Our house has seven people, so today I made some mail holders to put on our doors.
I basically had some long cardboard boxes, and cut them in half. Then I added new ends and separators in the middle.
I’m not sure if they’ll actually get used. Mail on the floor looks bad, but these aren’t that hot either. If you make some and want to improve the look, you can cover everything in paper or cardstock.
I decided I wanted to show (restricted) data views on the web in table form. Specifically, ‘stylish.db’ is a database provided by a chrome plugin. Here’s an example script, stylish.view, which displays the contents of that. It contains a comment saying which database it’s a query on, together with the query.
-- stylish.db
SELECT style, code, GROUP_CONCAT(section_meta.value) as 'website(s)' FROM
(SELECT styles.name AS style,
sections.code AS code,sections.id AS sections_id
FROM styles INNER JOIN sections ON sections.style_id = styles.id)
LEFT JOIN section_meta
ON section_meta.section_id = sections_id
GROUP BY style;
The cool part here is that none of this was specific to stylish. I can quickly throw together a .view file for any database and put it on the web. Continue reading
When I’ve talked to successful people, the one habit they pretty much all have is some kind of daily review process. Often journaling as well, but very specifically some kind of review process. I want to be a successful person, and I can understand how this would help, so I want that. I’ve tried to set it up before, but I never end up journaling every day.
The typical way to set up a habit is to link it to another existing habit. For a daily habit, you try to link it into an existing part of your daily routine. Here’s the problem: I don’t have any major daily habits. I don’t eat every day. I don’t brush my teeth at night every day. I don’t take a shower every day. I check my email, which is how I tried it before, which worked OK but it turns out I don’t do that every day either.
Daily: Wake up and go to the bathroom to put in contacts. Grab my journal and write a daily review for the previous day. The contents of the review are
I’m making sure to write down
I’ve also been writing my daily to-do list at the same time.
Weekly: Every monday evening, talk to <name> on Skype. Discuss the general direction my life has gone the last week and where I want it to go, and how to make those two accord. Can be as long/short as I want. I designed this to be with someone else because I didn’t anticipate doing it on my own. I haven’t done this one yet, although one Monday did pass.
Monthly: Spend two hours on the 2nd of the month (the 2nd so I notice dates). Review how the daily and weekly systems have been working, and how they need to be revised. I haven’t done this one yet. I’ve publically precommitted $100 to do this the remaining months of the year.
CFAR usually designs their techniques to help people Get Stuff Done. I have a failure mode of Getting The Wrong Stuff Done, so this time through their workshop, I focused on improving techniques to explicitly have steps around pursuing the correct terminal goals (which I’ll here call “terminal goal techniques”).
Original technique: Goal-factor
New terminal goal technique:
Sep, Oct, Nov 2014: Vietnam.
A year ago, I left my job at Streak and moved to Vietnam. I felt like I needed change. Vietnam ended up being wonderful; I was really glad I travelled with my friends Richard and Kathy, which ended up making the experience a hundred times better than it would have been otherwise. The basic environment was: everything is cheap, I newly have endless free time, I was automatically prompted by my friends in the evenings and sometimes during the day to go on small novel adventures involving physical activity, and I had little internet access. This is probably my perfect environment, and I was functioning very well (the vietnamese diet also has small, well-balanced meals which might have helped). For some reason, I was also able to intensely single-task. [I’d like to write more about what Vietnam is like, but this article is quite long enough as it is]
While I was in Vietnam, I made a to-do list. The to-do list had all the burning projects I actually wanted to do. I’ve ended up accomplishing most of them, at a rate of one every week or two, and it’s a decent summary of what I’ve been doing since. Two things made the to-do list a success. First, it had BIG tasks. These are projects like my recent “set up an IRC server” or “start a publishing company”. Because of that, I don’t get bogged down in minutae, and the tasks are always motivating. I find I function better when I try to carefully plan around having any logistics. The second reason, which I realized today, is that I was very careful to only include tasks I was planning to do (subtly different than tasks I wanted to do). The list was descriptive, not normative, although it certainly included some things like doing taxes I wasn’t wild about.
Looking at my journal and it really only starts up again in March, so I’m going to organize this post in terms of the to-do list. There are a couple items that don’t fit:
Now on to the to-do list.
I added an IRC server to my growing list of services. You can access it at:
Or via the webchat, which I recommend.
I’ve also recently updated my home page to look much prettier, in imitation of a Computer Craft cheatsheet I’ve been working on.
I consider Dead Tree Publishing to be Good Enough at this point. It’s launched.
New site style, FAQ page
I’m going to add support for URLs instead of uploading PDFs, and fix some bugs here for there, but it’s essentially done.
Meanwhile, I’ve already received my first physical book I’m publishing through the site. I got this nice email from Eric Eve:
Dear Zachary, Thank you for your interest in my work. Yes, do please feel free to offer print copies of the TADS 3 Tour Guide (or any other of my TADS 3 documentation) along the lines you suggest. The only copyright right I’m interested in enforcing is my right to be identified as the author of the work, and I'm sure that's not as issue here. Best wishes, Eric
https://www.rpgsolo.com/ has a table for resolving yes/no questions, in turn taken from FU RPG. Roll a die:
Their example:
I listen at the door. Do I hear anything? (I determine the odds are 50/50 so I click the “50/50” button in the Get Answer section and I get back the following.)
Yes, and…
(Now it’s up to me to determine what that means. Since it says “and” that means I got some kind of bonus. So I am going to interpret that to mean that from the sounds I am hearing I have received some extra information. So I type or say to myself),
I hear one person in the room. (Now I ask my next question.) Is the door locked?
No, but…
(The answer is no but it’s not a total loss. I interpret what that means then type the following),
The door seems weak enough that I can probably kick it open.
So we’ve gotten a base system for telling stories. We then added the following:
It was pretty fun in practice. I recommend using a text file over paper, since you’re going to do a lot of copy-paste. We had more fun with no GM than with a GM. No firm result yet on sandbox-worldbuilding vs players in scenarios; both seemed all right.
I wanted a partition to divide my room, and I had a whiteboard sitting around. I sawed it into three parts, and connected them with hinges:
folding whiteboard
hinge (front)
hinge (back)
I’m a little embarrassed at having done all this, since it was obvious as soon as I started the partition was way too short to work. I figured I’d still get some experience woodworking (this is my first project). Here’s where it went:
and I never saw it again
Recipe is mostly from Tricia.
Ingredients:
Read about raw beef and egg safety first to be well informed.