Business, Photography, Software, Life

2010.002 Solving the Rubik’s Cube
Originally uploaded by photojot

I’ve always wanted to learn how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, and today I did. I wrote down the solution algorithms in an attempt to commit them to memory. The solution comes from a WiiWare game by the name of Rubik’s Puzzle Galaxy: RUSH. I’m through 33/66 of the regular game puzzles … it was well worth the money.

2010.001 New Year’s Eve FREAKOUT
Originally uploaded by photojot

My birthday is December 31st. When I was little, I disliked my birthday due to the close proximity to Christmas. Less gifts. Now, I realize, it’s awesome. There is always a rockin’ party happening on my birthday.

About a year ago I decided to stop sitting at home for the coming of the New Year and start doing something awesome. A year ago it was driving to Athens, GA for two continuous nights of Of Montreal at the 40 Watt Club. This year, a drive to Oklahoma City, OK for the Flaming Lips New Year’s Eve FREAKOUT. Not sure what’s in store for next year, but I’m certainly looking forward to it — the past two years have been awesome.

Also, as a reminder to myself mostly, I really need to get to a Flaming Lips concert. This was my first time to see them, and I can’t wait to see a normal show.

After coming home from a week-long California trip, one of the days comprising of a ten-and-a-half hour hike in Yosemite National Park, I took a vow to hike as many local Texas trails as possible. The task fulfills several needs: exercise, exploration and discovery, and subjects to explore for photography. Tonight I set-out on the first hike with my photo bag packed with camera body, lenses and tripod, and plenty of water. The L.B. Houston Nature Trail.

In 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Dallas, Fort Worth: Includes Tarrant, Collin and Denton Counties, Joanie Sanchez describes the L.B. Houston Nature Trail as a “perfect example of how city dwellers craving the outdoors can turn an otherwise unremarkable location into a happening weekend spot.” After hiking the trail this afternoon, I can agree.

Setting out around 18:45, I noticed a few cyclists lining the parking lot. The trail is maintained by DORBA (Dallas Off-Road Bicycle Association) and is really more of a trail for cyclists than it is for hikers. This is the only major downside of the trail: you must watch for cyclists.

So what can you expect? I took a few snapshots with my iPhone to illustrate.

To view the complete gallery, check out the slideshow at Flickr.

Unfortunately for me, the guidebook fails to mention that there are a myriad of other trails other than the one specifically described. Instead of taking a left once back on the wide grassy lane after coming out of the woods, I took a right, continuing on the main trail. This led to an additional one and a half hours of hiking on top of the hour I had originally expected.

My wife eventually called wondering where I was, but mostly to tell me she was hungry and wanted something to eat. With the ever darkening sky, I sped up my pace, only to be confronted with darkness much too great for my eyes to handle. I had a flashlight on me, and used it to light my way back to the trailhead.

After finding my way back to the wide grassy lane, flashlight shining on the path before me, I see a car pull into the parking lot. I’m thinking, “great, possible trouble.” It’s nighttime, but the moon is bright enough to light my way. I turn off the flashlight to make it less noticeable as to where I am just in case. The car parks and the headlights are killed. I make my way to the car.

Upon arriving, I notice a man walking on the other side of his car. All I can make out is the glow of a burning cigarette. I smell the cigarette smoke amongst a strong scent of cologne. The car looks new; well maintained. The man says nothing; I say nothing. I check my tires with my light before entering the car and heading out.

Nothing happened of course, but the situation could have ended differently. I wasn’t worried, especially since I would have been much more freaked out by a guy coming out of the woods in the dark rather than some dude smoking a cigarette in a parking lot.

In summary, the hike was nice. Flat and extremely easy, I hope to find something more challenging after enjoying the mountains of Yosemite a week prior. In any case, it should be fun exploring Texas trails while finding subjects to photograph in the quest of fine art photography.

First things first: I became tired of writing semi-daily summaries on books I’ve been reading. If you care to look back, I didn’t get very far. The reason? I just didn’t see the point. They weren’t helpful. I’m more interested in discussing the main idea or the more interesting aspects of each book. My next strategy is to write about those. Coming up:

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
• The Dip by Seth Godin
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun
• The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
• I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

Lot’s of books. I’ve read most within that list already, I just haven’t gotten around to writing about my thoughts for each semi-eloquently. It’s all scribbles and mind-maps in my Moleskine at this point.

Otherwise, I’ve been working on software development skills, learning Vim once and for all (switching from TextMate), and learning Clojure for a rewrite and significant enhancement of integration software currently written in Ruby.

And once my system is fixed and everything organized once again, I should have many, many photography updates as well. This excites me …

This is part nine of my time with 10 Days to Faster Reading, a book on the Personal MBA Quick Start reading list. To read all posts related to this book, see 10 Days to Faster Reading on JustAJot.

Day 9, Reading on a Technical Track

Technical reading. Technical material is material “with unfamiliar vocabulary or terminology, numbers or statistics you must know, or completely new information.” Day 9 of 10 Days to Faster Reading teaches us how to better read technical material.

The explained suggestions include:

• Pre-view
• Become familiar with unfamiliar terms
• Identify your purpose and responsbility
• Look for 5W’s and H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How)
• Modify a faster reading strategy
• Re-view

The book’s content is becoming a review of everything previously discussed, with a few little helpful hints thrown in here and there. On to the tool of the day.

The tool of the day is referred to as “the thumb push.” The thumb push is very similar to the white card method discussed in day 1, but using your fist instead of a white card. I’ll leave it up to you to figure it out, and if for some crazy reason you can’t, buy the book! Or just buy it anyway, it’s worth it if you want to improve your reading skills.

In Ramit Sethi’s personal finance book entitled I Will Teach You to Be Rich, he discusses the importance of keeping track of customer support call information. I’ve been doing this for years in a web-application called Backpack. Great idea, great tool.

The mere thought of tracking customer support call information might be considered anal-retentive to many. But, truth is, having that information available is incredibly powerful. When a customer rep tells you “we don’t have a record of you ever asking us to remove that late fee, and no, we can no longer remove it because it’s been 30 days since the charge was incurred,” being able to refer back to previous calls, dates, times, names of reps, is POWERFUL stuff. Don’t be surprised if they immediately back off and start playing nicely — that’s exactly what will happen.

Of course you could use pen and paper to record this information, but the great thing about Backpack is that it’s available any time, from any computer with internet access, anywhere in the world. Keeping track of more than just customer support call information is a great idea too (some of those I’ll be discussing in later posts).

My strategy for keeping track of customer support call information is to keep it all in one Backpack page. I’ve created a Backpack page named “Call Logs” and then created a note for every company whose support call information I want to track. Within the note, I use the following bit of marked-up text as a table header:

|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|

When creating a new entry in reference to a call, it might look something like this:

|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|

And the whole note, after several entries, might look something like this:

|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|
|2008.07.23|4pm|Allison|123|Asked to remove late fee (I forgot to pay), they removed, offer one a year|
|2008.08.15|2pm|Steven|---|Noticed that late fee was never removed, reluctant to remove at first, but after discussing details of July 23rd call with Steven, he finally noticed the call in the system and happily removed the late fee, apologizing for the mistake|
|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|

The end result looks much better:

Backpack is a great tool, and incredibly useful for staying organized and keeping track of all sorts of things. Try it out!

Read more about my idea for Name Your Dream Assignment and please vote for me!

This is part eight of my time with 10 Days to Faster Reading, a book on the Personal MBA Quick Start reading list. To read all posts related to this book, see 10 Days to Faster Reading on JustAJot.

Day 8, Fine-Tuning Your Reading Speed

Knowing your purpose (Day 3) and applying pre-viewing (Day 5) are the key factors for determining your overdrive speeds: skimming, scanning, or skipping.

What factors affect your reading speed? There are several, all explained in Day 8 of 10 Days to Faster Reading:

• purpose and responsibility
• pre-viewing
• background knowledge
• noise level
• distractions and interruptions
• time factor
• time of day
• physical condition
• using a speed technique
• location
• temperature and lighting
• interest
• column width and print size
• author’s style

The idea is to “take as much control over your reading material, reading time, and physical environment as possible to make your reading experience as efficient and as effective as possible.” Basically, if you really want to learn something, it’s probably not smart to read while the kids are fighting over who gets to play what video game, while the dogs are barking at the kids acting all kinds of crazy, and while your significant other is in the room not doing anything about it. Or if your single without all of the above wonderfulness, don’t read and expect to learn much while the TV is on your favorite show and you’re about to fall asleep.

Read in the best conditions and your experience will be as efficient and as effective as possible.

Three reading techniques (or “not reading” techniques) will help speed you along: skimming, scanning, and skipping. Day 8 describes each of these techniques in detail and provides exercises for the skimming and scanning techniques. Abby Marks-Beale could have included an exercise for skipping, but chances are you’ll skip it.

Use skimming when you’re looking for the main idea. Use scanning when you’re looking for something specific. Use skipping when the material is familiar or irrelevant.

The absolute best part of this chapter is the following:

1. Always identify your purpose for reading. Remember that without knowing why you are on the road, you waste time, get lost, and become frustrated.
2. Pre-view everything you read. Pre-viewing gives you the background knowledge to decide whether the reading is worth your time and helps you refine your purpose.
3. Overcome your fear of missing material. There is more than enough reading material to last a lifetime and your job is to q-u-i-c-k-l-y find what is mot valuable to you.

I have a good reason for constantly referring to the ideas of defining a purpose and pre-viewing everything you read: it helps! Since I began to seriously study this book, I’ve recognized the good things and bad things about my reading technique. I’ve always been good at skimming, scanning, and skipping, but as for defining a purpose and pre-viewing? Nope!

I’ve been making a conscious effort to define a purpose and pre-view everything I read. It helps tremendously. I still haven’t fully overcome my fear of missing material, but I’m working on it.

The tool of the day is referred to as the “finger snake.” This one works best on narrow-columned material sitting on a flat surface. Place your index finger (either one) in the center of the column under the first line of text. Move your finger down the column like a snake, in a smooth, continuous motion. The goal is to learn to see and read more than one line at a time.

This is part seven of my time with 10 Days to Faster Reading, a book on the Personal MBA Quick Start reading list. To read all posts related to this book, see 10 Days to Faster Reading on JustAJot.

Day 7, Reducing the Pileup

Have a lot to read and feel like you’re never going to be able to get through it all? That’s what Day 7 of 10 Days to Faster Reading is all about. The chapter discusses causes and solutions to your ever-growing stack of material you have yet to read.

Several causes contribute to your reading pileup: procrastination, feeling the need to read and remember everything, and personal/professional development requirements. Procrastination is a tough one, and I’m going to give you a few suggestions from the book that may help. Reading and remembering everything is impractical, and I’ll give you hints as to why. And personal/professional development? That may be the most important material you can read.

Helping to solve procrastination involves cutting out the unimportant. What is your purpose for reading specific pieces of material? If you can’t define a valid purpose, if the material isn’t of much importance to you, then you simply don’t need to read it. Unsubscribe to all publications (both regular and electronic mail) that you don’t have a good reason to read (see: inbox zero). Toss any unnecessary reading clutter.

Another technique for limiting the amount of material you have to read, and thus helping your procrastination toward reading, is to pre-view everything you read. Pre-viewing will not only give you the big picture of the material, but it will also allow you to decide if it’s worth spending more time in a detailed read. If it’s not, toss it aside and move on to something else.

The main point here is to read selectively. Think a bit before you dive into material. Do you really need to read it? Is it going to benefit your life in any way? If you can’t answer yes, don’t read.

When choosing to read selectively, you might feel an increased urge to remember everything you read. After all, if you’re being more choosy about what you put into your mind, you might as well remember it all. But, this simply isn’t practical. You don’t need to remember everything and you shouldn’t waste your time trying. Remember only what you must remember — you must have a purpose for doing so.

There is an interesting exercise in this book that I’ve completed previously — one in which I highly recommend. If you don’t know where your time is going throughout the week, keep a detailed log of your activities. 7 days. 24 hours. 15 minute increments. Analyze the log at the end of the week and find more time to be productive and to read the most important reading material of all: personal and professional development.

The tool of the day is referred to as the “open hand wiggle.” With the material flat on a reading surface, open either hand with your fingers extended outward, palm facing the page. Center your middle finger in the middle of the column and move your hand down the page in an S-shape.

I’m not really digging the open hand wiggle. I still prefer the two finger pull discussed in day 4 and the white card method discussed in day 1. Whatever pacer tool works best for you, the most important thing is that you use it! Using a pacer helps you stay focused while reading, thus increasing speed and comprehension.

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