What I've been up to (14/05/2025)

Once again, a lot has happened since my last post. I'm ashamed to say that I'm not up to date with my Sensors class, but I'm proud to announce that I've managed to get a job! I'll be working as a boarding house assistant for a bilingual school starting next academic year. My job will basically be to act as a big brother to the boarders: I'll prepare them breakfast, get them to and from school, help them with their homework and be there for them if they need anything. The job doesn't pay very well, but it's balanced with the benefits that come with it, namely, I'll be living at the boarding house for free and won't need to pay for food, insurance, or the half-fare travelcard! This solves the two problems I described last time: finding a job and securing affordable accommodation (in this case it's free!) near the firehouse, before my parents move back to Portugal. I'll have access to sports courts that I'll get to use for my personal firefighter training and I believe I'll have enough time to focus on my Math From Scratch project, this time without having courses constantly looming in the back of my mind!

Still on the subject of my new job, I have an amazing anecdote to share. During one of my job interviews, one of my superiors told me that she had a friend whose son had attended the same high school as I did. A few weeks after I got the job, Orfeas sent me a message congratulating me. Since I hadn't told him about it, I assumed that Charlie, the only friend on campus who knows him and who I had told about the job, must have run into him and passed the news along. Two days ago, we finally met Orfeas by chance, 3-4 months after the last time we saw each other, and we arranged to have lunch together on the next day. Yesterday, during lunch, one of the topics that came up was my new job. As it turns out, Charlie never told him about it and the friend my boss mentioned, whose son had been to my high school, was actually Orfeas' mom! My boss mentioned me to her, so she asked her son whether he knew me. What are the odds that my boss is friends with one of my best friends' mom?! This blew my mind and reminded me of the six degrees of separation theory.

Moving now to some bad news, I've decided to stop attending my friend's class and to stop going climbing with him, because I haven't been managing to complete my to-do list for a while. He also needs more time to study and is fortunately managing his machine learning class just fine, so it's not the end of the world that I've decided to step away from it. I'm still sidetracking too much, but in one of my procrastination sessions, I stumbled upon Sheldon's quote from The Big Bang Theory: "I can't just give in to every urge I have when I have it. That's why I have a rigid schedule. It's bad enough I had to give in to my urge to create a rigid schedule". That simple idea is something I've used in the past with varied success depending on how it was implemented, but in my experience, it's usually an efficient way to create discipline. I've recently put together a version that feels simple, sensible and flexible enough to handle setbacks. It seems to be working so far, but it's too early to draw any concrete conclusions.

As for my firefighter training, I've been to more official training sessions and my next one is scheduled for next Wednesday. Some of my firefighter comrades and I have also organized unofficial running sessions near the lake.

Other things have happened, like how I made a new cube mosaic from memory during the Easter holiday, or how I managed to break my phone screen even more two days ago, or how I cut my finger yesterday, or how I found out about Lindenbaum's lemma (a key result in proving the completeness theorem for first-order logic), or how I learned that the constructive proof of the completeness theorem I've found for propositional logic was discovered by a Hungarian mathematician named László Kalmár, ... And the list goes on, but these events aren't nearly as consequential as the main ones I've already described. At this point, I don't think anyone is actually reading this, but I believe I shouldn't be writing too many personal details on the web anyway. I just find it fun to keep a kind of diary that nobody knows about, but that's available for anyone to see, as long as I don't suffer any negative consequences, of course.