Daily 5 Minute Journal - May 1, 2016

Cold

It's a cold rainy day in Long Island. The weather seems cooler this year than usual. It's 49 degrees.

Allergies

Today is May 1st and this is usually the first day of my allergy season. I don't know why but I just sneezed 3 times as I wrote this sentence. I'm reminded of my dad's unusual sneeze where he would say eee-ha, eee-ha, eee-ha when he sneezed.

Last night my eyes were itching. I've never been officially diagnosed with an allergy but I call it "Rose fever."  I usually have itchy eyes, scratchy throat and sneezing.

Coincidences

I've been noticing some weird coincidences recently and trying to document them. I don't believe they mean anything as it's kind of like the birthday problem. This is where if you have 23 people in a room the odds are > 50% that two people will have the same birthday (month & day).

I'll post a spreadsheet that demonstrates this phenomenon.

Sardines

My wife was asking me about sardines which I recently had a bad batch of the fish. That instant I noticed a book on my shelf and I pulled it off the shelf and turned to a random page and the following heading from the book Diabetes without Drugs.

HOW TO GET MORE COQ10 AND UBIQUINONE IN YOUR DIET

Dietary sources in descending order include sardines, ...

Weird Shoes

I started noticing people wearing these weird shoes in New York City. They remind me of the shoes worn by Herman Munster.

Book I didn't buy

I went to Barnes and Noble last night and was looking for the book

Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg. I heard a great podcast from James Altucher  that I thought was very good and worth listening to. I didn't buy the book because it was $28.00 which isn't a good price point. I would have paid $15.00 but I could get this from the library or Amazon.com or wait until the book is released in soft cover.

Excel Diet

I've weighed myself everyday in the morning for about 4 years. The only time I haven't was when I was on vacation or forgot. Today I didn't feel like taking off my clothes to do this.

Books I bought

I did buy 4 books

1. How to Fail at Everything and still Win Big - Scott Adams
2. How Google Works
3. Do you Talk Funny
4. The Brilliant Memory Box

The Scott Adams book I bought because I liked him on a James Altucher podcast. I bought How Google Works because it was $7.98 and looked interesting. I bought Do you Talk Funny because it had 5 star rating on Amazon and the Brilliant Memory Box was cheap at $9.95 and had nice packaging.

Lawn

I spent a few hours thatching, seeding, watering, mowing and pulling weeds from my lawn. The sprinkler broke just as I was about to water it. I should take before and after pictures.

I like doing the lawn even pulling weeds one at a time.

While I was doing the lawn I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast on him reading his book The End of Faith. I placed my phone in a dangerous place on the lip of a recycling can. It kept falling off into the grass and nothing happened. But then it fell into the street and my beautiful phone has a cracked screen. The reason I put it there was I was wearing shorts without pockets.

This teaches me 2 new lessons:

1. Be careful with fragile items and don't put them were they could fall
2. Wear clothes that has pockets

Hitting Baseballs

My son and I went to the baseball field in our town to hit fungo baseballs out of the park. It's only a 200 foot fence and I couldn't get the ball out unless I moved 10 feet ahead of home plate. I think the bat was too heavy for me.

I hit 3 balls out and one ball must have gone 400 ft. as a women handed it back to me and said "wow you hit that all the way to the tennis courts, that was some shot."

Goals for May

It's May and my April goal didn't come to fruition. Why? My goal was to write a small book on Excel/VBA. I think the task didn't interest me enough. I did work a little on creating software to create a mailing list so when the book was finished I could ask the people on the list to buy the book. This technique I learned from James Altucher's podcast with Steve Scott.


I'm not sure what my May 2016 goal is but today's goal is to figure it out.

Annoyances

I'm annoyed with Blogger, I can't use a shortcut to change the heading. Maybe I'll write some code to do this. I have all the components.

At work a plastic container I keep my coffee in disappeared. The only thing I can think of is that the cleaning woman threw it out for some reason. This item is very cheap and I can bring one in from home, but I think the anger is from not knowing what happened.  I just have to let it go.

I've learned from Sam Harris' book Waking Up to think of how ridiculous to hold on to this anger when I can easily replace the item.

Daily 5 Minute Journal - March 7, 2016

Rebate from Staples

Have you heard of the rebate scam. This is where you buy a product and are given a rebate in the form of a coupon or action to take to get some money back. But the majority of people forget to submit it. According to Wikipedia the rates can be as low as 2 - 5%.  Also there are 2 times when the consumer could fail to get the rebate. The first is if they forget to submit it and the second is if they forget to cash the check.

On the receipt there was no indication of a rebate, so I called the 800 number and they helped me complete the Staples rebate form online.

Task at the last minute

I hate when I get a task to do at the last minute. My boss tells me at the end of the day he needs a report. So I have to work overtime from home on this. This couldn't wait until tomorrow?

Frustrating day at work

Today was a frustrating day at work for me. I was trying to copy data from my local PC to a MapR cluster and kept getting error messages when trying to read avro formatted files in a directory. At first I was having issues due to a bug in Apache Drill that was solved by updating it to a newer version 1.5. 

I was also getting an error -Xmx512m is not a recognized as an internal or external... This error was caused by my JAVA_HOME=c:\program files\.....  and the space in the directory was causing the problem. I did a Dir /x which shows the 8 character filename and used that which was PROGRA~1. 

Your draw is messy

A co-worker comes over to my desk and says "Your draw is messy." I wasn't in the mood to hear this and didn't care much about what he thought. Keep these things to yourself. So I said to him how come your shirt isn't ironed, it's all wrinkly.  Don't give unsolicited advice to people. 

He also made a comment about whether I was drinking Bulletproof coffee and a previous day he was looking through a bag of mine to see what I bought. 

Books at Barnes and Noble

I wanted to buy some books:

• 301 Smart Answers to Tough Interview Questions
• Start your own eLearning or Training Business
• Big Data for dummies
• Python for kids

But the line was too long. When I looked them up on Amazon I saw that they were all rated poorly and priced much lower. 

 Was on sale used for $10.00 with shipping vs. $30.
The eLearning book was $14 vs. $20.00 and only had 3 stars. The Interview Question book was $4.00 vs. $15.00 and was rated 4 stars

Find String Code

I have some Excel VBA code that will find strings in text files.  I have 6500 files that I have to search each for 6000 different strings or however many you specify. The output is the file names in column A and in column B - IV contains what matched.

This code takes a very long time and usage of Doevents and Application.Statusbar is needed. Also I have code to update the status bar every 500 items by doing a remainder calc as follows

If j Mod 500 = 0 Then

      doevents

      Application.StatusBar = Application.StatusBar & "."

End If

Daily 5 Minute Journal Dec. 26, 2015

Islamaphobia. 

This term has been used in a number of ways, To me it means a fear of Islam. Islam makes me afraid as any doctrine that can get people to kill themselves and others fly planes into buildings, mass murder people who've done nothing at all is something to fear. The term seems to be used to stop people from criticizing an idea, which all religions are.  And when people talk about all the hate crimes against Muslims, there are a number of reasons people do this and the main one is what certain Muslims have done in the name of their religion. Obviously there are many good Muslims and the majority would never do these crazy things. The only question I have is that I believe the term phobia relates to an irrational fear, but I don't know that this fear is irrational.

Health

wt. 165.4 which is > 165. Blood Sugar was 93 which is better than usual. I took a lot of pills and stuff yesterday morning, maybe the affect is delayed. Saw family yesterday.

TV

I watch a weird Star Wars Christmas special that was so bad it was good. 6 is nice.

I watched Booze Traveler show which was in Guatemala. This show is giving me the travel bug. Niece is going to Thailand.

It's nice having my son home from college as he spends time with me. We watch some TV together, like Curb Your Enthusiasm (spoiler alert).

We watched the episode where Larry is going to a wedding get's hung up as he can't find his airline tickets. There is a scene where Larry and Cheryl are driving to the wedding and Larry sing's the following song. Ya dat da.

Memory

Where's my phone? This seems to be the question I ask the most these days.

I walk into the garage and forget why then realize it's to get a trash bag. I've been doing this since I was a kid where I'd get to a new room and not remember why I'm there.

I can't remember Mel Gibson's name and the movie he did with the Inca's?

Wisdom of a Dad

I recently located a hard copy of my book Wisdom of a Dad. It's a bit overwhelming figuring out how to get the information in the book into the one I've published on the web.

Current Task

I'm having second thoughts about CurTask, Which is the software that's supposed to help me reach my goals. I'm realizing that it's not working and maybe I need to come up with another method to get stuff done. The idea is something I've been working on a long time and the real name is Smart Task Selection. The idea is that a smart computer will tell you what to do and if you do it you will reach your goals.

Meditation

I meditated yesterday, using the Headspace app. I liked it. It did relax me.

Optical Illusions

I spent some time yesterday watching youtube videos on optical illusions. Mostly balls rolling up hill.

Annoyance

Annoyance that the Windows explorer to view files by descending date use to be instantaneous but with the newer version of windows it takes too damn long.

Twitter

I'm still posting to twitter and do love when I get retweets, likes or mentions. A little pissed that twitter has banned my account from advertising and I'm not sure why and they refuse to tell me.

Thinker's Block on a Walk Through NYC

Companies are constantly going out of business I see new ones popping up old ones closing. No one opens a business and thinks it will fail but most do. According to StatisticsBrain.com 55% fail after 5 years.

It's a very humid morning and I decide to walk 3 - 4 miles to work I see a dog pooping and realized my son figured out that if the tail is straight dog's pooping and if the tails curved the dog is peeing.

I realized that stepping out of your zone of comfort means going against habits and that's why it's hard. 

Beautiful architecture 14th & 8th

So I start on my morning walk from Penn Station to Fulton street. There's not much to see between 31st and 23rd street. There's some beautiful architecture on 8th Ave. and 14th street. On 8th Avenue and James Street one block south of 14th I pass some very beautiful flowers and a  crazy guy appears to be yelling at somebody. I'm trying to put my thoughts on the paper but of course the act of trying it means I'm not thinking of anything to write.

Pretty flowers

Whitehorse Tavern

I pass the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. I think it's one of the oldest bars in New York City. The prices are very reasonable last time I was there the food was very good.

and you can sit outside on picnic tables. It might not be a good choice if the weather is too hot or too cold.

Bagel Store

Streets and sidewalks are very empty at this time just before 8 a.m. to 9 am. I pass a bagel shop and feel sad that I can't have one because of what it does to my blood sugar. It's on Christopher and Hudson.

I pass a guy with a dog and wasn't sure what kind it was. I wanted to ask him but stopped because he was wearing headphones. I pass outdoor sidewalk cafes that would be nice to have breakfast at on Barrow and Hudson.  Hudson is the street Eighth Ave. goes into and some of the streets are very pretty.

I pass a vacant lot that looks like it's getting ready for construction I'm amazed at how the plants can grow anywhere or as they like to call them weeds.

Construction

There's an interesting chocolate store on Hudson and Charlton and they always doing construction in the city.

Pretty Streets

At Spring Street and Hudson the Freedom Tower pops up behind the buildings.

Near Hudson and Canal there is a Classic Car Club and a nice little park called Freeman Plaza.









Right off of Canal a  restaurant called American Flatbread looks like it recently closed.

On my way home at 5 p.m. I pass an interesting building on Lafayette and White Street

As I walk up Lafayette there is an interesting building off of Grand near Lafayette which i think is now a police station. There is a restaurant/bar called O'Neill's where I've heard some scenes from Sex in the City took place.


I pass some stencil art on a building in Lafayette. 

Blue Man Group tube show is on Lafayette near Astor Place and a place called Joe's Pub is across the street.



Lafayette goes into 4th Avenue and there is a pool hall Amsterdam billiards and bar which you should call ahead to make sure there's no leagues taking over all the tables.




 also right next door is the post from a few Seinfeld episodes.

Post office from the Seinfeld TV show

The is also an interesting costume store and used book store on the west side of 4th Ave.

This costume store is open year round

Small bookstore

A few blocks away is Strand bookstore which is on 13th and Broadway, one block to the left. If you make a left off of 4th Avenue Union Square Park is a nice park will be on your left side as you walk up 4th Avenue and you can see the MetLife building what used to be the PanAm building.

People lounging on the perimeter of Union Square Park

Bathroom on North East Side of Union Square park

View looking up Park Ave.

Great Barnes and Noble bookstore

Restaurant on the North side of Union Square Park. Only open during the nice weather

Great sporting goods store Paragon on Broadway