No, I Will Not Do Your Homework

Roughly once a week, I get an email from someone in India, Thailand, China, or some other far-flung corner of the world who is fervently working on their final undergraduate project, their master’s thesis, or some other coursework and wants me to help them. Don’t get me wrong, I like helping people wherever possible, providing their intentions are honest, and they’ve done their homework. I adopt the same attitude exhibited by physics professors at my undergraduate university – if you could explain what you’d done, where you were stuck, and propose possible solutions, they’d help you out. If you were fishing for free homework answers, you were SOL.

The kind of people that are asking for help clearly haven’t done their homework. They ask me for help on peer-to-peer networking projects, example code, and even exact programs that will essentially comprise their entire project. No dice. I wrote a book on the subject, and I gave it away for free (although, yes, it is out of date at this point).

Neither life nor Google are going to hand you a complete answer, polished and ready to hand into your professor. You’re going to have to learn to figure things out for yourself. Sorry, but this is tough love.

Perfect (Penmanship), The Enemy of Good

My nemesis: the Moleskin notebookI carry around two Moleskine notebooks just about everywhere that I go — a small, pocket-sized ruled version, and a larger sketchbook version. They’re with me to capture notions, ideas, thoughts, whatever. There’s just one problem: I rarely write in them.

As a rule, I’m generally quite a neat and organized person. This is reflected in my hesitance to mar these exquisite vessels with my unkempt scratchings. Although I spent three years in high school under the strict and hand cramp-inducing tutelage of Mr. Knipe, the drafting teacher, my previously draftsman-perfect block lettering has degraded to only an archaeological remnant of recognizable writing. Such is the price of progress and years of clattering away at a computer keyboard.

When I think of the great minds of the ages – Da Vinci, Newton, and others – their flawless lines of precise penmanship put me to shame (even in the case of Da Vinci who wrote his backwards). Great thoughts deserve great handwriting, don’t they? And so I restrain myself from degrading the pages of these two notebooks with my dribbling scrawl. It’s a weird neurosis, but I’m not sure it’s one that has a psychological classification yet.