Random Blog July 2

Greetings,

Enough has happened since my last blog that I decided to write a new one even though the only real thing I can say is that I have officially released my first product, Small Wide World. But I decided before I wrote this blog that I was only going to advertise it once or twice. This blog is about stuff that I think is cool. And there are a lot more cool things than my small project that does a few cool things and draws a few pretty graphs.

Entrepreneurship besides the whole hacking part is about selling stuff. It is a strange and interesting process that has a lot of issues. Issues like Paypal's IPN being non-trivial to secure. Issues like advertising taking way too much time and effort, but really being the only way to sell a product. Issues like hiring people being a massive money sink and being the way to earn large amounts of money. These issues I plan to figure out in the next year. And you're likely to hear about them in spades if you check back in a month or two.

What about things that are not related to my making money. Okay, lemme see.. Hanging out with friends has become a more important part of my life more recently. I would like to think that Dodgeball has helped with this, but a lot of factors have changed my normally non-social hours to social hours. I think that one thing that has caused it is my recent experiment with serotonin. (No, I haven't been injecting it.) I have been testing what things change my moods and hypothesizing that each time I have a mood swing, it's being caused by serotonin levels changing rapidly. What causes serotonin levels to change rapidly? If my experiment was done today and I had to turn in my results, I would say with a lot of qualifiers and maybes that the three things that increase serotonin levels are: caffeine, music, and exposure to friends. I haven't really found things that reduce serotonin levels specifically and reliably. But if you're me, you don't really want to decrease serotonin levels. Adjacent and related but not equal to moods are productivity, interest, and respect for life. While these things are obviously helped by better moods, there's certain factors that can change each of these. Stabilizing my mood is important to me, but often I want to play on the side of too good of a mood. How does one test whether they are in too good a mood? I went to the Infected Mushroom show (I didn't go in because I'm too poor) on Friday and took some interesting pills that made me really happy and I was really productive at Last Supper Club and for 6 hours when I got home.

ginseng yerba mate drugs

The problem was when I went to sleep at around 8 am, I slept for 4 hours and I had a hangover when I woke up. I drank coke at Last Supper Club (why is coke $1, but water is $3?) and took the pills. I didn't drink alcohol or anything. I drank plenty of water while working at home. What caused the hangover? The pills I took use yerba mate as the active ingredient. Yerba mate is great, but it's a super (though mellow) stimulant. It kept me up and working for 9 hours after I had been up for 11 hours. My guess is that it used up so much energy stored in various forms that it harmed my body. You can also take note that the Infected Mushroom concert involved eating a good dinner with friends, so that increased my mood making me able to work all night.

I have a list of items I am wanting to buy in the next month, but I think that I can only buy two or three. Defcon plane tix were $230 at Alaska. Defcon will be mildly expensive, but I hope to pay for part of the trip by selling 10 copies of SWW. What would I buy if I had $1000 to burn?

  • $100 Donation to Titan Robotics
  • $100 Pololu Robot chassis, motors, controllers, arduino bot
  • $120 Sumovore
  • $150 FPGA dev board
  • $50 dd-wrt router
  • $200 junior programmer
  • $100 bookshelf
  • $180 fake blackhat badge*

* I'm going to try to get one for free since I don't have $1000 to burn.
So, what plans do I have for the above stuff? Well, there are too many projects to list, but you can probably tell that I want to hack more hours than they day has. That's good because there were a few years where I didn't want to hack any more than 2 hours per day.

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