Manage your energy, not your time →

Published August 15, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 15

“Manage your energy, not your time.” This is the quote that made Tony Schwartz famous. And it’s one that I believe best represents a truly efficient lifestyle in the 21st century. Yet, living “manage your energy, not your time” is incredibly hard, at least for me. It probably took me around a year to fully grasp its meaning. Since then, I’ve turned my life upside down and changed my routine dramatically.

~ Leo Widrich from, The Four Elements of Physical Energy and How To Master Them | Lifehacker

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All your base are belong to us! →

Published August 14, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 14

The rubbish and recycling bins, from the company Renew, were set up to identify and remember people’s smartphones, and thereby the movements and habits of their owners, as they walked by – kind of like how web pages monitor site traffic.

~ Lisa Vass

You are aware that you are all carrying personal, individually identifiable, tracking devices, right?

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Inflation, deflation or discontinuity? →

Published August 13, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 13

After a while, a period of stagflation is reached. Population catches up to the new resource, and job opportunities for young people become less plentiful. Wage disparity grows, with wages of the common worker lagging behind. The cost of government rises. Because of the low wages of workers, it becomes increasingly difficult to collect enough taxes from workers to pay for rising government costs. To work around these problems, use of debt grows. Needless to say, this scenario tends to end very badly.

~ Gail Tverberg from, Inflation, Deflation, or Discontinuity? | Our Finite World

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Reality based martial arts? →

Published August 12, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 12

Of course, we all think our OWN martial art system is the best, or we wouldn’t be doing it, right? That said, I always tell my own students to have a healthy respect for other martial arts for what they do, or attempt to do, if within their own context, they are doing it well. I often point out differences in how we execute a throw, for example, or a punch, comparing it to judo, aikido or karate techniques. Different, same or indifferent. Here’s why and how. I explain, discuss and then quantify and qualify. We do it this way because we are concerned with an armored or gear-protected assailant. The other guy may do it this way because it’s primarily a sport done in shorts. The roundness of an aikido throw really is good at teaching disbalancing and force redirection, more so than the shorter, simpler throw we do, which may seem more practical, but it’s basically the same. And so on.

~ Wayne Muromoto from, 70. “Reality-based” Martial Arts Not So Reality-based? – The Classic Budoka

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Tipping must die →

Published August 11, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 11  ·  

If there’s no tipping, then how will the servers be motivated to do a good job?

When you step back and think about this for a second, it’s actually kind of hilarious. The person asking this question would have a full-time job as a software developer, or lawyer, or journalist, or doctor, always working to a pay rate that was negotiated ahead of time. We would never suggest that a code jockey or surgeon would be motivated to do better work by the thought that their clients, if pleased with the service, might toss in a few extra dollars.

~ Jay Porter from, «http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-3/»

Hear! Hear! You should go read that whole series by Porter.

Then you should start talking about how we should include the cost of providing service in the price of the menu items, or include a line-item percentage service charge on the bill. Pay EVERYONE who works in the restaurant a fair, living wage.

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Network Theory applied to altitude sickness →

Published August 10, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 10

They then mapped out the correlations between the various symptoms, creating a network. An increasingly standard tool in network theory these days is cluster detection–the ability to spot parts of a network that are more strongly linked together than others.

~ «http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512986/network-theory-approach-reveals-altitude-sickness-to-be-two-different-diseases/»

Acute mountain sickness (AMS) is a common problem among visitors at high altitude, and may progress to life-threatening pulmonary and cerebral oedema in a minority of cases. … These results challenge the accepted paradigm that AMS is a single disease process and describe at least two distinct syndromes following acute ascent to high altitude. This approach to analysing symptom patterns has potential utility in other clinical syndromes.

~ [1303.6525] Network analysis reveals distinct clinical syndromes underlying acute mountain sickness

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The obstacle is the path →

Published August 9, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 9  ·  

The examples can go on forever, but the principle becomes clear: when there’s an obstacle, don’t go around it. Don’t run from it. Go into it. Work with it. Explore it. Learn how to be with it and deal with it, and you’ll have a skill for life.

And what’s more: you will no longer be limited by obstacles in your path.

~ Leo Babauta from, The Obstacle is the Path – Zen Habits Website

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It’s just a ride →

Published August 8, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 8  ·  

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly coloured, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question – is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say ‘Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.’ And we… kill those people.

~ Bill Hicks

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Organizational skills for the win →

Published August 7, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 7

When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. … [T]here’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there.

~ James Hague from, Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry

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It is use cases all the way down →

Published August 6, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 6  ·  

The center of your application is not the database. Nor is it one or more of the frameworks you may be using. The center of your application are the use cases of your application.

~ Bob Martin from, Clean Coder Blog

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