One of the most undervalued skills is the ability to set a routine and stick to it.
Modern workflow is constantly inundated by distractions which can knock us off our game. I know a lot has been written about email, how to shut it off and keep tasks and priorities aligned, but phone calls, and the raw ability to go down any rabbit hole you want to is incredibly dangerous to both getting things done and enjoying life.
Even as I tried to write the content above, I was distracted to send out an email, update my books read on shelfari and start building gift lists for Christmas. I also opened four tabs that I want to look at when I’m done with this post.
I’ve started to get much more serious about WordPress themes. For me that means making them from scratch instead of modifying someone else’s theme. Traditionally, I just purchased a template and modified it. Now I’m starting to work with good designers and working from scratch.
I love to exercise. It gives me an excellent chance to relax and preserve my overall goal of maximizing my physical strategic margin, or keeping maximum function as long as I can. (I want to be able to wrestle with my grandkids as long as I can.)
I also love data. I love to track everything and know that if I care about changing something I should probably track it. I am also becoming more aware of a tendency to focus on long term goals instead of achieving short-term success and moving on from there. For several years, I have recorded if I worked out our not and give myself a 1-5 score for the category fitness. (As I do for my wife, relationships in general, devotional living and stress.)
While I have enjoyed looking back at my monthly graphs and reports, there have been several trends I’ve noticed that have been very insightful for me. I also am motivated to meet my goals when I know I am accountable to myself and anyone (my grandkids again?) who are going to look at my data. However, one of the things I have never been able to crack is how to track my workouts. I thought about making a simple text field that I can search, but how could I see my progress over time. When I was primarily a runner, I used to make graphs showing my mileage and overall pace improvements, but how could I show improvement with the diversity of workouts that CrossFit is providing me.
When I had to list my goals, I went back to my values. In this case they are:
Don’t get hurt (learned this one from experience)
Frequency: workout every day in some way if possible (yes, diversify)
Diversity: don’t long-neglect any of the core principles: Strength, Stamina, Cardiovascular Endurance, Flexibility, Speed, Power, Agility, Accuracy, Balance and Coordination
Improvement: improve in all core principles
With this in mind. I would like to track workout’s at the most granular level, if I could do so quickly. So, in setting software requirements, I look at the questions I would want to answer. Some examples where (T) is a threshold (must do) and (O) is an objective (want to do):
(T) Have I worked out frequently this month? (=> calendar view over varying times)
(T) Am I improving? (=> need to show incremental progress; chart)
(T) What is my PR for overhead squat? (=> query that lists PRs for all workouts; make this public?)
(T) What is my last score for “Cindy”:http://www.whatiscrossfitexercise.com/wod-cindy.php? (=> that would be on PR page, so named workouts and movements would have to be in a similar query)
(T) What are my last 10 scores for Cindy (=> time series query from previous)
(O) How many Watts did I burn this week? (=> need to track Work / Time)
(O) Is my ability to do more work faster improving? (=> need to index performance)
Next, I wanted to look at the data format when I just write down my exercises:
Run 3.65 miles in 20 minutes (=> need to record, distance, time and workout name)
Cindy: 28 rounds (=> need a database of crossfit workouts preloaded)
5 rounds Cindy, 15 Squad Cleans (#145), 5 rounds Cindy in 13:48 (=> need to record reps of named workouts)
Bench 245 x 10 x 3 (=> need to record reps, weight, rounds | might not have time)
Bike 6 miles in 25 minutes (=> same requirements as running)
Climbing for 2 hours (V4+!) (=> need notes field; might not have distance or reps)
All together, I had enough to start on the database design, which I always do on paper and ended up looking like this:
In listing out the basic data, I clearly needed to track weight and distance, in addition to the time duration and quantity that the basic exercise was performed. In order to connect between a workout and a specific instance of an exercise I created a join table value named an exertion. The tricky part would be the set of characteristics required to derive power from each movement. For example, the bench press would move a distance of my arm down and up with a resistance equal to the weight on the bar. My agile strategy was to input the data and start recording what I could and then figure out how to deal with the data later when collected.
The results of my initial web application are below:
Some features I did incorporate were the ability to create an exercise on the fly when inserting data. I wanted to make the data input quick and painless. I also made the four input fields very basic, and not tailored to the exercise in question. A future iteration on this would be to disable fields that are not relevant to a particular exercise. Through using the chronic gym and rails virtual attributes, I made the input general as well, so you could type in 6:41 for a mile run time or something like 6 min and 41 seconds or even 401 seconds. I haven’t incorporated it yet, but I also would like to input the distance in meters or miles and have either one work seamlessly. In any case, this format is going to work for now. I plan to collect data for a couple months, then play with adding the ability to track progress and some basic validation on the form elements. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions how I can make this better. This might already exist, but I haven’t found it, and I want to get this to work with my overall system and will probably stick to a custom solution, so I can own my data and adapt the system over time.
In a meeting last week, I had a moment of clarity that put a question directly in front of me that I’ve been dreading to answer: How much of my heart should I put into my work and at what cost to my family and other work interests?
You see, the meeting ended abruptly at 5pm because it was time for that particular office to “lock up”, meaning that they had boundaries and were used to going home to their families. I’m used to meetings at the end of the day being extra-long because there is almost a contest in the Pentagon to see who stays the latest, and therefore works the hardest and, we might assume, cares the most, is the smartest and has the overall highest worth to society. I stretch this a bit, but only slightly. Throughout my working life there has always been a tension to put in more hours, give the most of your heart and life to the system. This seems to be a concrete way to distinguish yourself as a top-tier worker.
Part of this is because the military is a large bureaucracy where everyone is compared to their peers at a local level and the system allows for abstract feedback. But working harder always demands some form of recognition. This is not all bad. I am convinced it is a good thing to want to do good work and devote oneself to making a difference, even if there are high personal costs. Looking some of my heros off the top of my head: Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, CS Lewis, Cicero and the Apostle Paul — I don’t see a 9 to 5 life. All these individuals probably didn’t coach little league (or their equivalent). All had strange family lives and suffered terribly.
This is the start of the conundrum: how much do our heros mislead us in who we are supposed to be? I mean, the suffering of Paul and his desire to spread the Gospel were a singular focus — totally out of sync with my desire to optimize my “wellbeing” in several spheres: relational, physical, spiritual, financial and intellectual. Did Paul check the air in his tires, fund his 401(k), apply fertilizer in the spring, always remember to write thank you notes, and read challenging books, oh and did he remember that what interests his boss, should fascinate, and consume, him?
No, he lived for the Gospel. Which is what I should be doing. Now, before this devolves into a discussion of life focus and God’s will, I want to bring this back to the main point: How much of my heart goes into my work? I have two main thoughts on this.
First, we should serve our work and put our full heart into it. I don’t jog well. I kind putz around and get tired. However, I can run fast. When I really put my heart into something, I can hold around a 6/min mile pace for marathon distances and am willing to really take my effort into a pretty extreme place. The same goes for my work. I can perform, but I have to really focus and really push myself to do something hard. I feel I should be sprinting at work — giving my employer, who happens to be the US citizen the very best I can. In giving my heart to my occupation and seeking to make a difference, I leave the legacy to my family of hard work and societal contribution. In working hard, I serve my son in ways that working only 8 hours a day might never provide him.
However, I feel that I need to be grounded in the Gospel. My heart must be grounded in the Gospel. My day must start and end with devotions and prayer. My risk tolerance must be calibrated by eternal consequences and supported by my knowledge that my self worth is provided by the Gospel. My hunger, motivation and passion must be centered in the Gospel. My sole metric is the commandment of Christ: am I loving the Lord my God above all else and am I loving my neighbor as myself?
Perhaps there is a tension here, and this tension is where I feel called to be. What it means practically, is that I am here to serve: to serve my family, to serve my country and to serve my God. But! The Gospel tackles fear head on. The Gospel tells me to forget all that and to trade fear for love.
Read not the Times; read the Eternities.
Henry David Thoreau
I’ve always struggled with how I process, manage and output information. I am basically an information junk food addict. I love consuming new and shiny bits of history, philosophy or modern commentary. A teaching company course catalogue is like a smorgasbord to a junk food junkie to me, so much to sample and enjoy — if I only could learn it all. Of course this worries me. I am concerned about the shallow way people interact with their information and I fear I’m doing the same shallow thing, albeit with an academic patina. And exactly why do I want knowledge? To what end am I aiming? This need for creative activity and contemplation is why I feel called to write and why you are reading these words. CS Lewis said we read to know we are not alone, I think he wrote to know he was not alone — and I’m doing the same. I want to flush out a set of personal information processing principles at some point resulting in a information processing manifesto. Here is my attempt to bootstrap that process. I’m sure wiser minds have figured this out and I would love to see this worked out much better.
I will season my information processing with a careful balance of new data, thinking/processing and passing on.
This means practically:
I will always write a review of each book
Just as I close my mouth when I’ve eaten too much of a food or am not hungry, I will develop the habit of listening to my mind tell me when I’ve had too much. I will therefore not motor through a bunch of pages just to finish the book or say I’ve read something.
Quality, not quantity. I will try to be more selective in what I read so that I’m better at stopping and thinking about content.
Also,
I want to select the material that I want to change me.
This means that I want to use the selectivity of history to filter down what I read, and:
I will chose classics over more recent literature
I will not be an early adopter, I want to let time/reviews select down information
I will quickly reject a book that doesn’t have the content I’m interested in. Life is too short to spend my time reading a crappy book.
There is very little reason to read or watch current news. Why be ‘ahead’ of the news cycle? I don’t live in a bubble, I can get the news I need from others (Tim Ferris’ low information diet.) and very, very little news is relevant to our lives. It is the trends that matter: the signal from the noise, and those are available from good periodicals like the economist or technology review — even better, a modern history course or good book that takes the long view.
One of the worst things to happen, is to let the internet malaise suck time out of your day — the little rss checking, the scan of the headlines, the re-entry into facebook to assuage your sense of loneliness — anything to convince you that you are relevant, informed and loved. All these are fake substitutes for the real things and the result of a global trade that is being made for novelty and convenience over substance and depth. Welcome to our ersatz information junk food world — it is here to match our current food distribution system. Some remaining questions:
Counterpoint. Should we be reading other perspectives? Should we make efforts to build friendships and hear other points of view? Yeah, of course we should but how much? Since “Diversity” is a current virtue, how much should we try to read things we disagree with? What limits are there? For example, morally offensive or certain ‘spritualy dark’ material would be off limits for me.
Impressing others. How do we avoid (or do we embrace?) the real fact that a set of books read are modern trophies. I take great pride in being ‘well read’ and am concerned that there is a tension between being both ‘well read’ and ‘well changed’ by what one is reading. However, can the desire to impress others be harnessed for good? For one, sharing what I’m reading is a great way to share and learn what the other good books are. Can this be done without the desire to impress others about the book you are reading? A personal litmus test for me is to catch myself reading books that I have no interest in, but I want to say I’ve read.
At what level does noise become signal? CNN headline news might be pretty noisy, but I feel a one week economist article is more filtered. Is the Iliad then, much more profound because it distills a long period of wisdom, even though it missed a huge amount of history and technology? Should we concerned about being relevant? I am totally opposed to relevance as a goal, but not exactly sure why.
Devotional. Does it really make sense to process other information than the Bible for the modern Christian? Given the very limited time any of us have, wouldn’t we be better off memorizing or diving deeper into scripture. Why is there so much extra-biblical Christian literature and is that a good thing?
I need to flush this out, but these are some initial thoughts. I would love to get some comments and develop this further. Please comment below and I promise a much more well thought out piece on this.
First I had to backup my database from Heroku — so I created the database in PostGresSQL.
heroku pgbackups:capture
curl -o latest.dump `heroku pgbackups:url`
pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -d booher_blog latest.dump
Armed with that and the handy Induction I then needed to get my data into a format easily imported by WordPress. There is probably a standard way to do this, but I didn’t have time to find the efficient way. The first place I did look was the wordpress import data page, which led me to the right plugins. Then I was planning on running a command like:
COPY products_273 TO '/tmp/products_199.csv' DELIMITER ',' CSV HEADER;
It turns out that Induction has a great export tool to easily get me a new CSV file, but I had to make a new join table:
CREATE TABLE for_wp2 AS SELECT pages.title, page_parts.content, page_parts.name, pages.updated_at FROM pages, page_parts WHERE page_parts.page_id = pages.id;
Then I imported this via the wordpress-importer plugin. I used radiant “type” as a category and am going for the quick and dirty solution and figured I can manually copy over assets as opposed to creating a wget script to upload them. Wish there were an automated tool for this, but a little database knowledge is all that’s required.
CrossFit is still a new and growing sport which is misunderstood by many to be a place only for the elite. Rich Froning brakes down the barriers between the most elite tier of the sport and the most casual reader as he lays out his life and worldview in an amazingly fast and engaging read. His book has three main themes constantly woven together in an interesting narrative: (1) explaining CrossFit, (2) telling us about his life and (3) sharing with us insights about his faith and philosophy.
It is rare to find such an honest and optimistic account from someone with so much fame and talent. While his readership will most strongly come from CrossFit fans, he packs some great lessons for all of us that have broad application well beyond CrossFit. Like his fitness training regimen, he doesn’t hold back or shy away from the key principles that guide his actions and frame his world. All this results in an intimate portrait of his strengths, weaknesses and casual thoughts. Part of what makes this narrative so engaging is the casual style he engages you with as he takes you through the CrossFit victories and defeats that define his nascent career. You have to keep reminding yourself that he is winning first place (consistently now) among roughly 100,000 athletes. While he takes you into the action, you are motivated by the thought that you too could compete at his level if you just were willing to work hard and get your mental house in order. Unfortunately, reality reminds you that Rich has something very rare that remains incredible from a fitness perspective. You are aware of the power of context in his life — he gives due credit to his friends and family for providing rare and outstanding counsel, love and wisdom.
Out of the roughly 30 books I’ve read this year, I have to say I’ve really enjoyed reading this one the most — both my wife and I read it in about a day as we fought for the book. Most modern biography seems to make the subject more inaccessible as details of their life unfold. Here, Rich has done the opposite, by the end of the book you know that you would be instantly comfortable around him and are inspired to make your life look a little more like his.
CS Lewis said we read to know that we are not alone. I’ve always read to find out how the world works primarily so that when I’m with others, I can clarify the world’s interactions. This is probably because I know that you have to understand a system to succeed inside and, as a parent of four children, I’m also committed to making the future as good as possible for them, in addition to loving my Creator and wanting to impact and preserve the world for Him. In short, I’m more motivated than lonely, though I am a little of both at different times. Whatever the reason, I’ve got a deep fascination with finding out how the world works and building an accurate philosophy of history. This book seemed to fit that bill and it does deliver the author’s opinion, cynical and misguided as it may be.
Clearly, George Packer is a well established member of the anti-establishment and that view determines the polarization of his pen as he sketches a series of lives and their experiences with what he terms the unwinding. He defines the unwinding as the change in American society present in the last 40 years as we have transitioned from a manufacturing-based and more localized economy to our present state. The author describes this world for us as a place where the institutions of government have failed us because they have been taken over by special interests and the only guardians of hope are the iconoclast organizers, journalists and activists determined to fight the system. However, any time these activists get to work, they better not get big because they risk becoming part of the establishment, which creates a strange tension for me: while you can’t trust any private institution to act responsibly, he seems to have a blind trust in the government to regulate and level the playing field. Through a set of engaging and short biographical vignettes, he builds the case for increased regulation to protect the public from our failed institutions. He puts a name and a history on what otherwise might be another name who loses their home. He portrays hapless families used by the big banks to take away their home, and to be content there, but to take away their dignity, their health and even their sanity in an insatiable act of greed. His message is clear — a disease has taken over our country and it is in general the establishment and in particular republican party (wholly owned by big business) and the democrats of the permanent political class. But isn’t he missing something here? Aren’t we all culpable when it comes to greed? I know it is obvious, but I can’t escape the fact that no one was forced to sign any of the mortgage papers that provided the legal justification to reclaim their homes after they repeatedly failed to make payments.
While he exalts the value of the individual against the institution, even his heroes come off a bit weak. Dean Price, Tammy and Peter Theil all get their platform while some are put before us for outright scorn or tabloid entertainment: Breitbart, Gingrich, and Oprah. Yes, all the biographies are interesting, but besides their entertainment value many failed to fall into the larger narrative in any meaningful way.
Despite my overall disagreement with his diagnosis, I greatly enjoyed this read and recommend it to my friends. He also exposes you to inside the system and does give some very interesting perspectives. The way he tells it in biographical sketches made the book very compelling and did teach me a lot about the world and the way he set up his framework forced me to ask some very interesting questions related to how I think the world fits together.
In the end, was left motivated by the book to do something. Not just motivated to be part of the solution, but I was committed to not be at the mercy of legal and banking systems. Most of all I want to be full in my humanity. I want to be an individual empowered by the ability to have freedom of action and freedom to be and I want to be part of the world that empowers individuals to do the same.
I have always believed in compensating for my lack of experience through leveraging my modeling background. With the right tools, I can hone my intuition and help my lack of experience through careful planning. I also need tools to communicate to my family, friends and any contractors my exact plans. In the past I had built small 3d sections of my yard through setting up a laser level on a high point and breaking my yard into a grid and carefully measuring with a level. The results were a 3d point cloud that I wrangled into (formerly) Google SketchUp.
My latest plans call for a shed and potentially a kitchen and house expansion. This requires a full 3d model of my entire yard and I don’t have anything close to the time required to build separate grids and compile them into a patchwork. Additionally, a key principle of mine is to match the fidelity required and all I needed was a rough sandbox for my yard — for the purposes of design only. This means I could be up to 5-10 off in elevation and still get what I want.
Two years ago, I purchased the GIS data for Alexandria, and through Matlab mapping toolbox I was able to pull up the following contours of my yard.
I couldn’t think of any immediate way to get these lines into dxf or some vector format readable by SketchUp, but I was able to retrace the lines easily enough (2 hours of work, but I wanted clean splines anyway) when I combined the 2′ contour data with the following survey of my house.
The problem was that it produced a terrible approximation that didn’t look like my yard. I ended up trying to approximate the yard through some basic shapes, but I ended up with this mess.
The next try was an attempt to get the fidelity right and rely on intuition. I took a hose out and tried to keep it flat. I learned that the city plot was a lot more accurate than I originally thought. Oh well, but now I had a better model to work with. I used Autodesk Sketch on the ipad and made up the contours with my finger. Than I scanned them into visio to get some good splines.
Here is the result:
With some rough pulling, I have something much closer to what I’m expecting:
All together this gave me exactly what I wanted, a solid 3d model that enabled me to play with my yard and start planning my shed.
