Norco Threshold A3

After working from home for about 5 years, I changed lobs last year to a company that has an office where you go to do work in the same place everyday. I took my standing desk in with me, and I've also been cycling pretty much everyday, which I am absolutely loving! It's only a 10Km round trip, but it's great to have a reason to get out of the house and start the day with some really good exercise.

Demise of my Kmart clunker

When we first moved back to Aus from Japan, I bought a bike from Kmart to cycle to a job I did a brief stint at. It was only about $150, but it served me well. After being left unused all these years while working from home, by my estimates it did about 1,500 Km since starting my new job.

Last year sometime, I hit a small brick curb at a medium speed, and bent both rims. The front had a slight wobble, and the back wobbled like it was trying to escape, but I kept riding it anyway, thinking that the cost of replacing the wheels wold probably be as much as the entire bike cost.

Until this happened:

I took pretty good care of it, oiling the chain and pumping up the tires every other week, but last time I noticed that the back rim has finally given out. Must have been metal fatigue after the bump it took last year, but the rim is completely cracked and broken, so I just had to buy a new bike!

The search for a replacement

For some reason, at first I was taken with the idea of a belt-driven internal hub commuter, like a Gates Carbon Drive and a Shimano Alfine 8 or 11 speed, but I found them to be quite expensive, in the $1,500+ range.

I had my eye on the Specialized Source, and the Trek Soho Deluxe urban commuters, and noticed that one of our local bike shops had a Specialized Source Eight in the shop, so I went in to take a look, but then I saw the Specialized Tricross and quickly abandoned the idea of internal gears, for a cyclocross style bike with drop bars.

Unfortunately the Tricross was a bit outside my (cough, my wife's) price range, starting at $1,500, so I kept searching until I found the Norco Threshold series.

Cyclocross!

The Norco Threshold series is marketed as a cyclocross bike, with an alloy frame, drop bars, and rugged tires. Unlike the Specialized Tricross which start at $1,500, the top-end Threshold is around $1,500, while the A3 retails for around $1,100. I picked up mine for about $900.

The hardware is pretty good, with Shimano Sora shifters, Shimano Tiagra derailleurs, and Shimano 9-speed cassette, Hayes CX5 disc brakes, and FSA 46/36 crankset.

The alloy frame is stiff, and light, weighing in at 11Kg for the 54cm. Coming from my last bike which had front forks, and a suspension seat-post, I love that you can feel both every bump & crack in the road, just the same as you can feel every joule of energy from your legs being transferred into forward momentum.

What's awesome

• I love the drop bars! It's my first bike with drop bars, and they're awesome.


• The shifters – from the website, it looks like they're the older thumb-click models, but the 2013 model comes with the dual–lever shifters, which are great.


• Quick–release wheels – no way I wold have fit it in the back of the car to get it home without being able to quickly drop the wheels off.


• Disk brakes! They actually stop the bike, instead of just making noise whilst slowing it down slightly…


• Saddle – it's quite hard, but it looks like it's designed to be slung over the shoulder for actual cyclocross racing, or for carrying it up stairs in my case

What's not quite awesome

• Rattly cables – I like that it has internal cable routing in this price range, but unfortunately it makes a noticeable and distracting rattle when riding at speed as the stiff cables bang on the inside of the frame.


• Short rear centre – all Threshold models besides the smallest measure only 425mm from the crank to the rear axle, and I notice myself hitting the heel of my foot on the frame. It may be more that the frame is wider to accommodate the disc brakes and rear cassette, but I'm thinking that toe clips might help keep my heel out of the way

Awesome bike!

The first time I rode it, I had the urge to laugh maniacally; it's a full 6Kg lighter than my last bike, and the gear ratios are much better, so it launches forward instantly, effortlessly climbs uphill, and I haven't ridden a long enough downhill slope to fully let rip in its top gear. I thought I might want 50 on the front, but that would probably be terrifying.

While I'll really only be using it for commuting, a cyclocross bike makes for a much better machine for surviving Sydney's atrocious cycling conditions at speed and in style than my trusty old Kmart hybrid. For $900, to get drop bars with Sora shifters, disk brakes, and an alloy frame is great value. The bike is light, yet stiff and solid, and I'm sure it will give me years of happy cycling.

External display not working, "detect displays" does nothing

This is a tale of apparent hardware problems which revealed themselves to actually be the result of the most common cause of issues when working with computer software, that which is located somewhere between the screen and the keyboard. i.e. user error

The problem

I have a Macbook Pro connected to a Cinema Display external monitor via a thunderbolt to DVI adaptor. I had unplugged the laptop and taken it downstairs in the evenings recently to do some late-night hacking. Usually when returning it to my desk the next morning, I just plug it back in and everything “just works” ™, but yesterday it didn’t, and when it happened again today I started to worry that I’d had a hardware failure somewhere. Silly me…

Symptoms

When connecting the external display to the Macbook Pro via the Thunderbolt to DVI adaptor:

• The external display seemed to wake from sleep, but did not display a picture
• The Macbook Pro did not detect the external display
• Opening the Displays preferences pane and hitting Detect Displays did nothing
• The system logs (Console.app) did not show any errors or warnings

Debugging

• Tried logging out to the accounts screen and logging back in (which should restart the window server), but it had no effect
• Rebooted the MacBook pro, and upon arriving at the accounts screen the external display was activated

Having already wasted enough time on it, I thought nothing more of it and got to work. When it happened again today though, I had to dig a little further…

The solution

I mentioned unplugging my laptop and taking it downstairs. The recent models of Macbook Pro have two GFX processors, a “discreet” GPU which is a powerful 3D processor with dedicated super-fast RAM for games etc., and an “integrated” GPU which shares system resources. They attempt to intelligently switch between the two depending on the applications being used, which is great in theory, but in practice many common OS X applications use library calls which trigger the dedicated GPU, and this results in the battery draining much faster than necessary.

A solution to this is using an application called gfxCardStatus to manually force the system to use the low-power integrated GPU when running on batteries. The only problem with this however, is that the integrated GPU can’t be used with external displays, so if you forget to switch it back to “automatic” mode…

Head. Bang. On. Desk.

1. Open the Macbook Pro
2. Set gfxCardStatus to Discreet only, or Dynamic switching
3. Your external display will spring to life!

Sometimes when your computer seems to be misbehaving, it’s just doing exactly what you told it to, in this case explicitly disabling the GPU required for using external displays.

A better solution

Mac OS X has a great speech synthesiser built-in, it could actual say “To use this external display, enable the discreet graphics processor” so that if the laptop is closed, you still get some feedback as to why the external display is not working.

DIY standing desk with 19" equipment rack

Standing desks are gaining in popularity, with more and more people spending large amounts of their day in front of computers, and noticing the negative effects being sedentary for too long. I thought I’d give it a try, but didn’t want to spend large amounts of money of fancy, motorised, height-adjustable desks, so I scouted around my office for things to use to hobble one together.

Attempt #1 - 5 unit equipment rack

Sitting up on top of a shelf behind me gathering dust was an old 5 unit 19” equipment rack that I’d made eons ago. It used to have guitar amps & effects racks mounted in it, but I had since upgraded to a nice SKB rack unit.

So I dusted it off and stuck my monitor & keyboard on top it:

Dodgy indeed…

Attempt #2 - wooden worktop & sliding drawer

Not bad, but it really needed a better worktop. We have an actual computer desk downstairs which came with a printer shelf. We never use our printer, so the shelf had since been removed and stashed in our storage room where we keep all our camping gear. We do quite a bit of camping, so while preparing for a recent trip I noticed the shelf and dug it out to be re-purposed for my standing desk.

The thing about standing desks though is that by mid-afternoon you really need to sit down for a bit, even if it’s just to have a hot beverage and do some inbox processing before getting back to it. With the Macbook Pro entwined in various peripheral cables however, removing it wasn’t a simple matter. Then it dawned on me - aren’t there shelves and drawers available for 19” equipment racks?

Indeed there are - behold, the transforming standing desk:

I got lucky by finding a 2 unit keyboard drawer on ebay for about $80 including delivery. The laptop sits on the top shelf, and a keyboard sits on a lower shelf which extends even further still. I was surprised by how much travel it has!

So now when my legs/back get sore, I can roll out my gym ball and slide out my keyboard drawer to sit down for a while, then transform it back again when done (yes, I will be imagining the noise from the original Transformers cartoon while doing it…). There’s still room for customisation too by slotting some more equipment into the remaining rack spaces, but this will suffice for now I think :).

Backup strategy

Time for a geek post! It’s been a while.

So, recently I’ve kinda been forced to implement a better backup strategy, not because I lost data, but because some things happened that made me worry about what would happen if it did.

This scary dialogue box appeared on a machine that until that moment had no backups whatsoever!!!

My current setup

I have two Macbook Pros, a 2006 model that I bought in Japan which is setup downstairs for our son to use for homework (cough, Minecraft), and a recent model which I use for work. With the introduction of iCloud, and iTunes Match, my music is now synced nicely across all my Apple devices, but the one thing that wasn’t synced was my photos. If I lost my music, I could always acquire it again, but we’d be heartbroken if we lost our family photos.

The old Macbook Pro had photos on it up until around late 2011, which is roughly when I got my new one and also upgraded our camera to a Nikon D90. The new one has photos since then, and everything taken with my iPhone 4S via Photo Stream.

Time Machine

Both machines are backing up via Time Machine to one Western Digital 1TB drive each; the older one has it plugged in directly via USB, while the newer one has it attached as a network drive via an Airport Extreme wifi router. (Yes, you can actually do that)

This is fine for system files & settings, apps etc. In case of a catastrophe, I can re-install my apps from the App Store, or the vendor’s website. I keep my serial numbers in Yojimbo, which I have saving it’s data to Dropbox. Time Machine is really only handy if you need to revert a file that you might have deleted from your desktop last week thinking you wouldn’t need it again for example. I’ve never used it to revert changes or restore lost/damaged files.

Dropbox

All my writing, notes, etc. are stored in a Dropbox folder, which automatically syncs to the cloud. In case of a catastrophe, I could restore them easily.

Source Code Management

I keep all my software development work under version control, which means it’s stored on the SCM server, as well as on the production servers my apps are deployed to. In case of catastrophe, a quick svn up will restore my work.

The problem

Both laptops have small, 128GB hard drives. The newer one is an SSD, while the older one is literally completely full. The iPhoto libraries are around 40GB and 20GB for the old & new respectively, so I needed a way to move the libraries off onto an external drive. If I do that however, they will no longer be protected by Time Machine. I’ve read that you can actually configure Time Machine to backup external drives, but there’s another issue worth considering - physically loosing or damaging the backup drive itself.

If there’s a house fire, or someone breaks in and steals the backup drive, our backups are lost. Hard drives can, and inevitably will fail. So for our most precious memories, I need an off-site backup solution.

The solution - off-site backups

Dropbox is great for small files, like plaintext documents, PDFs, etc, but the free plan only provides 2GB of storage, and the paid plans are reasonably priced, but considering I need to backup at least 40-50GB of data, I’d need to go to the Pro 100 plan for $20/month or $200/year. My precious memories are worth that, but there is a cheaper alternative - going directly to Amazon S3.

Dropbox actually uses Amazon’s cloud services for their storage back-end. You can actually sign up for an Amazon S3 account yourself, and get wholesale prices as it were, around $10/month for 80GB of storage. All you get is access to their storage, you don’t get any means of using it as part of a backup strategy out of the box. That’s where a handy little app called Arq comes into the picture.

Arq - automated backups to Amazon S3

Arq is an app which costs around $30, and provides a beautiful interface to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. It walks you through signing up for S3 and setting it up for automated remote backups. It runs in the background, and can quite happily backup external drives.

I now have a backup strategy that I’m happy with:

• Music
  • synced across devices via iCloud
• Photos
  • stored on an external drive which is backed up to Amazon S3 with Arq
  • might set up local backups onto the Time Machine drive for a redundant copy
• Videos
  • they’re just stored remotely on one of my Time Machine drives (the NAS), don’t really care if I loose those; I rarely if ever re-watch them
• Writing, documentation, PDFs etc
  • synced across devices via Dropbox
• Source code & assets
  • backed up remotely via version control systems
• System files & apps
  • backed up by Time Machine
  • bootable backup image updated daily by Carbon Copy Cloner

It will be some time before Arq finishes it’s initial 50GB upload, but once it’s done I’ll have peace of mind that our most precious memories will survive flood, fire, and hopefully foolishness :) Well worth the $30 up-front investment in Arq, and the $0.33/day in Amazon S3 storage fees.

Abandoning beans for Paleo

Sometime towards the end of January 2012, I ran out of beans. That’s not a metaphor, I quite literally depleted my supply of beans. My system was to buy packets of dried beans, soak them over night, and boil them up the next morning, then leave them to cool during the day and bag them up and freeze them in the evening. Then I’d just take out a bag as needed until they ran out, and repeat the process.

Except one time, inevitably, I couldn’t be bothered, and just added some extra veggies to my plate. Low and behold, without realising, or even intending to, I’d gone Paleo!

Here’s my weight from January 2012, clearly trending up (which isn’t necessarily bad):

And then in February 2012 after abandoning beans, trending down:

My body fat over the same period showed the same slight trend down.

What is Paleo?

In a nutshell, the idea is to try and replicate the diet that our ancestors would have followed before the agricultural revolution around 10,000 years ago, and the more recent introduction of processed foods and vegetable oils.

Basically, try and eat plenty of the following:

• Meat
  • lean cuts of beef, pork, chicken
• Seafood
  • Wild-bred fish like salmon, shrimp, mussels
• Vegetables
  • Pretty much anything non-starchy or sweet, like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, etc
• Fruit
  • Low sugar content fruits, like figs for example
  • In small quantities, preferably after exercise
• Nuts
  • Walnuts, brazil nuts, pecan nuts (in order of preference for their Omega 3/6 ratios)
  • In small quantities, as snacks if needed
  • Peanuts aren’t actually a nut, but are in fact a legume, so they’re out!

Dairy is generally out, although some allow certain specific types such as low-fat greek-style yogurt, and cottage cheese.

How is it different to the “slow carb” diet

The exclusion of beans & legumes, and a slightly more relaxed stance towards some specific fruit & veggies.

How is it similar to the “slow carb” diet

Besides the exclusion of beans & legumes, it’s very similar. The aim is ultimately the same: to keep satiety high with high-quality lean protein & good fats, and most of our nutrients from non-starchy vegetables with a low glycemic index/load that keeps blood glucose consistent and avoids insulin responses.

What’s wrong with beans

Seeds, grains, beans, and legumes are natures reproductive systems, and as such it’s really not in their best interest to be chewed up and digested, which destroys them in the process. Some fruits have evolved and kind of symbiotic relationship with their diners by packaging tiny seeds that can actually withstand the digestive process, and they actually benefit from being transported away from the parent plant. Generally speaking though, the rest do actually have a defence system against being digested.

Beans contain a toxin that is largely mitigated through cooking, but not completely. Even beans that have been soaked and boiled can still contain trace amounts of lectin phytohaemagglutinin, which doesn’t play too kindly with our sensitive digestive system. It won’t kill you, but after going 30 days without it, you notice the difference.

Too much information warning: before going slow carb, I was famous for my flatulence. After going slow carb, it was much better, but my no. 2s were still not ideal. Since eliminating both grains, and beans/legumes from my diet, I now have healthy, solid, “paleo poos”, and my farts are pretty much just “morning thunder” upon waking :)

Not all carbs are equal

I’m really enjoying this, it’s more sustainable than slow-carb because it doesn’t require processing beans, and I feel healthier from top to bottom. One thing I’ve learned though is that food generally fits into 3 categories:

• fat
• protein
• carbohydrates

Which generally means that if it’s not meat/oil, technically it’s a carbohydrate. That includes all those cruciferous veggies I’ve been munching down. But I’ve also read that once you’re lean & healthy, you can relax your stance on medium GI carbs like figs and sweet potatoes/yams. So I’m going to try following up my kettle bell swings with some some med GI carbs to keep my muscle glycogen levels up, and hopefully reverse that weight trend by gaining some lean muscle mass.

100 Russian kettle bell swings!

Firstly, happy 2012! Seems it’s been some time since I’ve posted anything here, but looking back it’s as though this has turned into a diet/exercise blog… Guess it just reflects whatever I’m into at the time, and right now I’m keen on getting healthy; I’m getting closer to 40 years old, and have realised that each day is probably the healthiest I’ll ever be from now on, so I’m working to make the most of it.

Towards that end, I’ve been on the 4HB slow-card diet for almost a year, and have been exercising with Russian kettle bells, as the book recommends. And it’s going really well!

My body recomposition goal when I started out at around 75Kg was to get down to around 70Kg, and my target with the kettle bells was to get to 75 repetitions of the basic two-handed swing using a 20Kg unit. Since hitting that goal last year, I decided to simply keep going and push for 100. Today, I finally made it!

100 swings in a single set

I do a bunch of different swings with a 12Kg unit to work as many different muscle groups as I can, and finish off with the two-handed swings using the 20Kg to focus on fat burn and core strength. The entire routine takes around 25 minutes now, with carefully timed 25 second breaks between each set. My first time hitting 100 swings took 2:54, or 174 seconds - and average of about 1.74 seconds per swing.

A bit crook in September

One advantage of my diet & lifestyle is that I pretty much never get sick, not even so much as a runny nose, but last September I got taken out by a nasty virus that kept me in bed for a few weeks with a high fever. I skipped my exercises for a few weeks, lost my appetite, and lost a couple of Kg that I haven’t been able to restore yet. You can see dip in the graph where I’d just hit 80 reps, but backed it off to 75 again when I started exercising again. Hopefully the weight loss was body fat and not muscle atrophy, although I wasn’t tracking body fat back then so there’s no way to know for sure…

Where to go from here?

So here’s my plan going forward: I’m going to increase my weights by 4Kg to 16Kg for the smaller, and 24Kg for the larger kettle bell. I’ll just jump in and see how many reps I can do without compromising my technique, but aiming for 75 with 24Kg. If I can do it, that’s great, otherwise I know that with perseverance and patience, I’ll get there eventually!

I’m also hoping to gain some lean body mass by taking the 4 means/day recommendation more seriously; until now I’ve been eating breakfast within 30 minutes of waking, lunch within 4 hours after, but then going 6-7 hours before my next meal with only a light snack of nuts or something in between, and nothing afterwards. That’s good way to trigger the body’s emergency energy storage mechanism (fat). This year I’ll try to get 4 meals a day, every 4 hours, to maintain consistent blood glucose levels throughout the day without triggering starvation mode.

Otherwise, I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions or any such bollocks, I just intend to keep working my hardest in everything I do to make it as awesome as possible!

cheers

Kettle bells & beans

Should someone ask what I use to stay healthy, that would be my answer - kettle bells & beans.

I've been doing the "slow carb" thing for over 6 months now, and it's going really well. Cut processed carbohydrates, sugars, and oils out of my diet, and I'm feeling great. I don't do a full-on "cheat day" as such, but rather I just relax my standards a bit on weekends. For example, I might eat "regular" meals on Saturday, and indulge in some cake, ice-cream, chocolate, or whatever else takes my fancy, but won't go out of my way to seek it out. I'll gain 1-1.5Kg in the process, mostly water retention. Then on Sunday I try to keep to slow carbs, but yesterday for example I had a couple of cupcakes, a little bit of chocolate, and 5 beers... this morning I'd lost 0.5Kg. So I'm not entirely convinced of the whole "don't drink carbs" thing, as personally I don't notice any observable weight gain from beer alone, but will see significant spikes from carbs & sugars.

Anyway, I've also been working on my kettle bell swings. I started out with a 20Kg unit, 75 reps broken up into multiple sets. At first the max. reps I'd do in a set was 20, giving a total of 4 sets: 20 + 20 + 20 + 15. I'd increase the number of reps in each set by 1 each time I did it, so the second day I'd do 21 + 21 + 21 + 12, the 3rd I'd do 22 + 22 + 22 + 9, etc until I finally made it all the way to 75 repetitions in a single set.

Here's a graph of my progress over 6 months or so:



In the beginning I was crazy keen, and would do my swings 3 times a week, sometimes twice a day, but now I just try to make sure I do it at least once a week, aiming to do it twice a week as often as possible. For some time now I've also been doing a range of different exercises using a 12Kg unit, including single snatches. I'm also doing myotatic crunches over a gym ball using the 12Kg unit (for the first few, the remainder without weights), and "cat vomit" breathing exercises after each workout.

I do my kettle bell swings on Mondays and Fridays, with a total exercise time around 30-45 minutes a time, once or twice a week, coming to 2-6 hours a month, probably averaging around 4 hours a month. I also do karate training on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Tuesday & Sunday is for 1.5 hours, Thursday's session usually goes for 2-3 hours. So that's another 5-6 hours of training a week, or 20-24 hours a month.

Other than that, I spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer doing things like writing software, and blogging about kettle bells & beans :)

How I use Trunk Notes

Keeping my digital life organized with a wiki works so much better for me than hierarchical storage systems, rigid todo lists, or flat plain-text buckets. My search for the ultimate digital lifestyle tool has taken me through so many different apps and systems, but with Trunk Notes I finally feel like I’ve almost achieved digital nirvana.

A long journey

I guess it all started when I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) 5 or 6 years ago, and I’ve tried so many different todo apps, note taking apps, organizers, etc since it’s just not funny. The apps I use fall into two main categories: task management, and information management. Tools to help me get stuff done, and tools to help me store and retrieve notes, data, etc.

Todo, or not todo

The first serious app with checkboxes that I recall using was OmniOutliner, which I tried to bend to a kind of GTD system until I bought the desktop version of OmniFocus when it first came out. It’s strict adherence to the GTD doctrine was too too much for me. Then I found Things by Cultured Code to be a simpler approach, but I would ultimately become frustrated by it’s lack of cloud sync and the developer’s complete disinterest in engaging with their customers, despite being very successful. From there, my todo pilgrimage took to me Wunderlist, a nice, simple, cloud-synced todo app. It was close, but I found that lists were becoming too cold and clinical for me, I needed something more organic, and found myself using Backpack by 37 Signals.

What I liked about Backpack was it’s concept of pages that can contain anything, notes, images, todo lists, whatever. It didn’t impose any form or function onto you, you can can do whatever you like with it. What I didn’t like about it was the $24/month required to access some of it’s features…

I also had my eye on TaskPaper, which takes a simpler text-based approach to managing todo lists, but it still uses a proprietary cloud sync service which customers have reported as being unreliable, and while the developer is planning to add DropBox sync at some point, his other apps are getting first priority.

Fortunately, in the meantime I discovered Trunk Notes!

There’s a hole in my bucket

For information management, I use and love Yojimbo by Bare Bones. It’s essentially a bucket to hold links, notes, pictures, PDF docs, passwords, serial numbers, etc. Again, my only gripe with it is a lack of cloud sync. There’s an iPad app, but it’s read-only, and requires wifi sync to get data into it.

So for plain notes, I ended up using SimpleNote because of it’s excellent could sync, and ubiquitous presence as desktop and mobile apps. It’s basically an omnipresent text bucket.

Unfortunately I’d often find myself having to search in multiple places to find something because I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. This arrangement left me wanting for a single system with cloud sync, to store notes in plain text and rich-text with images, passwords, and also manage todos. With Trunk Notes I’ve finally found it!

An organic system that grows with you

It’s so cool being able to take an idea, create a page, add some notes with links, insert a picture, jot down some todo items, and then have it grow organically out into other pages covering sub-topics, or breaking large projects down into sub projects, and having it all interlinked, tagged, and searchable. The wiki features of Trunk Notes alone are a revelation, not because wikis are new or I’ve never used one before, but I’ve never had one I can carry around with me in my pocket on my iPhone, and also access from my Mac and IPad. The coolest thing though, is Trunk Notes custom functions, which can turn it into a very capable, and powerful todo system.

Ubiquitous capture, automatic processing and retrieval

Here’s how I use Trunk Notes' powerful functions as my todo system. You can begin any line on a page with an “action” using a @, and then add dynamic functions to a page which collect every item from your wiki beginning with that action. I use them as tags, but you can only assign one to each item, so they’re more like contexts. As I work at home in front of a computer all day, contexts don’t fit my workflow, so I use the following actions to automatically filter and retrieve tasks:

• @next – regular todo items


• @due – Trunk Notes can process date stamps following the actions, allowing them to be scheduled and automatically float up to my dashboard


• @today – a quick way to flag tasks for today


• @done – changing an item’s action to done followed by a date stamp removes it from the other filters


• @someday – don’t really use it much though. Someday/maybe should really be called probably/never…

My home page has a dashboard showing a summary of tasks due today, and a 7 day summary of upcoming tasks, as well as quick links to my todo section:

• I’ve created pages with name prefixes
  
  
  
  
  • Todo
    
    
    
    
    • A dashboard using Trunk Notes' functions to show me all of my today, upcoming, and next actions on a nice dashboard
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Today
    
    
    
    
    • Filters all tasks @due today, and tagged with @today
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Next
    
    
    
    
    • Filters all @next actions
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Scheduled
    
    
    
    
    • Filters all @scheduled tasks
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Someday
    
    
    
    
    • @someday tasks which I’ll probably never do
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Home
    
    
    
    
    • This is where I drop home tasks. When Trunk Notes filters tasks into lists, it links back to the page they’re from, which behaves in effect as contexts or areas of responsibility.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Home:Someday
    
    
    
    
    • I try not to put anything in here…
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Home:Archive
    
    
    
    
    • Move stuff out of the home list when it’s done to clean it up
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Work
    
    
    
    
    • A dashboard of work tasks. I can freeform here with links to project pages, notes, todo lists, etc
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Work:Someday
    
    
    
    
    • Really try to keep this one empty
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Work:Archive
    
    
    
    
    • an increasingly massive list of completed tasks, kept for reference. When I complete a task I tag it with @done and a date stamp, so can go back through the archive to check when certain things were completed.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

I also keep an INBOX page, and have a link to the inbox and the main todo dashboard in Trunk Notes' special customizable footer, so I can quickly capture ideas. On my Mac, I’ve assigned a hot key using Alfred to open the inbox page in TextMate to quickly capture ideas. It works quite well, and TextMate can render the Markdown as HTML.

Workflow

For notes, passwords, links, etc I just create a new page and tag it accordingly. If it’s related to another page/project I’ll link them together. For tasks, if it’s a single actionable item I’ll add it to my top-level home/work/school page. For larger projects I’ll create a new page for them and link back to it from an item on the corresponding top-level page. Within the project page I just throw notes and todo items together without actions so they don’t clutter up the dashboard pages.

At the start of each day, I’ll check my home page for today & upcoming tasks, process anything sitting in the inbox, and then drill down into the home/work/school pages reviewing next actions & upcoming tasks and deciding what to work on today.

At the end of each day I’ll go through completed tasks tagging them with @done and archive them, I’ll process the inbox, review my next actions, and generally faff around on my pet project pages gathering research, jotting down ideas, inserting pics etc.

I’m looking into using the DropBox files with Automator/AppleScript to automate some of that, but that’s for another time.

A full bag of tricks

Some other cool things Trunk Notes offers:

• text snippets – can quickly insert regularly used text
  
  
  
  
  • can dynamically evaluate functions, for example to insert the current date/time
  
  
  • I use snippets to insert checkboxes with an action, and a notes field (using custom CSS…)
  
  
  
  


• custom CSS
  
  
  
  
  • I use a span for my todo notes, and use the custom CSS to style them
  
  
  
  


• include portions of other pages into the current page
  
  
  
  
  • it can even grab a random line, which I use to add a quote of the day to my dynamic footer
  
  
  
  


• dynamic header & footer
  
  
  
  
  • the header & footer are special pages which you can edit and fully customize. I have links to my inbox & todo list, and a random quote from my quotes page.
  
  
  
  


• encrypted pages
  
  
  
  
  • you can encrypt a page, and use it for storing passwords! A sprinkling of custom CSS makes it a very viable solution.
  
  
  
  


• images!
  
  
  
  
  • you can insert images into the page, which are stored on DropBox
  
  
  
  


• wifi server
  
  
  
  
  • it even comes with it’s own built in server for interacting with your wiki from a desktop device
  
  
  
  

Really, the possibilities are endless. Because it uses Markdown, I even use it to type up drafts of documentation and then use other tools like TextMate to finish it into the final product. It’s also handy for typing up blog posts like this one :)

Well, this got a bit long and ramble-y, maybe I’ll jot down a next action to refine it into a cheat sheet.

Slow carb diet - 100 days - before & after

Today marks the 100th day since I abandoned processed carbohydrates & sugars and replaced them with whole foods like beans, legumes, meat, and vegetables. I lost 5Kg, gained a significant amount of muscle, and have never felt better.

These may not be the most pleasant pictures to look at, but I'm posting them here more for my benefit really, just for posterity:

Before
First, the before photos:

This is a floppy tummy, accumulated during a month overseas overindulging in food & drink:


Side profile, slightly distended, droopy manboobs:


Upper arms - some preexisting muscle development from martial arts, but no visible lats, pectorals, etc:



After
Now for the after pics, 100 days after starting a slow-carb diet, and supplementing my existing martial arts training (3 times/week) with kettlebell swings. No protein or body building supplements at all, just whole foods and exercise.

Front, waist line significantly reduced, had to tighten belt several notches, and can wear pants I hadn't fit into since my twenties! visible lats. More developed pectorals and shoulder muscles, or at least better defined from a reduction in body fat. (I'm not flexing here, just raising my arms)

Most noticeable I think, and the extension of the lats.


And here's a side profile:


And some combined before & after shots:

Front:


Side:


So, here are my before & after shots from 100 days on a slow carb diet with kettlebell swings. I do a bunch of different swings with a 12Kg kettlebell, and have worked up to 75 reps with a 20Kg kettlebell, but still broken up into multiple sets. Started out with sets of 20 reps, so 20 + 20 + 20 + 15, and have worked up to two sets now of 50 + 25. I change the reps by 1 each time, and only do it twice a week now, so by the next time I report back after the next 100 days I should be up to a single set of 75 reps! Looking forward to that. Not the pics, being able to do that many swings...

Shark Tank - observations for start-ups

Recently, I read an interview between Tim Ferriss and Daymond John about how he built up his multi-million dollar business, and from there I found myself watching and keenly studying the TV series Shark Tank. In Shark Tank, successful business people, including Daymond John, form a panel of investors. People come on the show to pitch to the sharks in the hope that they'll invest in their company.

There's a recurring theme I've observed amongst the entrepreneurs (can never spell that word...) pitching their ideas to the Sharks:

• They rarely have significant sales.


• They almost always over value their companies by offering too little equity in return for too much money without sales to support them.


• They are very often torn between wanting to cash-in on the company and get rich, or to keep working in the business and follow their passion.


• They rarely agree to surrender a controlling stake in their companies (51% or more). Offers from the sharks have been turned down because the owner has an emotional connection to their business and doesn't want to turn it over to someone else, yet without an injection of capital it will most likely fail.


• They very often over value "potential" growth
  
  • $10,000 sales last year and growing somehow makes the business worth $500,000 to a million dollars, more often because they've already invested their life savings into the company and mortgaged their family home. The sharks might invest $20,000 or more in a company like that, but only in exchange for 100% equity, which the owners usually refuse.
  
  


• They're often unclear on what exactly they need the money for - is it for R&D, inventory, marketing, salaries? Quite often what they have has the potential to be a tidy small business, but doesn't have the kind of explosive growth potential that the sharks are looking for, and as such they would be unlikely to see a significant return on their investment.

The sharks respond very consistently - they are first and foremost investors looking to increase their wealth:

• They always ask for sales numbers - gross revenue, and net profits for the last year


• They want to know how many existing customers they have, or at least what contracts they've already secured


• 
  They immediately value the company by multiplying the net sales by the proportion of equity being offered.
  
  
  
  • People usually ask for around $25,000-150,000 in exchange for 10-25% of their company
  
  
  • This would value their company at $250,000 to a million dollars or more
  
  
  • They are often found to only have $50,000-$100,000 in sales, from which the sharks would value their company at about double - $100,000-$200,000
  
  
  • When asked why they think their business is worth so much more than the numbers suggest, invariably they'll talk about passion, or how much of their own time/effort/money they've put into the business
  
  
  • The sharks invariably give them a harsh lesson in reality...
  
  
  
  


• Even really great ideas with no sales are usually rejected straight away


• When a company has significant sales, but is still in the early stages of development, the sharks will usually ask for a controlling interest in the company (51% or more, often 100%) in order to protect their investment


• Even with significant sales, the sharks will often look for a contract with a major brand or reseller for mass-market products rather than attempting to muscle into an established market


• Licensing deals are more attractive to sharks than selling widgets - they'd be more interested in owning a license they can sell to a major manufacturer than trying to bring a stand-alone product to market


• They will often offer to buy 100% of a company and pay the owner an ongoing royalty, which they usually refuse, despite the sharks offering to use their own capital and expertise to build up the company


• They always ask what their investment will be used for.
  
  
  
  • Quite often the person has unrealistic expectations of what it will actually cost to develop their business.
  
  
  • Sometimes they think the sharks will give them capital to buy patents, or produce inventory, or spend on marketing - they never do; they simply want to buy a share in what they perceive to be a profitable company with potential for great growth.
  
  
  • The sharks won't invest if the money will simply be used to sustain the business, or keep if from collapse
  
  
  
  


• Patents are attractive, and will often make or break a deal


• They never invest in ideas with no substance to help turn it into a product


• They never invest in individuals/brands without a viable product/business to help them develop one

Studying the show has reaffirmed my belief in the importance of building a business for profitability, for two reasons: a business must have value to be profitable; I want to add value to the world, and a business must be profitable for it to be attractive to investors; I don't want to stare at a computer screen forever...

This may be less true on massive scales, for example a social network like Facebook/Twitter with literally millions of active users will be able to generate revenue by the sheer brute force of their volume, but before they had those numbers they had to prove themselves by building a popular product. When they were starting out, no one would go near them, but they scratched an itch, and it proved to be hugely popular. Had they taken their idea to investors and pitched them saying that although they have zero revenue, and only a few thousand users, they just need some capital to invest in infrastructure and they'll be able to get millions of users and generate tons of cash...

1. Have an idea


2. ???


3. Profit!!!

I don't think so. It's probably more like:

1. Identify a real human need


2. Build something to satisfy that need


3. Work your arse off for years developing and marketing your product to be revenue positive

Success with the 4HB slow carb diet

Last xmas we spent a month overseas mostly holidaying and over indulging in delicious food and copious amounts of alcohol. When we returned in January, I had put on 5Kg, and so decided to get a copy Tim Ferris' latest book, The 4-Hour Body and give it a try.

Before doing anything else, watch the brilliant video trailer!

My goal was to replace the 5Kg of excess flab with muscle, a body "recomposition" goal. I lost the 5Kg within a couple of months very easily, while eating more than I ever have in my life! I'm feeling fitter, and stronger than ever before, and I owe it to two simple changes to my diet and exercise habits.

The basics
The basic premise is pretty simple, and is comprised of a special diet combined with specific exercises. I was already fairy physically active, with martial arts training 3 times a week, but the recommended exercises have definitely seen a rapid increase in strength, and the change in diet has been spectacular to say the least.

Dietary changes:

• replace all forms of high-GI carbohydrates with low-GI, high-protein beans & legumes


• Cut out all sugars, fructose, and dairy products such as cheese, milk, yogurt


• Consume large quantities of fresh, low-GI vegetables


• Consume large quantities of lean meat, such as fish, beef, pork, and chicken


• Once a week, enjoy a "cheat day" - eat all the bread, pasta, fruit, cheese, chocolate, etc that you want!

I've been on the slow carb diet for several months now, which means I haven't been eating any wheat or dairy products, or any fruit at all during the week, but instead I've been eating lots of meat, veg, beans, and eggs. The book suggests using magnesium and calcium supplements, but rather than just buying some pills from a supermarket blindly, I decided to go to the doctor and get a blood test. Today we went over the results, and I couldn't be happier!

Empirical results
I was worried about my cholesterol levels, with all of the meat & eggs I've been eating, and also wanted to check magnesium & calcium to see if I should be using supplements, and also vitamin D seeing as I work indoors. The results were better than I was expecting!

My biochemistry results were all excellent across the board, so no need for any additional supplements! I'm taking once capsule of 1000IU of vitamin D3 a day, and the doctor suggested perhaps I could cut that back to every other day. The surprise for me though was the results for the lipids and HDL. My HDL cholesterol (the good kind) were high, and my LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) were low. At first I was a little concerned about a "cholesterol" level being high, but my doctor looked at me and said "can it be bad to have a high level of good cholesterol?". Point taken. The book talks about good cholesterol having benefits, such as helping with insomnia, which historically is something I've always had trouble with, and I can now say finally that I now longer have any trouble getting off to sleep. This is another one of those things that I wish I'd discovered sooner!

The theory is that high-GI foods can cause an excessive spike in blood glucose which tends to be stored around the body as fat. Low-Gi foods on the other are converted to blood glucose more slowly throughout the day, and are more satiating. I've found that I now eat about twice the volume of food as I used to, but don't suffer the inevitable sugar crash that typically accompanies a large carbohydrate-rich meal. No more dozing off in the afternoon, I have consistently high energy levels throughout the day!

Another pleasant side-effect of the slow carb diet is that you no longer feel hungry between meals. I have my breakfast around 8am, and lunch four hours later at 12pm, and don't feel hungry at all in between. I have a light snack in the afternoon usually comprised of celery sticks & peanut butter, and that keeps me going until dinner at around 6:30. Again, I don't feel hungry in the evenings, despite rarely going to bed before midnight. I'm trying the book's suggestion of taking a spoonful of almond butter before bed which is intended to keep blood glucose levels from dipping too low in the morning, but I've never been an early riser so it's hard to say if it's helping directly but generally I've been sleeping much better and feeling more energised.

As for the "cheat day", mine tends to start on Friday even with beers, and extend right through the weekend... It's so awesome being able to pig out on whatever I want once a week knowing that I'm not gaining weight or affecting my health adversely!

Exercise changes
This wasn't a change so much as a supplement. I do martial arts training every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, so I started out by adding a special exercise routing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. In recent weeks I had found myself feeling a bit exhausted by the end of the week though, especially considering how many repetitions I've worked up to now, so I've cut out Wednesdays. Only made that change recently, so too early to draw any conclusions from it yet.

So what's the big secret? Russian kettlebells. I started out with a 20Kg kettlebell, just going 75 repetitions of the two-hand swing, but a month or two ago I added a smaller 12Kg kettlebell for a wider range of movements, like the one-hand snatch. Kettlebells are an excellent supplement for marial arts training, because they exercise a wider range of muscles together at the same time in movements that are more similar to natural activities that free weights or gym machines, and they increase explosive strength rather than sheer bulk and lifting power.

They do increase core strength, but I've also recently added a gym ball for focusing on more on that. Still working towards visible abs, but probably have to get my body fat % down a but lower first.

Conclusion - it works!
What put a huge smile on my face was to hear the doctor say "whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it!". That in combination with the excellent blood test results validate that the perceived increase in overall health & wellbeing I've experienced are supported by empirical evidence. I intend to keep working towards my goal getting a reaction from someone along the lines of "what the fuck have you been doing?!"

I'll laugh and say "beans and cannon balls"...

Oscilloscopes & software development

One of my first jobs was as an electronics technician where I would build, and test, professional audio visual equipment. My work bench was covered with an impressive array of tools and gadgetry, one of the most impressive being the trusty oscilloscope. To the uninitiated, it appears to be a complicated display with a vast array of control dials and buttons, and it's certainly one of the more difficult test instruments to master.

A typical application of an oscilloscope, or CRO for short (from the now dated acronym Cathode Ray-tube Oscilloscpoe) it to display the waveform of an electrical signal on the screen. The classic noob mistake when first learning to use them is to change too many settings at the same time, resulting in a wild, unintelligible display on the screen.

My boss would often chastise me and remind me of two important principals which would serve me well later on in software development:
* always start from a known baseline
* never change more than one thing at a time

With a CRO, there's a sensible default setting that should always be used to start with because it usually will display something, and from there only requires minor adjustments to achieve the desired result. I'd equate that in software development terms to setting up test fixtures with sensible data and making sure you've isolated the code to be tested.

With so many dials and buttons it's easy to make the mistake of tweaking and fiddling in a panic and ending up with a garbled display. The more experienced operator will only make one adjustment at a time, and if it doesn't have the desired effect return it to it's sensible default position before trying a different adjustment. Similarly, when developing software it's tempting to hack and slash instead of methodically working towards the goal, but it often leads to breakages and a mess of spagetti code which no clear way of knowing exactly what caused the error. Try something, if it doesn't work roll it back and try something different.

I was reminded of the CRO analogy recently when I had a bunch of tests failing while trying to modify some functionality. After trying in vein to work out why my modifications were causing the breakage, I rolled them back and tested again, only to reveal than a recent update had introduced the breakage, not my modifications. So I fixed the failing tests, merged my update back in again, and re-tested. That way I know that I've started from a known baseline, and only changed one thing at a time, so if anything breaks it's my change that broke it, and from there I can work towards fixing it.

Fault-finding and testing faulty electronic equipment gave me a good mindset for software development that I'll always appreciate. Just as we'd always be sure to comprehensively test all our equipment before shipping it to customers to keep the number of returned products to a minimum, following test driven development before deploying any code to production keeps the number of bugs and rollbacks to a minimum.

Finding a muse - CPC doesn't work for everything

...or maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Recently read The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and loved it. I just wish I'd read it years ago when I had the opportunity to put it into practice before things got out of hand with the busyness and the tiredness and the being grumpy and depressed and not knowing why. I learnt a new word: "procrasterbating". Living in your email and reading industry articles on RSS and checking in on Twitter for updates isn't conducive to productivity or peace of mind, but it's weird how you somehow subconsciously rationalize it. I took the book's advice and went on a media fast, set up an email auto responder and turned off my email notified, unsubscribed from most of my RSS feeds, logged out of Twitter, and even stopped compulsively checking my inbox over breakfast, weekends, etc. and you know what? The world didn't end!

I can check most of the boxes for things from the book like working from home, having the freedom to travel & work abroad, pursuing interests in martial arts and language. Why is it that it's not until I see them presented in a book as something to strive for that I really appreciate them?

Anyway, been looking for a "muse", a means of generating residual income with minimum human intervention. Some time ago, I launched a site selling wine online. It's a niche market, selling imported European wines in Australia. It would appear to be an ideal candidate for becoming a muse, except that I haven't had much luck driving traffic to it from CPC ads.

The problem is two things:
* wine related keywords are expensive
* there's very little "local monthly volume"

Expensive keywords mean is that my margins are too tight. You can calculate your maximum CPC bid by starting with your revenue per sale, let's say $100 for example, and working with an anticipated conversion rate of 1% which would require 100 clicks per sale - a CPC of $1.00 would only see you break even. There aren't many worthwhile keywords that go for less than $1...

The low search volume for relevant keywords that get any kind of click through rate much over 0.05% basically means you don't get any clicks. AdWords will helpfully recommend hundreds of vaguely related keywords, but even if they do provide more clicks, their low relevance to your product will result in a lower conversion rate, which amounts to more money flowing out of your pocket and into Google's coffers...

My theory on this, and it's one I've seen proposed elsewhere, is that the people who actually click on ads fit into particular demographics that don't necessarily cover all products, services, and industries. There is a strong online community around wine, but search volumes suggest that online buyers are mostly looking for a bargain, not a $50 bottle of rare "noble rot" wine.

It's one thing to have a fully functional shopping cart hooked up to a cash register, but "build it and they will come" does not hold true at all. Where to go from here? Printed advertising probably.

Different types of people

There are some who look at the world and see amazing beauty in nature, and to them it's something they want to preserve and cherish, something precious they want future generations to be able to enjoy.

Then there are some who may actually share a similar appreciation of the world around them, but dissimilarly feel compelled by it to stake out their claim to part of it, whatever the cost.

The prior work to preserve endangered species, rain forests, and coral reefs, they get behind projects that promise clean, renewable energy, and think long-term about how the things the do today affect those who come after them.

The later, well, they somehow find a way to rationalise things like this, and are still able to sleep at night.

I saw this photo of the aurora borealis this morning:


The green fire of the southern lights


It's so beautiful. I'd like to hope that we'll still be here to appreciate the green fire of the southern lights for many years to come.

Water & air

Air menitik - Water Drop by emrank

Imagine we are drifting through space in a massive ark. It has a limited, finite water & air supply, and organic systems that recycle and cleanse the water & air as it's used. It can support life, but not indefinitely of course.

Our attitude towards how we use water & air would be completely different. We wouldn't pollute the air with carbon dioxide, or dump toxic chemicals into the water supply. We would ensure that the recycling & filtering systems were always operating in optimal condition.

Now shift our perspective, zoom out, look at the ark which is carrying us through space - it is the earth. It is in trouble.

To whom it may concern...

Wassup blog!

So I'm walking home the other day on beautiful sunny afternoon, when I spot an abandoned computer monitor on the side of the road. It's becoming an increasingly common sight these days, especially the old eye-destroying CRT monitors, but especially so in this particular street. Seems someone is always dumping stuff there.



I had almost walked past when I noticed a message pinned to the nearby tree. It reads:

To whom it may concern:

The number to call for general household rubbish pick-up is: 1300 655 006. This is a free service. Please show some consideration for fellow residents & do not just expect that someone else will clean up your pollution. Make the call if you leave the rubbish.

Thanks.

That's pretty cool. Sucks that the person had to go to all that effort though, must be a really easy life for the kind of person that can just leave shit on the ground without it troubling their conscience.

Oh, and also, buy some wine if you fancy ☺

RIP Sharkbait

We had a tragedy in the family yesterday - Tyler's pet goldfish died. It was his first pet, given to him for his 7th birthday not even a year ago. He was heartbroken, really upset about it, just cried & cried for hours the poor guy. It was really painful for us to see him so upset too.

So in memory of Sharkbait, Tyler drew this picture:



I asked him what the "POP" with a person in the "O" is. He said "That's me shrinking, it makes a POP noise". Then I noticed the little person in the fish bowl with Sharkbait. Then I suddenly had something very important I had to go and do in another room, something very grownup and manly that definitely wasn't wiping a tear from my eye too...

Bye Sharkbait, we'll miss you!

Cactus face

Cactus close-up, by r-z

"Hey Dad, what's that green plant with the spikes?"

"A Venus fly trap?"

"No, the other one"

"... you mean a cactus?"

"Yeah, your face is like a cactus!"


Apparently I have prickly whiskers, just like a cactus ☺

23" Cinema Display power adaptor failure

Thank you so much to the gentlemen working at the Maccentric service center in Chatswood!

This morning started out as though it was going to be "one of those" Mondays. A blackout over the weekend had taken out my beautiful 23" Cinema Display after having just received a notice from the power company that the rates were going up by more than 10%! Talk about adding insult to injury, but fortunately I'm here working in dual-monitor mode now and I've never appreciated it more.

Everything else in the house was fine when the power came back on, but the power/status LED on the Cinema Display was flashing in a peculiar way and not working. A bit of Googling lead to an Apple knowledge base page which revealed that the sequence of flashes indicated a problem with the power adaptor. So I made some calls to the local Apple stores asking after a replacement.

The closest store informed me that according to their technician it can be swapped out with a generic unit available from any electronics retailer. Made a mental note not to visit their "genius bar" and called the bigger store in the city where I was advised that a replacement part can in fact be ordered by making an appointment with the genius bar. I decided to skip that and went back to the Next Byte store I'd originally bought it from.

They referred me to the Maccentric service center which was just around the corner. Turns out they actually had a replacement unit in stock! I bought it, took it home, plugged it in and - got the same flashing status light. Shit, at this point I'm worried that my worst fears have been confirmed and the monitor itself has been damaged. I had to call them back anyway to give the serial no. of the monitor, and when I did the guy suggested that I bring it back in to try it with the PSU from a 30" Cinema Display because he had seen that fix the problem before.

Not an hour later I had dusted it off, packed it up, and driven it back into the store. Unbelievably, they also had a 30" PSU in stock as well, so we unpacked it, plugged it all into a Mac Pro on a test bench, and my beloved Cinema Display sprang back to life! I just had to pay the difference between the 2 PSU models and the problem was solved!

So I highly recommend Maccentric for any Mac repairs you might need, the staff were knowledgeable and professional, and by recommending a $140 power adaptor they saved me from having to replace a very expensive and beloved monitor.

Thank you again to the Maccentric service center, Spring St. Chatswood!
http://www.maccentric.com.au/home/contact/

(And a big F-U to Energy Australia for blowing it up in the first place!)

Clouds and planets

Hello blog, it's been a while! How's things? I've been busy over on Twitter: http://twitter.com/beet

Austin Mini Planet by Hi I'm Santi

Just wanted to quickly recall a conversation I had with my son the other day:

We were walking home from school on a grey, rainy day when he asked me where planets come from. Whenever he asks anything which is even vaguely philosophical I always avoid offering my own opinion and just reply with "what do you think?".

He went on to say something along the lines of: "Well, clouds kind of stick together to make rain drops, so maybe planets were made the same kind of way. Maybe there was all this dust and stuff and it kind of stuck together and turned into planets."

I was taken aback and had to ask if he'd heard something like that somewhere before. He then went on to ask where plants and animals came from, and how people were made. Maybe the cloudy weather had him in a contemplative mood that day.

Fortunately we arrived home just in time to save me from having to either offer my own opinion or pretend I don't have one. I really want him to keep asking awesome questions like that and find his own answers as he grows up.

He never ceases to amaze me with how a child's mind which has been spared any kind of indoctrination can see things so clearly sometimes.