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.

If your computer is slow what can you do?

This morning spent 3 hours from 10:30 to 1:30 to get computer to work. I used MSConfig utility to help. It told me to use Task Manager (taskmgr) to change start up programs. Of course just rebooting your machine can fix the problem but it didn't for me.

To run MSConfig I pressed Windows+R to bring up the Run dialog and then typed in MSConfig.

and when I restarted computer nothing worked, I think because of the "Selective Startup." I changed it to "Normal Startup,"

I clicked the Startup tab and it said "To manage starup items, use the Startup section of Task Manager, with a link

Open Task Manager 







I then disabled all start up tasks and also disable all chrome add-ins

chrome;//extensions


This fixed the speed issue. But one final thing to do is to uninstall recently added software. And then afterwards to add each disabled or stopped program back until problem is identified.

You can do this via Windows key+R and run "Control"

Select Programs and Features and uninstall software that might be causing the issue from the most recent,

Daily 5 Minute Journal - Jan. 6, 2016

Health

Blood Sugar seems to be improving slowly (97 at 9 AM, 100 at lunch and 89 at dinner). I'm trying to get my blood sugar < 90. My weight down to 163.8.  I'm trying to follow closely the ExcelDiet.com which I've tried a number of times in the last year but failed. The diet uses the acronym (MEAT)

• Measure
• Enter
• Adjust
• Talk

I measured and entered but didn't adjust and talk about it. The key is to be very aware of whether I'm above or below my goal and to adjust based on that. 

I was drinking Bulletproof coffee for a while but it didn't really work. The drink is about 500 calories for 2 cups and I was usually still hungry. 

Today I skipped my usual 6 mile walk because I'm ahead of my goal. I'm considering having ice cream if my family wants it.  

Work

Work has been a little more interesting as I've started working more with some new tools:

• Tableau
• MapR

Tableau is a dashboard system that takes data and creates interactive dashboards and MapR is a system that managed Big Data. 

A strange thing I noticed today is that we hired a new employee who is black. My co-worker is black and she hired another person who is black. It just seems odd to me that her group has 3 blacks in it. I guess people will hire people who are like them.  Many years ago I noticed the same thing in a department at a finance firm where all the employees and the manager was black. I feel more connected to them than to the foreigners at work which are either Indian Chinese or Russian. They're all very nice people, though I dislike when the Indians eat in our lunch room and talk in Hindi, makes me feel excluded.

One annoying thing at work is I can't load software to my computer. I have to learn this software but until it's officially approved can't use it. This really sucks.  

Happy and Depressed

I'm a little down from the short days, long nights and cold weather in NY.  When I walk my dog no one is out, it's very quiet.  I've been enjoying my older son being home from college as we've been playing chess and watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. 

Idea

To day on my phone I can say "OK Google" and it allows me to talk to it. I asked "What song is this?" and then whistled 2 songs. It wasn't able to guess it, but it should have asked me if I knew and then improved it's guessing via these types of "training sessions."

Goals

My month's goal is to weigh < 160. I've also have some goals from previous months, to declutter and to lower my blood sugar.

Daily 5 Minute Journal Jan. 3, 2016

Bs 106, wt. 166.8 both are high. I'm trying to get my younger son to also go on Excel Diet. One thing I'm trying is to get off of Bulletproof coffee and drink black coffee instead.

I don't want to do any Islamic research today as I'm sick of reading about it. The last one from a +Sam Harris post

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that religion isn't helping these kids: https://t.co/eHsGVt3ayP

— Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) January 2, 2016

showed from a Memri.org video, children being taught hate and murder in public. Why is this allowed? There are limits to free speech as you can't yell "FIRE" in a crowded movie theater if there isn't one.  You shouldn't be allowed to yell "kill Jews" in public.

Still frustrated with +Verizon as my phone continues to reboot for no apparent reason. On the picture of the battery you can see 7 - 8 gaps which is when the phone rebooted.
This seems to happen more often if the phone was left alone for a long time and then picked up. It has also happened when I didn't touch the phone. After this experience with them I think I'm going to use a different phone carrier.

I would like to know how I waste my time. Seems like I waste a lot of it. Some of my projects like Time-creator.com tried to answer this question but didn't do a great job of it.

Yesterday I tried to write a blog post on Islamophobia but didn't finish it. I didn't use my FTAD method

New York Times Takes bias to an Unbelievable Level

The New York Times today ran the above headline "Palestinian Shot After Stabbing Israeli in Jerusalem."  Why didn't the headline say,

"Israeli stabbed by Palestinian because she walked."

The NY Times headline makes it seem like there was an equal crime. The crime of finding a stranger and stabbing her for doing nothing directly to you is the most morally repugnant behavior sub-humans can do yet the NY Times appears at least in the headline to say that the shot Palestinian was more abhorrent than the Israeli that was stabbed.

Article is at http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/01/04/world/middleeast/ap-ml-israel-palestinians.html

Daily 5 minute Journal. Jan. 2, 2016

Woke up with blood sugar 107 which is still too high. I'm not sure the Metformin is working. I've upped my dosage of metformin to 1000 mg but it hasn't seemed to lower my blood sugar.

Weighed 166 this morning which was higher than I'd like.

I have set my goal for this month to weigh less than 160, but I've been stuck where I am for so long I'm not sure if I can reach it. I have stopped putting butting and coconut oil into my coffee.

Still have a messy area and thought today that I should do the following:

1. Come up with life's goals
2. Come up with 10 year plan
3. Come up with 5 year plan
4. Come up with years goals
5. Come up with monthly goals
6. Come up with week's goal
7. Come up with day's goal
8. Do most important thing on day's to-do list

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time watching Youtube videos. I learned how street performers levitate and watched many of Project One Life videos and saw very funny Jesus pranks. This guy  I have that http://Time-creator.com software that would every 15 minutes remind me to log data about what I did the previous 15 minutes.

question of "What did I do yesterday?" I feel like I did a lot of nothing that was goal related. I had an alarm in my

• What did I do
• What goal?
• My rating for review
• Exceeds Expectations
• Meets Expectations
• Below Expectations
• What an Exceeds Expectation would have done
• What to put on resume

Walked the dog and it was very cold. Watched Larry David with son.  I'm into compiling Larry David songs and he sang two:

1. Jaiya Jaiya Jaiya I made it out of clay
2. N-E-S-T-L-E-S song (The Terrorist Episode)
3. Ah Yapa doody Ya Ya

Reflections on 2015 and Goals for 2016

Happy New Year to all. It's kind of the worlds birthday.

How was my 2015 and what are my plans for 2016?

Many of my goals for last year continue into this year.

1. Weigh < 160 and have downward weight trend
2. Declutter house, books, tasks, ideas
3. Make $ from one of my ideas
4. Pay books on time
5. Make > friends
6. Lower blood sugar
7. Improve my Osteoperosis
8. Smart Task Selection 
9. Be Super Productive
10. Get books printed out (Wisdom of a Dad and 69 Immutable Laws of Weight Loss)
11. Make a million dollars
12. Improve my Job Security
13. >Fun
14. Make the world a safer place
15. Find a way to invest without losing $ do to stock market downturn
16. Coloscopy
17. Heart doctor
18. Lift weights
19. Find an anti-aging doctor
20. Create professional websites

Accomplishments from last year

1. Made 6 figure income
2. Got child into Cornell
3. Measured and tested my blood sugar
4. Finished reading a number of books
5. Got a new monitor and computer and phone
6. Not sure if I mad a new friend 
7. Complete first draft of Wisdom of a Dad
8. Came up with CurTask software
9. Decluttered back of basement
10. Didn't gain any weight stayed level
11. Organized my book shelves
12. Walked over 1 million steps

Failed to achieve in 2015

1. Declutter
2. W < 160
3. Normalize Blood Sugar
4. Make $ from any of my ideas

Top things I learned in 2015

1. Python
2. Mindfulness
3. I have Blood sugar issues
4. I have Osteoporosis
5. Bulletproof Diet
6. Learned of Sam Harris