Will Daly’s Blog

Life has been especially good recently.

Meals have gotten longer and longer as everyone tries to avoid going back to their rooms to study. I’ve really been enjoying the time I have to spend with the friends I’ve made this year, at meals, watching football or The Apprentice, at jazz rehearsals. I never forget that I’m leaving. But that’s good, because then I remember to really appreciate these people, this place, this part of my life.

On Monday, the jazz band is playing a show in the International Hall bar. Near the end, James, Oren, and I are going to play ‘Take Five’ and ‘Spain’, both of which I’ve wanted to play for years. The theme of the show is, ‘It’s Jazz Time’. It’s going to be laid-back and fun, so if you have some free time on Monday night…

In preparation for the show, I’ve spent a lot of time practicing this week. Until about a week ago, I was planning to sell my bass before returning home. But then, as always, I started to remember all the good times we’d had. All the hours of practicing, the awkward high school performances, UC Jazz, practicing during every spare moment at CTY, the IH Jazz Band.

Fender J-Bass, midnight wine edition, I will never sell you.

These are Erin’s pictures. But I’m pretty sure she took only one of them.

Erin’s the first and only person to photograph my room.

This is the insanity of scheduling classes at Berkeley.

I knew that I wanted to minor in CS, but I also knew that I’m supposed to take CS61A, followed by 61B, followed by 61C, followed by the upper division requirements. Since I have only the summer, fall, and spring semesters left to study, I wouldn’t get to the upper division requirements before graduation.

But then, after weeks of poking around the CS website, I downloaded the lecture notes for CS61C from this semester (Spring 2008). And on one slide of the lecture notes, in tiny red writing, it says: ‘CS61B is no longer a prerequisite for CS61C’. One slide in the lecture notes. So I emailed the professor and asked if that was true, and it turns out it is; the course catalog is wrong.

So I can maybe minor in CS after all. The only difficulty is that in my last semester, I’ll have to take three upper division CS classes all together. But I figure that even if I take only two and don’t quite get the minor, at least I’ll get a much better education in CS. Some of the upper division classes look absolutely amazing, especially the project-oriented ones. If I took those, I feel I would be much better prepared for whatever I end up doing, either tech writing or development.

Moral of the story: scheduling classes at Berkeley is a nightmare. But when it works out, life is great.

I’ve started yet another weblog: Thelonious Software Development Blog. I’m using it to post news about Accompanist, info on Mac development, and thoughts about learning and practising jazz. Feel free to check it out!

Yesterday, I had my last tutorial. The other student in the tutorial didn’t show up, so it was just me and the tutor. We talked about Hume and reason for a while, and then my tutor taught me the most valuable thing I’ve learned all year.

I’m not sure if I can explain it was well as he did, but I’ll try. He told me that when studying Hume, it’s really easy to get into the philosopher’s game of rejecting premises, providing counterexamples, weighing the plausibility of competing theses, and so on. But, really, that game can get you only so far. At the end of the day, Hume gave us a new way of looking at morality, a way that avoids scepticism while remaining naturalistic. And even if we can refute his theory, he’s still done something valuable.

And then my tutor said, the real value of studying Philosophy isn’t that you prove someone right or wrong, or that you complete some academic exercise on an exam. The real value is that now you have the tools to understand these ideas, to read a philosopher and come to view the world in a new way.

That was something I really, really needed to hear. I get so caught up sometimes in this stupid, analytic bullshit, clear writing and argumentation and critical analysis, marketable skills. And the more I get caught up in that, the more Philosophy is just something I have to do rather than something of value.

I think that’s why of all the philosophers I’ve read this year, I’ve gotten the most from Plato and Aristotle. More than anyone else, I think, the Greeks recognised the beauty and importance of Philosophy—not as something done for the sake of something else, but as something done for its own sake.

I don’t have that much time left in university. If everything goes according to plan, I’m going to graduate a semester early, in January of next year. I feel that by then I’ll have learned most of what I can learn from school, and I’ll need to enter the working world to learn more.

I know I’m going to miss it, though.

Yesterday, I was a hair model for the Toni & Guy Academy. I walked in to this very well-lit, white-and-black room with lots of mirrors and well-dressed, well-groomed employees. The other models were a very mixed group: variety of ages, ethnicities, and interest in personal appearance. Most of us were clearly there for a cheap haircut.

I listened to other people in line describing the intricate things they wanted done with their hair. When my turn came, I said, ‘I just want a trim’ and the guy said, ‘… all right’ with a sort of laugh.

The student cutting my hair was a young Italian guy who assured me he was good but seemed kind of nervous the entire time. He asked me all kinds of questions about how I wanted my hair cut, so after a while I said, ‘Whatever you think would be best, just go for it’. He spent two hours meticulously trimming my hair with scissors. Then two of his instructors came over to assess him: ‘Are you done? … are you sure you’re done? … really?’ The two of them spent maybe five minutes examining every square inch of my scalp. Then they nodded to each other, said ‘Good’, and walked away.

As far as I can tell, it came out all right.

Yesterday, I had a jam session with my friend James, who’s a very talented drummer. I’ve noticed that in jam sessions, some of the best moments come when I stop thinking about the music and start thinking in images. For a while, there were black spiders crawling on spongy grey wood, then a quiet rain-forest drizzle, then horses riding through the desert before a sunset. There were some hairy, benevolent, non-verbal beasts howling to each other for a bit—I think they may have been from a Murakami novel.

My ‘Waking Up At 5:30′ experiment has become my ‘Waking Up At 6:00′ experiment. I think I’m biologically wired to wake up at 6:00. No matter how early I go to sleep, I don’t wake up until six.

I’ve been taking naps in the middle of the day as well. I think when I nap my brain processes everything I’ve been reading, because when I wake up it all seems very clear. And in my dreams I find myself arguing about Philosophy. Then I wake up and read some more.

Lectures end this Wednesday, and then we have five weeks before the exam period starts. I’m trying to figure out how to structure my life for that time. Sometimes I picture myself locked in my room, frantically writing essay plans, devouring books, marking dates off a calendar. But this seems absolutely ridiculous: that’s not how I roll. And then I smile and read the words I’ve written on the wall behind my laptop:

Get a 3.5
Stay laid-back.
LAID-
BACK

Good day at work today. There’s this bicycle with a seat on the front of it, and we managed to get one of the kids I’ve been working with to try it. At first, he was really scared, but after about 20 minutes he got used to it and started to really enjoy himself. In the afternoon, another kid I was working with started to throw a tantrum because I got tired of pushing him in a wheelbarrow, so I took this huge, half-deflated ball that was lying around and sort of half-sang, ‘Oh no, I’m torturing you by not pushing you around! Just torturing you!’ and sort of playfully put the ball against him and moved it so it wobbled, and he kept saying, ‘No! No! Again!’ but then suddenly he wasn’t angry anymore, and he was laughing, ‘No! No! No!’, totally forgot about the wheelbarrow, and we played with that ball for maybe half an hour.

Last night, I listened to a really interesting interview with developmental biologist John Medina. He talks about how we should radically restructure our approach to work and education based on information from biological studies. At one point, he mentions that early-risers generally prefer to go to sleep at 9:00 pm and wake up at 6:00. Thinking about this, I realised that I get most of my work done between 8:00 and 9:30 in the morning, before I have to go to lecture. Usually I have to force myself to stop working so I can shower and get to class on time. So this morning I tried waking up at 5:30 and working until 9:30. Turns out I can finish about a day’s worth of studying in those few hours.

I decided to give myself the rest of the day off after my tutorial. The sun was out, so I decided to wander down to the Thames and walk around for a bit. Something changed for me this last week—it’s like the last six months have been a dream, and I’ve just woken up and realised I’m in London.

This morning, I came to the conclusion that this summer is going to be one of the best I’ve ever had. I’m going to go to Hawaii, kick back in Berkeley, learn about computer science, hang out in the sun, get a job, maybe take a trip to So-Cal. It’s going to be amazing.