If you are going to be running in cold weather, having a warm up to get you started will help. Here’s a good one to try: Winter Prep Workout from Runner’s World.
It typically takes 5-10 minutes to warm up when you go running. (Some people can take much longer). During those few minutes, I found I am cold and sometimes miserable. This warm up can help reduce the misery of winter running and also help you from getting injured.
Anything that makes winter running easier is worthwhile.
In this otherwise really good piece by Ed Keenan – Six things we learned from John Tory’s transit announcement: Keenan | Toronto Star – he made this comment
At a new price of $141.50, a Metropass costs almost as much as 51 tokens or 47 cash fares. For most weekday commuters, that math doesn’t add up.
At first thought, this seemed right to me. If you only use the Metropass to go to and from one location each business day, it isn’t worth it. For example, assuming most months have 22 working days, then that is 44 tokens, which is less than the 51 tokens it is worth.
Where the Metropass math adds up is when you start to be a heavier use of the TTC.
If you travel on the TTC daily, then you can get in as many as 62 trips/tokens on the TTC and a Metropass will be a good buy for you. Even in February, that is 56 trips/tokens. Daily users easily benefit from it. But if you don’t travel every day on Toronto transit, there are other ways to make the Metropass worthwhile.
For people who use it to go to work and then do after work activities, the Metropass is a good idea. For example, if you take trips to and from work, as well as using it to go to meet friends or to take after work classes or to go to the gym, then you can benefit from having and using a Metropass. For example, 44 tokens for work plus 3 trips a week to classes plus one to friends adds up to 16 more tokens a month for a total of 60 tokens.
For people who have to stop to pick up their kids from childcare, the Metropass is good value. I used to pick up my son daily after work. That was 3 tokens every day, so most months that was 66 tokens.
For people who can share it, the Metropass is great value. For example, if a couple works different shifts, then together they potentially need 88 tokens each month to get them back and forth to work. Sharing a Metropass could save alot for such a couple.
Even people who don’t use the TTC all that much can still make the Metropass work for them if they can reduce the cost of it. For example, people who can buy the Metropass on subscription can get it for a lesser amount. That means you need to take less trips to break even. And if you pay enough taxes to break be able to claim your Metropasses as a tax expense, then you also need to take less trips to break even with the purchase.
If you take your total transportations costs, including taxis, Zipcars, etc, then you might find that having a Metropass is worth it. For example, you might find you grab a cab a few times each month because you don’t have tokens or cash. Switching to a Metropass, you find you do that less and therefore your overall spending on transportation each month is going down.
Cost aside, the other great benefit of the Metropass is convenience. All the hassle of dealing with buying tokens is gone. That convenience means you may be more likely to use the TTC when you have a Metropass, which leads you to make your money back from getting it. Also, you may find you enjoy yourself more by getting out more. It’s an intangible benefit, but a good one nonetheless.
I think for heavier users of the TTC, the Metropass is definitely worth it. And to be fair to Ed, he acknowledged a number of these points in a discussion he had on twitter. Whether or not the Metropass is worth it to you will depend on your own use of the TTC and your own math.
P.S. Thanks for reading this. If you have found it useful and you’d like to say thanks by buying me a coffee, you can do so here. Thanks! That’s awesome!
If you are an old geek or interested in computing history, especially the early days of the PC, then I highly recommend you check out the section of the Computer History Museum on CP/M. Before Microsoft and Apple there was CP/M. You can even download the source code! Fun! 🙂
See Early Digital Research CP/M Source Code | Computer History Museum.
I don’t think highly of lists that supposedly help you to get in shape. I am happy to make an exception for this one: 15 Former Couch Potatoes Share Their Best Tips For Getting In Shape.
It’s not so much a list as it is 15 different stories. Each person has a different approach to getting in shape. What worked for one person may not work for you, but there is a good chance that out of the 15 stories, there will be more than a few new ideas that you can steal and use.
I also liked that it is not a list of advice from people who were athletes or people who were in good shape already. The people on this list were out of shape, and they lost weight and became fit using the sensible approaches they took.
I don’t usually recommend Buzzfeed articles, but this one is a very good exception.
If getting in shape was one of your resolutions for the New Year, this is a good thing for you to read now.
This came out awhile ago (As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living – NYTimes.com) but if you are thinking about writing apps for a living, then you should read it.
If you have a great idea for an app and a passion to develop it, you should. Just finish the above piece in the Times and keep it in mind.
And the BBC has a good story on it here: BBC News – Google Glass sales halted but firm says kit is not dead, including this comment that sums things up in a nutshell:
Google has tried to present this announcement as just another step in the evolution of an amazing innovation. But make no mistake – Google Glass is dead, at least in its present form.
I would say it’s been dead for sometime, and while wearable technology is alive and well, this piece of it is long overdue to be written off.
Read the BBC story: it has a good review of the history of Glass, what will happen next, and why Glass never had traction.
Do you find it weird when you search for something, then go to other sites, and it seems like the product is following you around? Do you worry that sites are tracking information about you and you want to stop it?
I’d like to say there is an easy way to put an end to such tracking, but it doesn’t seem to be so. If anything, companies like Facebook, Google and others have a big financial interest in tracking you, regardless of what you think, and they are going to make it hard for you to put an end to it all.
That said, if you still want to take action, I recommend these links. They highlight tools you can use and steps you can take to limit tracking. You don’t have to be technical to read them, but you have to be comfortable making changes to your system.
Some thoughts of my own:
As one of my areas of skill development this year, I am teaching myself Python (the programming language). I had a number of different sites offering help with it, but I have found these three the most useful, so far. I have found each of them useful, but I have spent the most time on “medium”. If you are interested in learning Python, I recommend you check these out:
Fast: Tutorial – Learn Python in 10 minutes – Stavros’ Stuff. Great as a cheatsheet or a quick intro to Python or if you used to do work with Python but haven’t done it in awhile.
Medium:the Python Tutorial from python.org. If you know other programming languages, this is a good starting point.
Slow: Learn Python the Hard Way. Good if you don’t know much about programming and want to make Python the first language you know really well.
Yes, it is possible to write good articles on what is the bane of our current existence: computer passwords. The first one talks about the top passwords that people commonly use. The second one is a beautifully written piece about the thought that goes into people’s passwords.
You will have an entirely new perspective on passwords after reading this.
P.S. Thanks to Anna P for pointing out the second one.
Then send them over to this really smart post by Sarah McIntyre: i want to make cartoons & comics but i have no idea where to start!. It’s packed with great advice and plenty of links for anyone who would love to do this but is stuck on how to start.
Superb. (Image is a link to her post.)
If “read more” is one of your New Year Resolutions, then Austin Kleon has 33 short pieces of advice on how to read more and read better that you should review, here: 33 thoughts on reading.
I am trying to adopt most of these. I have adopted many of them and the result has been much more reading by me for the last few years. I think the more of these you adopt, the more reading you will get done.
If you have made a commitment to getting fit in 2015, that’s good. If you think you can manage it, that’s better. But if you think you might have troubles with it, then consider the Pact app.
It works like this, according to Pact:
For more info, see their site: Pact – Commit to you.
I have no idea how well it works, but it sounds interesting.
If you’ve made resolutions and plan to stick to them, that’s good. What may help you stick with them is this article: A Master Plan for Taking Back Control of Your Life – 99U. Essentially it is a list of general guidelines that can help you on your way as you tackle things like….resolutions. You will find it useful in other ways too.
I think it’s worth a read. I’d also recommend Tony Schwartz in general: I’ve read a number of other pieces by him on the 99U and on other sites and I have found them to be valuable.
Happy New Year!
Last year, I was discouraged: I was doing a lot with little to show for it. I would frequently be up until midnight doing chores and trying to stay on top of things and I was exhausted. Despite all that effort, I could not tell you what I had accomplished and I wasn’t getting any feedback telling me either. I decided I had to change that, and to change that, I did two major things: I started using a spreadsheet and I started using Workflowy. Let me explain how these two tools made a difference for me.
First, I started using a spreadsheet to track everything I did. Before I would write my todolists on a piece of paper, do it, then throw the list away. With the spreadsheet, I put all my todos in there. Initially it had two columns: a todo column and a status column. Each todo had an associated status: Pending (i.e., I hadn’t started the task), WIP (work in progress, meaning I had started the task but hadn’t completed it) or Complete. As I did each todo, I changed the status from Pending to WIP (Work in progress) to Complete. I would try to only tackle tasks that were in the spreadsheet. If I did something that wasn’t in there, I started adding it there. (That last thing of capturing all todos in the spreadsheet was important.)
Very soon, I could see from the spreadsheet that I was doing a lot. In fact, the todolist expanded greatly. So I added a new column: priority. Each todo has a priority: 1-4. Once or twice a week, I reviewed my todos to see if they had the right priority. Then I ignored anything that wasn’t a 1 until the next review period. Prioritization helped me to focus.
Despite that, I still had many many todos, and still too many todos with a number 1 priority. I added additional columns over the year and this helped me manage what I had to get done. Even when my todo list had over 500 items on it, I could quickly filter out all but the 3 or 4 items I needed to focus on for a day. I added a column to help me separate Work todos from Home (not work related) todos. Then I subcategorized the Todos: there are todos related to my kids, todos concerning Money, my Home, even Me!
Of all the colums in the todo list, I found this last column of subcategories to be the most important in terms of getting a sense of accomplishment. Here’s why. At the end of each month, I took the completed todos and sorted them by subcategory. I could see from this where I was (and wasn’t) spending my time. For example, I might see that I was spending a lot of my time dealing with House issues and not enough of my time with the Kids. Having this in front of me allowed me to better focus my time in the near future. (Note: you don’t have to wait until the end of the month to do this, and when I find I am really busy, I will do weekly or biweekly reviews to see how the month is shaping up).
At the end of the month, I create a new worksheet for the new month by making a copy of the existing todo list. That way, I can focus just on the todos for that month.
After a few months of this, it was easy to do. You might think it is a lot of effort, but with the spreadsheet I have, I found it easy to add to and sort the todos. Most days I spend less than a few minutes reviewing it.
Occasionally I do things that aren’t on the list. It doesn’t matter much: most todos end up in there. The main thing is I get to see that I am getting things done and I can see where my effort is going.
That’s the spreadsheet. At first, it was all I wanted. I could see what I was getting done each month, and that felt great. I was getting a sense of accomplishment every month. But it wasn’t enough. The problem with just using the spreadsheet was that it is very granular. I could see I was doing a lot of tasks, but was that good or bad? Also, sometimes a bunch of smaller tasks add up to a bigger task that should be highlighted, but the spreadsheet couldn’t do that for me. I needed a different approach. I needed a different tool. After thinking about this, I started using Workflowy (workflowy.com).
At the start of the month, I create a list of major activities I want to accomplish that month. (Workflowy is really great if you like lists: that’s why I picked it.) Then I make sure my todos for that month are in line with those major activities. At the end of the month, I roll up the tasks that I did and put them in workflowy according to the major activities. Additionally, I might look and see I accomplished a number of things in the month that I didn’t expect to at the start of the month. I will add them to Workflowy, too, creating a new major activity to describe them.
What I liked about this is that month after month I could now see I was accomplishing a lot. I wasn’t just doing just a lot of little things: I was getting bigger things done. I could also see what I wasn’t accomplishing (e.g. running) and then correct that (or at least accept it in light of the other things I was accomplishing).
The other thing I realized is that if you have a lot on your plate, then it is difficult to make a lot of achievements in one month, but over many months, you start to see you have accomplished a lot. You miss that as your review your day to day activities because you are juggling a lot. Even looking back over a month, you think: wow, I barely made a dent in things. But as you look back over 3 or 6 months, you can say: wow, I made big improvements in 3 or 6 or even a dozen areas.
There are lots of improvements that can be made on this system, depending on who you are. You may have the advantage of being able to focus in one or two areas. If so, you could use a simpler approach. If you have many major responsibilities and you want to make improvements in your own life, this approach may work for you. It works for me.
A template of my spreadsheet is here. It’s an XLS file.
As for the list I have each month in workflowy, I start with a template like this:
In Month X I plan to achieve the following
If you have read to this point: thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to do this. If you try this approach and it gives you some benefit, please let me know. Good luck! Accomplish great things!
There is so much good about this piece by Zadie Smith that if I started pulling in quotes from it, I would essentially replicate it. It’s an effortless read, and yet even as I was reading it, I could feel how great it is. I had the feeling of racing down a high mountain on skis, exhilarated and impressed by the beauty and amazed how fast I am going and then it is done.
So, yes, I recommend you read: Find Your Beach by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books.
I find myself on my smartphone too much. It’s too easy to fall into that trap, and afterwards I wish I did something else instead. Did something useful. Or made something beautiful. Austin Kleon feels the same way, based on this post of his: Read a book instead. He made a screen lock for his phone to remind him to read a book and get off his phone.
I decided I wanted something similar. In my case, I found a photo I liked and used the Over app on my iPhone to create this:
I then saved it as my LockScreen. Now when I pick up the phone to start doing something mindless, the phone reminds me to do something better.
You can do the same thing yourself. You don’t even need an app or drawing skills. Write a reminder on a piece of paper and then take a photo of it with your phone and save it as your Lock Screen. It could be just the nudge you need.
Thanks for reading this. I hope you found it useful. If you did, then time spent doing it instead of playing with stuff on my phone was worthwhile.
I am amused every time I watch it. The folks who make it do a great job. It reminds me of the classic: Dogs Playing Poker,
Freshpet Holiday Feast – 13 Dogs and 1 Cat Eating with Human Hands – YouTube.
On it’s own, this is a great piece:
Old Masters at the Top of Their Game – NYTimes.com. The woman above? 99. She sold her first painting at 89. She is now a world renowned artist. And there’s more great profiles of people in it. You should read it, and not just if you are older. I recommend it for any age. How you read it at 20 will be different than how you read it at 40 or 60. For me, I was struck by how many of those interviewed say that nothing surprises them. As I get older, I find this true too, though I am still surprised. The flip side of this is that anxiety and concern about many things in life decreases. You know how to handle things, and you spend less time worrying about the things you ought not to worry about.
Another thing I thought interesting is that they don’t necessarily think of themselves as old. This is something I also found true as I age. I know when I talk to the 20 year olds in my office they must look at me and think: man, he’s old. 🙂 But other than superficial things, I don’t find my thinking or my view on the world has diminished from when I was younger. I have more experience now, and I had more natural energy then, but I don’t think: wow I no longer get this IT stuff now that I am older.
I highly encourage you to read the article. Then check out Austin Kleon’s blog because I found it there a lot with many other good things.
This is fascinating: 10 historic photographs an instant earlier.
If you immediately see in your mind the photo that comes after this one….
…then head on over to that site.
Chances are, if you talk to five different people at work, you will find five tools or techniques they use to be productive that you hadn’t even heard of.
Rather than do your own polling, you can also check out this article: Most Popular Apps Employees Use At Work – Business Insider.
Remember, these are just for work, and yes, Facebook still shows up there. And this is just the cloud / distributed services. (Also, I am wondering Evernote didn’t show up there.)
I would be surprised if you read it and didn’t adopt at least one of the items on the list by the end of your work day. Good luck.
I’ve made this Sweet and Spicy Asian Pork Shoulder Recipe from Real Simple a number of times and it has come out great everymtime. Besides the wonderful flavours, it doesn’t use too much liquid. I find many slow cooker recipes do, and that spoils the dish for me.
You may want to trim the fat before you make this recipe. Or make it the day before, cool of the liquid, and then skim the fat off the wonderful sauce that results in slow cooking the pork. Also, it calls for a lot of sugar, but it is not too much, if you ask me.
For a variation of the recipe, see this: Chinese Slow-Cooked Pork Shoulder from the Food Network. This has more liquid than I like, but some of you might prefer this.
If so, you know of all the …stuff…Word will add in there. I understand why Microsoft does it, but I would rather not have it. If you are in the same boat, I recommend you check out this site: Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML. It gives you the ability to take snippets of said HTML and clean it up for you.
It has it’s limits, but worth a look. Or to your tool box.
Interesting speculation on where Amy Winehouse’s musical direction would have gone if she hadn’t died so young: Amy In The Sun: The Other (Caribbean) Side of Amy Winehouse via LargeUp. That post has a lot of links to Amy’s performances on YouTube, so if you are the mood for something other than Christmas music, click on that link and enjoy.
So for those of you who say, “Hey! We were promised jetpacks!”…well, like the future, they are hear but just not evenly distributed.
For this videos and more on this, go here: This Man Flew Over Mt. Fuji on a Real-Life Jetpack, and It’s Absolutely Breathtaking – Mic.
Then the Harbourfront Centre’s Learn to Skate program may be for you. It’s a lovely little place to skate, and you can rent everything you need. In no time you will be braving the crowds at Nathan Phillips Square and zipping around with the best of them.
If you are looking for New Year’s resolutions to make, learning to skate is a good one.
P.S. It is usually cooler down there than the rest of the city. Dress warmly.
I know a lot of people take issue with Lagerfeld, but I admire many of his ways. He has remarkable energy, creativity and longevity. Case in point, here’s Karl Lagerfeld’s Schedule in 24 Hours from Harper’s Bazaar Magazine.
Very interesting. Emulate the best, toss the rest.
There’s some great photos at the link below, but my favorite may be this one:
You can actually see the shadow of the drone on the eagle’s wing.
The rest are here: The 15 Best Drone Photos of 2014.
Here’s three links if you are feeling stressed out and you want some guidance to help turn it around:
Uber seems in a hurry to demonstrate as many ways as possible on how to be a toxic company, from exploitng drivers to degrading women to ripping off passengers, and more. Mike Loukides lists at least eight here is this piece: Uber is breaking bad over at O’Reilly Radar.
The idea behind Uber is worthwhile. Try and support better companies that provide such services, like Lyft. And be on the lookout for more such companies that sense an opportunity and try and be a good business for their customers and their investors.
I wrote about Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century here and here. As I said, I strongly encourage you to read it and take notes.
If you want a great summary of the book, I highly recommend this post: Piketty Explained: Summary of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
It’s superb. Peter Shirley, the author, has written a 30 second summary and a 15 minute summary, and when you finish both, you will have a very fast but very thorough introduction to the book. I am going to come back to this from time to time as a refresher to what I read in the book (as well as flip through the book again). Did you read Piketty but skip sections? Then review Peter’s post to see what you missed.
More good reasons to pick up Piketty before 2014 ends.
(The chart on world growth rates is from a link to Peter Shirley’s blog post.)
It’s no fluke: if you watch the whole thing, you can see he is into it!
Crows are remarkable. Via YouTube and someone on twitter….I can’t remember who though. Thanks, whomever you are!
Really. There is a kickstarter going on right now you can contribute to: LUNAR MISSION ONE: A new lunar mission for everyone. by Lunar Missions Ltd
The team there says….
We plan to send an unmanned robotic landing module to the South Pole of the Moon – an area unexplored by previous missions.
We’re going to use pioneering technology to drill down to a depth of at least 20m – 10 times deeper than has ever been drilled before – and potentially as deep as 100m. By doing this, we will access lunar rock dating back up to 4.5 billion years to discover the geological composition of the Moon, the ancient relationship it shares with our planet and the effects of asteroid bombardment. Ultimately, the project will improve scientific understanding of the early solar system, the formation of our planet and the Moon, and the conditions that initiated life on Earth.
I think this is the most fantastic Internet project I have seen yet. I highly recommend you check it out.
Thanks to Kottke for pointing it out.
There are three winters within each winter season. The first, early winter, can actually be lovely. The temperatures are cold but not terribly so. Often you can go out with no gloves or hat. If you celebrate Christmas, there is all that to look forward to.
Next comes the bleak midwinter, sometime in January and lasting through until the end of February. This is the cold heart of winter. You need to psychologically strengthen yourself to get through this part, but if you learn how to make the most of it, it passes quickly, like all time.
Finally there is late winter. Winter falters then: days lengthen, ice melts, the earliest of flowers – snowdrops! – appear. You can already taste spring, and summer seems possible and not just a cruel memory.
Winter seems long, but each of the three winters is short. They whip by like speed skaters or tobagganers.
(Originally written on my Blackberry and published on Posterous on December 11 2011, 9:54 PM)
…can be found at this link:
MySQL Tutorial – How to Install MySQL 5 (on Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu) and Get Started with SQL.
Even if you don’t know hardly anything about SQL or databases, you will find this helpful. It covers pretty much everything you need to know to get started, and it’s a great cheat sheet for people who have more experience but need to know a command format or get some other quick guidance.
Recommended.
P.S. It specifies Ubuntu, but if you are using other distros like CentOS you should still find it helpful.
This piece on the three day work week, Why Not a Three-Day Week? in The New Yorker explores the notion of working three and not five days a week and is well worth a read. But….
But….before you protest that you don’t work a five day week now, the better and more important question is: why do we have to work so much and so hard and why can we not have a lot more for a lot less? My own belief is that we are still shackled to a culture underlined by a Protestant work ethic and devoted to to a lower form of capitalism. We would lead better lives if our energies and our lives were devoted to more meaningful activities that addressed our higher needs, instead of tolling away to survive. The good/bad news is that even if we want to stay chained to this culture, we will not be able with the way mechanization and automation is proceeding. We need to start thinking about the way we work now, whether we want to or not.
I got into a habit of making pasta on Mondays: there is so much happening on Mondays for me, and pasta dishes were a way to allow me to multi-task and make dinner, help with homework, clean-up, &c.
If you feel overwhelmed on Monday, or simply if you love pasta, then I recommend you try pasta Mondays. Worst case, just keep it simple and use pre-made sauces. If you would prefer to make things from scratch, then here are two updates on some classic pasta dishes:
Pasta Carbonara With Spicy Sausage Recipe from Real Simple
The Best Macaroni & Cheese You’ll Ever Have from a Cup of Jo blog
Enjoy!
Looking to do something different this weekend? Consider these projects:
Making Pop Art – Apartment Therapy.
In the zone: Organized home storage solutions
The Food Lab: Make Your Own Just-Add-Hot-Water Instant Noodles (and Make Your Coworkers Jealous)
If you plan to go out wine drinking this weekend — or any day next week — then head over to blog.to and see what they have to say on 5 restaurants with cheap wine in Toronto.
Of the restos on the list, I have known about Le Paradis for along time. Whenever I went, I’d remark how reasonable wine prices were here compared to other places. (The food and ambiance of the place is also not bad.) If the other places are comparable, then this is a very good list indeed.
Smart People I Know 