Jeff

cooking

So my holiday weekend is beginning to wrap up. Oddly, I did very little over this long weekend. I visited some friends from Indy on Saturday at a tailgate down town, then came back and hung out with Kim. Then I spent the last two days sitting around the apartment. I did a lot of cooking this weekend. I enjoy making stuff that I can then enjoy. It is a lot like writing software. It is approachable and directly rewarding. I can just as easily try out a new type of cuisine and can select dishes for different diets. I get to try different methods, like timing the parts of a dish or long term marinades or cures. There is a certain satisfaction to exploring new things and then getting to taste the success.

I have gotten to explore a lot of new things. I cured my first slab of bacon almost a year ago. Kim found a place that sells slabs of pork belly and I ordered some of the whole spices and made the cure. Then cured the belly for a week and slow cooked it (I don’t have a smoker… yet). It was awesome, I have cured a number of slabs since then. It adds a new level of flavor using your own bacon for a recipe rather than some store bought thing (you can also cut the slices to your liking, so I usually cube chunks for a recipe). I also tried pickling something this weekend. Kim likes pickled unripe mangos (it seems common in south east Asia) and I had watched a Good Eats episode on pickling so I figured it was worth a shot. The pickling has another day to go (Kim said it didn’t taste fully done today), but she liked it. I will probably try pickling some other stuff down the road, need to get comfortable with it and explore some of the potential. I also would like to try some other charcuterie, I tried corning my own beef, but that recipe turned out horrible, I probably need to adjust the recipe a bunch or look for some alternatives.

I have been trying a lot of different cuisine and using different ingredients. When I first got out of college, it was beef all the time (I absolutely love beef). For my new years resolution, I have decided to only eat beef once a week. This was for both health reasons and to force me to diversify my diet and taste. I have tried to do more seafood and vegetarian dishes and use chicken and pork more. I feel like I have been largely successful in this. This weekend I made a cheddar and garlic bisque (technically not a bisque as there is no shellfish in it) that turned out amazing. I went back from seconds and thirds. Tonight I made a mushroom and bacon rigatoni. I used my own bacon for it and it turned out great. A year ago, I doubt I would have been cooking with mushrooms ever, yet I find myself doing it more and more often. I also made a dessert yesterday, it was a cookie dough cheesecake bar. It is very rich and turned out good. I am trying out some desserts these days, even though I shouldn’t do it too often. I feel like there is a lot of fun in making desserts, but Kim doesn’t eat them much and I really shouldn’t eat them much.

I am continuing to look for new and exciting things to try in the kitchen. I feel like there is so much to learn and try that it will be hard to ever grow bored with cooking. Maybe the mangoes will get me into canning more. Only time will tell.

productivity and effectiveness

So I started reading a sort of self help book entitled The 4 Hour Workweek. It describes a man’s strategy to shorten the amount of time he spent working without decreasing the amount of things he got done. He primarily used two different economic theories. The first is that 80% of income comes from 20% of the customers (this basic theory varies a lot in terms of numbers and examples), this is called the Pareto principle. The second is that the task’s complexity and effort is based more on the time allotted to do it than the actual task, this is called Parkinson’s Law. I feel like these two theories apply well to ways I can improve myself and how I do things.

The first, the Pareto principle, applies well to me already. I have always said that, for me, programming is all about ‘bursts’. I mean that I get most of my productivity done in a short, focused burst of effort. I can really put myself into a super focused mindset and really produce work, the difficulty of doing this is keeping focused, for various reasons. The main reason is hitting roadblocks, things like a coworker’s mistake stops me from progressing and I must stop and consult them to figure it out or someone runs into an issue with something I wrote and I need to help them resolve my mistake. This breaks up my ‘flow’ and all the effort I took to get that ball rolling is gone and must be re-applied. But also, the largest deterrent in doing this is keeping myself going from the end of one part to another. I may rewrite some code that does A, but once that is done, I do not know, immediately, what to move on to. So I am going to begin planning out my burst periods. I will then allot a set amount of time (for me I am saying 2 hours between the morning stand up and lunch) to accomplish this full set of tasks. (I then have a laundry list of tasks I can work on in the afternoon, but will do so out of a ‘burst’ mindset). The goal is to start accomplishing most of my work in a very efficient and effective period of time. Doing this will allow me to continue using this strategy with tasks at home, like planning out my goals on a train ride to/from work. This would mean less dicking around on the train and I would actually make progress on various projects.

The second, Parkinson’s law, is even more applicable. If someone gives me a single task to do and a whole week to do it, I feel little urgency to get it done sooner, so the tasks expands to fill the available time to do it. Whereas, if I limit the time to something smaller, it will be more urgent and also much simpler, in order for me to meet that deadline. Simple (and slightly relevant) example is planning a wedding. For most wedding plans, people have a year+ to plan the entire thing. So with a whole year, people end up nitpicking the colors of flowers, the seating arrangement of the reception, and all sorts of other small details. Versus, if you only have 4 months to plan a wedding, you end up quickly forgetting or diminishing the importance of such small details and just focus on the important and larger details. This idea can be applied to help simplify various goals that I have and allow for them to be easier accomplished. First, it requires that I start drawing up deadlines for projects, I fear that if I don’t, they will never have the urgency to get finished. Also, doing this along with the previous rule, I can force myself to maximize the use of that focused time. If I keep that 2 hour period as fact and pick out goals that are a generous focus for those 2 hours, I feel like I will end up amplifying that time usage rather than diminishing it (so it wouldn’t really be 80% work in 20% of the time).

So, starting today, I will be setting shortterm deadlines for various subparts of projects. My first (and experimental one) is getting this website open sourced. I have broken down the tasks I want to get done to consider it in a “1.0” state and have it be proper for an open source view. I am setting the goal at a month. I have picked time periods of (at most) a week per task and I will begin breaking those down into smaller, day sized, chunks. This allows me to get the feel if I am making good use of that time or not. Also, setting the time so short, it allows me to eliminate various other optimizations I had thought of, a common form of the perpetually moving target syndrome many projects get. We have this issue at work at lot, and I have begun to speak up about us ending up in it. It basically ends up where we are getting near the end, yet we keep wanting to improve things, eventually pushing back the release. The real need is to set in stone the goal to accomplish and set that as the goal for a decided upon release, then start making a list of improvements. These improvements then become the list of things for the next version, which gets set in stone at the end of the previous deadline and with a new deadline. Wash, Rinse, Repeat

The real hope here, is to eliminate distractions and improve my use of time. Allowing for me to feel more accomplished in the time that I do spend working on things, without lessening the time I spend doing other things. If I spend 8 hours traveling every week and most of it is dicking around because I have no sense of urgency or need, I am very likely to just waste the time neither doing something entirely enjoyable nor entirely productive, the time really becomes a wash. I would be better spending the 15-30 minutes of actual time used in one go and then spending the rest of the time reading, writing, or sleeping. Hopefully, I will be able to eliminate my chance of being distracted and increasing the amount I get done in the time I do work, giving myself more uninhibited free time, along with a greater sense of productivity.

just a trip to hawaii

So I have been on vacation for the past week and a halfish. Last Saturday, we left for Oahu. The occasion, to get married. Yup, that is correct, I am a married man. On that Tuesday, we got married on a beach. Then the next day we went to Kauai and spent five nights there for our honeymoon. I will post pictures soon, just uploaded them all to my computer, need to pick out the ones worth posting (spoiler, nothing will be from the wedding, just scenery and such from the trip, didn’t bring my camera to the wedding, had enough going on).

I had wanted to have a beach wedding for a long time (read: before I had met Kim). She grew to like the idea, so when time came, we started planning it. I liked the idea of a small wedding, one where only a handful of people were there, less meet and greet and more fun. Sadly, it also meant having to tell many people I would have liked there that they were not invited (including my aunt and uncle). I also liked the destination idea because it meant the location didn’t favor either side of our families (hers being based in Malaysia and mine primarily in the eastern to midwestern U.S.). I also liked the idea of not doing every wedding in existence (granted beach weddings are pretty common). I have been to enough “classical” weddings to not be able to differentiate where one ends and the next begins. This was my wedding. It lasted under half an hour, everyone was barefoot on the sand. Sunny, waves crashing behind, no music, lots of smiling (and Christy cried :D). We all posed for pictures afterwards and enjoyed the view (it was pretty amazing, again, pictures of the location soon). It was pretty much my dream wedding (only thing really missing was doing shots at a bar).

I had wanted to see Kauai, so we planned for our honeymoon half to be there. That is an amazing island. Every picture taken looks amazing, even the bad ones. Every place you like is picturesque, I could just stand and watch the scenery for days. Truly one of the most beautiful places on earth. One day we drove up the western side of the Waimea Canyon and I took tons of pictures, another day we traveled up to the north coast and had drinks with my parents and sister (and Joe), on another, we spent the day in Poipu, sitting on the beach and then having extended happy hour right next to the water, and then on another, we took a helicopter tour of the island (probably my favorite part). I will try and caption all of the photos too. I got to see a beautiful sunrise and sunset, tasted some rum made on Kauai, fly through the area used for Jurassic Park, and spend some relaxing time with my new wife.

Now it is all over. Tomorrow, I return to work. It is tough getting used to that. Tough coming to terms with the idea that I probably won’t be back there for a few years. Waking up and making that train tomorrow is going to be tough, but each day after will be a bit easier. It is nice seeing that life can be that beautiful, but sad to see that it cannot always be that beautiful. We are already discussing our next vacation, that is what will keep me going. So, until then, life becomes just a bit less beautiful and a bit more tough (but hey, that is where character comes from, right?).