Flatland and my adventures in Stanford's libraries

I almost forgot to post this tale, but I recently ran across the relevant photos on my phone and knew I had to write something.

A few months ago, in preparation for a trip up to Sonoma, Molly and I were at the Stanford Library to pick out a few books. Susan's house in Healdsburg is one of the few places I actually take the time to read, as opposed to listening to audiobooks; after a day of biking, wine tasting and swimming, there is nothing better than relaxing by the pool with a good story. Except the massages. But that's a different story.

The pool

I keep track of all the books I read - and all the books I want to read - on Visual Bookshelf, so I had my list ready when we got to the library. I found the nearest computer and began to search. First up was Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. They had a copy, but it seemed to be on hold. Next up: The Pragmatic Programmer. Somebody already had it out. I then tried Xenocide, the 3rd book in the Ender's Game series. They had it! I wrote down the call number and headed down to the stacks with Molly.

20 minutes later, we came back to the terminal empty handed. The book was nowhere to be found. I continued searching. The Island? Out. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest? Lost. I tried a few more and finally got a hit for One Hundred Years of Solitude in another library. We wandered over there and, sure enough, it was missing from the shelves. How could this be? A world class library and I can't find a single thing to read? Close to giving up, I decided to look up one final book: Flatland. It was available, but hidden away somewhere in the basement. Expecting more failure, we headed down.

We found ourselves in a large room with a dark red carpet, low ceilings with exposed pipes jutting out and sliding stacks. We followed the call number to the proper shelf and, to our great astonishment, the book was there!

Success! I was just about to head out when one of the pages caught my attention. I opened the book up to take a closer look and this is what I found:

Scribbles. I flipped the page and found more scribbles. I flipped through the whole thing and it was nothing but jagged lines. Every. Single. Page. At this point, I was sure that I had lost my mind. Perchance to Dream anyone?

Molly captured on camera the split second when I totally, utterly cracked.

As it turns out, instead of the real Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, I had stumbled across some modern art/poetry thing with the exact same title. The "author" explains on his webpage:

For each page of Abbott’s novel I have traced, by hand, a representation of each letter’s occurrence across every page of text. The generated result is a series of superimposed seismographic images which reduce the text in question into a  two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports.

How the hell does this crap get published? Why did Stanford buy it? WHY?

I left the library that day without a book and quite shaken by the experience. Fortunately, time heals all wounds. Time, and a nice bottle of wine.

My hackday project is live: The Resume Builder

Last Friday, I got my first project up on LinkedIn Labs: Resume Builder. This little app will take your LinkedIn profile and convert it into a beautiful resume. You just sign in with your LinkedIn account, pick from one of the many resume templates, customize what sections are visible and their order, and then print & share to your heart's content. Some samples: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3.

The Resume Builder was my first hackday project: it won "most likely to launch" back in March, 2010. What motivated me was the frustration of maintaining my "professional profile" in multiple places. I had Word and PDF documents all over my computer, my LinkedIn profile, my homepage, etc. Every time I needed to send my resume somewhere, I wasted hours searching for the latest one and often times had to resort to some old version that I tracked down in my gmail "sent mail" folder. Once I joined LinkedIn, I figured it was time to keep my professional data in one place and produce all other formats from it, and I tested this idea out as a hackday.

The reaction to my hackery was very positive, and while it took me a while to get around to it, the Resume Builder has finally been converted into a fully functional app. The best part was that it gave me the opportunity to learn and play with a number of "best of breed" technologies: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Compass, SASS, the LinkedIn APIs, and Markdown. Naturally, these are all part of my resume now.

I created the Resume Builder Blog to track updates to the project as well as the Resume Builder IdeaScale community to give users a chance to leave feedback, report bugs, and vote ideas up and down. If you have some time, give the Resume Builder a try and let me know what you think!

2010 Crossfit Games: Northern California Qualifier, Day 2

Introduction 

After a smooth first day of competition, Sunday was a bit of a mess. Although all of Saturday's scores and standings were available online, no one really knew who was eliminated, who would compete on Sunday, when to show up or when the workouts were. Not until ~11PM on Saturday did a link to a heat schedule appear on the Crossfit Games website in the comments of the day 1 results page. The schedule looked legit - there were timings for the top 186 finishers from Saturday (the other 70 were cut) - but the whole thing looked poorly planned out. 

My workout wasn't scheduled until noon, but I felt bad for those who had their first heats at 8am. The disorder continued when we arrived around 10:30 and found out that everything was massively delayed and my workout had been pushed back to 1:20. I would've expected these sorts of details to have been worked out more smoothly considering registration for the qualifier was $100.

Anyways, after baking in the sun for 3 hours, it was time for the two back-to-back Sunday workouts: 

Workout C1
In 6 minutes, work up to a max squat clean to overhead.
* The bar must start on the ground, you must pass through a squat, and then send the bar overhead in any manner you choose.
* You'll be able to designate your opening weight before the workout begins, and the judge will be able to help you load and unload weights. In addition, you'll have plenty of time to warm-up prior to the beginning of your heat.

Weight completed: 235lbs (missed 245lbs twice)
Rank: 61 (out of 174 competitors)

Once again, Crossfit honed in on another weakness of mine: the split jerk. I could get the bar to my shoulders without difficulty - the cleans were no where near my max - but I just could not get more than 235lbs over my head. I missed the jerk on 245lbs twice, both times with horrendous technique. I'll definitely be practicing this lift a lot more in the future.

Workout C2
At the immediate conclusion of Workout C1, perform the following for time:
25 Burpees
100-yard Walking Lunge
Then 5 Rounds of:
- 15 Dumbbell Shoulder-to-Overhead (40lbs)
- 100-yard Dumbbell Farmers Walk (40lbs)
Then 25 Burpees
Row 500m
Run 450 yards

Time: 21:25
Rank: 101 (out of 173 competitors)

A brutal workout - especially on the shoulder/traps from the combo of farmers walk and shoulder press - but overall, a pretty classic Crossfit "chipper."

Final Thoughts

I ended the weekend in 61st place out of 256+ competitors. As a software engineer who spends ~10 hours a day behind a desk, I'm pretty happy with a finish in the top 25%. To qualify for the regionals, I would've needed to finish in the top ~8%, but I had too many holes in my fitness. The good news is that I had one hell of a fun weekend: the athletes put up some amazing performances, the spectators were incredibly supportive, I learned a lot from the experience, and I know what I need to work on for next year.


Pictures and Videos
Day 2 pictures
Day 2 videos

2010 Crossfit Games: Northern California Qualifier, Day 1

Introduction


The Crossfit Games are the olympics of Crossfit. They are held each year in Aromas, California and claim the winner is the "fittest person on earth" (check out more info about the Games). Whether or not you believe this claim (personally, I think the Games simply find the fittest Crossfitter on earth), the competition is definitely an awesome test of fitness and fun to watch. In order to make it to the Games, athletes need to complete a series of sectional qualifiers held all over the world. The top athletes from the sectional qualifiers advance to regional qualifiers, and the top athletes from the regionals move on to the actual Games. 

This year, I decided to participate in the Northern California Sectional Qualifier to see how my fitness compares to that of other Crossfitters. The NorCal Qualifier took place on an olympic track at a high school in San Jose over the weekend of March 27-28. This post will describe my experiences on the first day.


Day 1: Saturday, March 27

One of the unique challenges in the Crossfit Games is that you don't know what the workouts will be until a few days before the actual event. Since the workouts can contain almost anything - long distance running, sprinting, olympic weight lifting, powerlifting, gymnastics, rowing, climbing, kettlebells, jumping, etc - athletes have to train all aspects of their fitness equally. For the NorCal qualifier, each athlete was scheduled for two workouts on Saturday. My first workout was at 1PM: 

Workout A

Against a 6-minute running clock:
* Run 800m
* Max rep overhead squats (115lbs)
Scored by total number of overhead squats.

Reps completed: 44
Rank: 22 (out of 256 competitors)

I'm typically a terrible runner, but today I felt great. I heavily paced myself on the 800m, going at a light jog to make sure I had plenty left for the OH squats, but was surprised to finish the two laps in just 2:55. After that, I snatched the weight up and got squatting. My shoulders are pretty tight, so locking out 115lbs overhead for ~3 minutes was pretty tough. However, with the crowd cheering everyone on, I was able to get 44 reps, a 7 rep PR over my attempt in the gym at the same workout earlier in the week. 


At 5PM, I had my second workout:


Workout B

Max rounds plus reps in 10 minutes of:
* 7 Thrusters (115lbs)
* 12 Kettlebell Swings (53lbs)
* 7 Pull-ups (Chest-to-Bar)

Rounds completed: 4 + 7 thrusters + 9 swings (120 reps total)
Rank: 109 (out of 256 competitors)

Crossfit always finds your weaknesses and one of mine is poor shoulder flexibility/mobility. I had some *15* KB swings not counted because I didn't get the KB vertical enough. I couldn't consciously get my shoulders to go that far back, so the only way I got valid reps was by driving the KB hard enough with my hips that its momentum pulled my arms back enough. This obviously took a ton of effort - as did all the discounted reps - and I fell far short of my 6 round goal. Of course, I have no one to blame but myself: the rules were known beforehand and the judging was completely fair.


Standings at the end of Day 1

I ended the day in 54th place out of 256 competitors. In order to qualify for the regionals, I'd have to be in one of the top 20 spots, so I had a long way to go. On the other hand, 54th place was good enough to avoid elimination, so I knew I'd be back for Sunday.

Pictures and Videos

Day 1 Pictures
Day 1 Videos