I recently moved into a new building with a washer and dryer in the basement. At midnight, I loaded my clothes into the washer, then returned to my apartment to wait. (Why I am so ridiculous as to start doing my laundry at midnight is outside the scope of this discussion.) I was reading, it was hot and radiators are not adjustable, so I removed my hoodie. My iPhone timer went off, so I picked it up, walked downstairs, moved my clothes to the dryer, walked back upstairs, then realized my keys were in the pocket of the hoodie on the other side of the door.

I am by no means a carefree sort of person. I am constantly worried about something. If there is nothing to worry about I will find something. I almost never lose my keys or wallet because I (usually) check my pockets several times before leaving a place. This is the sort of situation that could easily make a person like me flip out.

But I did not flip out.

I did not flip out because, about four years ago, I took an improv class. If you’ve heard Stephen Colbert’s commencement address to Knox College, you may be expecting me to describe how I used the power of “yes-and” to get back into my apartment. But the specifics of improv didn’t really have anything to do with it.

I didn’t really matter that the class was an improv class. And it also didn’t matter that I had taken that class. What mattered is that I socialized with people in that class, and took the next class, and made friends, and took more classes with friends, and assembled performing groups with friends, and even though I don’t perform as much as I did a year ago, I have a significant number of real friends.

So at the moment I realized I had locked myself out of my apartment, I didn’t panic because I knew I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor or be extorted by a locksmith. I used my phone to tweet my predicament and within minutes two friends had offered me space on their sofas for the night.

If nobody had replied, there were a dozen people I could call (although I’d feel pretty terrible about waking them up). If they didn’t pick up, I still could have walked to the theatre or designated watering hole (uncomfortably in my socks, but do-able) and probably found somebody to help me out.

Websites like Twitter and Facebook are called “social networks” but that’s not what they are. They are models of social networks or tools to communicate within social networks, but without an underlying social network they are frivolous.

Here’s what worked for me: I was born in 1980 to parents who were successful enough to afford a home computer and also easygoing enough to let their children play with it. The timing was fortuitous because it meant I had plenty of time to learn and — I think this is key — computers of the late 80s/early 90s were easier to learn about. Since then all I’ve had to do is keep up.

In other words, what worked for me definitely won’t work for you.

First of all, you should know that programming is not the same as computer science. It’s like the difference between doing math and being a mathematician. Or between gardening and being a plant biologist. I already knew how to program long before I got to college. Most students who enter C.S. programs do, in fact, which is why college programming classes are usually terrible. Don’t bother taking a class, unless you know someone who can vouch for it.

Second, you should distinguish programming (the skill) from learning a specific programming language, like Java or C++ or MATLAB. Different languages are suited for different tasks, but regardless of your ultimate goal, your first task is to learn programming. For example, if you want to write an iPhone app, you must learn Objective-C, but if you know nothing about programming, it’s a terrible place to start.

The first computers I ever used had a built-in BASIC interpreter, and if you were a geek (which you were, because you had a computer in your home in 1989) you would buy magazines with program listings in the back and type them in. Even if you didn’t want to learn how to write programs, you could not help but be exposed to the process.

Since then, computers have become consumer products that do all sorts of useful things out of the box, no programming required. Also, graphical interfaces have completely replaced text-based command lines. That’s great news, unless you’re learning to program, because programming for a graphical user interface is hard.

When you write for a text-based system, your program starts executing at the top, and continues line by line, until it gets to the end. This is relatively easy for a beginner to understand. When you write for a graphical system (desktop or web), your program is responding to events, and different functions are called in response to user actions. Writing programs for an event-based environment is a lot more complicated.

Why am I telling you this? Well, a lot of tutorials ignore or try to gloss over this difference. They believe you will be more excited to draw circles on the screen than to print text in a terminal, so they drop you in the event-based world without a good explanation of what is going on, telling you stick your code here and not worry about the rest of it. But the minute you start experimenting your program locks up and you don’t know why. A good tutorial will teach you programming skills in a text-based environment.

OK, so those are some of my opinions on learning to program, from the perspective of someone who likes to write programs. But you aren’t specifically interested in becoming a programmer, you just want to learn enough to mine data from websites. So, if I haven’t scared you off, let’s talk about your specific case:

The good news is that you won’t need to learn any of that event-based graphical user interface stuff. And not in you-can-cut-corners way, but in a that-won’t-be-useful-for-the-task way.

Second, you will want a language that can deal with text easily, since you will eventually be downloading web pages and then parsing out the bits you are interested in.

Anything in the category of “scripting language” would fit the bill, and those are a good choice for learning general programming concepts, too. The big ones in that category are Python, Perl, and Ruby.

My advice: find a book that teaches programming using one of those languages. Preferably, a “Learn How to Program” book that happens to use one of them, as opposed to a “Learn Python/Perl/Ruby” book that claims to assume no prior knowledge is necessary.

I can’t recommend a specific book. Search Amazon and read the reviews or go to a bookstore and browse through the books. Even better: go to a bookstore and look up the Amazon reviews on your smartphone as you browse.

Once you pick a book, treat it like a college textbook and work through it. Do all the exercises. (Oh yeah, pick a book with exercises.) Wander off course and experiment on your own if you’re feeling bold, but if you get lost or stuck, go back to the book.

Oh, and sign up for an account at Stack Overflow. It’s a Q&A site for programmers. If you have a question, you can search there to see if it’s been answered, and if it hasn’t, you can ask it. (I’m happy to help, too, but I guarantee Stack Overflow will get you answers faster.)

Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

It’s frustrating. To be productive, I really need a large block of uninterrupted time. This is not a novel idea. I’m not a morning person, which means I get the most done if I can work uninterrupted from the afternoon into the late evening. Unfortunately, somebody usually wants me to meet them somewhere around 6 or 7 p.m., which means that just as I get some momentum going, I have to stop and sit on a train for twenty minutes, irritated.

Simply knowing that I have to quit around 6 p.m. can discourage me from taking on anything big or complicated. And knowing I have to leave to get somewhere induces a low grade background anxiety. I’d like to lose myself in my work, but I’ve got to watch the clock instead.

The worst part of it is the feeling that my time does not belong to me. When I have to break away from my work to meet somebody, it makes me resent that person a little bit. It’s entirely unjustified, and by the end of the train ride it has usually dissipated, but it’s ugly and it’s real.

I am not a helpless victim. My situation is by no means unique and there are ways I can improve it. Waking up and getting started earlier would help. I’ve decided to quit personal training; I have a variety of reasons but the regular mid-day interruption is a major reason to quit.

Before this impromptu therapy session goes any further, let me get to my point: I need to write more about my work, especially about FatWatch and other projects. The trouble is that, when I have precious time, I feel like I should be spending it on code rather than English prose. I’ll have to figure out how to divide my time, but a good first step will be in deciding what goes where.

When I first released FatWatch nearly two years ago, I was still posting to LiveJournal, and had just started posting to Tumblr. I also set up a tumblelog just for FatWatch. Then in November I decided I was managing too many blogs, and the right thing to do was consolidate everything with a blog at benzado.com, the one you are reading right now.

That was a bad idea.

One-blog-for-everything, with categories and tags to divide up the content, sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t really work in practice. People are going to look at a few posts on the main page and decide whether they want to subscribe, and if I’m trying to reach several distinct audiences through one publication, I’m just making a confusing mess.

Here’s the new plan. This blog will be for longer posts about technical topics and general announcements about my work; my personal tumblelog will be for all those “hey look at this neat thing” posts that I assume only my friends are interested in; and, I am rebooting The FatWatch Weight Log with a mildly clever title and a focus on FatWatch specifically and weight management in general.

By sharing my plans with you, I have doomed myself to failure.

It was covered in stickers. There were stickers on each side of the display, pointing out things that would presumably be on the screen when I turned it on. The trackpad had a sticker over it explaining the pinch-to-zoom gesture that everybody knows from the iPhone, yet iPhone users were never “helped” with a sticker on the screen.

When I powered it on for the first time ever, I was presented with the “Windows did not shut down properly, do you want to start in Safe Mode?” screen.

During Windows set up, it:

1. Tried to connect to the Internet automatically.
2. Told me it could not connect to the Internet and I’d have to configure it myself later.
3. Immediately asked if I wanted to connect to the Internet to send my registration information to Microsoft.

When I launched Outlook Express, a wizard walked me through the process of connecting to the Internet (even though I was already online), asking if I already had a dial-up account or wanted to sign up for one.

Fortunately, the PC wasn’t pre-loaded with too much crapware, which is a good thing. I’m finding it hard to read the thinly rendered text used in most of the system; fortunately Safari for Windows does it’s own text rendering. Like my MacBook, it supports two finger scrolling, but the cursor turns into a tiny scrollbar graphic (in case I don’t know what’s going on?) and the page jerks around instead of moving smoothly.

My dad bought a MacBook Air for my mom, and I spent a long time setting it up. On the whole, it was much more pleasant experience, though in the interest of fairness I’ll say that using Migration Assistant over a network connection is annoyingly unreliable.

Anyway, I’ve watched four seasons in thirty days and I kind of want to talk about it. So here we go. I know the show is five years old and probably everything here has been written by someone else, but this is my blog.

A lot of the drama comes from characters refusing to, or doing a poor job of, answering questions. There’s no reason Juliet couldn’t have diffused a lot of tension by saying, “I was tricked into living on the Island because I thought I was taking a job with a pharmaceutical company and I want to go home, too.” Also, I don’t understand why Daniel Faraday believed that it was better to cryptically insist that the camp wasn’t gone rather than just say, “We’ve gone back in time.” He could have spared himself from fifteen minutes of arguing and a slap in the face from Sawyer.

I’m no student of literature, but I suppose LOST is not unique, and that’s where a lot of drama comes from. But LOST clearly depends on it, at first keeping the characters in the dark and then, in season four, the viewer also.

In the first three seasons, the format of the show was very clear: a story on the Island interleaved with flashbacks to a story before the crash. To be honest, any spoilers that I had come across never bothered me, because the show is really engaging. The two stories always tied together in a very clever way, such as Kate trying to save Jack despite his instruction not to versus Kate killing her abusive stepfather against her mother’s wishes. Both stories are about acting selfishly under cover of helping someone you love.

Although there was plenty of mystery in the first three seasons, you always knew at least as much as the main characters did. The writers withheld information from you so that you could identify with the characters.

In season four, with the inclusion of flashforwards, that changes. Once off the island, the characters clearly know what happened to them, but the scenes are carefully crafted to keep you guessing. This is most clear in the episode where Sun gives birth and Jin races to the hospital with a toy panda. Only at the very end do you learn that Jin was presenting a gift to a Chinese executive on behalf of Paik Automotive, before the plane crash; then you see Sun visit Jin’s grave and explain that she was calling for her husband during the birth because she was delirious. Ha ha, fooled you!

This is mildly irritating, because the mysteries in season four are no longer part of the story, they are part of the show. They are not shared with any of the characters; they exist only as an artifact of the video editing process. Season five seems to be rectifying this, but I’m only a few episodes in.

Other thoughts:

• I was really intrigued by Shannon, and how she managed to seem like a stuck up bitch every situation, even when she wasn’t. Then I noticed that a mini-theme of female characters with really strange facial expressions: both Juliet and Charlotte look kind of smug, all of the time. Maybe I am horribly sexist?
• The writers go out of the way to make the red shirt characters act like condescending assholes. If a survivor you’ve never seen before starts complaining about everything, insulting everybody, and not contributing anything, he is going to die. It’s interesting that they work so hard to make you dislike these people, presumably so you won’t mind too much when they are killed. It’s not like the show has avoided killing more endearing characters.
• I really enjoy seeing The Numbers show up everywhere, but apparently I am soon to learn that they are factors in some equation, which I’m sure will make no mathematical sense and thereby ruin it for me.

It wasn’t obvious what was causing the crashes, but I found out I could use a Microsoft Debugging utility to read the memory dump files that Windows creates on each crash. I offered to take the computer home with me, so I could plug it into a network and install the utility and finish the job.

Booting into “Safe Mode with Networking” worked, so I was able to download the utility, but I was not able to install it. I was told, “The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation.” That was confusing, because I logged in using the fucking system administrator account. Now I am pretty sure that the error message is inaccurate, because some lazy asshole at Microsoft decided to use that very specific text as a generic “operation failed” message.

It turns out that the installer program requires the Installer Service to be running, but the Service cannot be started in Safe Mode. So, if I want to use the debugging tools, I am caught in a catch-22: the computer will crash if I don’t use Safe Mode, but I can’t diagnose the crashes if I do use Safe Mode.

After chasing my own tail for longer than I’d like to admit, I realized I could try finding some other tool to extract the utility from the installer package. I found such a tool, and in the process I learned that MSI archives are apparently unable to store file extensions, so when you unpack them, you have to manually insert the dot in hundreds of file names. I do this for a subset of the files that seem necessary to run the diagnostic program, and finally, I get it to run.

At least, I think I do. It outputs a lot of error messages, but the instructions I am following from some sketchy website say it is normal to see a lot of messages, so I have no clue if it’s working or if I need to add more dots to more filenames. I blindly forge ahead, and finally get it to generate a report from one of the memory dump files.

The goal, in case you’ve forgotten, is to find out what is responsible for crashing the kernel. The report indicates the memory location where the crash occurs: Good. It also contains a list of loaded drivers and what memory locations they occupy: Good. So I scan the list to find the culprit. While every other line has a driver name, this one has the name “00001b6f” or something like that. No name, just a hexadecimal number without context. WTF?

So, I give up.

To be clear, I’m not just giving up on this job, but I’m giving up on ever attempting to “fix” a computer running Microsoft Windows ever again. It’s been so long since I used one regularly that I’m no longer familiar with all the voodoo incantations required to make them work. The only thing my technical knowledge buys me is a misleading sense of being “one step closer” when in fact I am running in circles. It is painful and frustrating and humiliating. I honestly feel like I’m the butt of a joke right now. Like I’ve spent four hours trying to catch a pig on a dare.

By taking this computer home, I thought I was doing a favor for a friend, but now I realize that she has done a favor for me. I’ve learned a lesson. I’m sorry, I can’t fix your computer, I don’t know how.

Ten years ago, in the spring of 1999, I enrolled in CS 212. At the time, Cornell computer science students could choose between CS 211 (“two-eleven”), which was taught using Java, a practical programming language used in the real world, or CS 212 (“two-twelve”), which was more nerdy and mathematical and required learning Scheme, a language nobody had ever heard of, because nobody uses it outside of courses like this.

Due to a mixture of ego and peer pressure (the same mixture that later pushed me into advanced physics classes I shouldn’t have taken), I elected to take 212. For somebody who had already learned a good bit of programming by fooling around with computers throughout middle and high school, it was an eye opening experience. Scheme was my introduction to “functional” programming, and it was both weird and beautiful. The professor and course staff talked about code being “elegant” in a way that I had never heard before but immediately understood. I got this class and I loved this class.

Thus, it was heartbreaking when the first problem set was graded and I received a less than perfect score. As I already said, I was not accustomed to a perfect record, nor did I feel it was my due. But I remember reviewing the problems and realizing that I hadn’t lost any points because I didn’t understand the material or couldn’t figure out how to solve the problems. I lost points because I was careless. I put off the assignment until the night before and rushed through it. I realized that if I had spent any time checking my work I would have caught all my mistakes. I had no excuse for a less than perfect score.

Considering how much I loved the class, it was embarrassing. So I swore that, for the remaining assignments, I was not going to make any mistakes. I said it out loud, walking down Libe Slope on the way home from my 212 section. (It didn’t hurt when I needed to find a partner for future assignments.)

I kept my word and aced the remaining problem sets. I did well on the tests, earned an A+ in the course, and was later asked to be on the course staff. CS 212 will always be a fond memory and point of pride of my time at Cornell.

My recent audition for a Harold team has reminded me of that moment; the parallels are uncanny for two such apparently unrelated things. While I joined everybody in wondering aloud why they didn’t get picked, I knew that if I was placed on a team it would have been in spite of my audition, not because of it.

I know that, at the end of the day, there are a million factors out of my control that would affect whether or not I would be picked out of hundreds of other qualified people, and I accept that. But that does not excuse me from taking responsibility for all of the factors that are completely under my control.

Today, that is what I will set out to do.

Countless people will tell you that studies show eating breakfast will help you lose weight. (Almost no people can tell you exactly which studies show that.) The general idea is that if you eat breakfast you’ll be less hungry at lunch time. Perhaps I was overweight simply because of my breakfastless upbringing?

I bought a box of raisin bran and a quart of milk. I ate a bowl every morning for a few days. It was a disaster.

First of all, I hadn’t been a regular milk-drinker since high school, so my lactose tolerance wasn’t what it used to be. But, more importantly, I didn’t feel any better and wasn’t inclined to eat any less at lunch.

I was always suspicious of the argument for breakfast. I realize now that the “hunger” angle, though it might be useful for some people, made no difference to me. I don’t eat because I am hungry; I eat because food is there. Even if I don’t need it. Even if I know I will feel awful. So what’s the use in reducing my hunger, when hunger is rarely the reason I eat?

Before I could become completely discouraged, I discovered The Hacker’s Diet, which imparted to me these ideas:

• Your body is governed by the same laws of physics as everything else. Mass and energy are conserved. If you consume more than you burn you will gain weight. If you burn more than you consume you will lose weight.
• Food, exercise, and your weight can all be measured in calories. A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories of energy.
• If you track your weight using some basic statistics, you can see progress (or regress) long before any other indicator.
• Your body is a sophisticated system, and as long as you aren’t stupid (don’t starve yourself or contract scurvy) you will be fine.

I bought a scale and a Palm Zire (to run Eat Watch), and began to track my weight. On February 21, 2006, I weigh 211.5 lbs. Because eating lunch with my co-workers is an important social activity, I decide not to change that. I avoid keeping much food in my apartment. On March 5, 2006, I weigh 206.5 lbs. For the first time in my life I feel like I have control over this. I ignore the “helpful” people who preach that I shouldn’t eat the pizza at engineering meetings and should bring steamed broccoli from home instead. On April 1, 2006, I weigh 198.0 lbs. I sleep in a T-shirt and shorts so that I can roll out of bed and walk directly to the room with the elliptical machine in my apartment complex. It had a 25-minute program called “fat burner”, so that’s what I use. On May 2, 2006, I weigh 191.0 lbs. My persistent cough is gone. I ignore the meatheads who insist complementing cardio with resistance training is essential. On July 4, 2006, I weigh 182.0 lbs. I change jobs and leave Pittsburgh for New York City. On September 4, 2006, I weigh 177.5 lbs.

In New York I no longer have easy access to an elliptical machine. I have access to 24-hour public transportation and people to drink beer with. On November 3, 2006, I weigh 183.5 lbs. I join the New York Sports Club and go fairly regularly after work. On May 18, 2007, I weigh 171.0 lbs.

It’s hard to keep up the habit. On January 5, 2008 I weigh 191.5 lbs. I quit my job and begin to freelance. There’s no excuse to miss the gym now. On June 28, 2008, I weigh 183.0 lbs. It’s hard to keep up the habit. I’m looking to save money. I cancel my membership. I live near the park now, I can run there for free. It’s hard to make that a habit. On October 27, 2008, I weigh 190.0 lbs. Barack Obama is elected President. On January 20, 2009, I weigh 195.5 lbs.

On March 5, 2009, it is my birthday. I am 29 years old. I weigh 200 lbs. Again. On the phone with my parents, I can’t decide if I should join a gym, when my business isn’t profitable, when I live nearby a park. My parents remind me that I am dumb, but they will give me some money for a membership, as a birthday gift, if that will get me to sign up.

On March 5, 2009, I joined a gym.

I was having a conversation with somebody I met last night and we were running through all the standard biographical interview questions: What do you do for work? Where are you from? How long have you lived in New York?

I tried to think of somewhere more interesting to take the conversation, so I asked her, What’s the last book you borrowed from a library?

After some thought, she answered Fahrenheit 451, which is actually kind of an interesting answer to a question about books, and the library was in Los Angeles, so we talked about New York versus L.A. for a while. A few moments later she excused herself to go to the bathroom, which I assume she did. Later I saw her sitting at another table.

An optimistic, healthy person would probably take the events at face value. Our conversation didn’t end on a cliff hanger; drifting from conversation to conversation is what people do in a bar.

However, my ability to over-narrate any situation is making me wonder: did my question, which honestly popped into my head from out of nowhere, make it seem like I was trying some kind of pickup artistry? Did she assume it came from a set of index cards that I was carrying in my pocket? Did she actually have to use the bathroom, or was it a polite excuse to end the conversation?

Last night I wasn’t thinking of any of this in terms of “meeting people” and relationships. It’s only in the morning after that my mind creates a pessimistic narrative around the facts. I feel like I’ve been falsely accused in a secret court which presumes my guilt and forbids me to testify at the proceedings. It is impossible to know if the court is real or exists only in my mind.

First, buy a reusable cloth shopping bag from your grocery store. They usually cost 99 cents. If you remember to take it when you go grocery shopping, you will cut down on your bag accumulation.

Bonus:

• Some stores, like Whole Foods, will give you a discount if you bring your own bag.
• At home, store your shopping list (and a pen) in or near the bag, and you won’t forget to take it with you when you go to the store.
• Do the same with coupons.

Now, what to do about the millions of plastic bags that you already have? Find somewhere on the way to your grocery store that you can drop off plastic bags for recycling. If you’re lucky, that place will be at the grocery store itself, near the entrance.

When you’re at home, grab a bunch of the plastic bags and put them inside your cloth shopping bag. Each time you go shopping, you can drop off a bunch of bags to be recycled. Over time, you will slowly dig a tunnel to plastic bag freedom much like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption.