2019 September
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The following article made the rounds recently: I Quit Social Media for a Year and Nothing Magical Happened. It's interesting enough not only on its own, but also for the discussion generated around any piece about qutting social media. I will admit I've been flirting with the idea myself, but that's a topic for another day. Of particular interest to me at the moment is this comment about the article on Hacker News: My biggest issue with social media is less that it's distracting (IMO not necessarily an unhealthy thing) but that it has, for me, more than anything else
2019 April
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A Ghurka rifleman escaped from a Japanese prison in south Burma and walked six hundred miles alone through the jungles to freedom. The journey took him five months, but he never asked the way and he never lost the way. For one thing he could not speak Burmese and for another he regarded all Burmese as traitors. He used a map and when he reached India he showed it to the Intelligence officers, who wanted to know all about his odyssey. Marked in pencil were all the turns he had taken, all the roads and trail forks he has passed,
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Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. -- Winston Churchill I already typed the above quote into the post, then realized I had already used it before. Whatever, just goes to show, I'm no stranger to failure. I was reminded of this quote because recently I prepared a demo for a project that didn't push through. At first I was annoyed at the wasted effort, but I realized that I had wisely taken the demo project as an opportunity to learn/sharpen some skills. Specifically, I used it to study the Django
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I found myself poring over the Wikipedia entry for the Ship of Theseus the other day. If you're not familiar, it's basically a thought experiment along the lines of "if a given ship's parts are replaced at every port it visits, and eventually none of the parts are from the original ship, is it still the same ship?" The thought experiment questions the meaning of identity of a whole composed of many individual parts, such as a ship, or even a human. I thought about this while I was digging through time (read: old posts) the other day. In all
2019 February
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I'm not much for public performance. But sometimes I think about doing some stuff that involves some level of public performance. My examples for this post are: game streaming public speaking standup comedy Public speaking and standup comedy are basically the same, and might be interesting to do (standup seems more fun). Like many people, I used to have a mild fear of speaking in front of a bunch of people/strangers, but as I've gotten older and cared less about what other people think, this kind of faded away. But the main issue with these two items is that they
2019 January
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A friend was worried and jittery about an event he'd been preparing for a while now. He just wanted it to be over and things to not go wrong. I told him not to worry, that he's already done the best preparation he could and that no matter what things will surely work out. It's easy to fall into the trap of anxiety, overthinking things that might go wrong, or things that might not go according to plan, and so on. And you know what? It's fine. Not everything goes according to plan. Unexpected things happen. People understand. We laugh
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After yesterday's post about Konmari, I thought about some stuff that brings me joy, some of them despite my better judgment: learning new things. This is a bit uncommon I guess, so it makes me a bit of a nerd. Luckily nerds are cool now, or something. Okay, this is super positive I guess. being argumentative. I love a good debate. However, since the 2016 election season, I've cut back on this significantly. It's only fun if the debaters aren't fanatics and understand that the goal of debate isn't victory, but progress following at least one person on social media
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I don't know much about this Konmari thing. I think it's been around for a while, but got a boost recently due to a Netflix special. I think I agree with it in principle, or at least what I know of it from secondary social media commentary. Minimalism is a worthwhile goal, and so is getting rid of things that do nothing for you other than take up space. Some people aren't reacting well to the idea of throwing away books though: Edit 22 Jan: The account has gone private, so the previous embedded tweet is no longer accessible. I'm
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Here I am writing about Duolingo and keeping up streaks, then just a few days later, this happens: On Jan. 6, 2019, 3:33 p.m. I wrote: Ah crap I broke a 97 day Duolingo streak D: There's a problem with Duolingo's streak notifications that I'm not sure how to solve. It send you a daily reminder at around the same time you did the work the previous day. If you're unable to do it at that time, there are no further reminders later in the day. I feel like there should also be another reminder near the end of the
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Happy new year! Last year I posted some year-end statistics. That seems like a good way to recap the year, so let's do it again. Random statistics from 2018: Work, Learning and Self Improvement: Hours worked: 1,163 (up around 50% from last year) Programming languages/frameworks learned: I'll say 4. I'm counting: C++ which I revisited this year after more than a decade of not using it Go, which I used for the templating in the Hugo blog Flask, which I had dabbled in before but only used in a full-scale project this year Laravel, which I also used in a
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New year's resolutions are hard to maintain, so much so that people will make jokes about opening a gym that only runs during January, since most gym NYRs run out of steam by then. One of the best pieces of advice I've found regarding acquiring new behaviors comes from the first motivational books I ever read - The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino, which for some reason we had a copy of in our house when I was young. The book tells us that: humans are slaves to habit bad habits can only be replaced by good
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New year's resolutions are hard to maintain, so much so that people will make jokes about opening a gym that only runs during January, since most gym NYRs run out of steam by then. One of the best pieces of advise I've read on this is "Don't break the chain", most often anecdotally attributed to Jerry Seinfeld. This advice means that for a recurring activity, once you get a streak or chain going, as much as possible you should avoid breaking the chain. So if your NYR is to exercise daily, you should try to avoid breaking that chain for
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Most of these are carried over from the 2017 checklist. Maybe an annual thing, eh? In no particular order: Greet your loved ones and friends and anyone else you hold dear. Maybe even those you disagree with Ponder why people give so much significance to the transition between an arbitrarily-chosen pair of 24 hour periods Take stock and reflect on the past year Think about what you'd like to learn this year or how you want to improve Count your blessings for the past year and be grateful Change your passwords Buy a new toothbrush Make a New Year's joke
2018 December
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I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but here's some suggestions if you're into that sort of thing: learn a new language talk to strangers more often visit 12 museums (one per month) step away from your devices once a week (increase the duration every time) read at least 12 non-fiction books read at least 12 physical books write a poem; maybe write 12 poems walk in the rain travel somewhere alone learn to draw stop a fight walk two thousand kilometers make more puns find something you can change in your local community and try to change
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If you're looking for a New Year's Resolution, why not try learning a new language? Since late 2014, I've been using Duolingo to teach myself new languages. Learning a new language not only helps when you're travelling, but it unlocks different ways of forming thoughts in your brain, helping cognitive development (I may have made up that last part with absolutely no basis except my own speculation.) The first language I tried to study using Duolingo was Spanish, mainly because back then we had an upcoming trip to Europe (including Barcelona) planned in 2015 so the Spanish would have helped.
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Via a blog post by Dave Martin, I read about Steven Pressfield's quotes on "The Resistance" that keeps us from doing our work: The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows that we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got. (Side note: I've put his books on an Amazon wishlist. I should remind myself to do this whenever I find books that sound interesting) I think about new projects all the time: game dev ideas, app ideas, programming
2018 November
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The aforementioned quote is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. I've been thinking about this lately as I try to plan for what's ahead and what I want. I think one has to be able to decide what one wants independently of what other people are doing. As a concrete example, it's easy to fall into the trap of "Oh, this other person in my field did X and now they are making so much money, should I take that path as well?" In a situation like this it's helpful to ask yourself if "more money" is really what you want. Sure,
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Aside from my hobbyist readings (keeping up with gaming and comics news, etc), my usual reading diet used to consist of current events and tech news, primarily through apps like Flipboard and Feedly, secondarily through social media like Reddit and Twitter. Recently though I've started following more sources and blogs that are focused on more... "cultural" affairs. When I started doing #sketchdaily a couple of years ago, I started following more artists. During the past few months, as a sort of counterbalance to the prevalently negative current events and tech industry news, I've also begun following a few more people
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"The price for being the best is always... having to be the best." Terry Pratchet, Lords and Ladies This is one of my favorite quotes. For context: in the story, one of the characters has a special talent that he can shoe anything anyone gives him (like when you put horseshoes on a horse). And Granny Weatherwax tells him that the price he pays for that talent is that when someone brings him something to shoe, no matter how wild or ridiculous the request, he has to do it. In real life of course, the literal interpretation is ridiculous. You
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I remember a conversation I often had with a friend, the first team lead I ever worked with. Many times she would be putting in extra hours for days at a time and I would say to her "Put that off until tomorrow, it's time to go home." and she would reply along the lines of "But I still have so much work to do." and my usual rejoinder would be "Are you expecting to finish all of that work tonight?" The modern working world is full of problems, issues, tasks and other work that needs to be resolved, and