Author: smartpeopleiknow

Sprawlball: how the 3s are messing up the NBA and how to fix it

Two good pieces on how three point shots are affecting the NBA. Opinions differ, but these pieces seem to think that the 3s are not improving the game:

  1. How Mapping Shots In The NBA Changed It Forever | FiveThirtyEight
  2. The NBA is obsessed with 3s, so let’s finally fix the thing

My feeling is pushing out the 3 point line is likely the best thing to do to add more variety to the game.  But read them yourself and decide.

Fifteen good links to help you manage your personal finances better


Lots of good stuff here, from how to save money on food, your kids, your transportation….and much more. From the New York Times, Vox, the Cut, and quite a few from a good site for this information called The Simple Dollar.

  1. When and How to Stop Paying Your Kids’ Bills – The Simple Dollar
  2. 13 smart ways to improve your finances in 2017 – Vox
  3. A Household Budget Strategy for People Who Hate Budgeting | Apartment Therapy
  4. 11 Lifestyle Changes That Will Help You Save Money & Depend Less On Consumerism
  5. What to Do When You’re Bad at Money – The New York Times
  6. How to Save Money But Still Have a Life
  7. What I Learned From Tracking My Spending for a Month – The New York Times
  8. 33 Productive Things to Do Without Spending Money | Apartment Therapy
  9. 5 Money-Saving Lessons I Learned in a Month of Budgeting – Bon Appétit
  10. The First Step Out of Debt – The Simple Dollar
  11. 10 Things You Should Never Pay For – The Simple Dollar
  12. Nine Frugal Strategies for Tackling the Winter Blues – The Simple Dollar
  13. Finding Meaning Within Your Job – Even If You Don’t Like It – The Simple Dollar
  14. Five Monthly Bills You Could Live Without – The Simple Dollar
  15. Five Things You Could Afford If You Didn’t Buy a New Car – The Simple Dollar

So you want to become famous on Instagram? You might want to read this first

Why? Because as this article shows, become famous on Instagram is a lot harder than you might think:  I Tried to Make My Dog an Instagram Celebrity. I Failed. – The New York Times.

Yes, I know you are not a dog, but the same lessons will apply.

My guess is that the ship has sailed on become famous on Instagram. Same for podcasts and any other social media that has been around for a few years. You need to get in early, work hard, and take advantage of network effects.

If you do decide to become Instagram famous and manage to pull it off, please come here and mock me and I will update this post. 🙂

Great advice for parents of older teens/young adults


Can be found here:  How Should I Talk to My Son About His Career Dreams? – The Atlantic. 

Being a parent is never easy, no matter what age your kid is. There is lots of good advice for people with infants and young children but not much for when your kids are older. Glad to see pieces like this and to promote them.

Hang in there, parents!

(image via pexels.com)

11 Easy Pesto And Salad Dressing Recipes | Chatelaine


If you find yourself in a cooking rut, steaming or sauteing the same basic meals, then here’s a suggestion. Make some of the pestos and dressing here (11 Easy Pesto And Salad Dressing Recipes | Chatelaine) and add them to whatever it is you are about to eat. A bowl of steamed vegetables or a plain pork chop transforms into a better meal. Later, you can mix some with mayo or yogurt and add it to a sandwich of your preference. Even a plain green salad is elevated.

(Image: Eric Putz, from a link to their web site)

Two tools to help you be more productive at work

Spotify

You can use Spotify to listen to music while you work. But sometime music can be distracting. Sometime all you want is to drown out the sounds in your work environment. During those times, a good alternative to music is rain sounds. Spotify has a lot of different rain sounds to choose from. Well worth trying for those noisy work spaces that you need to be productive in.

Flow

 
Another good way to be productive is to use the Flow desktop app for the Mac. I’ve tried many a timer app and I like this one best. It is simple to get started with. It reminds you when to take a break and when to work, but let’s you chose if you want to get back into the flow. It can block out certain apps that might prevent you from being productive, like your browser. Also worth a look.
(Image from pexels.com)

Some thoughts on bad communication by Chase and other large organizations

Lots of people on twitter giving Chase heat for this tweet today:

Part of me understands that. I mean, how could a company that received such a big bailout have the nerve to tweet that? But the other part of me knows that big organizations work in silos and compartments. There is likely no-one at a high level at Chase scrutinizes low level communications like tweets. You know how Amazon sometimes sells T shirts with offensive messages? Same problem.

People believe big organizations are homogenous and aware of every aspect of the people who work there and what they are doing. This belief is wrong. Some orgs may be that way, but the majority are not.

Something to think about the next time this occurs.

How to get up to speed really quickly on Kubernetes and Docker if you are an infrastructure specialist

If you are an infrastructure person and you are trying to ramp up really quickly on Docker and Kubernetes, here are some good links to get you started:

I also have this repo on github that can help.

Is this the last word? Good lord, no. But it can help you stay in the conversation and helps you map all this stuff to networks and processes and files and VMs and services and other tech you are used to.

Bon Appétit pays homage to red sauce restaurants

Bon Appétit has a rich list of articles and photos paying homage to red sauce restaurants in America. You likely know this type of joint. It has:

The oversize portions. The red-and-white-checked tablecloths. A carafe of the house red. Old-school Italian-American restaurants, a.k.a. red sauce joints, are the kind of institutions you’ll find, with very few deviations, in just about any city in America. But as we discovered upon reaching out to dozens of writers, chefs, and celebrities, these restaurants are about a lot more than a plate of penne alla vodka. Whether or not you’re Italian, red sauce likely means something to you—about family, or home, or history, or politics, or class, or citizenship, or selfhood, or otherness, or all the above, or a million other things. And that’s what this package is all about. Welcome to Red Sauce America.

For a feast of this type of dining, see here: Welcome to Red Sauce America – Bon Appétit. 

 

Joan Benoit Samuelson at age 60 and what that means

This piece is a must read for anyone trying to maintain their fitness later in life. It’s not easy, even for legends like JBS. Take solace in seeing how even the greats adjust as they get older, and read this:  How a great marathoner — Joan Benoit Samuelson — keeps going at age 60 – The Washington Post

 

Twenty good IT links to make you smarter

Here are some good links I have been collecting over time on IT that are still worth reading. They cover AI, the IOT, containers, and more. Enjoy!

  1. How to build a supercomputer with Raspberry Pis: Fun!
  2. 6 things I’ve learned in my first 6 months using serverless: Good stuff for serverless fans
  3. Building a serverless website in AWS: More good serverless stuff
  4. The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix: A really good history of Unix. Well written.
  5. Spring Boot Memory Performance: If you use springboot, this is worth your while
  6. The end of windows: Anything that stratechery puts out is good, including this
  7. Dockerize a Spring Boot application: Speaking of springboot, this is useful
  8. Building a Deep Neural Network to play FIFA 18: A fascinating example of using AI to play games
  9. ThinkPad 25th Anniversary Edition : A great commemoration of a fine computer
  10. GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button: A good piece on the story behind this investment by Microsoft
  11. Circuito.io: Want to build circuits, but don’t know how. This killer site is for you.
  12. Effie robot claims to do all your ironing: If you like robots and hate ironing, this could be for you.
  13. How To Install and Use TensorFlow on Ubuntu 16.04: For AI fans
  14. Set up a firewall on Ubuntu: Another good tutorial from Digital Ocean
  15. Not even IBM is sure where its quantum computer experiments will lead: For IBM Quantum fans
  16. In an Era of ‘Smart’ Things, Sometimes Dumb Stuff Is Better: Why analog is sometimes better.
  17. A simple neural network with Python and Keras: A good way to dabble with NNs
  18. The Talk: A comic which wonderfully explains quantum computing
  19. Use case diagrams: For those who like UML
  20. Eating disorder and social media: Wired has a good piece on how people avoid controls

why the best white noise machine might be the Google Home Mini

I have had a number of white noise devices with some of them costing a lot more than the Mini. They are not hard to set up and once you do you can ask it to play rain sounds or relaxing sounds or whatever sounds help you relax or sleep it work. Plus you get all the advantages of having it to find out the weather, get news, set appointments and more. If you don’t mind having one in your house – and some people do – then you can buy them everywhere, like here: m.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/google-home-mini-charcoal/11615336

On having no heat in the middle of winter

In the last five years I’ve lost heat in my house twice in the middle of winter.

The last time it happened was this week. My furnace started intermittently failing. It wasn’t a big deal, despite the cold. I bought a heater and my landlord had the repair people come in a few days and fixed the furnace.

The first time it happened was the ice storm of Christmas 2013. Then it lasted over three days as lack of power prevented my furnace from starting. My house got as low as 42 Degrees, and I could see my breath in the house. And then at 12:30 am on Christmas Day the power was restored and over many hours my furnace warmed up the house.

In both cases I remember the satisfaction of hearing the forced air furnace blowing warm air through the house. It’s such a basic thing, and yet so satisfying.

There are many great pleasures in the world, but few compare with the restoration of heat your home in the middle of bitter winter.

The problem with carpentry and how it differs from IT

It is near impossible to learn how to do carpentry from either books or the Internet. I know because I’ve tried really hard.

Let’s say you decide you no longer want to buy bookcases from Ikea but you want to make you own. You decide a book case is simply a box and decide you want to learn how to make a box with a few tools and some simple instructions.

If you go search for help with your box, you may very likely come across instructions like this: www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/how-to/g1591/how-to-make-a-box/

It makes assumptions that you have lots of tools and you can do hard things like cut joints. After a few hours of searches, you will find most sites are like this: tailored to woodworkers making wood pieces that are hard to do and not anything near modern looking.

IT is different. For any technology out there, you can search for the name of the technology and “tutorial” and find something. You can be up and running using the technology in the time it takes you to give up looking for carpentry skills.

I am not sure why that is. Maybe there is more interest in IT so there are more tutorials on it. You could argue carpentry is harder but I have done both and I disagree.

I especially disagree because there is one site I could that actually does make it easy to make furniture and that is Ana White’s. Because of her I have made a wide range of furniture with basically a hammer, a jigsaw and a drill. The furniture isn’t fancy but it was cheaper and better and as modern looking as Ikea.

I think that is a problem with a lot of woodworking sites. They assume you want to do fine woodworking. Find woodworking is fine, but for people starting out, they likely want to make a simple table, a bookcase or set of shelves, perhaps a storage chest. A good joint may be best, but most Ikea furniture is held together with dowels and screws. If you make a book case with dowels and screws and glue, it will last and hold lots of books.

I wish there were more introductory sites on the internet that help people who wanted to learn how to make furniture and do carpentry, like there is with IT. Right now all I have found is Ana White’s site. I highly recommend it.

Who can bear to be forgotten? Who can bear to be remembered?

Who will pass on without kind words? Who will have loved ones gathered for them? Who will have them stay away? If a tree is best measured when it is down, what does it say when the downed tree is not measured? Where is the measure of how we were loved when we were alive? Or the measure of how we were unloved?

If you read obituaries from your small home town, you will see things and you will wonder. Wonder about lives past. Wonder about your life to pass. What people will think. What people think now. What difference you can make. Did you even make a difference. Are you remembered. Are you forgotten.

And I have thought these things as I read this. RIP D.J.L.

On the things we endure

We endure so much throughout our lives. When we are young, we endure school. We endure our siblings, perhaps. Certainly we endure some of our classmates. We endure teachers and subjects and our parents to some degree.

Later we grow up and roommates, apartments, bad jobs and bad relationships of once kind or another we live through in hope of an end.

Eventually we get old and the thing we have to endure most of all is ourselves. The qualities we seem stuck with, the habits unshakeable, and the traits indelible. We make an effort occasionally to shake them off, like dust, but then we settle and they settle back upon us. And so we endure them. Until the end.

On confusing resilience and endurance

As I suffer from personal difficulty, many people tell me I need to be resilient. This is what I thought as well. But what they really mean is I must be able to endure.

The key difference between resiliency and endurance is temporal.

If the difficulty you suffer is over and you bounce back, you are resilient. You can’t be resilient if your difficulty is on going. Then you are simply enduring.

For some reason, resiliency sounds better than endurance. Perhaps the former sounds active and the latter passive. There is nothing passive about endurance. It is a struggle to work against your difficulties, and those that passively suffer them will likely not endure for long.

To be resilient is good. But while you suffer, endurance is what you need.

It’s RRSP season in Canada. You may feel: why bother contributing? Read this then.

If you are daunted and dismayed with the impossibiity of saving for retirement, then read this.

A few thoughts:

  1. It’s written for Americans, but it works just as well for Canadians. (Replace 401K with RRSP).
  2. You may still not be able to retire, but the more you save, the more cushion you have for later.
  3. It may help you get to sleep at night when your brain starts saying: you are doomed to die old and poor!

On deplatforming on social media

Deplatforming is starting to rise up as a means of dealing with the bad effects of social media. For instance:

On having fallen from the grace of god

Having walked for seven plus years, having lost so much, so much dead, so much broken, he accepted he had fallen from the grace of god. He walked through the years, and recalled them, picking over broken things, things he had built now gone, things he had saved now lost. He had walked for seven plus years and lost so much from the lack of grace from god. And he despaired, and fed the fires of despair. And when his despair had burned away, he looked around once more and saw what still remained, what was good, what could be built up. And this was the true gift, not this thing or that, not the vain hope of never losing. This vision was the gift. With this vision, he could see that he had regained the grace of god, though it had never left him.

Some thoughts on leftists calling for radical measures on climate change

I see that leftists are calling for radical measures to fight climate change. I have a few issues with this:

  1. You have to be careful for what you wish for. When they talk about radical measures, they are likely thinking that the line of what is radical is where they get to draw it. I don’t think this is true. To me, radical is things like geoengineering. Or nuclear proliferation. Leftists should not assume they get to draw the line as to what radical is. And leftists should not be surprised if they don’t like what they ask for.
  2. Some of this seems to be a way to score points against centrists and rightists. It may be true that centrists and rightists have bad solutions. They are not bad solutions because they are associated with anyone of a certain political stripe. They are bad because they may not be enough.

Everyone involved with dealing with climate change should

  1. work very hard to promote new and better ideas and solutions for climate change
  2. be as persuasive as possible, especially for those more moderate than themselves
  3. be very humble when it comes to thinking you know what is right

Obviously this is not the easy a thing to solve by any stretch, and the tradeoffs are significant. Worse still, the solutions involve humans and all their flaws as well as science and technology still in development.

I personally believe it is too late already and that:

  1. there is going to be global devastation with many coastal cities being destroyed over the next 20 years, despite any advances in policies or technology.
  2. there is going to be such severe weather in the next two decades that global warming and climate change will be the main political topic affecting everything, and there will be a surge in advances in response to this.
  3. there will be feedback in terms of population decreases, new technologies, new policies, and planetary unknowns. This feedback will result in climate change stabilizing.
  4. there will be positive gains to be had from global warming and climate change but that they will not be known for sometime.

Thanks for reading this. Feel free to disagree. Just not on twitter, or I will block you.

The joy of being out of and in a storm at night

There is a joy of being out of a storm at night. You can listen to the wind blast and watch the trees whip while the rain or snow fills the air. You can experience that from inside a warm room, dry and safe. You can think: thankfully I am not out in weather like that. It is a pleasure to be sheltered in such a night.

There is a joy in being out in a storm at night. Dressed well, you can move through the elements, complimenting yourself for being able to handle such weather. Even in a big city, you will have little if any company. If you do come across another hardy soul, you can nod and smile as if you met another member of your secret society.

There are not many things that can bring joy no matter how you experience it, but a storm at night is one of those rare things.

A great list of interchangeable ingredients to turn to when you are cooking, from Mark Bittman

Is this list.

Print it off, leave it in the kitchen, add your own items.

I often use sriracha for dried chilies, or even any hot sauce, for when you just need some heat. Likewise, if you don’t have jalapenos, you could also replace them with some of other heat source. (If it is a lot of jalapenos, you might use regular peppers with some chilies or other hot things to add the appropriate level of hotness.)

Finally, I’ve seen people suggest replacing creme fraiche with full fat greek yogurt.

Things you don’t need and the one thing you do

This struck me today: I had these two posts I found interesting, both starting with “You don’t Need”. This is good: I think I will stop pursuing something because I think I need something first. Recipes help. And have free time to make things helps. But don’t use things you think you need stopping you from doing what you want.

Here are the two pieces. The only thing you need is a desire to make things.

  1. You Don’t Need to Quit Your Job to Make
  2. You Don’t Need a Recipe – The New York Times

C’mon, It’s Just 7 Days – a good challenge for next week

You either are keeping your New Year’s Resolutions (yay!) or you have shelved them. If the latter, cheer up. You don’t need to wait a year to resolve to be better. And you don’t need to necessarily make a big commitment either. Maybe just a week of doing something for the better is enough to make an improvement in yourself. A week may be just the thing to kick start you and send you off in a better direction.

Sound good? Great. And if you are stuck for ideas, check out this:  C’mon, It’s Just 7 Days recipes and how-tos from Food52. 

It’s not just about food. If you are looking for a week of challenges to try out, read the articles there.

The articles are fun even if you aren’t looking to change. A lot can happen in a week.

My new favorite dish: Andrea’s Pasta with Pork Ribs from Mark Bittman

I made this last week and I’m thinking of making it again this weekend, it’s that good: Andrea’s Pasta with Pork Ribs, via Mark Bittman.

It has all the benefits of a good marinara dish, but the ribs really take it to a whole different and higher level. It is especially good with cheap pork ribs that might not make sense grilled due to being an odd shape. Those ribs are perfect here.

If you want, add more garlic…I added twice this amount. I also threw in sprigs of fresh herbs too. I went with basil, but I am sure rosemary or thyme or marjoram would be great.

I also doubled the ribs and I took  half, deboned them, then chopped them into bite sized pieces and added them to the sauce. The other ribs I garnished the pasta with.

Finally, since you have so few ingredients, try to use really good tomatoes and cheese. You can skimp on the ribs and get gnarly ones because they will still taste great, but the tomatoes especially make a huge difference here. Same with the cheese.

Superb.

The law of supply and demand strikes again, this time with truckers for Walmart

It seems to me that the law of supply and demand stops working from time to time. But I think that is wrong, and pieces like this remind me that I am wrong: How Walmart has successfully recruited truck drivers amid a labor shortage crisis.

The reason I think it stops working is because I see wage growth stagnating in many places. But I also see productivity stagnating too, and I think there is a relationship between that. There is some elasticity there that allows wage growth to stagnate but in return productivity growth stagnates too.

In Walmart’s case, the elasticity is gone: if they can’t get truckers, they lose business. It’s simple.  But for businesses without such hard and fast metrics, you might just continue to see slack productivity and slack wage growth.

A few thoughts on Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo and her method of cleaning up are very hot now, likely due to her TV show. This hotness sparked a number of discussions about her, such as this: “Tokimeku” Means So Much More Than “Spark Joy” in Japanese | Apartment Therapy. It also sparked other, more extreme discussions, such as how it is racist to not account for the deeper Shinto meaning in her works.

I read her book when it first came out and I admired it. I didn’t agree with all of it, but I liked her approach to life and the things we own. I got the Shinto aspect of the book, but I don’t recall that  it was emphasized, so criticizing people of missing that who are unaware of Shintoism is a ridiculous criticism.

There have been shows like Marie Kondo on before. It makes sense. We are driven in North American culture to accumulate, and shows like hers provide us with an antidote to this. When Marie Kondo is forgotten, another home organizer will come along.

I have read more extreme versions of Marie Kondo, like “Goodbye, Things”, which promotes a very minimal life style. I bought it the way I buy other books that have subjects to aspire to but will never achieve. I guess others have too.

There is something to be said for a minimalist lifestyle, a maximalist life style, and something in between. In the end, what counts is that you have positive feelings towards the place you inhabit, however much you have.

One thing Marie Kondo misses is the notion of a room as a workshop. If you have a hobby, be it cooking or woodworking or gardening or reading, you likely have a room where all your tools and supplies are. If you are good at your hobby, you likely have alot of them. That makes sense. It doesn’t make sense to get rid of them just because you want to have less things. Have what you need to do the job when you want to. You could still trim back: do you really need 10 cutting boards or 3 screwdrivers that are exactly the same? But otherwise keep the tools you need or may need.

I think Marie Kondo is great because she encourages us to live better with some simple guidelines. Even if you don’t follow them all, you will live better if you consider her message and try to apply it. In the end you’ll have a better home, and you will have a better idea of what you consider a better home.

Image from the NYTimes article on her, here.

 

Howard Schultz is running for President. Here’s something you might want to read about him….

If you are seriously considering Howard Schultz run for president, you should read this:   How Howard Schultz Left a Bitter Taste in Seattle’s Mouth – POLITICO Magazine

I think he doesn’t have a chance, although he could help the current President get reelected.  I thought that before, and I thought it even more after reading the piece in Politico. Here’s hoping he drops out.