I’ve been wanting to write a proper post on “crab mentality” ever since I noticed that my post on Ako Mismo unexpectedly got into the first few pages of Google’s search results, but I didn’t feel like writing about something so trivial.
Unfortunately, some idiot tried to use that term as a rebuttal in a Facebook hate group that I passed by earlier today and it looks like it’s a good time to share my thoughts about that Filipino derogatory term.
I’m now selling books to help cover for shipping expenses spread hard to find knowledge to people thirsty for information. More information here.
For some odd reason, I missed this little gem in last year’s Notable CD-R King Items.
It’s a 64GB solid-state drive for only PhP 5,800.
This will probably be the last in the series unless I figure out what to write for Training.
I’m sure many of you have resolved to “correct” their diets this year, either by cutting down on some types of food or by eating more of “healthy” food. Unfortunately, unless you have an unusually high degree of discipline, you’ll find out that these diet resolutions are impossible to follow.
The key point here is that one’s eating habits, like talents, are rooted to our past. Our experiences in our childhood subconsciously affects what and how we eat. Unless we learn the reasons behind our eating habits, we’ll eventually revert back to them a few weeks or months into a new diet plan.
For example, I was born into a poor family so I had been trained from a young age not to waste any food on the dinner table. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), our family became less and less poor as the years went by and the food on the dinner table also increased. My problem of eating more than I need became worse when I started working because of the free dinners and Frappuccinos the company gave us whenever we went on OTs.
After some thinking, I figured out a simple way of dealing with this problem: avoid free food. Having little free food means I don’t gorge a lot. When I did my fitness regimen four years ago, I didn’t eat at home except on Sundays. I also limited myself to salt crackers when passing by the company pantry (which is stocked with free snacks). Limiting myself to paid food also allowed me to limit the portions of food that I eat every meal, as opposed to the virtual all-you-can-eat meals at the dinner table.
Another aspect of my poor past allowed me to pull this off with relative ease: I can get sated regardless of how little I eat as long as I clean up my plate. It’s psychological, yes, but if I didn’t have this, I probably would have had to use other tricks to make me feel full easier on every meal.
So before you decide to change your eating habits, take time to look back and see what are the things that influenced how you eat today. You might be surprised that some of your worst eating habits could easily be turned off (e.g. you eat ice cream often because as a kid you thought it was the greatest thing ever, but nowadays it’s just meh) and that you could steer yourself to a healthier lifestyle with just a few changes (like my example above).
You know the drill.
It would be a typical New Year’s resolution for developers to learn a new programming language this year. But seriously, what’s the point of learning C# when you’re a Java developer (or vice versa)?
What you should be striving for are programming languages that are orthogonal to your current skill set. If you’re an enterprise developer used to statically typed OO programming languages, try dynamic languages like Python and Ruby. If you’re already using dynamic languages, try your hands on functional programming like Erlang and Scala. Same goes for platforms: web developers might want try programming in RIAs.
The point here isn’t to add bullet points to your resume, but to have different ways of looking at problems, like adding new tools to a toolbox. For example, had I not been aware of the basics of functional programming, I might have tried to force traditional Java-like synchronization techniques in my Google Wave gadgets instead of the more elegant FP approach.
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Just a short plugging:
Rapid Development‘s Classic Mistakes (in software development) was a real eye-opener for me when I read it four years ago. Even though it was written almost a decade ago, a lot of the mistakes listed there were still present in my company.
To keep the list up to date, Construx (Steve McConnell’s company) is now holding the Classic Mistakes survey for 2010. Help update the study by taking the survey here.
A simple tip to start the first work week.
Everyone has different motivations in the workplace. Some are there for the money. Some are there for the titles and recognition. Some are there for the sense of achievement that comes with closing a deal or finishing a project. Some are there for the learning experience to prepare them for their next job.
It is a common mistake when dealing with co-workers to think that what motivates them is the same as what motivates us. You can’t bait fish with cake, nor can you entice people with worms.
So the next time you need to ask something from your subordinates, or the next time you need to convince your boss to do something, put things in that person’s perspective instead of your own. If you can’t, make an effort to find out more about those persons in order to make it putting yourselves in their shoes easier.
Edit the config/environment.rb and add the following:
config.logger = Logger.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']}.log", 5, 10*1024*1024)
Where the 2nd and 3rd parameters are defined here.
It’s a Sunday so we might as well do some cleaning.
Longtime Windows users should already be familiar with this app. WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) provides a treemap view of your hard drives, making it easier to find out which files or folders are taking too much space.
This is a Windows-only utility, but alternatives are available for other OSs. JDiskReport runs on any computer that runs Java. Mac users can also use Disk Inventory X, while Unix/Linux users should be comfortable with just using du.
This one’s going to be a bit harder than the previous post.
It is common to see people living beyond their means just because they aren’t aware that they’re earning less than they’re spending. You don’t need to read books to know that the obvious solution to this problem is to be aware of one’s financial situation.
However, personal wealth is more than just your paycheck and bills. In order to paint a better picture of your financial situation, you must track down other aspects of your finances and your life.
For this tip, I’ll be asking you to take note of the following for the next month:
Your passive income.
This is the money you’re getting in a month that doesn’t require any work. The simplest example would be collecting rental fees for a house that you leased to other people. Other examples would be interest on bonds, valuation increases in stocks, and profit from businesses you’ve invested in.
If you’re a normal twenty-something professional, this should be zero.
(Spoiler: financially independent people have a passive income higher than their expenses.)
Your wealth.
To simplify things, just ignore your “assets” and just focus on your wallet and your bank accounts at the end of this month.
Your current wealth should be the sum of the money in your wallet and all of your bank accounts (credit limit not included since it’s not real money) minus all of your debts. Credit card balance counts as debt and should be subtracted from the total unless it’s on a 0% monthly installment (then it should be counted as part of “expenses” below). Also, if someone owes you a substantial amount of money, add this to your wealth.
The normal value for a twenty-something professional would be at most at the low 5 digits (Philippine Pesos) to around negative 5 digits.
Your income.
This should be easy. Just get your paycheck and take note of your gross income.
The time you spend for your income.
This is a key point from the book Your Money or Your Life. The obvious example would be to compare a person earning PhP 5,000.00 for 40 hours of work to a person earning PhP 2,000.00 for 10 hours of work. Even if the two are set in the same time span (say, a week), the latter is more appealing because it’s 200 pesos/hr compared to 125.
The not-so-obvious way of thinking stated in the book is to take into account the other hours you spend for the sake of work. There’s commuting. There’s the hours you spend dressing up for work or shopping for work clothes. There’s the work-related meals. There’s the “decompression entertainment” and vacations to keep you sane. There’s the visits to the doctor due to work related stress.
It won’t be surprising to find out that a person who works 40 hours a week spends another 30 hours a week on the average to support his job.
So for this step, track down how many hours you’ve spent this month as a side effect of your job.
Your expenses.
Here’s the hard part:
Track down and itemize every expense you make down to the peso.
I would suggest you go low-tech for this one, using a small notebook or hipster PDA then transferring it to a simple spreadsheet instead of being tempted to find an app for your expense tracking. The problem with the latter is that their classification systems are usually inflexible. You’ll have more freedom classifying your expenses when you do it manually.
Yes, it’s annoying and yes, it’s easy to fall off the habit after a few days. However, knowing your financial situation depends on how accurate you track down your expenses. This is the only way you’ll see if you’re spending too much on certain things like food and clothes.
This process might also cause some feelings of guilt, especially if you notice that you are spending too much on stuff like food and clothes. Don’t feel guilty about your expenses (yet). You’ll just fall into the same trap as binge eaters who feel that they need to compensate for their overeating but just end up in a worse condition in the long run. At this point, just spend as you would spend normally.
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Next month, I’ll write a follow-up post to discuss what to do with those numbers.
To mark the start of the new year, I’ll be posting simple suggestions to improve your life this year for each of the major categories in this blog.
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(This, of course, assumes that your main browser is Firefox.)
My Weekly Browsing Schedule is a Firefox extension that automatically opens websites according to the schedule you provide it. Setting this up on your browser can boost your productivity in two ways:
1. It saves you the burden of manually going through your bookmarks.
People normally use bookmarks to open regularly visited websites at certain times in a day. They open mail, news, and social networking sites at the start of the day and at regular intervals throughout the day. Some sites like webcomics and stock market news only need to be visited once a day. Other sites require less visiting frequency, maybe just once or twice a week.
The problem with the bookmark approach is that your browsing efficiency is dependent on whether you’re disciplined enough to develop a good browsing habit e.g. you don’t visit certain sites too often (see the next reason below) and you don’t forget to go to the rarely visited sites.
My Weekly Browsing Schedule can help resolve that problem. You can define which sites open at startup. You can define which sites open at certain hours and the days of the week. You can even tell the extension to catch up with certain sites in case the browser wasn’t open when they were scheduled.
2. It helps cut down on distractions.
When you’re working and have internet access, it can be tempting to check your mail, your social networking sites, and news sites once in a while to keep up with things.
Studies show that this habit can kill your productivity. Don’t believe them? Install ManicTime and see for yourself how many hours a day you waste on those sites.
The most common suggestion to deal with this problem is to learn to “batch” these sites at certain times (I personally use 4 hour intervals). Now while I’ve written against batching previously, the scenario is different in this case because of the conversational nature of e-mail and social networking sites. The more you visit and participate in these sites, the more you’re compelled to post new stuff and initiate conversations.
When you limit yourself to certain times during the day, you get more work done while still keeping up with the updates in your social network (preventing you from becoming a soulless zombie/corporate slave). The extension can help you with this, though you’ll still have to learn to close the sites when you’re done to keep yourself from refreshing/checking on them.
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The downside to this extension is that the UI is clunky at the moment. Setting up a schedule will eat up a bit of your time, especially if you visit a lot of sites regularly.
