I have not written about gratitude for awhile and after chatting with my colleague this weekend i decided to write about the gratitude I have for Persinger. I did my undergraduate degree with him where he was my supervisor for my thesis, where I treated depression in rats. As an undergraduate I was a very poor student, I did not put much effort into my classwork and spent most of my time in the research lab running experiments. He saw something in me and always pushed me and knew how to get under my skin and get my competitive edge going. We had an assignment that was due at Christmas, and I submitted something that was probably not my best effort. During class he went around handing back our papers and gave some feedback to all of the thesis students. When he came to me he tossed the paper at me and told me, “contrary to popular believe, the world does not revolve around you and this paper is complete crap.” He also told me that he knew that I could do better and he expected that I would turn in something better afterwards. I excelled at statistics and would help out a lot of the students in my class. I would either charge money to people at a rate of $100/hr or 100ml of tears. If you were my friend I would help you out for free, but I charged for people that I did not know and did not have time to help, so this helped weed out people. Well it got back to Persinger that those were my payment terms and he laughed at the people that were complaining. Adter graduation I did not know what I wanted to do and I ended up moving to Ottawa and started doing a degree in Comp. Eng at Ottawa and then eventually Carleton. I did not really enjoy it much and was just going through the motions as I did not know what I wanted to do. I knew a lot of things that I was being taught so I was not being challenged. Persinger knew how to challenge me and when he saw me getting bored he would give me more advanced work. I was very arrogant with my professors, but I finished top of the class in my courses so I could get away with it. I ended up moving home for the summer and did not have much intention of continuing my studies and was going to do it remotely. I spent time going back to the lab and visiting and hanging out with friends there. I think that Persinger knew that I was floundering and did not really have much direction. One day while we were sitting in the office he turned me while he was working on his computer and told me to go fill out the paper work to do my Masters with him. Normally he would take students right after undergraduate, as they continue and go right into their M.Sc. doing research. In the past he has not taken on students not from his program, nor did he take on a student that went away for a year and came back. We would have frequent one on one sessions where we did a lot of advanced mathematics and explored a lot of different concepts. The way that we did calculations and our work differred greatly and we never ever had the same answer. He would estimate his math and be more concerned with the concepts and whether they were in the right range while I would be extremely precise. We did a lot of theoretical work on fractals, and automata theories. I wanted to create consciousness or develop an intelligent system using simple automatons to see what could emerge within a system. I appreciated how much he pushed me and made me think differently, and I would make him think by showing him varied perspectives. I learned a lot about interacting with people and how to understand people from him. I am grateful that he took me under his wing and pulled me from not having direction and reigniting my love for research. Once of my strengths was every time I read an article I could see multiple paths forward. This is one of the reasons why I thought that creating a few simple rules could lead to something impressive as we were trying to establish if we could create something that could self evolve using a simple rule set. He always pushed me but he knew how to keep my ego in check and my arrogant believe that I could figure anything out. He had the perfect balance of pushing me forward for growth and keeping me grounded at the same time. I am grateful for all of the lessons that he taught me and the influence he had on Mel and myself. His public persona and his private one was quite different and he was extremely caring and he even attended our wedding to the shock of many.
When I hire people now, I do not care about their previous experience. What I ask questions for is how they think, I look for potential in people and whether I can extract the best from them, do they want to learn and become better. When my team hears me do an interview they always thought that the questions that I asked were difficult. I ask questions that even now would be difficult for an AI because what I guage is your throught patterns and how you break down a problem to solve based on what you have told me. It amuses me now when people use AI to answer something as it is quite evident with the strucutre of the thinking. Knowledge is easy to teach and I am confident that I will be able to teach people. I want to see the inherent potential for growth and gravitate to those people and measure whether their personality will mesh with the culture that I am trying to build. I want a team that thinks different from me and provides a different perspective as opposed to someone who can echo what they think I want.
Today was an interesting day for one of the projects that I am working on. I have young people developing something and according to experts that do some of this commercially it was supposed to take 2 to 4 months to do. We have implemented it in less than 2 days. We had run into some small problems here and there but we had gotten it functional and stable over the weekend. This morning one of the developers made a small mistake. We have two different instances of this, one in production and one in a sandbox for testing. We broke the sandbox and were going to reset it as we found some critical errors and we had to revise a lot for it. In some odd twist he managed to completely delete both instances and all of the work that was done was now erased for good. It was not just his work, but a collaboration of several people. No one got mad and e collectively teased him for breaking one of the team rules. The rules for my team are as follows:
1. Be Awesome
2. Do not suck
3. Championship effort
He did 1 and 3, but slipped up on 2. Our team has a strong culture where we saw this as a learning opportunity on how we prevent our previous mistakes and this one from happening again. The impact on the team could be negative if you have a weak culture, but we teased him that he dropped all the tables and databases because he was jealous of the development of the front end interface design. It was a safe space and he acknowledged his mistake and everyone on the team said it was not a big deal and this is the time to make it. He got it up and running now and this iteration is better than the initial one. I have encouraged them to make mistakes, to fail fast and we can recover as a team. Everyone makes mistakes and there is no shame to it.
I woke up this morning at 1:00am as I had ideas in my head and wanted to get them down. I got up went to the washroom and then had a quick snack and did some work for an hour. Looking at all of my wearable data I slept for 4 hrs last night. I was in bed for 8hrs so my sleep score indicated that it was good, but the quality was bad as I did. I had enough meaningful sleep to function well today. I ate my regular tofu at 7:15 and then after the kids went to school I made shakshuka for Mel and myself. I slightly overdid a couple of the farm fresh eggs and the yolks were not runny. For lunch I had crispy pork belly and had a coffee in the afternoon. I am not sure if I ate enough today or not but food intake has been decent enough. My weight has been stable and fluctuates between 131 and 133 on a regular basis over the course of the week, which would suggest that the ascites is not currently accumulating. I can also taste food which is nice and will continue this for the next couple of days. Tomorrow we planning on having tuna steaks for dinner and if Olivier does not like it then I will let him eat Spam as he has not had that for a while. Tomorrow I need to go in for bloodwork in preparation for Wednesday. It is a fairly early appointment. I would like to have my appointments on Tuesday if I could and may see if I can get them moved. There are times where we will need to travel prior. I am going to believe that this week is going to be awesome and treatment will be easy.
Q