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Mostly musings.

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I’m a fifth year computing student.

No, wait.

I’m five years into my three-year degree.

Still wrong.

My degree usually takes three years, but this is my fifth.

You don’t really realise how bad it sounds until you say out it loud. Say it out loud to a friend you haven’t seen in a few years, and you might as well wish for the earth to swallow you up right there and then.

I guess whichever way I put it, there’s no getting around the fact that saying that “I’m a fifth-year computing student that isn’t doing honours” is awkward as all hell. And really, as awkward as it might be, it’s fair enough — it is a pretty awkward situation to be in, if I’m honest.

If you’ve bought stuff online from the US before, you might have had the option of shipping your goods via USPS. The United States Postal Service is kind of weird in that their basic service is called “first class”, and a faster service is called priority1. On the surface, this makes very little sense: if you want something shipped fast and have the choice between “first class” and “priority”, which one do you choose? You might lean towards first class, as that usually represents the best out of all the possible choices (it certainly does in terms of airline tickets, anyway), but then you realise that priority is more expensive. This is totally weird the first time you come across it, and if you’re not careful, can lead to a package arriving later than you expected. Depending on how impatient you are, this may be the worst thing in the world, or you might not care.

For the longest time, I’ve put “student” as my occupation in forms and surveys. But it was only the other day that I realised what this actually meant: for me, it means the only priority in my life should be to finish my degree and graduate. Not to be proficient at Mass Effect 3 multiplayer on the platinum difficultly level. Not to capture the flag in Battlefield 3’s End Game. Not to operate like an operator in ARMA 2’s Wasteland. Because when it comes down to it, I should have no other priority than to graduate this semester. Actually, I could have graduated last semester too, but I got lazy.

Now that I think about it, I get lazy a lot.

It just gets to a certain point in the semester where there’s just too much work to do and too little time to do it in, so I just… don’t do any of it. And as stupid as that sounds, I usually write it off with excuses like “it’s just a Benny thing” or “I couldn’t have passed that unit internally anyway” and skive off the exam.

I’ve long considered the possibility that I have an issue with how University-level assessment works, in that it encourages cramming and rote-learning (memorising stuff, then forgetting it over the summer break), and to a certain extent, that’s true. I don’t like how it works. Java? I did that in first year, and I’ll be damned if I can remember even a fraction of it.

I’ve also considered the fact that, for the most part, I just don’t get programming. Everyone tells the joke about “to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion”, but recursion still makes very little sense. Looking at my code these days, it’s just really basic-level stuff; methods/functions that might do complex things, but it still consists of basic if-else statements at the core. There’s heaps of technical stuff I still don’t understand, either. I would have thought that computing students would be able to regex their way out of any given problem. I would have thought that computing students would be able to code fluently in several different programming languages, instead of constantly having to refer to documentation to figure out what any given function does. Maybe I need to re-adjust my view on programming as a whole (as in, how it “works”), but I would have thought that by now, programming would be easier than it is2.

All this makes me wonder: at the end of my degree, what will I have actually learned? I mean, anyone can copy and paste code from Stack Overflow. It might take a few more skills to work out what any given code does or why it doesn’t work, but what are those skills worth? A few years of your life? Tens of thousands of dollars in HECS fees?

Education or no, what you get out of it will depend on what your expectations are going in. I’ve wondered what life without a degree might be like — I see successful people all the time doing things that are completely unrelated to the degree they attained in university — and as much as I might have wanted to quit and drop out, they’ve all said it’s a good thing to get under my belt.

So I guess there’s nothing else to do but grin and bear it. As much as it sucks now, it probably won’t suck as much after, right?

Right?

  1. USPS also has an actual express service available, too. In order of fastest to slowest: express, priority, and first class. Go figure. ↩
  2. Maybe I needed to lower my expectations of what a computing degree would do for me, as if I would magically become some gung-ho programmer overnight. Tangentially related: maybe we expect too much of geeks. ↩

Here and Now

There’s a perk in Fallout 3 and New Vegas called Here and Now. When taken, it immediately grants you another level, complete with all of the advantages that brings. There are plenty of other, equally-enticing perks to choose from, all with similarly beneficial advantages, so why choose Here and Now over any of those? We’ll get to this in a bit.

FalloutNV 2013-01-27 15-51-27-99

I wanted to write about a number of different things on my birthday today, seeing as last year’s post was so disappointing length-wise, but then I realised that as much as everything changes, it all just stays the same. As much as I want to about all the great things that happened last year, or some of the cooler moments, I’ve already done so. I’ve already posted about how I’m now a great photographer, and how I’ve played some of the best video games currently on offer. What else is there to write on here about?

Correction: what else is there to write about that won’t sound as depressing as it actually is?

By all accounts I should have finished my degree by now, but I’ve failed enough things to mean that this year will be my fifth year of a what is usually a three-year degree. We were talking about this in the car with a friend a few weeks after results came out, and he was like “that kinda sucks man, are you bummed about that?” My response was that I was pretty “meh” about the entire thing, because really, it’s not such a big deal, but yeah, it does kinda suck; therefore, meh seemed like an appropriate response. Not something to get too hung up on, but not something to be entirely ignored, either.

And that kind of describes my entire life, actually: all the bits that aren’t OMG amazing or FML depressing are just kinda, well, “meh”. Not overly exciting, but not exactly something I want to brag about, either.

But isn’t that the point? If I think about it, doesn’t life mean we take things as they come — the good, the bad, and the Things That Sit Squarely In The Middle? I mean, I’d be somewhat concerned if my life was all awesome, all the time. Concerned, or re-ordering my stock of valium, one of the two. In fact, I’d say having this good/bad/meh balance is as important as anything else in your life; too much of a good thing is a bad thing, as they say. And as much as we might want great things to happen to us all the time, bad stuff happens. All you can do is take it in your stride and learn from the experience.

It’s this learning from experience that I wanted to finish on today. Life throws a great many things at you, but as long as you come out the other side, you’ve come out on top. Because, if nothing else, you’ve learnt something along the way. Every time you die in DayZ, you learn to not do whatever you did to die. Every time you take a film photo, you learn to refine your composition technique. You learn to get in someone’s face. Every time you finish a Gun Master round in Battlefield 3, you learn to aim better with the guns you’re given. You learn how they work, how much recoil they have. You learn, for the hundredth time, that you hate the LSAT with the fire of a thousand suns.

Point is, you learn from these life experiences; good, bad, or completely mediocre.

Which brings us back to Here and Now. Because as nice as having all those experiences are, and as nice as doing all that learning is, wouldn’t it be easier if you could do all that learning without going through the experience in the first place? I mean, who really wants to know what having their heart broken feels like, or what losing a close friend or family member feels like? Wouldn’t you rather just know beforehand, instead of having to actually go through it and experience it for yourself? If you could just know what things feel like and what would happen if you did a particular thing, wouldn’t you? They say hindsight is 20-20, but wouldn’t it be great to have that kind of hindsight before stuff — good, bad, or otherwise — happens?

Hence the Here and Now perk in the Fallout series.

An additional experience level, complete with all the advantages that brings.

Bleak is an understatement

When we were five, they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Our answers were things like: astronaut, president, or in my case, a princess.

When we were ten, they asked again: we answered rockstar, cowboy, or in my case, a gold medallist.

But now that we’ve grown up, they want a serious answer. Well, how about this: who the hell knows.

This isn’t the time to make hard and fast decisions, this is the time to make mistakes.

Take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere.

Fall in love. A lot.

Major in philosophy, because there’s no way to make a career out of that.

Change your mind, and change it again, because nothing’s permanent.

So make as many mistakes as you can, that way someday when they ask what we want to be, we won’t have to guess.

We’ll know.

You know, this is exactly the reason I don’t post about personal stuff all that often. It’s way too easy to get sucked into some kind of depression-vortex, where the only way is down and no matter how you try, you just can’t seem to see the sun.

That said, every once in a while you have to think about it. At least a little, to try and work things out a little more. Not necessarily dwelling on it for any lengthy period of time — because that leads to a road we’ve all been down — but just thinking about things for a bit, to try and get some kind of better understanding of what’s what.

So instead of burdening you with my lengthy and not-insubstantial woes about the future, you get a quote from my favourite Twilight movie, Eclipse.1

Seems like a fair trade to me.

  1. Which reminds me, I have to watch the final Twilight movie sometime. ↩

On Starting Again, Earth-Scorching, and Legacy

You’re familiar with the scorched earth concept, right? Wikipedia says it’s a military strategy where a retreating force destroys anything in their path that might be useful to the enemy. It’s this idea that if the enemy captures that territory, it’ll be useless to them. The scorched earth concept is mostly applied to retreating forces since there’s a higher likelihood the enemy will capture that land anyway, but here’s the rub: it can also be used for advancing forces, too.

I’ve been toying around with the idea of starting an entirely new blog in my head over the past week. Not just “Benny Ling’s Bling 2.0”, but something entirely new and fresh.

On the one hand, the idea of starting again is exciting. Leaving all the old stuff behind so there’s no baggage, nothing tying me down or holding me back. Free to explore new horizons, a place to write about stuff I find exciting and things I’m enthusiastic about, and so on.

On the other hand, I’m the kind of person that would feel extremely sentimental about all the old stuff I’m leaving behind. I mean, I get sad throwing away parts of my childhood, even stuff that I have absolutely no rational use for today or in the future, stuff that I haven’t touched for years. There’s quite a number of posts here that are nothing more than short sentences on a particular topic — which is great, sure, but compared to some of my longer pieces?

When I first started this blog I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be a Tumblr-style reblog-fest where I’d repost any old trash from my social network, or whether I wanted it to be only about my writing. At first it was the former, and for a little while, I wrote a few bits here and there about cool things. But somewhere along the way I must have decided that maintaining such a blog was either daunting/exhausting/too-much-work or all of the above, because I soon stopped posting about stuff I had written and simply linked to stuff online that I thought was cool.

And don’t get me wrong, I still think most of that stuff is cool and/or worth your time, it’s just that, well, is my blog the right place for it?1 Do I want that stuff to have the same permanence as the stuff I’m proud of, the stuff that I’ve written personally? Stuff like my gaming reviews, pieces on why iOS is kicking Android’s butt, and putting together home servers.

Which is why I’m drawn back to this idea of starting again, and having a place for just my writing. It’ll mean less updates, even more sporadically than they currently are, but maybe — hopefully — it’ll mean an increase in quality.

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What is smart?

It could be the fact that it’s the mid-semester Uni assignment period once again (and thus, the perfect time for procrastination and/or reflection on how stupid assignments make me feel), or the fact that I read a really great article the other day on “what is smart”, but intelligence is something I’ve been thinking about lately.

Notably; what is intelligence? How is it measured? Is it different from person to person, or is there one universal definition of what “smart” is?

You hear about people with “genius-level intellect” all the time. Almost universally, those people are regarded as “smart”, or at least intelligent. Which brings us to another question: are intelligence and “being smart” the same thing? Can you be smart as well as intelligent when you’re not talking about the dress-sense kind of smart?

Other definitions of smart are a little harder to nail down: maybe you can only name a few US states and their capitals, for example, but you have an innate understanding of how physics works (facts vs understanding). Or maybe you can recite the periodic table, but don’t understand why it’s rude to ask someone’s age (again, facts vs understanding).

Maybe you can be socially smart. Maybe you’re just good at reciting facts. Which brings us to yet another question: if you have an eidetic memory, does that make you smart? Possibly; I guess it comes down to what kind of things you choose to memorise. You could just memorise a whole lot of junk about unimportant minutiae, and that probably wouldn’t make you very “smart”. Very good at Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, maybe, but probably not smart.

Or maybe all this is wrong. Maybe, like the Thought Catalog article suggests, smart isn’t just about knowing things, but it’s about knowing how things relate to each other, how they go.

But then I came across an article from the creator of Dilbert which completely changed my mind about smartness and intelligence: Scott Adams’ crackpot theory of intelligence is simply that intelligence is nothing more than pattern recognition.

My crackpot idea for today is that intelligence is nothing more than pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is nothing more than noting the frequency, timing, and proximity of sensory inputs. Language skill, for example, is nothing but recognizing and using patterns. Math is clearly based on patterns. Our so-called common sense is mostly pattern recognition. Wisdom comes with age because old people have seen more patterns. Even etiquette is nothing more than patterns.

Think about that for a second. Maybe intelligence (or how smart someone is) is nothing but pattern recognition, at both a micro and macro level.

And when you think about it, it all makes sense. On some level, with enough inputs, everything can be learnt through pattern recognition: social interactions? Pattern recognition. Physics? Pattern recognition. Programming? Pattern recognition. Pretty much anything can be interpreted as a pattern: even the haphazard arrangement of tabs in my web-browser could be explained, with enough knowledge about my habits and browsing patterns (if this was a game of Taboo I’d have just lost), with pattern recognition.

Actually, I’ve come across this idea before: my old piano teacher used to say pattern recognition was an invaluable skill to have when learning new pieces, as musical theory has heaps of repetition. I think the general idea was to recognise the patterns in order to learn to play pieces faster and more efficiently.

So, what do we know? We know a few things:

  • Intelligence is, or at least can be, some kind of sophisticated pattern recognition; know enough about something and you’ll start to see patterns, which can lead to conclusions and interpretations about what you’ve observed/sensed. Roughly translated, this is “learning”.
  • Complex patterns can be broken down into many inputs. Variables can be controlled. Changes can be observed. Results can be recorded. And finally, perhaps most importantly:
  • This was an excellent way to procrastinate an assignment I’m not feeling great about.

Does it make you a better… ?

There’s a scene in The Unit — one of my favourite TV series of all time — where one of the lead characters asks another soldier who’s about to make a life changing decision: does it make you a better soldier? In that scene, Jonas asks Mack whether what’s he’s about to do will make him a better soldier, and it’s a good question: if killing your superior officer (who slept with your wife) doesn’t make you a better soldier, you have to ask the question: what does?

It’s the kind of question I ask myself all the time; what can I do that will make me a better person?

A while back I was asked if shooting film made me a better photographer. At the time, I didn’t really have an answer for the guy who asked, because I hadn’t really thought about it myself.

But thinking about it now, the answer seems pretty clear: sure it does, if only on a purely technical level. When you shoot film with a manual-exposure camera, when you’re guessing exposures, you learn about apertures and shutter speeds in addition to thinking about all the other aspects of your shots. A lot of shooting film is also the experience of not being able to look at your photos immediately and having to wait for it to get developed. That teaches patience, which, last time I checked, was a pretty good attribute to have.

With film, you’re limiting yourself to only shooting a certain number of frames. It means you can just spray people at 5fps — 12 if you’re lucky enough to have a 1DX — and it means that you value your shots more because you’ve got less to work with.

And you know what? At the end of the day, maybe taking photos with film cameras doesn’t have to be about if it makes you a better photographer. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t — but if you’re having fun doing it, then I guess that’s okay too.