eric brochu | haiku factory

Broadcast at the Biltmore, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

It’s been a beautiful fall weekend here in Van, but I’ve mostly been home with an annoying rhinovirus. However, I did get out to see Broadcast at the Biltmore, and being stuck on the sofa in a Neo Citran haze has been a good excuse to spend hours reading TV Tropes (which may be an even more powerful timesuck than Wikipedia). Meanwhile, my parents are at this very moment in the process of purchasing a pretty spiffy retirement home on Vancouver Island, the lovely Janelle comes to visit in just 24 days, my apartment is the cleanest its been in weeks (months?) and I have some time to ramble on the ol’ Haiku Factory.

So, first up, I think I’m going to make this blog a once-a-month kind of deal, probably until I finish my thesis. I’m thinking that on or around the first of each month, I’ll post a longish update like this one. At the same time, I’m going to try to put more Eric (my links, photos, etc.) into the sidebar. Unfortunately, the volatile combination of WordPress plugins and my hosting company seems to be so fragile that at least half of the plugins I’ve tested seem to cause the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error.” So we’ll see how that works out. Hopefully my future posts will have go beyond the self-involved meandering of this one, but give me a break, I’m siffly and whiny today, and my throat hurts.

Ironically, though, the main reason I’m restricting my blogging is my writing. I’m doing a lot of writing these days — not only my thesis and the occasional paper, but I’m also working on a book with my supervisor, and I may soon be working on a special soopersekrit project that I can’t tell you about right now. The thing about all these projects is that they have a finite end in the next several months, so if I have the writing impulse on a Sunday afternoon, or late at night some evening, I feel like I should be working on those. Now that the end of grad school is finally in sight, spending a few hours writing in the middle of the night means my book or my thesis will be finished all that much earlier, right?

The flipside of this is that I’ve been finding myself up at 3AM editing papers and writing code and sleeping ’til noon. It’s not because I’m really pushing myself all that hard, it’s more that I know how lazy, unfocussed and unmotivated I can be, so when I don’t feel that way, I want to take full advantage of my finicky brain. Oh brain, why must we always be at odds?

Well, actually, I’m not sure that’s really a problem. While operating on a noon-to-4AM schedule puts me at odds with normal people, I kind of do like working at night. I’m definitely more creative in later in the day — I think pretty much every good idea I’ve ever had came to me after 8PM. And what’s more, I kind of like that I’m in a position where it’s an option. I’ll admit to a holding a certain nerdily romantic view of being awake in the wee hours, working on a PhD thesis in an empty lab or annotating papers in a 24-hour coffee shop. It’s like I’m some kind of cool Bohemian, or something. Mainstream society be damned, I’m a Creative!

phantasy of phinishng a phd, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

So for those keeping track at home, I took leave of my position at Worio last month to go back to work on my PhD full-time. I’d been either a non-student or part-time for the last two years, which seemed kind of incredible to me. How the hell did a six-month leave turn into two years? I guess by extending it and then getting sponsored to be a research intern, is how, but that answer seems too literal and lacking the existential resonance I was hoping for. So I’ll just say that the PhD is simultaneously the best and worst thing I’ve ever done. I’m glad to be back and gladder that the end is finally in sight.

But for now, I’m fully immersed in the full-time grad student lifestyle again. It all came back easily, as I immediately had to dive into submitting a paper to a fairly high-profile conference. Which means the past month has been the tick-tock of an approaching paper deadline with far more to be done than time to do it. Days with the sickening feeling of knowing you’re procrastinating and feeling powerless to stop it. Other days enjoyably lost in elaborate code, listening to Four Tet and Aphex Twin. The sudden happy click when a once-obscure paper starts to give up its secrets and make sense, or the rush of getting a really clever idea for solving a problem. And then biking home from the lab, exhausted, in the early morning hours, and passing through Kitsilano, which is still and quiet and smells like flowers and marijuana and the ocean.

All that, and I kind of think the paper I submitted was not-so-good. The code stayed buggy, the experiments unconvincing and the writing something less than a model of clarity. Oh, well, the “good” news is, there’s always another conference deadline coming up soon!

Until I’m finally done, and then there isn’t.

Bloody Vivaldi, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Janelle + Eric + photo booth + the random album game = the best new album you’ve never heard.

I haven’t been sleeping very well lately, and I’m not sure why. At first, I thought it might be all the coffee I drink, but I cut my intake down to 1-2 cups a day, and that just made me sleepier and crankier during the day without making me more inclined to sleep during the night. I increased my exercise regimen, but that’s just made me more tired-er without sleeping better — and of course, incredibly buff. I’ve come to suspect it has to do with starting my thesis, an act which has been inflicting all kinds of psychic trauma on me the past couple of weeks.

So as a pre-emptive anti-insanity measure, I decided to take today off, and not think about work. This turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be — the little voice in the back of my head is telling me that I should be editing my draft and running some new experiments. But you know what? Fuck you, voice. You’re not the boss of me. If taking Sundays off is good enough for Yahweh, it’s good enough for me (maybe we could make this a tradition).

And so I spent the day reading David Simon’s Homicide and playing Braid, which I have to say, is one of the most original and satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had in quite a while. I think the whole “are video games art?” argument is kind of, how shall I say? … “retarded”. But, I will say, Braid has made me think about it’s themes and ideas in a way not many games have. And it had some out-and-out fantastic level and puzzle design.

So I’ve officially started writing my PhD thesis. I’ve downloaded the latex template and written an outline and everything.

My typical thesis-writing day goes like this: