I went through an ordeal last night.

I was at Eudemonia for BATLL IX (Starcraft tourney!!) all day, and caught the last BART home. I got off at Daly City and walked towards the cab line. I was fourth in the group of passengers. The first two passengers got in to taxis without incident. The third passenger waved me ahead of him, so I was up, but there were two taxis at the “front” of the line — it seemed that one of the taxis was trying to cut (or maybe he was just trying to save space since there was a big influx of passengers coming out of the last BART) so the driver of the taxi closer to the curb was really pissed. He yelled at the passenger in front of me (who was waving me forward) to get in the car, saw that he was waving me forward, then yelled at me, “where are you going? Which of you is going farther?”

This made me not want to get into his car. I mean, I understand that in order to survive in a capitalist society, you have to take the fare that’ll get you more money instead of wasting your time with one that doesn’t go very far. It was just really abrasive.

I told him where I was going. He yelled at me to get in again and repeatedly. I got in. Instead of taking off, he cussed out the driver immediately to his right (the one that looked like he was “cutting”) and ended with “get the fuck out nigga”. This incensed the other driver such that he pulled ahead suddenly to block my taxi from leaving, effectively pinning us to the curb. So my driver got out of the car to cuss him out some more. I considered getting out of the car, but was paralyzed. Driver got back in the car. Other driver didn’t budge (so we couldn’t move anyway). My driver got out of the car to yell some more obscenities at the other guy.

At that point I finally got out. I walked away quickly and turned my back on the driver who was yelling at me to get back into the car. At this point, passenger #3 (the one who’d waved me forward) was still just waiting passively, and there was a fifth passenger who saw an opportunity to play the two warring drivers against each other. “He’ll take me to Oakland for $60,” he said to the allegedly cutting driver. “What’ll you take me there for?” Then he said, “This guy’s cutting,” pointing at the guy he’d just been talking to. “Nobody get in this motherfucker’s cab.”

I walked briskly away and went out of line of sight so that the driver would stop yelling at me to get into his car. I briefly considered going backwards in line but the other drivers were getting out of their cars to see what the commotion was about. It wasn’t worth it. I walked to the now-closed bart-station and yelled through the grate at the departing station agents: “What should we do if the taxi drivers are fighting?” Their receding backs said, “If they’re fighting, call the police” and zero fucks were given. I guess it happens all the time. And I can’t really blame them, they were off shift. I felt scared and alone.

I called Fritz to get him to pick me up. He hurried here. But as I was waiting, the driver whose car I was in briefly kept yelling at me, so I walked farther away. He went around the station to get closer to me and kept yelling for me to get in his car, so I walked across to the other side of the station. He then went around AGAIN to yell “I’m so sorry,” and try to get me to come to him, and I was freaked the fuck out. He left right as Fritz arrived.

I’m done travelling at night. I’m also buying a fucking car.

Also, this is cutting it really close for Iron Blogger, but I made it in before 3am!

Once I miss one event, I feel like I can’t blog before I catch up.

Blizzcon 2011: October 21-22! I’ve been to 6/6 Blizzcons now. (The others were in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.) I watched esports. Lots of esports. GSL finals on Friday night, Blizzard Invitational on Saturday night. On Friday, Jaedong, Fantasy, and Bisu sat near us briefly. So did Mike Morhaime and Dustin Browder. Haha. On Friday, I played a tiny tiny bit of heart of the swarm. On Saturday, I ran around a tiny bit as a Pandaren when I saw Rokysopp working the Mists of Pandaria section. I didn’t know the singer of Foo Fighters guy was such a huge goofball (it was also a genuinely good concert. Easily the best Blizzcon concert ever). Oct. 22 was my birthday, so we went to Joe’s Crab Shack, and then to the Hilton for the bar. On Sunday, we went to koreatown on the way home and had korean bbq and bingsu.

On my sister’s birthday in early November, my family came up to visit (from the south bay) and we ate dinner together and Skyped our birthday wishes to my sister together, since she’s on the other coast. At that time, we still had the kittens, and I watched my dad pick up one of the kittens using the Cat Pacifier technique. Turns out his family had a cat when he was little, in Taiwan.

I went to my first Railsbridge in September, at Pivotal Labs. I had also started going to Women Who Code meetups. The people that do these events are really amazing. I started a small Rails study group, and we have a core of about 8 people that have gone through the Ruby Koans and the beginning of Hartl’s Rails Tutorial in the past two months.

Then there was Startup Weekend, organized in SF by Women2.0. I pitched a language-learning Kinect game and my team won! We got $1000 in amex gift cards, which we’ve already spent a majority of on buying Kinects and Xboxes for members of our team. I wrote a blog post for Women2.0 here: http://www.women2.org/words-with-bears-wins-women-2-0-startup-weekend-2011/, and you can see it through Women2.0′s portal at forbes too.

I’m definitely at a crossroads. There are lots of great ideas out there. How do you turn them into a product? Is this what I want to do? I’m excited and terrified, maybe more than I’ve ever been. I’ve run away from opportunity so long that I don’t know what to do with it when it’s here. I need help.

I read about Ilya. I never knew him, but I really look up to some people that work on Diaspora and stuff, and I know they were hit really hard by his death. 22 is too young. So now is as good a time to talk about the process of going to get professional health, right?

I have spent a lot of time being scared. It would be great if I could do things. So there’s working on being okay with failing more (via the twitter of one of our mentors at StartupWeekend who was really awesome), and there’s working on being able to do stuff despite feeling really, really sad all the time. How can anyone do stuff when you have a mysteriously low white blood cell count and you don’t know what’s going on and you’re vaguely worried, but there’s nothing to go on and maybe there isn’t even anything to worry about? and you’re watching videos and reading articles about policemen beating students and one of your favorite professors? and you don’t understand business and you think you probably belong in a commune, because you don’t want to be aggressive or have to fight for things? and the world is unfair? and how can we eat? and everything is a fight for resources? and you can’t relax and all of your dreams are nightmares about everything being ruined?

This sounds like whining. So, what is the correct course of action? Disregard distractions, acquire grounding? Acquire confidence? How? I’ll break the things I have to do into smaller chunks, to be able to do them. But I have to decide on what I want to do at all.

Here is Peterson arranging Wassail in Lilypond, which is music engraving software for TeX.

Unlike most music editors, you have to enter in the notes as text. Also, you can’t just select a part and play it: you have to use the tool to convert it to a midi, and then play that. It renders beautifully, though.