Poojan (Wagh) Blog

Executive Summary

in the same way that a commodities market maker ensures liquidity in a market and reduces the chaos that might be caused by low participation in a market, is there a way to formulate a labor market maker? Can this same concept be applied to the labor market?

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Introduction

What happened to making acquaintances? It seems like this sour economy has employment on everyone’s mind, and it seems to be impeding the formation of true peer relationships. I’ve caught myself in this regard. Here’s an example: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in a team that’s intent on finding the best circuit design for a given application. This doesn’t happen often to many people, but I feel that I’ve had more than my share of this opportunity.

The conclusion is usually that we come up with some topology (let’s call it circuit X) that optimizes all the performance criteria. I walk away wanting to generalize the experience with the lesson that circuit X is the best circuit ever, and I want to use it everywhere.

Inevitably, I find that some other topology Y is better suited for some other application. There were some specific constraints or conditions on circuit X that don’t apply to circuit Y, and as a result, circuit Y is more optimal for application Y.

Looking back on this behavior, I think the main fault is the tendency to remember only the conclusions and not the assumptions. Why do we* do this? Well, because the assumptions are where we start. The lesson learned is where we end. We’d rather remember the finish line—the victory—rather than the starting line. It’s certainly more glorifying to remember your accomplishments rather than the mundane criteria that drive us to the goal. We are also rewarded for the results, not the specification of the problem.

I’ve periodically re-learned this tendency to form generalizations by forgetting assumptions and by only remembering the conclusion of the thought process.

footnotes

* Maybe I should say I, not we: perhaps I am generalizing again.

Interesting (albeit long) article on a very large psychological study spanning many years:

As Freud was displaced by biological psychiatry and cognitive psychology—and the massive data sets and double-blind trials that became the industry standard—Vaillant’s work risked obsolescence. But in the late 1990s, a tide called “positive psychology” came in, and lifted his boat. Driven by a savvy, brilliant psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the movement to create a scientific study of the good life has spread wildly through academia and popular culture dozens of books, a cover story in Time, attention from Oprah, etc..

Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust or faith. “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

via What Makes Us Happy? – The Atlantic June 2009.

It’s an amazing song, but honestly, get the whole album.

I just read New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org.

A few things strike me about the results:

1. It meets the 80/20 90/10 rule.
2. Twitter is basically a broadcast service–not a one-on-one messaging tool.

#2 strikes me because I’ve always seen myself as an outsider. I’ve always felt that there must be a large contingent of twitter users that use twitter to tell their friends where they’re meeting for drinks tonight.

I’ve told friends that the only thing they’ll get from me on twitter is spam. (That’s a bit facetious: I’d like to think that my blog posts have intellectual value that informing people that they can proffer money in exchange for retail products advertisements do not.) If I were a corporation, they’d be filled with tons of marketing.

I suspected that I’m not getting this utility out of twitter because my friends aren’t on there, sharing in dialog.

What I realize now is that there’s a sort of myth behind twitter: it’s generally being used as a broadcast medium. In that respect, it seems less useful for my socializing: I don’t really care what most of my friends are doing each night in Chicago. I’m not in Chicago most nights. If I have a night available to meet up with friends, I’ve already pre-arranged it.

Incidently, I learned about this post from http://twitter.com/HarvardBiz/status/1995340326

I recently detailed the high-level setup of my latest GTD roll out. This follow-up post has a high “geek factor” and contains the details of how I do this using computer automation (Python scripts).

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Listen to Song #9: For the Win.

I’ve been thinking about switching from DreamHost to BlueHost. My main reason is price: I’m paying around $10/$9/$8 per month (1/2/3 year term respectively). However, I’ve come across a coupon that causes BlueHost to charge me $5/$4/$4 per month (1/2/3 year term respectively). My DreamHost term expires in June, so I’ll need to either pay month-to-month or sign up for another year.

My difficulty with BlueHost is that you need to pay up-front: there’s no free trial term. I want to lock in this cheap hosting for as long as I can (3 years preferably), and BlueHost will reimburse you if you quit early. But I want to make sure I don’t regret the time I spend switching hosts—and I definitely don’t want to have to undo all my changes sometime in the future. If anyone has any experience with both DreamHost and BlueHost, let me know (in the comments for this post).

Here’s a comparison with the services I’d be interested in:

The “SORT OF” entry under Mail Filtering isn’t merely a pun: I just mean that both hosts provide mail filtering, but they don’t (for example) do custom sieve scripts.

Between DreamHost and BlueHost, the main difference is in off-site backups. BlueHost does not provide them, so I’d have to continue paying Amazon. (I use Jungle Disk’s interface to Amazon S3.) This isn’t so bad: Jungle Disk’s solution is set-and-forget, with very little intervention required. If I decided to use the FTP space that DreamHost provides, I’d probably go with manent. I haven’t tried it in a while, but it looks really good, and they’ve just added a Windows installer.

For SSL, BlueHost is better since they offer a shared SSL site and they offer unique IP’s (required for SSL) for cheaper than DreamHost. I don’t know if BlueHost provides SSH tunnelling. However, if I can use SSL, I don’t need it (I use SSH tunnelling to secure my HTTP traffic.)

I’ll probably stick with DreamHost for now. But, I’ll continue to obsess over BlueHost. If anyone has any information to tip me in either direction, I’d be relieved to hear it.

In this post, I’ll present what I’ve been using for the last month or so to facilitate GTD. My conclusion is that GTD is meant to be customizable, and it’s sometimes better to develop your own (fully custom) solution than trying to adapt someone else’s to your values.

I recently posted about both what I was doing wrong in my previous GTD systems and what I learned from a recent David Allen seminar and promised this description.

I do use a computer for this system. This post doesn’t contain the technical details: that isn’t for everyone and I’ll detail that in a follow-up post.

I finally bit the bullet and came up with a system that’s computer-based. I didn’t use any pre-packaged software to do it. I wrote my own “computer program” (a very short and simple python script). The important lesson—that took me a couple years to realize—is that GTD is meant to be customized.

That’s why all the pre-packaged software solutions I tried didn’t work: there’d always be something that bothered me that I wanted to fix. I’d spend lots of time trying to fit a square in a circle hole and it wouldn’t work. The ones that were customizable ended up being time-consuming, because modifying them to do what I want still took a lot of time.

In short, there are things about GTD that you care about that I don’t. Adopting something that emphasizes someone else’s values can prove more laborious that developing your own.

Anyway, here’s the high-level of how I collect and process:

First, the buckets:

• A metal mesh “inbox” at home
• A small eco greenroom notebook that I picked up at Target (and then ran through the washer/dryer) spiral-bound pocket notebook from Wal-Mart (~$1). I also really like the Pilot G2 Mini pens. (Also available at Walgreens at ~$1 apiece.) These pens write smoother than just about anything else out there, in addition to being very portable.
• I maintain an “Inbox” bookmark folder in Firefox, I use the SyncPlaces Firefox extension to synchronize my bookmarks across all computers (country and western work and home).
• Work and home email accounts.
• When I’m driving, I use Jott (and the free alternative, reQall) so that I can call a number and have a transcribed message sent to my email address. I could carry around a voice recorder (or use the one built into my phone), but I know I won’t be disciplined about reviewing my voice recordings—and I don’t need to since there is a functional alternative.

In addition to these inboxes, I realized I need some “Action-Support” collections for stuff that’s immediately relevant to my next-actions:

• A mesh orange plastic bag that I got from the David Allen seminar (for my at-home action support)
• “Follow-Up” folders in my work (W-FU) and personal (P-FU) email accounts
• Follow up bookmark folders in Firefox (FF-FU).

My latest setup is based on text files: One master set of text files handles the tasks and project lists. A second set (derived through computer automation from the first) merely organizes these tasks by context. I’ll detail it further in my next post.