Adventures March and April 2020
In March 2020, I took a 2 month sabatical between leaving Amazon and joining Facebook. Given it was a substantial amount of time, I came up with some big plans, and wrote them down. It was a great plan, BUT my time off correlated perfectly to the Corona Virus and as a result I wasted lots of my mental energy thinking about the Corona Virus, and adjusting to being in pseudo-quarantine. Took me a while, but I finally realized I should ignore corona virus, or at least minimize my time thinking about it.
- Priorities
- Blog Content
- Minecraft
- NLP
- Windows
- Vision systems - OpenCV
- Magic - Sleight of Hand
- Kids Show - I can do a 15 minute parlor show
- Biking
- Inspirations
- iOS
- Books
- Family
- Blog Tech
- vim
- Cut
Priorities
Physical because my body is the only one I’ve got
- I will weight 200 by May 1st (205 by April 1st).
- I go to a personal trainer once a week.
- I go to gym 5 days a week.
- I wake up daily at 5 am.
- I close my rings daily.
Emotional health because that’s how I experience the world
- I medtate daily.
- I do a mental wind down befor bed daily.
Living the 7 habits, because that’s my bible
- Eating the frog
- Quarter/Month/Week/Day Habits
Blog Content
☑ New logo
https://github.com/idvorkin/blob/blob/master/idvorkin-bunny-ears-ar-2020-180-180.png
☐ The manager book
- ☑ Chapter #1 - What is a manager
☐ Eulogy
- ☑ Refresh
- ☐ Update family section
☐ Job Hunt Rollercoaster Post
☐ Emotional Health Posts
☐ Money Ideas
☑ Time Off
My guide to taking time off
Minecraft
See detailed notes
☑ Bedrock Server
☐ EC2 Updating
☐ Ubuntu vs CentOS
Yeah, use Ubuntu unless you need CentOS.
NLP
I’m a huge fan of NLP, and have a pretty good corpus in my journal entries. However, try as I might I get few insights beyond the fact I generate lots of typos.
☑ Building ‘generative text’ from my chat logs
☑ ‘generative text’ from my journal entries
https://github.com/minimaxir/textgenrnn https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/intro.ipynb#recent=true
☐ ‘generative text’ using gpt-2
Too early, waiting for someone to make fine tuning easier/web service
Windows
☑ Remote access to a mac - Teamviewer
Vision systems - OpenCV
☐ Remove ‘non-changing’ images from ring doorbell library
Magic - Sleight of Hand
☐ Hannibal Road Show
- Review the Roadshow trick by Hannibal
- Practice Palms
☐ Multi Card Appear and Disappear
☐ Write my magic homework
☐ Carl’s Unicorns
Kids Show - I can do a 15 minute parlor show
☐ Chris. T. Magician
- ☐ Read Chris T Magic Book
- ☐ Track Christopher T Magician
- ☐ Listen to Chris. T. Magician Show and Notes form Last conference
☐ Silly Billy
- ☐ Skim Silly Billy
- ☐ Watch Silly Billy Lecture
☐ White board
- ☐ Learn cake routine
- ☐ Practice Drawing Eye Balls
☐ Silk Changing color
☐ Unexpected dots
☐ Remote Setup - Considering Zoom
☐ Better webcam - ivCam
Biking
☐ Daily bike ride - bottleneck is calfs locking up.
☑ Got my e-bikes
- Got my ebikes
- ☐ Get Hydraulic Brakes
- ☑ Buy a cargo-ebike
- ☑ Buy another e-bike
- ☑ Buy suspension seat posts.
☑ Kids biking
- ☐ Amelia can ride at school playground by herself
- ☐ Zach can use gears
Inspirations
- Clown Philospoher - Slava Polunin
- Dude who wire walked the world trade towners Phillipe Petit
iOS
☐ Video Editting - Luma Fusion
Books
☐ How will you measure your life
Ideas:
Chapter 1:
Don’t solve a problem, share a theory and give an example. Theory is more important then data, as theory is predictive (Assuming correct theory), test of theory is its predictive power.
Funny story about data “everything that flies has wings”, not predictive power.
Chapter 2:
Work Sat is two independant axis 1) Sat and 2) Hygiene
- Sat is AMP
- DSat is the extrinsic motivators
Money, annoying boss, nice office. !Hygiene does not equals Sat.
Chapter 3:
Strategy is deliberate and emmirgent, e.g. what you discover is more important then what you think. Flexibility and seeing what’s most importan matters.
- Test core strategies assumptions (Irridium cell phone)
Chapter 4: How you spend your enegy is your actual strategy, and invest early.
Elilogue:
Being 100% committed easier then 98%.
98% means always need to think about it, and easy to give in. Juicing vs dieting
Chapter 5
- Too late to invest in family after it catches on fire
- Best time to invest is 100 years ago, next is today.
- Seems like don’t need investments, but when need them you’re screwed.
- Family, Health, Career all lines of business, and when one fails, needs all your attention, and you’re screwed.
Chapter 6
- Focus on the job to be solved (Milkshakes)
You “hire” a product to solve a problem you have.
Crappy game company, but focused on problem - 12 minutes to play game.
Milkshake purpose 1) fun get to work snack - slow == good2) way to reward kids - fast == good. Diff products for diff time.
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
☑ StoryBrand
Using the hero’s path to createa marketting plan. Also, helpful to clarify what your “business” really is.
Superb book. Very well written, and really speaks to the many, many, websites you see now a days.
Use their awesome online companion tool
- A charector (your customer not your business)
- Has a problem (external, interal, philisophical)
- Meets a guide (your business, empathy, authority)
- Who gives them a plan (process, agreement)
- And call them to action (direct, transitional)
- That ends in success
- And helps them avoid failure
- Which results in a transformation (from, to)
Book well layed out:
- Why you need it
- SummaryWhat it is
- Combo What and How of doing it.
- How to do the nitty gritty on your web and org and etc.
Business Model of the company well layed out (customer value, franchises), and a great model of using this framework.
- SMB owners
- Web Seminars
- Peronal Coaching
- IN person seminars
- Medium Business owners
- Internal culture, business problems.
- Coaches as franchises
- Training Selling to independnat franchisees who sell the method
Also an interesting business model for the book
☐ Upstream Thinking Upstream
☐ Inspired Product Management
☐ HBR Thinking Strategically
☐ Joy on Demand
Seach inside yourself v2, focused on Joy.
☑ 5 Dysfunctions of a team
Fast read:
- Lack of Trust
- Lack of Debate
- Lack of Commitment
- Lack of Accountability
- Lack of Delivering results
I think in modern terms:
- Pyschological Safety
- Healthy Debate
- Disagree and Commit
- Hold each othe accountable
- Deliver value
☐ Creativity
Meh book from the Phillipe Petit who walked the tightrope accross the world trade center and had other great adventures. Pretty meh book designed to inspire through “poetry”, pretty meh.
Family
Amelia
- ☑ Reading Matilda daily
- ☐ Roller Skating
- ☐ Bike Dates
- ☐ Somethign computer based(??)
- ☐ Daily Writing
Zach
- ☑ Watch Star Wars
- ☑ Work on website.
- ☐ Man dates
- ☐ Teach him to update his own games.
- ☐ Come up with test framework for games
- ☐ Figure out how to change things to markdown for him
- ☐ Code Combat
☐ Tori
Don’t worry, Tori is a big part of my energy, but she’s private so we won’t talk about that.
Blog Tech
☑ Clone tech diary into tech blog
☑ Better broken link checker
☑ Deep dive into CSS and bootstrap (great idea)
Quick notes here
☑ Redo CSS to be bootstrapped base
☑ Create ToC
vim
☑ Digraphs to support TODO and not-TODO
Digraphs let you use completion without needing GHFM which only works in lists.
☑ FZF super powers
Have C-O open interesting files across my repros and move there
☑ tags
Turns out there’s a new version of ctags, that support markdown, which you want for fzf :Tags
Also build interesting tag files for a markdown repo, by only using fd, which honors .gitignore
ctags `fd md$`
☐ Community
Find the community:
- Subscribed to rss feed for reddit via https://reddit/r/subreddit.rss
- Find interesting discord