or Norman Jaffe. Clearly I'm no ordinary software engineer.

The movie brought back an emotion I had felt while at a play at the Perimeter Institute (Picaso at the Lapin a Gilles played as part of the Einstein festival). The play would have meant much less had it not been for another talk I heard earlier that week as part of the same festival comparing the similarities between Einstein and Picaso and their quest to invent the 20th century. In some ways I feel like I'm at that point right now... I'm poised to invent the 21st century. I'm not saying that in a pompous or pretentious way. If anything I'm setting myself up for failure and in the grand scheme of things it won't matter and 100 years from now no one will even know. But I'm going to try!

So I guess that begs the question... what is my greatest fear? I suppose it's not having enough time to do everything that I feel I need to do; not having enough time to explore all the ideas I get. I am coming to the realization that unless I can figure out how to improve the speed of programming by an order of magnitude I may never be a great enough hacker to get around to trying everything I would like to try. I may just have to enlist the help of a code monkey :p