Meetup day

So... today I aroused myself by concentrating on the pleasant feelings I had while grinning. True story. It was really weird.

I spent some time bartering for fireworks. I feel like I could have done better than I did were I to just apply my knowledge that rejection's okay more, but I still got way better deals than last year. Actually that'd be a good stat to track, I got just under 25 shots per dollar this year, with one larger-shot portion, so that's ~26-27 shots per dollar. Next year I'll go for 30?

I wrote a bit more of my utility app, it crudely estimates utility from stated preferences between lotteries now. I need to make the estimation converge faster with a better model, display the utilities in a nice scale-and-translation-invariant way, and choose which lotteries to ask about based on current utility estimates as the three next steps.

We had a meetup! It was a lot of fun. People there: Chris, Jess, Yoni, Morgan, Ben, John, me, (Robin). We did some practice on wants/goals, and I have some homework: do the math of various things around not working, like "how long can I live at my current rate without any further salary", "how much does it cost to take 6 months off of work and do something random". During dinner Jess shared two tips that sound really useful: 1. Nordstrom personal shopper, where someone dresses you up for like an hour and you can take pictures and get advice and such. 2. Go to the Bellevue goodwill 'cause fancy people drop of like-new stuff there. At the very end the 4+1 of us left discussed briefly how our inner cognition goes on, which was fascinating. Some people talk to themselves, some have little subpeople holding conversations.

https://secure.nordstrom.com/services/personal_touch.asp?attempt=1