Sense of Place

After moving to different places, what keep us human is a sense of belonging. A feeling of being part of something. This call becomes more urgent during the pandemic period where your movement becomes limited due to border restrictions. Sometimes you start questioning what you want in life. I think that's one of the reasons that despite everything is bright and shine now, I am still not sure about my future with him. Another long distance after a week meet up? What's the point of having that kind of relationship? On the other hand, I also haven't figured out where I want to be. What I know for sure is I want to be part of something.

These couple of weeks, I have been participating with new communities, one is Code in Place where I shared my journey with four other people and the other is a writer's community where people who want to write share their struggles and write together. I like my Code in Place peers. After the official class end, we met for a casual talk and shared our expectations. But being to many places, I became too familiar to a goodbye setting where the feeling was strong, we had a great time but now our paths won't no longer intersect with one another. That's what moving places has thought me, to be good with detachments. 

Probably, in the back of my mind, I still want to have a longer relationship, a sense of place that can give me stability. The power to paint my own room since I know the house belongs to me. Buying stuffs I want because I don't need to think about moving out. Something to call, mine. 

Routine

Entering the second period of circuit breaker. In a way, I am more use to it than earlier and it's also better since I have a better accommodation. On the other hand, how my research has shifted from field work to desk study also affected my productivity. Apparently, being on desk for too long is not really my cup of tea. While I kind of made up my data gathering by shifting offline interviews to online, I started to get fed up with online interactions. Can we just have a cup of tea and sit in silence than talking all the time? 

The bright side is I involve in a new activity: Code in Place. It's nice to distract my head with something else. I have been spending most of spare time to study a new thing and it felt nice. The best approach for me is to have simple projects, which should be solvable and challenging at the same time. I have been joining extra class as well. It's interesting to see different logics in solving a problem and how efficiency may not be the goal for the early stage.

So here is an example of what I did for last week assignment, creating a reflection. I add a twist in the assignment by creating additional filter in the reflection. And another one: the Warhol project. 

Die Hard

My mom told me that when I was a toddler, I started to walk at the age of 9 month. However, once I fell, I stopped walking until I was 11/12 month old. I have the tendency to stop doing something after a failure, either its a personal relationship or work related subject. Each time I face a conflict, I prefer to avoid it instead of solving it. As people say, old habits die hard. Probably, because I am not bad in studying, I could get away with avoiding the subject that I don't like. But it also made it hard to excel in something. I have been jumping discipline quite a lot, math, development studies, innovation science, urban studies and now, ecology. My methods also range from differential analysis, ethnography, case study, statistics, system dynamics and currently I am into big data through social network analysis and text analysis.

I like to study, but every time I face a hurdle, my natural logic sends a break function into my brain. The only thing that usually keep me going is either group pressure (i.e. in class setting, or obligation). But still, if I cannot solve a problem, I have the tendency to create a never ending loop, which lead to a broken program by forcing it stop (I give up) or dragging someone to solve it so I can make sense of it and keep on going. Learning for me is like a rubber band, if you pull it too hard, it will break, but if there is no challenge, it won't be moving. Finding the right balance between challenge and the limit break is the challenge. 

So there I am, in the Code in Place journey. I have no problem following the materials in the Ed environment provided by the course. But when I started working in Visual Studio Code, problems start to emerge. I think that's what code in the wild means, there are many unexpected variables that influence the program. And sometimes being stuck in the details of the wild can be discouraging. 

Game of Nimm

Coding is so fun!!! Where was I ages ago when I learned coding in my undergrad degree? Probably, people can change, you may be disinterested with something in a moment in your life, but you can get hook by it at another moment in your life. So yeah, this my code for a game of Nimm, where the rules are: each player can only pick one or two stones and the player who picks the last stone loose. In the code below, I play with the computer that operates on random function.

I don't know how to insert a code without making it messy, so I put the code in the form of picture. If you are interested, you can find the code in my github account here: https://github.com/Yuti-AI/Games/commit/bafda1edf14c5bea10d41c53ae7992573bf30376

After trying different environments: PyCharm, Anaconda, Spyder and Visual Studio Code, I like VSC the best. So will stay with that one until I find a better one.