Starting a new adventure in reducing debt.

Over a year ago, I said that I was going to start up my blogging, but that did not happen. I am again going to give it a try, and a major theme will be my efforts to improve my finances. I intend to pay off a lot of accumulated debt.

A large part of it will be following a budget. I followed a podcast by a company called "You need a budget" or YNAB for short. I will get into it more in a future post, but the aspect that was a game changer for me is that the software only has you allocate the funds you have in your bank account right now.

I therefore worry about future income when it shows up and not until then.

When I have spent some time between jobs, I ended up charging to credit cards and just not getting the balances to come down. I am now in a concerted effort to retire my debt. I will share things that I have learned, and things that have helped me make progress financially.

Again I highly recommend the YNAB software. They offer a 34 day free trial, as well as weekly online workshops, as well as a helpful blog. Check it out!

Coming back to my blog

It has been a while, and a lot has happened. I am now in Taylorsville Utah and working for Elsevier in Salt Lake City as a QA Engineer. Lots of exciting things going on that I am reading and trying to do. I am past my first half century and am following the "Younger Next Year" Exercise program. With that and improved diet. I have managed to get my cholesterol within bounds, without taking statin medication. I also got my blood pressure way below 120/80 which was surprising. since I thought it was already optimal. When I gave blood recently they measured 94/60!

There are some interesting things that I want to delve into, so I hope to talk about  my work in those areas in this blog.

Getting exposed to some new stuff

I have yet to take advantage of this service, but I think that it is pretty cool.

Quarterly is a web site that features Curators that will periodically send you a package. You do not find out before-hand what it contains, but it you do get to choose your curator, and many are already well known on the internet for their design chops (hope you know what I mean there).
I have wandered onto the web site every so often, and it has really been growing, with new curators joining on. The most recent wandering was from www.thisiscolossal.com whose curator is now associated with Quarterly.

Learning about Other Countries, or A Dangerously Distracting Web Site

Since my geography skills are rather poor, I was looking for some worksheets that would allow me to brush up on countries and related information. I found Sporcle which has some games where you have to come of with the names of all the countries on certain continent, as well as matching games and other related things to do.

This reminded me just how ignorant I am of many other countries. It brings to mind the woman that set out to read a book from each country of the world. I guess a similar task would be to travel to each country, but that would be expensive, if not because of airfare, at least in terms of time.

I wonder what else could be done in a similar style, maybe eat a meal from each country, or buy a handicraft, or listen to a song.

Any suggestions?

The Online prescription eyeglass experiment!

I read this book a while back (Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World by Mark Frauenfelder). It was pretty good. I am interested in the DIY, or Maker revolution, and maybe his was a good example of an everyman trying his hand at things. I subsequently checked out his blog, and he talked about getting eye-glasses online. It was a little risky but I decided to get some extra glasses, I am always shocked by the markup on frames at my local eye doctor. So I tried Coastal.com and got a pair of prescription sunglasses, and a pair of regular eyeglasses, for about $137.00 and $48.00 respectively. The frames are a little funky, and my wife does not really like the red ones, but I think that I fancy myself stylin' like Seth Godin.

Here is what my new glasses look like:

Kind of a Men in Black sort of look. 

 

A little of the detail of the frame

 

Red eyeglasses

A side shot to show the checkerboard pattern.

So far I have been happy with them. From what I have learned they are made in the USofA

These shoes are magical

I do not get too many compliments about my attire except for two things:

• My Star Wars t-shirt (certain to get compliments at Vons (like Safeways))
• These Shoes (fake Vans)

Seth Godin stepping into the MOOC realm

Following Seth regular blog, I saw that he is starting a variation on the Massively Open Online Class. Although it might not be strictly online, and he calls it Krypton Community College
.
He observes that there is a 97% dropout rate for classes such as Coursera. I can attest to this because I have started a number of them and have dropped out of all when I realize that I just had not accurately determined the time I had available.  Seth is looking at creating courses that are taught as people meet in small groups in homes. I have yet to read through all the information, but it is interesting. Check it out.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/krypton_community_college/

20 Things The Rich Do Every Day from Tom Corley

On Dave Ramsey's podcast he shared some of this info, and then provided the following on his web site. It is from a book by Tom Corley, where he talks about the difference in habitual behavior between rich and poor. The following was on his website RichHabits.net. I am going to see about getting this book. I have some questions about his methodology, but find the differences very telling.

1. 70% of wealthy eat less than 300 junk food calories per day. 97% of poor people eat more than 300 junk food calories per day. 23% of wealthy gamble. 52% of poor people gamble.

2. 80% of wealthy are focused on accomplishing some single goal. Only 12% of the poor do this.

3. 76% of wealthy exercise aerobically 4 days a week. 23% of poor do this.

4. 63% of wealthy listen to audio books during commute to work vs. 5% for poor people.

5. 81% of wealthy maintain a to-do list vs. 19% for poor.

6. 63% of wealthy parents make their children read 2 or more non-fiction books a month vs. 3% for poor.

7. 70% of wealthy parents make their children volunteer 10 hours or more a month vs. 3% for poor.

8. 80% of wealthy make hbd calls vs. 11% of poor

9. 67% of wealthy write down their goals vs. 17% for poor

10. 88% of wealthy read 30 minutes or more each day for education or career reasons vs 2% for poor.

11. 6% of wealthy say what’s on their mind vs. 69% for poor.

12. 79% of wealthy network 5 hours or more each month vs. 16% for poor.

13. 67% of wealthy watch 1 hour or less of TV. every day vs. 23% for poor

14. 6% of wealthy watch reality TV vs. 78% for poor.

15. 44% of wealthy wake up 3 hours before work starts vs.3% for poor.

16. 74% of wealthy teach good daily success habits to their children vs. 1% for poor.

17. 84% of wealthy believe good habits create opportunity luck vs. 4% for poor.

18. 76% of wealthy believe bad habits create detrimental luck vs. 9% for poor.

19. 86% of wealthy believe in life-long educational self-improvement vs. 5% for poor.

20. 86% of wealthy love to read vs. 26% for poor.

The only solution to texting while driving

This article talks about the dangers of texting while driving.

The More You Talk On—Or To—Your Phone, The Worse You Drive

This is in spite of new speech to text solutions.

This obsession to make most use of all our time, even when behind the wheel is just not going to go away. The only solution will be having a car that will drive itself.

As an aside, I think that there will be an accompanying capability to have our car judge our driving ability and maybe make us better drivers, before taking the job away from us completely.

What do you think?

Gary

Have your bugs cataloged!

 This is an interesting citizen scientist site where for $99 you submit some samples and it determines the relative populations of different microbes. There is emerging research that our microbiome affects our weight, well being and much more.


http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/

Fascinating Emigration Graphic

at http://peoplemov.in/ there is a cool interactive graphic that shows the movement of emigrants between countries.

Gaming as a path to longer life?

I recently listened to a TED talk by Jane McGonigal entitled "The game that can give you 10 extra years of life".  She is also the author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. In her TED talk she talks about all the benefits of Playing Games.
 
I really have mixed feelings about this topic. I really do like playing games, once I have moved up the learning curve a bit. I do find that it is easy for me to spend lots of time playing, like when Lode Runner came out on MacIntosh (sp?) when I was in college, and I played all through the night. Even a few years ago, I would spend so long playing Civilization on the PC that my neck would freeze up in the position that I was holding it.

I have seen much recently in the business writing about the concept of gamification (not sure it is really a word yet). Basically we can take the concepts that draw people to games, and apply in the workplace, like having a leader board for a sales organization

Right now, I am just taking a break from my game addiction, Minecraft, and using it as a reward for completing some tedious Cub Scout rechartering.

 How do games make a difference in your life?

Thanks to those that click through to Amazon and buy anything there. I appreciate your support of my blog.

A domestic fox as a pet!!!

Years ago I had read an article in Smithsonian Magazine about a research project in Russia where they raised foxes, and selectively bred them to bring out the friendliest characteristics. In each round they would take the kits that are most compatible with humans and mate them together to bring out those characteristics.

It was interesting that those foxes soon took on the characteristics we associate with domesticated dogs, such as being fertile only at certain times of the year, instead of all the time, like the dogs' wolf forebears were. 

I just found at www.domesticfox.com  that you can now adopt these foxes to the U.S. (probably from the same research facility). And they are soo cute!

Augmented Reality

I saw this video on TED about augmented reality app that run on your smart phone.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_mills_image_recognition_that_triggers_augmented_reality.html

I find this fascinating because of the possibilities to enhance the capabilities of the cell phone. They demonstrate that you can aim your camera at a painting in a museum, and it can replace the painting with a video that can explain the painting's history. I think that this can make for a very fun scavenger hunt experience. They also show where you can layer video over a live background. I wonder if the video is created using a Green Screen. They call it Aurasma.



I know that Qualcomm does something in this space called Vuforia. This is something I want to investigate more.

The top 1% and what they do

I find this interactive graphic from the New York Times, though not new, to be very interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2012/0115-one-percent-occupations/index.html

It shows where the top 1% are occupied. It is interesting because the 1% is really spread out a lot. Of course if you are a lawyer or doctor or work with financial securities, you stand a good chance of being rich.

I find that discussion of income and taxes to be oddly affected by individual's perceptions about the rich. Either we have a strong feeling about it, because we feel that some people are earning more than is fair, or maybe we are against some policy, such as the estate tax, because we think that that tax will impact us personally, even though we are not likely to be in that category. I think that I flip flop in my own thinking about this often.

A self driving car

The Google Blog just issued an update about their self driving car program. Their computer controlled cars have logged over 300,000 miles without an accident. Now members of the team are going to use the cars to do some limited commuting, with only a single human within the vehicle. Previously the humans were in two person teams. This is very remarkable for a number of reasons.

1. Image recognition is very hard, and so I guess video recognition is also hard. That said, there is probably a reasonable subset of features that are critical for the computer to recognize, for example. A person can easily tell the difference between a horse, or a cow, or a deer is in the road, which the computer will find difficult. However to avoid a collision, we do not care what the large obstacle is, we just need to know that it is in our way, or on a path to be in our way. The computer is probably much faster than a human in responding to an identified obstacle.

2. This is a very bold move by Google. They started out as a search engine company, and now they do so many things. I try to avoid hyperbole, but they are probably the most innovative company around. Now it might be that they are just the best at buying other companies of interest, but this foray into big hardware is significant. For Google this is a high level of diversification.

The idea of boldly going after an innovation is inspiring. Now I do not know about the self driving car niche, so I do not know how much of the techniques and algorithms are borrowed from academia etc., but Google is most certainly picking up patents by the basketful as they are figuring out how to make this work. There is a lot to be learned by putting yourself out there and making the effort. At some point you have to stop talking and thinking and start making something. I would love to see the full story about the prototypes and simulations and failed tests that went into this effort.

Also, given human nature, I wonder when people or the regulators will feel safe about people giving control over to the driving computer in even larger numbers. At what point do we determine that it is safer than a human driver? I am certain that we could achieve that pretty easily, but it still might have its flaws, and would we require it to be perfect? It is certainly an interesting question.

I'm starting classes at the University of Michigan!

Well, not exactly AT the University of Michigan. I am taking Social Network Analysis through Coursera.org. Right now Free virtual classes are all the rage. Online courses in general are nothing new. U. C. Irvine, for example has several computer science classes available online, but they are about the same price as the in-classroom version of the same material.

What Coursera (as well as a few similar businesses ) offers is free on-line courses from top universities. There is a good introduction to some of the offerings in the TED Blog.

I signed up for Social Network Analysis because I have an interest in social networks, and in data visualization, which it seems would be part of the class. I've heard that some courses allow you to pay at the end for a completion certificate of some sort. I am just happy to get the information.

The TED blog lists a variety of courses that include ones available through ITunes, and YouTube.

Biological Black Matter

Nathan Wolfe has an interesting TED Talk about the uncharted worlds of exploration within our own bodies. I find it interesting how the organisms that live within our bodies affect our health and well being. When Wolfe cataloged the DNA captured in a human nose for example, there was a significant amount of DNA that was not associated with known organisms! It was like a UFO in your nose (and elsewhere).

A Favorite Web Site for Readers

I do not know about you, but I loved the Reader's Digest. They brought together the latest in interesting articles and repackaged them for easy consumption. I also like the jokes, which came in three or four flavors (humor in uniform, etc.). It was funny that my reaction to their condensed books is just the opposite.

Whenever I come across one of their condensed books at a garage sale, I will pull back in horror. I appreciate how they will abbreviate non fiction material, so that I can get the important core of it easily, but in reading novels, I really want the original words of the author, just like I am disappointed with the editing that changes a book into a movie.

I came across their web site and found that there you can get many of the articles that you enjoy in the print edition. Of course you do have to subscribe to get everything, like the vocabulary column, which I always enjoy. Also, it is much easier to create gold painted 3-D Christmas trees from the print edition.

The World's Funniest Joke (and more)

I recall hearing the following joke on NPR (My most listened to station) as the winner in the scientific search for the worlds most funny joke.

• Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner and a
  bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep.
  Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. "Watson,
  look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
  "I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes" replies Watson.
  "And what do you deduce from that?"
  Watson ponders for a minute.
  "Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially
  billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I
  deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I
  suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that
  God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the
  universe... What does it tell you, Holmes?"
  Holmes is silent for a moment. "Watson, you idiot!" he says. "Someone has
  stolen our tent!" 

 What I did not know at the time, is that it was a preliminary result, and the final report came out in October 2002 with much less fanfare. (I did not hear about it). Well it is available here: http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ll-final-report.pdf and is chock full of interesting and funny facts. such as..

What type of humor is the most popular in the US or Canada?
What part of the brain is responsible for our humor?
What is the top Joke in Wales?
How did Dave Barry try to sway the results with gnawing weasels?

It is easy reading (only 14 or so pages long)

The Laugh Lab web site which has more resources is: http://laughlab.co.uk
  
Oh, and here is the final winner:

• A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them
  falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled
  back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the
  emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What
  can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: “Just take it easy. I
  can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is
  heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?”

Have a fun day! Any good jokes you would want to share?