Accidentally rederived Lanchester's Square Law again, in a different way than I'd seen before. If your units are X times as good as mine and each of your units hits p of the time and mine q, then each of your units should take out X times as much stuff as each of my units. You unit takes out p*1 of mine, and mine takes out q*1 of yours, and yours are X mine, so mine takes out q*X my-units of yours. But yours are X times better so we'd better have p*1 = X * (q*X) or X = sqrt(p/q). You'll need 100/X to tie my 100.
A coworker mentioned a Jeff Atwood post that points to Luke pointing to Richard Wiseman. Yessssss.
I traded off going to my favorite restaurant for everyone else having a better chance of not having bad service there (Friday). Definitely the kind of trade I want others to make, so I made it.
I wrote up most of the stuff Anna asked for in her "retrospective please!" mail, but it's not quite done. I'll finish tomorrow.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Talking with Partners
Very nice day at work today, avoiding all the mistakes of last milestone and actually ironing out all the potential problems with partner teams before we start coding. Yay for that! I didn't do much of improvement note, though I am sneaking in random reps of pushups and leg lifts. I finished a novel... still not sure what to think about reading science fiction. It's a lot of fun but does take up a lot of time. Maybe some kind of fiction budget is in order.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Orbital Bombardment
Hm, woke up and went back to sleep this morning. I'll have to start Brandon's 30 countdown thing again. At work my PM made me super happy, he stopped by my office and said something like "just so you know you're having an impact on the world, I was in a meeting and they were like 'hey Chris can you get this statistic?' and I asked them what actions they'd take based on what the answer was like you do to me and they couldn't tell me, also I'm watching for when I'm rationalizing now and when I catch it I just do the opposite".
Neat!
Not sure about the opposite thing but hey it follows my other heuristic of "go to the other end of the spectrum first".
As for me, I hella procrastinated today in the name of "but my stuff's building". The random chime is great for not allowing me to make excuses, no excuse is a good reason for the paucity of "yeah I'm doing endorsed work now" entries today. So that's not great. Luckily I didn't totally do that at home, and I'm pretty sure I have a good activity for 2-weeks-from-now. Seeing that "opposing" goals don't actually interact too much just by trying some examples.
We played 3:16 and I'm burning through resources as quickly as I can, 'cause now it's in their best interest to just kill me and get promoted, jumping a bunch of levels. I think I can make Major before I get offed. Eric had some nice imagery for the result of me using orbital bombardment, my character was strapped to a red X over the hologram of where the planet used to be, interrogated by the Lt Col. 3:16 is living up to its promise.
Time for a shower, calibration exercise, and sleep.
Neat!
Not sure about the opposite thing but hey it follows my other heuristic of "go to the other end of the spectrum first".
As for me, I hella procrastinated today in the name of "but my stuff's building". The random chime is great for not allowing me to make excuses, no excuse is a good reason for the paucity of "yeah I'm doing endorsed work now" entries today. So that's not great. Luckily I didn't totally do that at home, and I'm pretty sure I have a good activity for 2-weeks-from-now. Seeing that "opposing" goals don't actually interact too much just by trying some examples.
We played 3:16 and I'm burning through resources as quickly as I can, 'cause now it's in their best interest to just kill me and get promoted, jumping a bunch of levels. I think I can make Major before I get offed. Eric had some nice imagery for the result of me using orbital bombardment, my character was strapped to a red X over the hologram of where the planet used to be, interrogated by the Lt Col. 3:16 is living up to its promise.
Time for a shower, calibration exercise, and sleep.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Python
I am typing this while palming a dollar coin. Now, while palming one in each hand. It feels weird but basically works fine, with my right hand. Left gets cranky. Anyway, work was good today, though I got super lethargic at around 3:30. Dunno why but it means I'm sleeping more tonight. As usual it cleared up completely after dinner. :S
I ran some calibration drills and learned some more Python. I'd say if I improved this much per day on average I'd be pretty satisfied. But not ecstatic so there's room to improve at improving. Tomorrow I won't have a lot of time but I plan to collect my notes on the lw-meetup discussion and look for any major missing pieces, and make a quick plan on organizing the work I'll need to do to put it together.
Interestingly mousing is much harder than typing.
I ran some calibration drills and learned some more Python. I'd say if I improved this much per day on average I'd be pretty satisfied. But not ecstatic so there's room to improve at improving. Tomorrow I won't have a lot of time but I plan to collect my notes on the lw-meetup discussion and look for any major missing pieces, and make a quick plan on organizing the work I'll need to do to put it together.
Interestingly mousing is much harder than typing.
Undefeated?
This no-caffeine thing almost failed this morning but I compromised and got some decaf coffee. Whew! I got a big hit of less-motivation though, when I realized it was Two Weeks until M3 coding start rather than One Week like I thought. :S First off, I have no idea how I made that mistake. Second, once I realized, the thought kept popping up - "a whole extra week! you don't need to do anything right now!". I powered through it instead of fixing it, which was a mistake. Tomorrow if it happens I'm fixing it.
Frisbee was sweeeet. The opposing team was undefeated. We played a really good, tight game the whole way except for one dude getting pissy near the end of the first half (he managed to stop) and a bit of overconfidence during the beginning of the second half. I missed one really nice deep catch, sad cat, but made another couple and generally played some very good defense and above average offense. We won 15-13 and went out to dinner afterwards, about half a dozen from both teams. Now I have infinite cold noodles leftovers. Not infinite, but seriously about 5-6 meals. I managed to converse, both starting and continuing good conversations at dinner. I am sooo bad at it still, but I'm now able to see how bad I am by how much attention I have to pay to doing it rather than bad results. That's progress.
And I gave an intern a ride to and from dinner. True story.
Frisbee was sweeeet. The opposing team was undefeated. We played a really good, tight game the whole way except for one dude getting pissy near the end of the first half (he managed to stop) and a bit of overconfidence during the beginning of the second half. I missed one really nice deep catch, sad cat, but made another couple and generally played some very good defense and above average offense. We won 15-13 and went out to dinner afterwards, about half a dozen from both teams. Now I have infinite cold noodles leftovers. Not infinite, but seriously about 5-6 meals. I managed to converse, both starting and continuing good conversations at dinner. I am sooo bad at it still, but I'm now able to see how bad I am by how much attention I have to pay to doing it rather than bad results. That's progress.
And I gave an intern a ride to and from dinner. True story.
Monday, July 25, 2011
LW meetup
Some memories from yesterday. Bring paper towels or napkins to the LW meetup. Also what are we doing next week? I'd host Space Alert, or some more-intense paranoid debating. :D And check to make sure my intuitions on Occam's razor make sense. My mom's coordinated her family to deal with my grandfather and aunt pretty well. This potato soup gets rather less liquidy on day two. I'm ready for some social effectiveness leveling at frisbee dinner and Tokyo night. I have no idea what the current political debt thing actually means economically or politically. I wish the Randi forums were better but they are not. Also palming a coin seems easier than I thought.
Some thoughts from right now: Fine, I'll write down thoughts that night, it works much better.
Some thoughts from right now: Fine, I'll write down thoughts that night, it works much better.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Coding fun
I'm going to start doing TopCoder algorithm competitions again 'cause those were fun and I've lost some of those skills - I can tell because I did some practice problems and they were fun but I had more trouble with them than I remember. The problems seem to be about the same difficulty level they were a few years ago, which is pretty impressive. Also I started learning Python, 'cause why not.
Today would have been a great day for rejection therapy at Marymoor. Too bad weather is friggin' impossible. But I got in some running, walking, and ping-pong.
I made my second potato soup, turns out adding more butter and more cheese is a really strong play.
Other than that, I did mostly do-nothing stuff today. Recovery, I'm calling it. I don't know whether it was required but it felt like it. So starting tomorrow I'm back in full-fledged Improvement mode, after a week or two of wait-what-am-I-doing. I've got my list of Important Stuff and everything. Most important is choosing the first One Focus Area.
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