Daily Five Minute Journal - January 16, 2016 (video will bring tears to your eyes)

I haven't been journaling daily but it's much easier to do it on the weekend. It says 5 minutes but it definitely takes much longer.

Still doing twitter and also enjoy getting retweets or likes.

Blood sugar is high this morning 110 and weight was down 162.6.  I haven't been that focused on losing weight even though it's my month's goal.

Neck pain almost gone. I slept on couch for a couple of hours and woke up with a pain in my neck. I've had pain for at least a week.

Movies planned for tonight

David Bowie

David Bowie passed away this past week. They're is a shrine to him on Lafayette and Houston (pronounced Howston) in NYC. Loved his song Space Oddity with my favorite lyric "and the stars look very different today" brings tears to my eyes.

Death List

I continue to update my Death list of famous people who died before their time http://bit.ly/DiedB4Time

Cur Task

This is the term for a spreadsheet I use to select what to do, ie my to-do list. I use it to PURGE (Plan Ur Goals Everyday).  It's a partial solution to my STS (Smart Task Selection) idea. It's goal is to answer the question "What should I do now?"

Obstacles

I'm into obstacles this week. One of the things I've been bad at is overcoming obstacles at work.  

Verizon

Finally got Verizon to send me a new phone. This was a PITFA. The Droid Turbo phone kept rebooting. I lost data in the process as I didn't back up information from my apps. There was nothing that I really needed, mostly ideas and passwords. The things I tried were:

• Bring phone into Verizon service center
• They told me it was a bug and I had to wait for Motorola to fix it
• Report issue via twitter
• Ran phone on safe mode (still randomly rebooted)
• Refreshed phone (still randomly rebooted)

I did notice that the reboots were much more likely to occur if I was outside and walking. If listening on headphones it rebooted even more. I'm not so confident that a replacement phone will fix the issue. Verizon also said they would remove an overage charge from the phone.

Lottery Odds Computation (Powerball)

I didn't win the $1.6 Billion Power Ball drawing. I joined a group at my company and we bought 100 tickets from 40 people at $5.00 a pop.  We won $20 and played the Friday night powerball.

The odds of the Powerball are easy to calculate in Excel.

Five balls are picked without replacement numbered from 1 to 69 and a sixth ball from 1 to 26 is picked.  The Excel formula
=COMBIN(69,5)*26

returns

292,201,338 which means you have a 1 in 292,201,338 chance for each $2.00. The actual formula is       n! ---------- k! (n-k)!

where ! is the factorial. The factorial of 5 is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.

The odds of flipping a coin to heads 28 times in a row is .5^28 = 3.72529 10^-9 and 1/3.72529... = 1 in 268,435,456.

The ^ character means to the power of. So x ^ y  is x to the power of y. So 2^3 = 2 x 2 x 2 = 8.