Drunk

Tricky Keg Stands

A collection of various and sundry things.

Words:
essays, creative nonfiction and random shiz
Projects:
bands, cars, nerd stuff
Life:
photos, resume, etc.

Today I Learned

2014 07 17

https://github.com/josephmisiti/awesome-machine-learning

2014 07 10

http://www.nuclearphynance.com/default.aspx

2014 07 07

a nice, super simple intro to markov chains http://techeffigy.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/markov-chains-explained/

2014 07 01

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-death-data startup deaths

2014 06 21

on april 21 i wrote myself an email that said, get this book for seth. it was a neil gaiman book called instructions. a few days ago i was headed to the library and thought, 'there was a book i wanted to get for seth.' i looked in this file, checklist and 10 other places (pretty much everywhere but my email) and couldn't find it. A shame, too. it's at most of the libraries in stl except for mine. try oak bend or headquarters

Instructions - Written by Neil Gaiman; Illustrated by Charles Vess J 821.914 Gaiman, Neil New York : Harper 2010 1st ed.

2014 06 18

Jai Alai is the sport I always am forgetting the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai hi aleigh ay alli etc... for grepping

Audi Allroad quattro is a cool car. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_allroad_quattro I saw one on the road yesterday morning. like.

2014 06 15

C86 http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/c86-compilation-oral-history/

I want this - thin, money clip wallet - http://www.bigskinny.net/acrobat.html

2014 06 09

I was working through some angular.js tutorials a few weeks ago. The tabs have been open so long I'm putting them here so I can revisit at some time.

https://egghead.io/lessons/angularjs-ngrepeat-and-filtering-data https://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial/step_00

and i'm thinking I don't need this plug-in, but not sure yet:

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/tree/master/AngularJS

2014 06 08

The guy who sold his startup for $25M. Good comments about due diligence and whatnots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7858317

2014 05 09

http://rs.io/2014/04/05/anki-10000-cards-later.html is a nice write up on how to use spaced repetition learning ( SRS ) and anki. I like his thoughts on what kind of things to put on the cards, how to write them so you will remember the topics from several angles, and what to put in your deck (don't just memorize state capitals... that's something I did when I first started and I quickly quit because it wasn't interesting or useful.)

2014 05 08

The Dirichlet Process Mixture Models - http://blog.datumbox.com/overview-of-cluster-analysis-and-dirichlet-process-mixture-models/

2014 05 08

Was just about to close these tabs: https://github.com/scoofy/wxStocks/blob/master/wxStocks.py http://dpinte.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/pyql/

first one is done by a guy on a few forums who likes to mention this code. I'd like to try to use it. It is a python app that scrapes yahoo and morningstar to get data about companies. Might be a good stock screener?

The second one is something else I need to use. Quantlib is supposedly awesome, pyql seems like the bridge between that and pandas. I'd like to use it someday.

2014 05 05

I thought I had this somewhere on the site already. Seems not. Here it is:

Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling:

2014 05 04

http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/mid/31 - west stlco scanner at bottom, super nerdy.

2014 05 01

I'd like to read this book when it comes out http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032441.do Python for Finance - Analyze Big Financial Data

Relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680223

2014 04 28

This looks like a great pandas resource https://github.com/jvns/pandas-cookbook

And this is a good way to brush up on my vim knowledge http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/

And did I mention the track to learn options? yep, looks like I did on 20140421

There's a lot to keep in mind that is illustrated by "The Strategy Cycle" chart here http://alephblog.com/2014/04/26/why-it-is-hard-to-win-in-investing/. I think it is relevant to more than just investment.

and this is a fair way to do equity? https://medium.com/this-time-is-different/12ddebcc63ef

2014 04 21

When trying to explain yourself, try to frame the explaination as: 'I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z' (this is from Laszlo Bock of google. He said, 'some people will say, I wrote editorials for the NYT. but it would be better to say Had 50 op-eds published compared to average of 6 by most op-ed [writers] as a result of providing deep insight into the following area for three years.'

2014 04 19

Options trading for beginners, a guy on reddit wrote a free book, i downloaded it (look for a file called developingOptionsIntuition.pdf) he linked to a good set of comments on reddit explaining options from the beginning http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/pigr5/optionstrading_102_past_the_basics/ here is the original link http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/239ncq/i_wrote_a_draft_of_an_intermediateadvanced_book/ and a complete list of the comments that explain options

http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/pigr5/optionstrading_102_past_the_basics/ http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/pnray/optionstrading_103_the_premium/ http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/psxp0/optionstrading_104_mechanics_of_buying_options/ http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/q067b/optionstrading_105_risk_and_strategy_part_i/ http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/qsazd/optionstrading_106_risk_and_strategy_part_iia/ http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/qsbh8/optionstrading_107_risk_and_strategy_part_iib/

2014 04 18

Tachyus is the industrial data analysis startup that got funding

2014 04 17

contour is a graphing lib that is similar to the one some guy i follow on feedly uses to show off examples (but, i can't ever find who that was, so i'm lost when looking for ideas) http://forio.com/contour/examples.html

2014 04 14

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/david_foster_wallace_was_right_irony_is_ruining_our_culture/

2014 04 12

notes: growth model + the innovation multiplier, see section 8 of model thinking. it taught me more about how startups are able to innovate so quickly and why large companies (who are already far along in their growth) require acquisitions. it also helps me understand how those acquisitions can help growth. (small town entrepreneurship grants and capital are taking on risk by subsidising R&D for large companies.)

2014 03 30

This is my favorite thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFAK8Vj62WM

"or like that game we played with that sleepwalking construction worker you'd wind up and watch him climb through girders and occasionally fall to his death."

2014 03 28

Like 15 years ago a friend of mine was explaining to me how Michael Jackson was a brilliant musician and referenced an interview on Oprah where he busted out a song and it was amazing. This showed up today:

http://lacienegasmiled.tumblr.com/post/77598143356/as-jackson-couldnt-fluently-play-any-instruments

and then there was a link to the Oprah interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcpdmqzNRyE

holyshit.

and then there was this silly long deposition where he goes in depth about his writing techniques https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf5xsXWneQs

2014 03 17

Not sure if I put this in here yet, but a while back I purchased yakbuttertea.com. Here are my notes about why:

A game of yak husbandry and hipster domination

Sell manure to the local rooftop farm

Get dinged when the competitor unveils free range yak farming

2014 03 12

I spent way too much time trying to find this article back I even paid $5 for a feedly pro account so i could search my feed history. it didn't help. "ceo new jersey company annual letter published as a book" were my search terms. no wonder i couldn't find it. i had to dig through my broswer history a day at a time to find this back... derp.

http://betaworks.com/pdf/betaworksShareholderLetter2013.pdf http://betaworks.com/shareholder/ http://www.anaqua.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFE00CSvpjs&list=PLGqc26s6O0E2P2BnK73JWXk4YYTgl3dmb stopped at 4:13 http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~martin/W2024/R11.pdf

2014 03 11

What are we really doing? We are a part of this sort of distributed research and development service for large companies. That is, independent firms give us capital to perform R&D that probably should be funded by the acquiring company, but isn't for whatever reason (acquirer can't allocate resources due to risk) so, the burden of that risk is shifted to us, the entrepreneurs, and our investors, who somehow can bear that risk because they are properly diversified. The acquiring companies have to be good at absorbing this new, external innovation, without smothering it. Read this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mgiresearch/2014/03/04/the-future-of-venture-capital-tech-valuations-and-the-fate-of-tech-incumbents-conversation-with-bill-janeway/

Let's talk about a TSLA analysis.

Their market is ev's, power train, batteries, IP, and engineering.

Look at their suppliers, first. Look at their patent portfolio.

Figure out their licensing deals (what tech do they buy? what tech do they sell?)

Look at their general numbers.

Look at appl and how they can benefit from battery tech. Look at all industires who can benefit from battery tech. Who owns that IP? Who are their competitors? What supply issues are in place?

How does the energy storage market compare to the EV market?

what happens when too many EV's are on the road and people reliant on fuel taxes? like, when is that tipping point?

who competes on tsla's patent portfolio? As in, if tsla has something important enough to patent, they're probably using the tech, who has similar tech and who builds it and how are they doing?

what suppliers do other EV and battey users use? How are those companies doing?

How about Tata motors? Chinese manufacturers?

2014 03 10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold

2014 02 28

http://www.evanmiller.org/linear-regression-for-fun-and-profit.html http://econbrowser.com/archives/2014/02/use-of-logarithms-in-economics

2014 02 22

still trying to figure out what was trying to figure out yesterday. I stumbled upon a course called "Model Thinking" on coursera by Scott Page at the U of Michigan. It is all kinds of awesome. you should check it out. Today I learned, "All finite, deterministic systems are guaranteed to cycle" after learning about cellular automata which is the ones and zeros qarl had on his site. Things are starting to make sense.

2014 02 21

I'm wrestling with an idea that involves truth tables, decision matrices, simple 2x2 matrix. do an image search for "truth table xor". I love the idea of having your inputs on the left and a single output column on the right. the 2x2 matrix is good to visualize clusters, throw a quadrant over the top to identify groups of the items that have a specific kind of trait (slow and dumb vs fast and dumb vs smart and slow vs smart and fast.) Finally, go to the wikipedia page for decision matrix. Then try to help me figure out what I'm trying to figure out.

let's make a list of startups and what they did to make it happen

just works | fast | shiny | first to market | iteration of an old idea | X | X | | | X | whatsapp X | | | X | | dropbox

etc... i don't know where I'm going with that besides it is a contrived illustration of maybe how this can help me make sense of the world and present these thoughts in a way other people can understand/critique. There might also be ways to solve these in an algorithmic way, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-criteria_decision_analysis.

so, maybe a system of cheat sheets, checklists, and decision matrixes with truth tables and 2x2

2014 02 13

sickbeard plex roku, netflix and hulu+. mythtv for over the air.

2014 02 10

https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc/wiki

2014 02 05

some scalable infastructures: http://www.hakkalabs.co/articles/big-small-hot-cold-data-needs-robust-pipeline http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/1/28/how-next-big-sound-tracks-over-a-trillion-song-plays-likes-a.html

2014 02 01

bon iver owen - the ghost of what should have been https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0soTCY7qT2g&list=RD_Mn5TeV0aS0 sujfan stevens mclusky lost in the trees chvrches album - american football https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr_DMGZ-JrY listener https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8k9rD7lx9c old... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-fjyEIgWik deer tick - electric https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zdzlTqIVTE holy fuck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhaRkWfaq10 future of the left - i am the least of your problems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm_zlqC2zlI kopecky family band - heartbeat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq-8dxYHnyU

2014 01 21

set up a fresh wordpress box http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essential-security-for-linux-servers https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-nginx-php-and-varnish-on-ubuntu-12-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-create-a-ssl-certificate-on-nginx-for-ubuntu-12-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-on-ubuntu-12-04 and then i set up nginx to 301 redirect all http traffic to https by adding this to /etc/nginx/sites-available/wordpress server { listen 80; return 301 https://hostrequest_uri; } and then i set up fastcgi cache using the following how tos: https://rtcamp.com/wordpress-nginx/tutorials/single-site/fastcgi-cache-with-purging/ https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-setup-fastcgi-caching-with-nginx-on-your-vps and then I added a swap file: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-12-04

2014 01 15

links for setting up a happaugue wintv 2500 capture card on Linux

http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/watch-tv-capture-video-linux-help-199290471.html?page=3 http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1567490.html http://www.mythtvtalk.com/hvr-2250-ubuntu-12-04-mythtv-0-25-installation-16023/ http://marksnotebook.com/PVR-150_capture http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1734916 http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ubuntu-63/zoneminder-1-24x-ubuntu-10-04-pal-ntsc-cameras-pv-981-8-port-811014/ http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/IVTV_Install#Creating_device_entries http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1567490.html

I gave up and bought a PV-143 from blue cherry.

apt-get install zoneminder apt-get install x264 ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zoneminder.conf adduser www-data video service zoneminder restart

/dev/video0 maximum fps 5.0 alarm maximum fps 5.0 reference image blend %ge 7

channel 0-4 NTSC BGR24 which isn't correct 768 480

captures per frame on options->config needs to be 4

fix shared memory problem echo 536870912 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

comment out all ScriptAlias directives in all the files under /etc/apache2/ (do a grep to find them)

fix the scriptalias in /etc/zm/apache.conf by adding ScriptAlias /cgi-bin "/usr/share/zoneminder/cgi-bin"

i doubt the scriptalias thing has anything to do with the sockets problem.

2014 01 09

"Nickel and diming yourself to a partial success"

http://colorbrewer2.org/ for picking chart colors.

http://tohtml.com/java/ for pasting your code into gmail

2014 01 05

I may say that this is the greatest factor—the way in which the expedition is equipped—the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck. — from The South Pole, by Roald Amundsen

google image search "As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young”

2014 01 04

to find the energy at a particular freq, spin your signal around a circle at that freq and average some points around that path - fourier x

2014 01 03

three philosophers quadrupel

2014 01 01

#{systemProperties['RDS_HOSTNAME']}

2013 12 22

"i am becaus ew e are"

WGD4800BQ is the dryer we bought.

2013 12 21

"The girls in the video were cast by people who didn’t quite understand what they were engaged in culturally." http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/sir-mix-a-lot-baby-got-back-video-oral-history.html

2013 12 19

Jonathan Lebed http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/magazine/jonathan-lebed-s-extracurricular-activities.html

2013 12 18

We produce great quality work in an asbestos rich environment.

2013 12 17

opportunistic but not goal oriented.

2013 12 10

that accounting class I never finished https://class.coursera.org/accounting-001/lecture/index

2013 11 30

Some tunings - DADGAD, DGCGAC, FACGCE... DADF#AD

2013 11 28

Chicago: Their / They're / There http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m98pIKAYwbs American Football http://www.amazon.com/American-Football/e/B000APPVD6/digital/ref=ntt_mp3_rdr?_encoding=UTF8&sn=d Owen http://www.amazon.com/Owen/e/B000APOV3M/digital/ref=ntt_mp3_rdr?_encoding=UTF8&sn=d Owen playlist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiYpHzCBOyk&list=ALGLx1orRGw4VLFLCFfLPzluyBUsOUY7x0

2013 10 25

Contrapposto

2013 10 15

danny brown franzen is a band I'd like to be in.

2013 10 08

To win you must first identify what it means to win, then figure out what the game is. Learn its rules, find your competition. Once you know everything there is to know about the game, practice becasuse the only way to win is either be better than everyone else or cheat. then there's the idea of focusing on 1) valuation - how much is this worth and how much is it worth relative to other things. 2) Trend - what is the macro doing in sum? expanding? contracting? 3) Inflation (this pertains more to finance than the general game) What's the overall trend? 3) Earnings - how are others doing in aggregate? Is the macro working or dying? 5) Credit - what credit is available and why is it (or why isn't it?) there has to be a reason and it likely is relevant.

2013 10 05

It was my first day at the job site and they said, "There is the pile of 2x4's. Build a wall from here to there and another over there." I got my tools and started working. I masured twice, cut the wood square, nailed it right. I worked quickly, methodically. I checked it twice with a level before securing it to the floor. My boss came back from the store and yelled.

"What the #%Cd is taking you so long?!?"

"I don't know how I can work any faster."

"Is that a level? Son, we don't have time for any of that. Eyeball it. We'll square everything up when we set trusses."

I am sure there isn't a civil engineer out there who couldn't design a concrete span that would last forvever. I'm also pretty sure there isn't hardly a bridge bult today that will last more than 100 years. We are engineers. Our job is to build things that are good enough. we aren't paid to find the best solution. we're paid to quickly find one that is just good enough and saves time and money.

I am an engineer. My job is to build things that are 'good enough' while working within the constraint of cost. I'd like to believe I could build something beautiful given enough time and money. However, that is not my job. I need to get something that mostly works into production so I can go home. This, of course, doesn't mesh well with the need to build good code but again, i am an engineer. I'm sure there are civil engineers out there who are sad they can't build a bridge that will last forever. I'm sure there are mechanical engineers out there designing car fuel pumps who laugh that what thye're

2013 09 30

re: spaced repetition learning http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition

re: learning about monentary policy by reading a guy's lessons learned after trying to build a simulation game http://esoltas.blogspot.com/2013/09/5-things-i-learned-from-fedsim.html

2013 09 29

Some vim plugins I need to take the plunge:

http://majutsushi.github.io/tagbar/ http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3465 http://thomashunter.name/blog/installing-vim-tagbar-with-macvim-in-os-x/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6972114/vim-omnicomplete-in-real-time http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/dwatkins/entry/vim_omnicomplete_awesomeness/ https://github.com/Shougo/neocomplcache.vim

and I need to learn tmux - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux http://superuser.com/questions/236158/tmux-vs-screen

Unrelated - Game theory trail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_resident#Matching_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility

And even more unrelated, some reading from the epicuriandealmaker http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/cbl/Gorton_Some_Thoughts_on_the_Recent_Financial_Crisis_Aug_29.pdf http://www.lse.ac.uk/CPNSS/projects/CoreResearchProjects/ContingencyDissentInScience/DP/DP_Cartwright0509Online.pdf

2013 09 26

Rambling Without Context: Why I'm Not Mad. There isn't a us v. them because them don't exist. To show this, we use a combination of nash equilibrium, the law of averages (and keep in mind just how average things actually are AND that there is a whole left hand side to that bell curve) and how people are indeed 'different' and have, dependent on the instant of time sampled, different motivations.

I noticed some talk about R&D and how that relates to a young company as it transitions to a more stable, larger and aged entity. To me, this helps explain where apple is at right now and why pfizer did what it did re: layoffs in r&d.

http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2013/09/decline-and-denial-requiem-for.html http://www.whopperinvestments.com/rd-bureaucracy http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2013/09/rebirth-and-reincarnation-escaping.html

2013 09 23

A case study for increasing developer stock in a city. STL 2013

  1. attract existing talent
  1. create an attractive environment for the talent
  1. create talent from within

2013 09 22

http://www.gametheory101.com/ http://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/1mkb3i/thinking_of_going_into_finance/ https://class.coursera.org/accounting-001/lecture/index

2013 09 21

"I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish." - http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm see also "this is water"-DFW

http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/nucam/trying.htm

http://center.sustainability.duke.edu/sites/default/files/documents/system_intervention.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points

http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf

2013 09 12

Blind Willie Johnson

2013 09 11

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-09/woodford-s-theories-rooted-in-japan-slump-embraced-by-bernanke.html and "Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy"

Older versions of bootstrap docs - http://bootstrapdocs.com/

2013 09 10

Full Text Search for Apps and Patents - http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/index.html Assignment Data (missing pending and abandoned apps) - http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat Bulk Data From Google - http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto-patents-pair.html

2013 09 08

There are some interesting theories on L'appel du vide out on the intranets. There was a great comment on reddit that i can't find back, but there are tons of other theories out there. good fun!

2013 08 20

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto-patents.html

I spent an hour trying to find this back. So, I'm placing it here http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/16/the-amazing-surprising-africa-driven-demographic-future-of-the-earth-in-9-charts/ and along those lines: * http://www.registerguard.com/rg/opinion/30156138-78/population-million-africa-billion-2100.html.csp * http://beta.fool.com/whichstockswork/2013/05/30/targeting-africa-as-the-new-china/35532/ * http://alephblog.com/2012/11/29/on-human-fertility-part-2/ * http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/02/unleashing-the-us-investor-in-africa * http://www.businessinsider.com/analyst-world-population-will-peak-at-85-billion-in-2030-2012-11

After visiting the Farnsworth house, this post makes me happy http://www.oobject.com/category/12-buildings-inspired-by-the-farnsworth-house/ adding a "steel house" section to my checklist.

2013 08 14

elasticsearch query tutorial http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2013/07/01/elasticsearch-query-tutorial.html

2013 08 09

Re: Salad - "Once your free your mind about a concept of ingredients and flavors being correct, you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do." I spent a few minutes last week thinking about what I need in a salad. Dark leafy greens, kalamata olives, cucumber, and marinated sundried tomatoes create a salad that is nearly spot on for me. I may add nuts when I decide which will work. Sunflower seeds, maybe? In the past, I felt I needed a good, stinky cheese on my salad. I've spent months smothering lettuce with blue cheese, feta, gorgonzola, but it never quite worked. Surprisingly, the kalmata olives provide the flavor I thought was provided by cheese. Today, I paired the salad with carrots dipped in peanut butter. I don't use dressing. (Photos available upon request)

2013 08 08

I've had this link open for far too long. Finally putting it away. An interesting chart using d3 http://timelyportfolio.github.io/rCharts_nyt_home_price/

2013 08 01

Some NLP people and things:

http://bcomposes.wordpress.com/ http://www.jasonbaldridge.com/projects https://github.com/turian/textrank

Some NLP papers: http://people.csail.mit.edu/francois/research/papers/is11-lda.pdf http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/sekine/papers/li07.pdf http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/files/presentations/BGU_WordRepresentations_2009.pdf

Some FP videos:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich-Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Datomic-Database-Value

2013 07 27

http://www.zengabros.com/

http://www.zengabros.com/ski-boys

http://www.zengabros.com/line-sight

2013 07 21

new metric - # mistakes per day. If I'm not making a ton of mistakes, I'm probably not doing anything worth doing.

2013 07 18

I'd like to read, "The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort)

2013 07 15

What are you doing? How are you getting users?

2013 07 03

How is it I don't have anything in here about the zurich axioms?

And then there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory which is interesting in both a behavioral economics way and a how-to-live-a-life kind of way.

2013 06 24

again, don't forget * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression * http://ww2.coastal.edu/kingw/statistics/R-tutorials/logistic.html

and, on the k-means clustering front, this might be nice: https://code.google.com/p/ekmeans/

and the idea of named entity recognition... i need to implement this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17352469/how-can-i-build-a-model-to-distinguish-tweets-about-apple-inc-from-tweets-abo

and, of course, all of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:String_similarity_measures

2013 06 19

Starting points for value screening http://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityAnalysis/comments/1gag5l/value_screening_metrics/

A man in the parking garage shoved $5k and a red pill into my hand this morning. He said I could keep the money if I put the red pill in my next load of whites. The pill, he explained, would turn everything a pale shade of pink. I would have to wear the clothes in public. 'Trust me, we have people watching,' he said, 'There will be... consequences if you do not follow the instructions.' Apparently, they do this just enough to keep people buying fancy laundry detergent and splitting what could be one load of laundry into two or three. I converted the cash into a starbucks gift card because it is impossible to make drinkable coffee at home.

2013 06 18

A nice intro to R data frames : http://ww2.coastal.edu/kingw/statistics/R-tutorials/dataframes.html

2013 06 17

"Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere." - googleit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

The difference between a rocket and a missile is a rocket is unguided. Also, you spell missile with two i's.

lumbermissile.com is available along with lumberrocket.com. This is funny in a certain context. thank you, come again.

2013 06 16

Rule of Thumb - Guess how much money per year on which you need to live then multiply by 25. This is how much $ in a brokerage account you'll need with a steady 4% return after inflation to live off dividends forever excluding taxes and blah blah blah, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism pretty much says that nothing in this comment is Truth, but the comment http://www.reddit.com/r/depression/comments/1gdxry/depression_feels_more_real_optimism_feels_like_a/cajbziq is nice. Namely:

And from an old episode of Mad Men, "If you don't want to drink, you don't have to drink."

2013 06 12

https://bigml.com/features http://blog.quandl.com/blog/our-new-partner-bigml-lets-you-easily-create-powerful-financial-economic-and-social-predictive-models/

Lisa Rokusek, Recruiter

2013 06 09

I've stopped taking my pills. I feel like I've welcomed a best friend back into my life

The pills were good because I learned something. I can now look at my old friend squarely and say, 'What is wrong with you?' It is like going home after graduation and having a night out with your buddy who still lives at home and blazes all day. You miss that life but you're looking at it from new eyes. With those eyes you know you'll be able to wake up tomorrow and do something. I once thought there was no prize for being functioning adult, but being able to get outside and pay your bills is the prize. It is Enough.

And, last night was spent with someone who is about to have a child. Sometimes I wonder why people don't ask my opinions or for advice then I realize all these ideas and thoughts are on the inside and the bit I let out is what typically makes an unlikable buffoon. So, I shrug and think, 'yeah.' As for the advice or 'what I've learned' there is one thing I'd probably not say to a half stranger over drinks. Having a child made me realize we are made up animals. Nothing special. We are ordinary mammals who are slaves to our own biochemistry and evolution with a level of whimsy enabled by our laughably large cerebral cortex. The whimsy can make us believe we are different than a cow or an orangutan in that we make up abstractions about ourselves that allow us to ignore what we are.

2013 05 31

I should probably use recline.js...

2013 05 29

It has been a long time since I've run a java app from the command line. Re: the class path - Don't forget the quotes:

java -cp " * " net.fiftytwo.juristat.misc.CaseLoader

2013 05 28

Every night I sleep in the recovery position

2013 05 21

http://vimeo.com/66294748

We read news and feel compelled to stay informed "to distract ourselves from the things we fear is being: criticized, called out as a fraud, being identified as a poser, being called out as someone who had no right to do the work that they just did." Find that person who's live tweeting the event you aren't at and wasting a half hour looking at those pithy comments. that person is hiding, they don't need that information. it's keeping them from doing scary work... What if you turn off information for a month and work on something that might get you fired or run out of town. Do that so you can say, "I made this." You have enough information to do your work. You don't need it. Talking about stories that worked years ago at one place wouldn't work at another place because some places (people) are already carrying a bias. People who are getting paid to do what they love aren't getting paid for the work, they're really getting paid for their story. Learning how to see is what design really is. seeing the gap, and visualizing in advance of what is going to work. Be connected to the output of your work. Use that connection to learn what worked, what didn't, and how you can do it again. Do this by using your experience and immersing yourself in the interactions to learn. once you are sitting there reading your comments and crying about them, then you're probably not "seeing" anymore in a way that will help your work in a way that matters. If you do something that people will have to reference to describe something, then it will likely spread because people will use that in conversation so others will look it up. And idea that is easy to spread and talked about means you win. Get your idea to spread and the revenue will appear.

I need a clear, locking thermostat guard.

2013 05 17

I need to implement this - http://www.elasticsearch.org/2011/05/13/data-visualization-with-elasticsearch-and-protovis/

2013 05 16

An MIT econ and finance prof's very accessible class notes: http://web.mit.edu/rpindyck/www/Courses/

2013 05 13

Mathematical primers - http://jeremykun.com/primers/

what is this? The master game by ropp. 60's creative psychology. wonder if it influenced dalio. (similar to alan watts? just realizing how much 60's pop philosophy i've gotten hit with today (something on reddit re:finance what if money was no object))

2013 05 07

I want to add a new dimension to the framework. one of risk management. So much of what we do is managing risk. Source control, alarm clocks, cars that never break down, air bags, and background checks, are just a tiny portion of what we do every day to manage or mitigate risks. I hadn't thought much of risk management before i studied finance. Seeing practical examples in that context helps me understand at a fundamental level how it bleeds into daily life and how people pay so much just to minimize risk. Whether it be paying top dollar for a reputable plumber, or subscribing to linkedin so you can get a handle on someone's clout before interacting with them. How I could have missed something that is so ingrained in the human (spirit? psyche? what's a good word to put here?) for so long boggles my mind. With that said, now we have something about a generalized framework for making people care about a product/cause/issue with a side of the "machine" idea (presented below), the habit cue routine reward motif, with a heaping side of risk management. This, of course, is a half-baked idea that has been kicking around inside my head for a few months. I'm waiting for it to click so I can write something about it that makes sense. Until then...

2013 05 04

People still listen to this? Youtube la dispute, defeater, touche amore, and pianos become the teeth. skeuomorphism - http://www.themachinestarts.com/read/2012-11-how-we-started-calling-visual-metaphors-skeuomorphs-why-apple-design-debate-mess

2013 05 03

A few years ago I read The Road in one sitting and cried my contacts out at the end. My dad and I went through some shit together and he was pretty much all I had for so many years. He was the only person on this earth who I actually liked. Sometimes it was horrible but I knew that he was doing his best and so we made mistakes together and basically trudged through the buckets of shit that life threw at us. He had no idea what he was doing. I was a kid. In my mind, the only important thing was we were together. If you've read the book, you might understand why I lost it at the end.

Last night I watched the movie. I have my own son, now, and because of that, the story means something else. I'm no longer the scared child, I am the scared father who will do anything for the welfare of his child. I'll admit (sometimes too eagerly) that I have no idea what I am doing, but I am working with what I've got. I can only hope that I can be the father that my dad was to me.

I'm lucky.

2013 05 02

this might be the coolest boat on the planet

2013 04 30

2013 03 21

2013 04 18

2013 03 30

Wanting to build Bootstrap. * Install node using the os x package. * npm install * make

2013 03 26

http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit

2013 03 25

Check engine light came on. Here's what I need to DIY the OBD-II connection - http://www.e90post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=480261 The cable I should buy http://www.one-stop-electronics.com/shop/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=16

2013 03 22

How to Build Your Everything Really Really Fast

2013 03 21

my new favorite font, proxima-nova I hear people like PT Sans which might be free. Open Sans? Oxygen? from google? oh, wait, Lato is my favorite free font from Google. Roboto is better for italics and there is Roboto Condensed.

2013 03 16

https://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/

http://www.kirkreport.com/2013/03/09/trade-like-a-pawn-shop/

http://timelyportfolio.blogspot.com/2013/03/doing-things-hard-way-with-d3.html

I'm working on a type of framework that draws from Peter Thiel's cs183 lectures, Ray Dalio's Manifesto, the habit ideas I ran across a few days ago with a little game theory and a lot of economics and stats.

Peter Thiel's c183 class notes:

Class 1: The Challenge of the Future

Going 0 to 1 is much harder than going from 1 to n because people will think you're crazy. "The path from 0 to 1 might start with asking and answering three questions. First, what is valuable? Second, what can I do? And third, what is nobody else doing?" or "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" or "What valuable company is nobody building?"

Class 2: Party Like it’s 1999?

Learn about statup history then think for yourself.

Class 3: Value Systems

This is a good class to study/memorize.

"Great companies do three things. First, they create value. Second, they are lasting or permanent in a meaningful way (Great companies are durable.) Finally, they capture at least some of the value they create." This class explains some valuation equations (go back and learn them.) It speaks of competition and monopoly.

Class 4: The Last Mover Advantage

"The usual narrative is that capitalism and perfect competition are synonyms. No one is a monopoly. Firms compete and profits are competed away. But that’s a curious narrative. A better one frames capitalism and perfect competition as opposites; capitalism is about the accumulation of capital, whereas the world of perfect competition is one in which you can’t make any money. Why people tend to view capitalism and perfect competition as interchangeable is thus an interesting question that’s worth exploring from several different angles."

"Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever."

"Things in the professional world are often worst of all; at every level, people are just competing with each other to get ahead. This is tricky to talk about. We have a pervasive ideology that intense, perfect competition makes the best world. But in many ways that’s deeply problematic."

People often tell lies:

"if you have a monopoly, you probably don’t want to talk about it. ... So monopolies pretend they’re not monopolies while non-monopolies pretend they are." (so investors will invest in them)

"People also tell lies about markets. Really big markets tend to be very competitive. You don’t want to be a minnow in a giant pool. You want to be best in your class. So if you’re in a business that finds itself in a competitive situation, you may well fool yourself into thinking that your relevant market is much smaller than it actually is."

"These questions are hard, but the bigger problem is that your incentive is not to ask them at all. Rather, your incentive is to rhetorically shrink the market. If a bearish investor reminds you that 90% of restaurants fail within 2 years, you’ll come up with a story about how you’re different. You’ll spend time trying to convince people you’re the only game in town instead of seriously considering whether that’s true."

The takeaway is that it’s important to identify how these rhetorical narratives work. Non-monopolies always narrow their market. Monopolies insist they’re in a huge market. In logical operator terms, non-monopolies tell intersection stories: British food ∩ restaurant ∩ Palo Alto. Hometown hero ∩ hackers ∩ sharks. Monopolies, by contrast, tell union stories about tiny fishes in big markets. Any narrative that carries the subtext of “we’re not the monopoly the government is looking for” will do.

Market Share lies:

"There are all kinds of ways to frame markets differently. Some ways are much better than others. Asking what is the truth about a given market—and reaching as close to an objective answer as possible—is crucially important. If you’re making a mobile app, you need to determine whether your market is apps on the iPhone, of which there are several hundred thousand, or whether there’s a good way to define or create a very different, smaller market. But one must stay on guard against the sources of bias in this process."

"It’s not surprising that this is Google’s narrative. Monopolies and companies worried about being perceived as such tell a union story. Defining their market as a union of a whole bunch of markets makes them a rhetorical small fish in a big pond. In practice, the narrative sounds like this quotation from Eric Schmidt:

“The Internet is incredibly competitive, and new forms of accessing information are being utilized every day.”

The subtext is: we have to run hard to stay in the same place. We aren’t that big. We may get defeated or destroyed at any time. In this sense we’re no different than the pizzeria in downtown Palo Alto."

Cash and Competition:

"One important data point is how much cash a company has on its balance sheets. ... n a perfectly competitive world, you would have to take all that cash and reinvest it in order to stay where you are. If you’re able to grow at $30b/year, you have to question whether things are really that competitive. Consider gross margins for a moment. Gross margins are the amount of profit you get for every incremental unit in marginal revenues."

"But in perfect competition, marginal revenues equal marginal costs. So high margins for big companies suggest that two or more businesses might be combined: a core monopoly business (search, for Google), and then a bunch of other various efforts (robotic cars, TV, etc.). Cash builds up because it turns out that it doesn’t cost all that much to run the monopoly piece, and it doesn’t make sense to pump it into all the side projects. In a competitive world, you would have to be funding a lot more side projects to stay even. In a monopoly world, you should pour less into side projects, unless politics demand that the cash be spread around. Amazon currently needs to reinvest just 3% of its profits. It has to keep running to stay ahead, but it’s more easy jog than intense sprint."

How to own a market:

"For a company to own its market, it must have some combination of brand, scale cost advantages, network effects, or proprietary technology. Of these elements, brand is probably the hardest to pin down. One way to think about brand is as a classic code word for monopoly. ... Brand is a tricky concept for investors to understand and identify in advance. But what’s understood is that if you manage to build a brand, you build a monopoly."

"Scale cost advantages, network effects, and proprietary technology are more easily understood. Scale advantages come into play where there are high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Amazon has serious scale advantages in the online world. Wal-Mart enjoys them in the retail world. They get more efficient as they get bigger. There are all kinds of different network effects, but the gist of them is that the nature of a product locks people into a particular business. Similarly, there are many different versions of proprietary technology, but the key theme is that it exists where, for some reason or other, no one else can use the technology you develop."

"Apple—probably the greatest tech monopoly today—has all these things."

Creating your Market:

There are three steps to creating a truly valuable tech company. First, you want to find, create, or discover a new market. Second, you monopolize that market. Then you figure out how to expand that monopoly over time.

Choosing the right market:

Find one that's just the right size - Too small = no customers. Markets that are too big are bad - it’s hard to get a handle on them and they are usually too competitive to make money. "Creating your market has nothing to do with framing stories about intersections or unions. What is essential is to figure out the objective truth of the market.

Monopoly and Scaling:

"If there is no compelling narrative of what the market is and how it can scale, you haven’t yet found or created the right market. A plan to scale is crucial."

"The best kind of business is thus one where you can tell a compelling story about the future. The stories will all be different, but they take the same form: find a small target market, become the best in the world at serving it, take over immediately adjacent markets, widen the aperture of what you’re doing, and capture more and more. Once the operation is quite large, some combination of network effects, technology, scale advantages, or even brand should make it very hard for others to follow. That is the recipe for building valuable businesses."

Tech Frontiers:

"There is always some room to operate in existing markets. Instead of creating a new market, you could “disrupt” existing industries. But the disruptive tech story is possibly overdone. Disruptive companies tend not to succeed. "

"Much better than to disrupt is to find a frontier and go for it."

"So where are the places where technology is happening? Where is there room for the journey to continue? The frontier is a promising place, but also a very uncertain one. You can imagine a tech market where nothing is happening for a long time, things suddenly start to happen, and then it all stops. The tech frontier is temporal, not geographical. It’s when things are happening."

"We should ask ourselves whether the right time to enter a tech industry is early on, as conventional wisdom suggests. The best time to enter may be much later than that. It can’t be too late, since you still need room to do something. But you want to enter the field when you can make the last great development, after which the drawbridge goes up and you have permanent capture. You want to pick the right time, go long on tech, succeed, and then short tech."

"Google, the narrative goes, is the last search engine company; it wrought a quantum improvement in search with its shift to an algorithmic approach, and that can’t be much improved on."

"But sometimes seemingly terminal markets aren’t. Look at aerospace. SpaceX thinks it can cut space launch costs by 70-90%. That would be incredibly valuable. If nothing has happened in an industry for a long time, and you come along and dramatically improve something important, chances are that no one else will come and do that again, to you."

"The question is whether there’s a gold rush in mobile. An important subquestion is whether, given a gold rush, you’d rather be a gold digger or the guy selling shovels to gold diggers. But Google and Apple are selling the shovels."

Frontiers and People:

"One way to tell whether you’ve found a good frontier is to answer the question “Why should the 20th employee join your company?” If you have a great answer, you’re on the right track. If not, you’re not. The problem is the question is deceptively easy sounding."

So what makes for a good answer? First, let’s put the question in context. You must recognize that your indirect competition for good employees is companies like Google. So the more pointed version of the question is: “Why would the 20th engineer join your company when they could go to Google instead and get more money and prestige?”

The right answer has to be that you’re creating some sort of monopoly business. Early businesses are driven by the quality of the people involved with them. To attract the best people, you need a compelling monopoly story. To the extent you’re competing with Google for talent, you must understand that Google is a great monopoly business. You probably should not compete with them at their core monopoly business of search. But in terms of hiring, you simply can’t compete with a great monopoly business unless you have a powerful narrative that has you becoming a great monopoly business too.

Class 5: The Mechanics of Mafia

Speaks of good company culture. Cult vs not having a culture at all. "You want your people to be different in a way that gives the company a strong sense of identity and yet still dovetails with the overall mission. Having different kinds of problem-solvers on a team, for example, can make for a stronger culture."

Does your company create or fight? avoid fighting where you can, but where you must you should fight and win. "You want to pick an environment where you don’t have to fight. But you should bring along some good fighters to protect your non zero-sum people and mission, just in case."

"... with such passivity, what are you going to do about your competitors? Can you even build a sales team? If you got run over so hard by investors, how are you going to fare against the entire world?"

And then a lot of good anecdotes about hiring and building teams.

Class 6: Thiel’s Law

This is where he starts comparing the nation's founding fathers to startup founders. How a founding can last a few months or several years depending on how long technical innovation is happening. Founders should stay in charge from 0 to 1, then the executives should execute to go from 1 to n. It speaks of trust and rules; a 2x2 matrix of lowTrust/highTrust vs noRules/manyRules. in other words, how much structure to impose on your startup to keep it going well.

It says to set up a Delaware C Corp and says why.

It talks a lot about equity alignment.

It talks about fundraising.(read/memorize this.)

Then it talks about the board.

Class 7: Follow The Money

This is about VC, history of, how it works. It introduces the power distribution. Good anecdotes from PG, and others.

Class 8: The Pitch

Great advice for pitching.

Predictable things that VCs will want to know:

  1.   Macro
  a.      Are you a company or just a product/feature?
  b.     Your vision for the company
  2.  Your product(s)
  a.      What it is
  b.     What problem it solves
  c.      Why it is superior
  d.     Why it is not likely to be displaced for some time 
  3.  Team
   a.      This is the ethos part of the presentation – why are you the right people for the task and why should the VC trust you?
   b.     Are you missing anyone?
   c.      How are you recruiting/convince the 20th employee to join?
   d.     What’s your philosophy on compensation?
  4.   The Business
   a.      Market size, specifically the “addressable” market
   b.     How much of the market are you are going to capture and how
   c.      Competitive analysis/advantages
   d.     Business model
   e.      How will you generate revenue?
               i.     Sales process
               ii.     Customer acquisition cost
               iii.     Profitability
    f.       Barriers to entry/exit
  5.  The Ask
     a.      How much do you need and what will you use it for?
     b.     What’s your burn?
     c.      Valuation
  6.  Funding History/Syndication
    a.      Who else are you talking to? (This is the pathos bit)
    b.     Why do you want to work with this VC?
    c.      What do you want from the VC besides money?

Class 9: If You Build It, Will They Come?

Distribution - getting your product to customers. Introduces Customer Lifetime Value, Average Revenue per User per Month, retention rate, Average customer lifetime, and cost per customer acquisition. You want CLV > CLA. A product is never so good it sells itself. He talks about how great salespeople basically hide their pitch in conversation, are able to hit all levels at once. Advertising that is hidden typcially works best. It speaks of engineering vs sales. You must find your unique sales angle, be it via complex sales

UNFINISHED.

Class 10: After Web 2.0

Class 11: Secrets

Secrets - * monopoly vs competition (monopolies lie about being monopolies. competitors swear they're monopolies) * power law (most stuff is crap. about 2 things on the right side of the curve make up for everything else) * importance of distribution (salespeople are important)

trick is, there are a lot of secrets out there. you have to find one and execute on it. There is a framework for finding these secrets. 1. natural secrets - go out into the world and work until the universe reveals the secret. 2. people secrets - people don't tell you everything.

So, go out and figure out what people aren't telling you OR what the universe is not telling you. What people aren't telling you should give you a good idea of where to go looking for secrets. That's where you should direct your attention. Often, people will hide secrets about the universe, for ex. the power law. The idea is to ask questions to find out what is taboo, what is not talked about. Tesla succedded because they realized that cleantech was not about being clean, but more about being fashionable. So, they went for the high-end luxry market and won.

Now, what do you do wiht your secrets?

start up. don't tell secrets about people (julian assange). do share secrets about nature. tell your secrets and MOVE FAST.

Class 12: War and Peace

Decide if you want to fight or flee.

Class 13: You Are Not A Lottery Ticket

Luck vs. Skill in success. optimistic/pessimistic vs determinate/indeterminate - need to study this one more.

Class 14: Seeing Green

Of markets in clean energy and environment.

Class 15: Back to the Future

Ways to think about the future. Look at past predictions of the future and see where they went wrong. We're probably making similar predicting the future, now. Figure out where the "future" failed (nuclear, flying cars) and maybe concentrate in those areas.

Class 16: Decoding Ourselves

of biotech companies.

Class 17: Deep Thought

Of AI companies

Class 18: Founder as Victim, Founder as God

Traits of founders - one interesting thing here is finding/being the scapegoat and the politics of sacrifice (britney spears).

Class 19: Stagnation or Singularity?

talking about the future with three experts.

2013 03 12

Habits habit loop: cue, action/routine, reward

most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action

  1. where are you?
  2. what time is it?
  3. what is your emotional state? (bored, sad, happy, etc.)
  4. who else is around?
  5. what action preceded the urge?

you can get The Power of Habit at the library

2013 03 11

This guy might be my new hero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_McKay

2013 03 10

When you get an error in your eclipse project that says "a schema cannot contain two global components," have a look at the xml file that it is complaining about. I had "http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/jpa/spring-jpa.xsd" in my schema location property. It should have been "http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/jpa/spring-jpa-1.2.xsd" (Adding the version fixed the error.)

Remind me to read this http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/R-and-pandas-and-what-ive-learned-about-each.html

2013 03 08

The past 5 days included a lingering stomach virus, losing our 2 day a week babysitter, a dead battery, and a great band practice. In other words, I learned a whole lot. The most exciting part for me is I'm finally at my target weight. I haven't had any added sugar in 5 days mostly because any food-like item makes me want to ralph. BUT, last december's flu let me quit caffeine so I'm hoping this one will let me quit eating so much damn sugar. The babysitter situation is sad for everyone, but everything worked out. I got stranded with a dead car last night but a good friend came through and saved the night. This morning, another friend came through in the form of tools that let me run to the dealer to get a battery and install it. I read a ton of stories about how you had to have the computer reset if you changed the battery in my particular car. Apparently, you don't. A $200 battery is way better than a $200 battery, a tow to the shop (a shop that has the means to reset the computer), and labor. Oh, and I saved $262 at daycare because I'm a nice person and I asked for it. It's a great week, even though it isn't. I'm just glad I was able to eat something today. XOXO

2013 03 03

Charlie Munger - psychology of human misjudgement PDF here

2013 02 28

Why do I always have to go to the cafeteria on Panda Express day and get a double orange chicken? I scarf it down then immediately feel like I'm going to die. It happens every Thursday. Blech!

2013 02 27

Talking to a friend a while back about Saves the Day and he was like, "I never could get that into them because they always sounded so much like Lifetime." I was like, "who's lifetime" and he said, "Check out New Jersey's Best Dancers and you'll understand." Holy shit, he wasn't kidding.

While we're talking about that, I wonder if Ozma is pissed at Weezer for ruining everything.

Markdown + Pandocs + Latex = writing awesome looking documents. I'm digging into it, now. Also, looking into generating presentations with Markdown + Pandocs + Latex + Beamer.

2013 02 26

The trouble with having a difficult to spell last name - http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/BizNext/2013/02/st-louis-startup-juristat-wants-to.html

I would read anything titled, "I was an Encyclopedia Brown Ghost Writer."

This retina based macbook with the scaling turned all the way up (so everything is tiny) is wonderful. So much room for activities!

if you want to use pandocs to generate pdf on os x you have to install basictex and then run sudo tlmgr update --self

if you want to make a latex resume, use this guy's template and call it a day - http://www.toofishes.net/blog/why-i-do-my-resume-latex/

2013 02 25

I received a 13" macbook retina and spent a few hours setting it up. I should have been updating this with details on how to deal with things like eclipse/tomcat integration (install the j2ee bundle, then install the wtp m2e thing necessary to hook the maven project up to the server in the server list) but, I didn't. I do still have the list of software i installed:

The most annoying thing was getting eclipse working properly with maven and tomcat. I think I got everything working after an hour of fiddling. One Good Thing is I found some bugs in juristat that cropped up when trying to build it in this clean environment. While writing this I realize I have to rebuild the spelling dictionary for this machine. I'm sure there will be weeks of finding little things missing here and there.

The thing I fear the most is working in a non-case-sensitive partition. WTF Apple?!? When I bought my last mac I immediately installed a bigger, faster hard drive. I formatted it as case-sensitive. I'm going to try to leave this machine as-is from the factory. I have a feeling I'll have to bring up an ubuntu VM and do a lot of work, there. Well, a lot of testing, at least. I'm glad I have the continuous integration server working.

One part I'm happy about is this machine is going with me everywhere. I was EXTREMELY paranoid taking my other machine with me because it contained things like my budget, taxes, all my photos, scans, paperwork, and I'm sure plenty of other stuff I'd rather not be in someone else's hands. This machine is strictly going to be for work. I don't even plan to log into facebook with it. The SSD is only 256GB so it can't hold my music and pictures, anyway. Everything on this machine is in a central repo. If the machine disappears, I'll be able to recover quickly. Good thing, because I just noticed this does not have a slot for a Kensington lock. WTF Apple?!?

Things I still am on the fence about installing. Do I need an elasticsearch instance on this box? It would be nice. A full rails environment will wind up on a VM. A local SOLR would be nice, but... meh. I think the most important thing is to decide which music I want on this machine. So much to do!

2013 02 24

monsters - a work in progress. So emo!

IF you are using Hibernate and JPA and have cascade set in your relationships, you HAVE to put the cascade type in the @OneToMany annotation for JPA to see it. If you only set it in the hibernate @Cascade it will probably not see it and you will have bugs. I'm saying, do it like this:

@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.EAGER, targetEntity = Role.class, cascade={CascadeType.MERGE})

and forgo the extra @Cascade annotation if you don't need it.

I noticed the problem when JPA was essentially trying to a cascade.ALL even though I had an annotation telling it to only MERGE. I removed the hibernate annotation and added the cascade option to the JPA annotation and everything started to work. The more you know...

Something something oral history something something.

Say you put your task scheduler in your applicationContext.xml. Say you also reference that file twice in your web.xml once for the context, once for the dispatcher servlet. Well then, your scheduled tasks are going to run twice. So, don't do that. I created an applicationContext-tasks.xml and put the tasks there and passed it to my contextconfiglocation. that fixed the double tap.

2013 02 23

When I have a key->value Map, i often want to serialize it to json. Doing that gives:

{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}

Say I want to turn that into a select box. how do you do it? Here's how I did it:

        $.getJSON("/path/to/json", function(result) {
          var options = $("#options") //the id of the select box to which we'll append;
          for (var key in result) {
            if (result.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
              options.append($("<option />").val(result[key]).text(key));
            }
          } 
        });

but I thought I could do better so I did:

        $.getJSON("/path/to/json", function(result) {
            var options = $("#options");    
            $.each(result, function(key, value) {
                options.append($("<option />").val(value).text(key));
            });

But then they list was unordered, so I added some sorting:

        $.getJSON("/path/to/json", function(result) {
            var options = $("#options");    
            var keys=[];
            $.each(result, function(key, value) {
                keys.push(key);
            });
            keys.sort();
            $.each(keys, function(index, key){
                options.append($("<option />").val(result[key]).text(key));
            });
        });

Op-Shop is another term for thrift shop.

2013 02 22

Zookeeper + elastic search with the zookeeper plugin that turns off Zen Discovery. Remember, zookeeper can keep track and manage SOLR instances, as well.

I love the idea of making an open source, boilerplate kind of spring app that has all the features I think are necessary/useful for an MVP, but actually doing it is tedious!

Some pomodoro notes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_technique_software http://nodetimer.com/

I can get free access to ValueLine and Morningstar through the St. Louis County library. wow. http://www.slcl.org/research/databases-a-z/v, http://www.slcl.org/research/databases-a-z/m

2013 02 21

Worthless trivia - Peacock Alley and Club Riviera were the hot spots when my 70 year old friend was cavorting with the glitterati around St. Louis in the 1950's.

I would like to read this and implement it soon - http://centripetal.ca/blog/2011/02/07/getting-started-with-selenium-and-jenkins/.

There is a robot on another planet drilling holes into rocks right now. Humans effectively have a mine on another planet. Baby steps, of course.

The Antics Roadshow is a fun show that might have been created by Banksy.

2013 02 20

Remember the Pepsi Chill-Out?

I learned about Haim today from audioindie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ovrplcNwXo

I'm pleased with my Warby Parker experience. I bought the Crane frames in Sugar Maple. On one hand they feel like inexpensive frames. On the other hand, they're nice looking, you can't beat the price, I got them in less than a week, and I can see. The only downside is I'll have to adjust them myself so they fit my face. I wonder what people who do not have a heat gun do.

My app had a log4j.properties file in the classpath which had environment specific stuff hard coded into it (and therefore committed to mecurial.) Remember back when I pulled all the passwords and environment specific config out of the config files that lived in the webapp? I couldn't figure out how to do a similar thing with log4j.properties. So, I left it in my classpath (the WAR file.) Today I realized I can tell web.xml to look in /etc/<appname>/log4j.properties for the file. Yes, that path is hard coded, but, the /etc/<appname>/<appname>.properties file is also hard coded in applicationContext.xml. I feel relatively comfortable having just those two places that call out a directory that has to exist before the app can start up. At this point, I can't think of any place in my app that has things that shouldn't be hard-coded in the source, database, or in some arbitrary place. Everything is in /etc/<appname>/ * . Feels good, man. Added bonus is I can set up my graylog2 logger with appropriate originHost based on the machine that is running. That means I can filter by machine. Now I'll be able to easily tell what's coming from development, test, production, etc.

NEATWHEELIES.COM IS AVAILABLE!!! If only I had a reason to buy it.

2013 02 19

Three more reasons for using markdown instead of Word: grep, xargs and sed.

2013 02 18

Sand Mandala & Sisyphean - I'm writing a book/short story about a young man who spends the majority of the time re-building the runway at his family's old farm. He steals airplanes and grows a little and eventually crashes and the runway turns back into an overgrown field. If everything goes to plan, the book or story should be finished sometime around 2022.

Are reposts (re: reddit) simply A-B tests for content? Or, maybe training sets for click maximization algorithms? Even I Can Haz Cheezburger admits that data is the most important thing to drive business - There is no way they only use algorithms to lay out their pages. Why wouldn't they do some crazy optimization for content to drag people in as deep and for as long as possible. In fact, that's the only thing they should be optimizing for assuming that is what drives their revenue.

2013 02 17

drained.

ok, weird moment

I have awesome, vivid dreams and I love coincidences. I know you're not supposed to talk/write about dreams because no one cares and it makes you sound like a nut, but this is all I've got today.

I took a break from working to read "A Look Back" article about 1940's gang violence in stl. I mapped a couple of the addresses including the one mentioned here: "The Rats��� hangout was the Maxwelton Club, on St. Charles Rock Road at Pennsylvania Avenue." There's nothing much there anymore except a few cemeteries (and a children's psychiatric hospital? sad!)

An hour later a FB friend posted photos of a mausoleum she was in (it was very cool!) someone asked her where it was and she said it was at Valhalla on St. Charles Rock Road... I was like, wow, that's weird, i was just looking at a cemetary on a map, i wonder if it is the same one. I found Valhalla's website and yep, it is very close to where the Maxwelton Club used to be. Then I scrolled down and saw the Valhalla building. Sho 'nuff, I was in and around building that looked exactly like that in a dream a few months ago. I was being chased and it wasn't cool but I stumbled on this very cool looking mausoleum and kind of hid there for a while.

Fun coincidences! I really want to drive up there to see if I get chased.

done

2013 02 16

I finally shut down my underutilized-but-always-on EC2 instance. Look at me, being all frugal and whatnot.

Regarding "What'd I Say" on the 2004 soundtrack for "Ray!" I love how the instrumentation slowly falls into place rhythm-wise. The band is like, "Whatever... We'll hit a couple things here and there until he gets a groove going." They get it together just in time for Ray Charles to miss the mic when the words start. The whole intro is somehow both wrecked and perfect. "Roller, baby..." I can't find much information on this particular recording. IMDB says it is courtesy of Atlantic Records but it says nothing about where or when it was recorded. I'd link to the song but I can't find one for you.

Wait for a sunny day and find a kitchen who's sink is under a nicely lit window. Thaw frozen blueberries in a stainless steel bowl. Eat the blueberries but leave the juice. Rinse that bowl under a stream of water and watch closely. Wait for the instant where the purple juice turns blue. That's my favorite color. A white bowl works, too. But, it has to be stainless steel to be my favorite.

Holy shit, my continuous integration process is amazing. I committed a change set to github. My Jenkins server immediately started building the project. When the build finished Jenkins deployed the war to my test tomcat instance. The webapp restarted and my changes are live. I'm checking my static code analysis results and smiling like Whitney Houston. I have no idea what that means...

2013 02 15

If your csv file starts with the string, "ID," Excel thinks it should be a SYLK file and barfs a bunch of warning dialogs http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626

I'm setting aside my hatred for funk and fusion so I can learn about The Meters today. They're a 70's funk band from New Orleans. I get it, I think. There was a 5 minute bass solo which included a minute of wha wha and a few moments where he ignored the rest of the band (it is a polyrhythm! applaud goddammit!) I guess they aren't fusion at all, certainly funky, though.

locking down my workflow for editing this site

Last week, (2/8/2013) I was complaining a bit about maintaining this site in markdown. Specifically, dealing with line breaks while writing and not having a good way to spellcheck. Thanks to a friend's tweet, I learned that VIM can deal with soft wrapped lines pretty well. Check it http://alols.github.com/2012/11/07/writing-prose-with-vim/. The first thing I did is convert this page's source (markdown) to soft wrapped lines. Then I realized I don't use VI. I happen to be using eclipse as a text editor because it is always open and I like organizing the files in a "project." Today I switched from the default editor to WikiTextEditor. Not having to manually manage line breaks makes typing and editing a breeze. In fact, it makes me want to type more. Ruh-Oh!

I converted the line breaks by hand. I might (eventually) have to run a script on all the pages if editing in this mode turns out to be better. So far, it is WAY better. I love it. If you're into emacs, i just found this http://blog.avarthrel.org/blog/2011/05/lets-just-use-emacs.html. That brings up some interesting ideas, like splitting your editor to work on 2 sections of the same doc at once (eclipse does this) and having multiple files open at once (also, available in eclipse). I'm still missing a decent spell check, though. Let me try to fix that.

Fixed it!. First, download one of Kevin's word lists from here http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/. Install it in eclipse as a user dictionary (Preferences->editors->text editors->spelling). I used Kevin's scowl list by concatenating all english and american words into a single text file. I saved it to /jordan/notes/allWordsForSpelling.txt and pointed the eclipse user specified spelling list there..

There are a ton of words in there and it has helped tremendously. I didn't think I could get the spellcheck to suggest correct spellings until I noticed wikiText editor has the "quick fix" option. Hover over the word and hit cmd-1. It gives suggestions. Rad! A few other ideas if you're using eclipse. Want a word count? Do a file search, select the file, enable regex and search for + Sure, it's clunky, but it works.

I spent a few minutes looking at org-mode, but I don't have the energy to learn it. Immabe happy with a smattering of markdown files and my new, soft-break editor.

Have I mentioned how awesome pandocs and make are for generating the html and shipping the contents off to S3? If not, have a look at the github repo where all this BS lives and check out that make file. It isn't anything fancy, but it saves me a lot of time. I can publish with one command.

Finally, I set the font in the text editor to be something a little more readable. Now I'm writing comfortably inside a IDE. I have like no excuses left for not writing armp.it.

done

Google returns zero results for Compilenaut. Let's hope from now on it will return at least one.

Remind me to go here when they open this spring - http://www.strangedonuts.com/

2013 02 14

Pandas explained in ten minutes http://vimeo.com/59324550

If you're sad that wasn't a video of baby pandas, here is a bucket of sloths http://vimeo.com/59234110

$1.5M

I've been working on a thought experiment where I derive paths to get $1.5M*. Or, rather, what exactly does it take to create $1.5M of value. Take t-shirt sales, for example. (I'm making these numbers up. I'm sure they're naive. Try not to get hung up on them.) Say you make $1.30 profit on each shirt sold. Assuming a 30% tax rate, you'd have to sell 1.5 million shirts. How can you sell that many shirts? It will take herculean combination of marketing and luck no doubt, but what about manufacturing and distribution? What kind of support would you need (server capacity, call center, physical warehouse, employees) What kind of pains are bound to happen at that sort of scale? What are your quantifiable risks?

Sure, it is silly but it takes me way outside my comfort zone. That has got to be good, right?. In the future I'm going to apply that sort of framework to the ideas I think of or get pitched. A sad part of it is applying it to most of my ideas lead to the whole, "You'll make more money opening a couple of Dunkin' Donuts and it will be way easier." conclusion. I call it "The Dunkin' Donuts Test" ®

Maybe I should write a self-help how to book based on the Dunkin' Donuts Test. Could that book net me $1.5M? How long would it take to write the book? What does it take to market a $1.5M book? What are the risks involved? Take an objective look at existing book sales, publishing figures and the number of starving authors out there... What's the back of the envelope conclusion? It would be eaiser and less risky to open a few Dunkin' Donuts...

And why Dunkin' Donuts? My grandfather was a baker so it is in my blood. Sadly, I can't bake so I'd needsort of a turnkey franchise to set everything up and I'd need to hire people who can deal with mixers and whatever it takes to make food.

done

The first thread on this HN post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3816350 (which is about Gabe's argument for a single co-founder) is a nice conversation about diversifying with several, small, monthly income type projects.

The Show is the Rainbow is now Touch People and after checking his twitter feed it seems like he is a big gamer. Cool story, brah.

* - this is what I consider the lowest rung of f-you money. Enough to retire on some rocky land in the Ozarks and not do anything except maybe learn to hunt.

2013 02 13

Before this morning the only Deer Tick I've heard is off Divine Providence (they're latest album.) Hearing some things off War Elephant is a surprise. They're folk-alt-country? I had no idea. I'm sure the recent change to their sound was a deliberate move, but I like to think that through the years they've been accidentally writing these one-off songs that didn't at all fit with their sound. Then one day they were like, "let's finally record all these fuckers and put them on one album."

Last night in the State of the Union address Obama said, "Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer���s." I work on the platform that handles imaging data for the Human Connectome Project and all that FDA stuff I bitch about is for a new class of Alzheimer's drug. Our lab is managing the brain imaging data. Fun!

2013 02 12

I have no problem with The Show is the Rainbow.

Little else going on today. This FDA BS is getting me down. But, band practice is in a bit so that'll make it all better.

She walked slowly though her gait was one of a barback sliding quickly through the crowd with buckets of ice. Her walk is best described as some sort of reverse moonwalk in high heels.

Practice was better this week. I was more with it than last week. The two new songs are coming along nicely. Best joke of the night was Frank Ocean was simply channeling the spirit of Wesley Willis Sunday night at the Grammy's.

Speaking of jokes, here's a doozie I made up while brushing my teeth, "Of course i'm jealous of her ex's. They can dodge bullets." This, my friends, is why I'm often confused for a comedy genius.*

* - not true.

2013 02 11

Frank Ocean is a little rough around the edges when it comes to Grammy performances. I should have watched. Instead I was working.

I still love We Were Promised Jetpacks and then a Counting Crows song came on and I thought, "oh you..." and then i listened to it and then i realized that there is always room for these effusive songwriters like Dashboard Confessional and now, who, Mumford and Sons? What are they really doing? Playing the game. And then 15 minutes later I realize I'm still listening to Counting Crows.

Oh, and yeah, so a lot of the stuff I've been listening to relies heavily on rich reverbs and echo (braids, givers, seryn, tree ring) so that's sort of the sound now. And then some old pearl jam or this counting crows stuff comes up which relies heavily on multitap delays. Was multitap delay sort of the sound of the late 90's? I know I was using the hell out of it (even though I had no idea what I was doing and it sounded like crap)

Friday the sys admins were losing their shit. Today it is the developers who are doing a live demo in ten minutes. I'm glad it isn't me.

2013 02 10

Google API's are a tease. I know they can do what I want them to do but google imposes artificial limits that stop me just before I get a solution. I can't blame them, of course.

"Foodfight" is a terrible movie I want to see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uROQ9nplxIY

Notes from Ray Dalio's Manifesto

If you can give society what it wants you have a higher likelihood of being "successful." If you can, move forward using a process of productive adaptation (assuming you can observe the landscape as you trudge through it and all of its inevitable setbacks) in an effort to "evolve" your process in cooperation with the general path of the system's nature. Don't let your self interests be in conflict with the system because you won't succeed. Nature is testing you and it is not sympathetic. You need to step back and design a machine of the right people doing the right things. Constantly assess and improve that machine by objectively comparing outcomes with goals. If the outcomes are inconsistent with your goals, modify the machine. Include yourself as part of the machine and place yourself in the correct role. If you aren't good at that particular role, be sure to fire yourself. Again, the most important requirement is you are objective and logical at all times.

done

Download with curl and immediately untar: curl http://site/someFile.tar.gz | tar xvz

I used that trick to install elastisearch today. (these really are just my notes so I don't forget.) ./bin/elasticsearch to start it up. It is running on port 9200. Then I wrote an app to index a ton of json. hit http://localhost:9200/cases/case/search Then I installed elasticsearch-head using these instructions https://github.com/mobz/elasticsearch-head use it by hitting http://localhost:9200/plugin/head/

Elasticsearch might replace solr in our environment. However, i think elasticsearch's documentation is god awful.

2013 02 08

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade

The Gardener

I'm oddly excited about using Quickbooks. I spent two hours with an accountant this morning and it sort of changed my life (not really.) I wonder what else I could learn by hanging out with someone I normally wouldn't. For example, what could I learn in 2 hours with a tow truck driver? How about 2 hours with a funeral director, or, I don't know, an arborist?

I hang out with a gardener from timeto time and you know what? It is fascinating. One time he was showing me a book (he's a reader)and I opened it up and some sort of pressed leaf fell out and he was like, "Wow, let me have a look at that... Oh, yes, that's from a blah-blah-blah(latin) which is a rare species of blah blah (more latin) typically found in (exotic location.) I was somewhere in Clayton when I saw it. I was so excited I took a leaf."

done

And holy shit, FDA documentation is a drag but the power keeps going out and the admin guys are running around losing their minds. Today also includes lots of chocolate milk and there is a surprise party tonight. It is a good day.

Markdown is sort of fantastic

Here's the deal. If you're on a team and trying to do documentation don't use Word. Make a simple rule: Everyone writes everything in markdown and everything is committed to bitbucket or github. This goes for specs, documentation, whatever. If you need some sort of fancy font or table, provide a stylesheet or embed some html. Doing this solves a sundry of problems. (I wanted to say "sundried list of problems" but i don't know if sundried is a form of the adjective sundry and it looks like sun dried as in tomatoes. which are fan frikin' tastic by the way.) You get your versioning under control, you don't have to worry about losing anything and you never have to deal with Word destroying your formatting.

Fuck MS Word. Excel? Excel is fine. Powerpoint? Ppt is annoying (use markdown if you can.)

The only beef I have with markdown is I can't ever decide how to deal with word wrapping. I do carriage returns manually right now instead of using an editor that wraps for me. Doing that is painful when editing, and i edit a lot (I know, doesn't seem like it, right?) Maybe I have two beefs, but not with markdown per se. My editor is an IDE which barely has spell check. My mac doesn't have spell, So, well, until I do a site-wide spell check this whole thing is going to be riddled with typos. yay.

done

My toynbee tile has not survived the winter.

This http://selectadecision.info/ is a cold war era russian choose your own adventure type game.

I pulled this next thing out of my checklist doc (private) because it doesn't belong there. It belongs here:

Things to remember:

The superfuture thing comes from something I read on /r/malefashionadvice regarding a boot choice and the fact that yes, someone could pull it off, but "you'd have to be so ridiculously on point you probably wouldn't be on MFA in the first place" and then someone mentioned superfuture and I went there and kind of get it but not really.

2013 02 07

I'm running on empty.

If you're close to using all of your RAM, quit screwing around. Go out and buy some more!

Pudenda... is it a real word? I'm at work so I can't look it up.

I can't get the hearbeat task to run in my app.

Today I am... chatty.

Creating documentation for FDA regulated trials is a drag.

How many people out there get some level of enjoyment out of making a joke that is either so meta or obscure that everyone listening thinks you are serious? This is one of my favorite things. Along those lines, sometimes I am bitter about growing up with a comically gifted set of friends. Here's why. When someone makes an average joke and everyone sort of chuckles I kind of want to smash their face with bricks. The joke was painfully obvious and there were a dozen other things they could have said that would have been funnier.

Of course, I typically keep quiet because I know most of my jokes aren't that good.

This is a great D3 tutorial http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/

Mixpanel - using properties https://mixpanel.com/docs/properties-or-segments/a-tutorial-on-using-properties

2013 02 06

I should purchase parts at a discount site and take them with me when I take a car in for repair. I paid $84 for a rubber boot today. Never again.

I don't write very well anymore.

Frightened Rabbit's "Pedestrian Verse" is really good!

2013 02 05

It is impossible for me to fake my way through band practice with this new band. There aren't enough of us in the band to cover mistakes. I like that.

2013 02 04

Centralize logging (see Graylog2) is the shit. I never gave much thought to logs in the past but now that there is a way to search/filter and view all logs from all apps and servers from one dashboard, I want to use them for everything. I will spend the next few days making my log messages work for me. First thing is sort of a heartbeat that does a system check and spits it to a log. I'll be able to filter for those heartbeat messages to assess the status of my apps realtime (and historically if I need to track down an issue.)

Warby Parker!

2013 02 02

My life of late has been a grind house soundtrack of glitch punctuated by bits of progcore twee.

I am getting 2 pairs of glasses. Normal and computer.

2013 01 15

Nagios: 'taint pretty, but it gets the job done.

2013 01 12

The Chippewa boots are really nice! I busted out my vintage, made in England Doc Martens and cleaned them up. Now I have 2 pairs of boots. The docs are also very nice. I had no idea how good I had it back then. I've worn nothing but crap shoes for the past 10 years and, well, now I know the error of my ways. Also, wool socks are phenomenal. I used to only wear them snowboarding like they were only for special occasions. I asked for a few pairs for Christmas and have been wearing them ever since. Amazing!

2013 01 06

Boot Decision 2013! I wanted Wolverine 1000 Mile boots, but they were $340. Then I wanted Red Wing Iron Rangers, but they were $285. I bought Chippewa Apache Lacer's for $136.

2013 01 02

Miami Connection - http://youtu.be/VpZu69OB2KM

I moved configuration (passwords and tokens and whatnots) out of the webapp properties so I wouldn't accidentally push them to a repo. I wasn't sure the best way to do this, though. I explored using jasypt, but it seemed like overkill, and its development isn't very active. I wound up putting everything into /etc/<project>/<project>.properties on each server. I figure the server knows its own environment so it can be responsible for providing the correct settings in that properties file. I did not encrypt because 1) Each of my servers is typically responsible for one thing and 2) if someone has access to that file on one of my servers, i have big problems anyway. Sure, I should encrypt sensitive data there, but I'm saving that for a rainy day.

2012 12 19

A moment that, for me, is both terrifying and confusing.

2012 12 18

lee /l��/ Shelter from wind or weather given by a neighboring object, especially nearby land. 2. The sheltered side; the side away from the wind.

2012 12 17

We move faster if, for anything, to spend less time in it.

2012 05 05

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chingon_(band)

Here is my last attempt at blogging consistently

What is this all about?

I threw an anonymous site together in 2004 as sort of a repository of raw notes, stories, ideas and pictures. I kept my name off the site so that I could really let loose and say anything I wanted.

Four years later I realized that:

A) I didn't have anything that needed to be anonymous.
B) Few people stumbled upon the site.
C) Most who did promptly left.
D) The whole thing was damn ugly and difficult to navigate.

It was time for a change.

I took out the trash, spit shined the leftovers and did my best to turn it into a typical, self-serving, narcissistic, personal shrine to myself. Don't you just love it?

If so, be sure to hit the contact page and let me know what you think. Feel free to tell me how neat I am and how amazing and life changing you found my website. No, really, do it. Now.

Please? Seriously. Maybe we can like meet up and hang out or something. I like lunch. In fact, I eat lunch almost every day. What's that? You eat lunch, too? See, we have so much in common. I knew we'd be pals! I'm so glad you contacted me via my website.

Inspirational quote goes here...

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