Short-term goals (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

As I mentioned in my last post, there's a lot going on right now, and for the first time in quite a while, everything that's happening is positive. I thought I would share my short term plans with the small number of readers I have more for accountability purposes than to say "Look at me!"

I firmly believe that getting others involved in your success is just as essential a part of the process as anything else. It's an extra measure of external accountability.

Finishing school

My first goal is to finish school. I've been struggling with motivation problems as it pertains to schoolwork, but I've recently been jazzed because I found out a piece of good news that I didn't anticipate: rather than graduating in December of 2009, I can graduate in May instead.

I can't even tell you how exciting this is. As someone who has struggled to finish anything, I can truthfully say that this will be a huge weight off my shoulders. I've never finished anything in my life. I'm just not one of those people that can put there shoulders down, dig in, and finish something. I have to believe in what I'm doing to get anywhere, otherwise I give up.

Things must have their own intrinsic merit. Merit cannot be imposed by an external force, otherwise I will not do it.

Starting my own business

I mentioned in my last post that David and I have something going, and that the business plan is largely written. While I don't think it was technically necessary to write the plan, I think it's been a worthwhile exercise, because it allows you to get a better handle on what you want to do; refine your income sources; learn about your competitors in a structured fashion; and just generally get a better handle on where you stand.

Getting a small amount of funding will be the next big challenge, but frankly I'm not really worried about that. It's a solid idea, the plan stands on its own, and I've done the hard part of asking for money to fund a business idea before. It was uncomfortable, but this time I'm actually looking forward to it because I believe in this from my toes right up to my (thinning) hair roots.

Wrapping up OnThePharm

I've been thinking about how to wrap up OnThePharm for a little while now, and I've hit on a good way to close it out. I won't share it here, but it's a topic close to professional students' hearts of all stripes and colors. I hope to get the two to three posts written in the next month.

Unlike some med bloggers, I won't be deleting the blog or taking it down or selling it. (Though I could probably sell it for $10K or so.) While I don't ever envision myself moving back to the medical field in any front-line capacity, I do still have a love for the field, and I would like to eventually be in a position to use the property to build a nice pharmacy publication. I'd like to hire a couple of pharmacy and/or medical students to write current news articles and opinion pieces for me on a pay-per-post basis. Get a nice theme, get a couple of premium advertisers and go to town. More as a hobby than to actually make a significant profit from it.

That will likely be 2-3 years from now, though.

Keeping my head above water

I haven't had a panic or anxiety attack since February. Before that it had been since ~November. I want to keep that going, and I think I'll be able to. My life hasn't felt this in line with my inner desires since I was back in high school, ready to charge off to university to conquer the world.

I'm able to exercise — I bought a nice road bike! — and I'm loving it. I just wish the roads around my house were less trafficked, and had fewer potholes. As it is, I have to keep my bike at my dad's house, because riding it is too painful (literally) to do so around here.

? (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

Over the last month, I've unconsciously begun moving forward again in a personal development sense of the word. I've started several new things, and dropped several others during that time. I've begun studying economics formally, and while I've struggled with motivation at times, I'm moving forward. David and I have something interesting in the early startup stages that will quite likely be incredibly profitable, but more importantly, it's relevant to anyone with a driver's license. While it's not interesting from a low-level, implementation point of view, it is interesting in that it does solve a big, higher-level problem.

So while the business plan for that is ~60% written, I'm juggling some other things as well. One of them being elimination. You see, one of the quickest ways to make progress when you're trying to work on yourself is to simply eliminate that which adds no value to your life. Here are some of the things I've done over the last two years…

Cut down time spent on discussion forums

As of this writing, I have 22,409 posts on the Ars Technica discussion forums. I'm sorry to say that most of that time has been wasted. Yes, I've made several friends, and many acquaintances during the time spent there, but there's been an inordinate amount of time and mental and emotional energy expended there, with little to show for it.

When I backslide and start posting more, I'm quickly reminded that I could better spend my time doing other things when discussions quickly devolve into dog-piling and other similar kind of uselessness.

Pruned my RSS subscriptions

Unlike many who enjoy technology, I don't find that having tons of RSS feeds essential or even particularly interesting. Lately, I've found it counterproductive, as seeing whatever new thing is coming tends to lend itself to a consumption mindset — so I've been religiously pruning subscriptions that don't add value to my life in any meaningful way. Even some of the blogs that I've followed for years. Indeed, this is a natural extension to cutting down on the amount of time spent on discussion forums.

I find that the less time I spend taking in information, the more time I actually spend doing things that are worthwhile. Things like biking, working on our business, and talking and spending time with friends or family.

I'm using RSS for three things now: to keep up with those I care about, to take in blogs that add value to my life — I've been loving Success Soul lately — and to take in a very limited amount of information in two narrow channels: technology and medicine. I have literally three feeds for news, and of the content they push, I read maybe 5% of what's published. I hit that "Mark all as read" button religiously.

Decreased my media consumption

I watch far less television than I did even two months ago. I actively avoid watching sports, because it's such an amazing sinkhole for time. It's currently baseball season, and someone in my family watches every single game. At six games a week at 3.5 hours per game, that's about 21 hours per week spent in front of the tube. Almost a full day.

What a complete and utter waste of time.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sports. Particularly playoffs. I would even like to own my own professional sports franchise at some point down the road — most likely basketball — but then passive consumption becomes smart business.

Decreased my alcohol consumption

I've never been a big drinker, per se. Maybe once a month I'd have a couple of drinks. Now it's more like once every two or three months. I find that as I spend time doing things that are worthwhile, my desire for alcohol has decreased to levels even lower than they were before.

Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses, and I believe that he was right. But I also believe that alcohol is, too. (And if you want to get technical about it, alcohol uses the same reward pathways that opiates use, which is why opioid antagonists show quite a bit of efficacy in alcohol dependence. )

Along with alcohol, I'll throw in cigars. I haven't smoked a cigar since my birthday, and I haven't really wanted one.

It should be noted that both cigars and alcohol are expensive hobbies relative to the satisfaction one derives from them. Worthwhile activities don't leave you with a foul taste in your mouth or a hangover when you're finished.

Pruned some friends

The greatest change that I have made in terms of lasting impact has been on friends. It's hard to cut loose the dead weight in one's life, because it's uncomfortable. Giving up booze and cigars is easy because they don't talk back. They don't call on the phone.

But it can be done, and I would urge those that are in unhealthy relationships — both romantic and otherwise — to reconsider. Life can be so much more rewarding without dead weight dragging you down.

–

You'll notice that a common theme here has been changing my mindset from that of consumption to that of abundance. I find that the less passive consumption I partake in, the happier and more buoyant as a person I become.

I have a couple of more personal development posts in the works, but not many, and they're less in the way of pontification, and more in the way of explanation. I don't find writing about personal development rewarding so I tend not to do it, and others are far better at it than I. What IS interesting are the results that come about as a result of making constant effort to better yourself.

A history of debt in America (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

While going through my RSS reader this morning, I came across one of JD's daily links posts, and one of them was to A History of Debt in America. It's quite a long article, but well worth reading. Unfortunately for people like me, reading large quantities of text on a screen gets to be painful after a few minutes.

I whipped up a quick PDF of all of the pages, and Tom, the author of the article, has graciously allowed me to post it here.

It's 21 pages long, and will take you a little while to read it, but it's worth the time.

PDF link.

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy my post on how paying off debt is like folding laundry — a behavioral, as opposed to mathematical approach to paying off debt.

Impressed with Ubuntu (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I've been wanting to learn MySQL and PHP for a little while now, because I think it'll be useful in the coming months, so I decided that I should probably install Linux, rather than installing the two on Windows. (There's something about that that just feels wrong.) I have something I'm itching to build, and it's time to start picking up some new skills again. I've had a spare 500GB drive lying around for a couple of months, so I popped it in on July 4, downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and installed the OS almost as a spur-of-the-moment thing.

I was amazed at how quickly and painlessly the OS installed. Back in 2001-2002, the last time I made a serious go of running Linux (Debian), it took almost 18 hours to get the OS installed and configured to the point where I could use X. It took a lot of help from the guys in #linux, too. I never would have been able to do it without their help.

But this time it was as easy as putting the CD in, booting from the optical drive, entering my desired username, password, and localization settings, and that was it. About 45 minutes later, I booted into Gnome, and had working sound and networking, right out of the box. I ran the GUI Update Manager, which found a proprietary display driver for my GeForce 8800 GT — in addition to other normal system updates — and a single restart later, I had graphics acceleration and an up-to-date OS installation.

Total time to working install: ~60 minutes, including software updates. It was faster and easier than installing XP, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard, and by a significant margin. In terms of ease of installation, I would rank them in this order:

1. Ubuntu 8.04
2. Windows Vista
3. Mac OS X
4. Windows XP

I also installed the Redhat Liberation Fonts following the instructions here, and pretty soon, I had non-crappy looking fonts. (You'll have to change your system fonts in both Firefox and Ubuntu itself to use them before you'll notice a real difference.) While they're still not as nice as Windows or OS X, they're quite a bit better than what you get OOTB with Ubuntu. And I'm not even sure that they're *bad* per se. I think they're just different than what I'm used to.

That ended my adventures in Linux for a few days until tonight. I needed to get a significant amount of schoolwork done which unfortunately requires Internet Explorer. I'm pretty well caught up there, so I've been booted back into Linux for the past two hours or so. In that time, I've gotten my laser printer working using the generic PCL6 drivers with Foomatic/pxlmono. Print quality is great, and I can even configure the printer to print as "draft" quality without messing around. I couldn't even do that with OS X.

My only complaint so far as that when the machine is woken from sleep or hibernate, there is no sound. Apparently this is a common problem with a couple of possible solutions, but I have not felt any inclination to try any of them yet. Maybe in another couple of days or so.

Hopefully I will be booted into Linux for another couple of days before having to go back to Windows for any reason. Alas, I am unable to ditch Windows entirely as I do some pretty intricate page layouts and PDF conversions from within Word, but hopefully I can minimize the amount of time I spend there.

To figure out for the future, should time and attention span allow:

• iTunes replacement that can import old iTunes metadata
• Figure out these page layouts and PDF conversion in OpenOffice, if possible
• Get my Blu-ray player working, which should be possible with mplayer and some other tools

My main focus right now, though, is building my project, which has some very serious monetization possibilities. Now if only I can get someone else to answer his phone.

Idle thoughts (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

Today was one of those days where you think to yourself, "Wow, if I had a day like that every day of the week, who knows where I'd be."

Very curious — I often have productive days where you get a bunch of stuff done. Do X, take care of Y. Normal stuff that does nothing for you except keep life running smoothly. Those days are merely mediocre. Average. Not anything special. Today wasn't like that. I actually finished a final exam in a class that I will be very sad to see go. I absolutely loved psychopharmacology, and I really wish there was a Psychopharm II or a Neurobiology I. I also wish there was a computational pharmacology or some other kind of class that I could dive straight into. But I know that even if there were, I'd be lost.

And that's something I want to change.

Days like today make me wonder where I'm going with my life. I'm sort of headed back in the direction of more technical and "science-y" type stuff. Really getting into the nitty gritty details of the brain thanks to school, and on the side, doing quite a lot of IT stuff. Not the rewarding kind of computer stuff — the creative kind — but rather the Do X, take care of Y kind of thing. Nonetheless, it has sparked some old desires of mine.

A very close friend of mine is moving home in the next five weeks, and I can honestly tell you that I've never been so excited for something in my life. It's like Christmas that's been years in coming. Someone close to me made an observation that was completely out of the blue — "I think you two were meant to go into business together and do something great. But I think he needs to work in the private sector for a while and you need to be academic for a while."

Probably so.

Now with 70% less angst (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

For no reason at all today, I decided to try to fix my old gallery software, as I had several hundred photos uploaded, and I wanted to be able to view them again. It's been broken for probably a year or so, and I wanted to back and look at some of the captions I had put on them. (I have all the photos offline, just not without the descriptions.)

Memories fade, but images do not.

Took me about an hour and a half, but I successfully got:

1. Gallery working again,
2. Upgraded to the latest version of Gallery 1 so that I could
3. Run the necessary scripts to import to Gallery 2 and
4. Import my old Gallery 1 galleries into Gallery 2

So my image galleries are now consolidated at the G2 URL, and this includes my trips to Europe and Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

http://rianjs.net/fotos/

Along similar lines, I've been thinking about what to do with this site, because I haven't been writing here very much. I like owning my name, and at some point, I will probably open some type of medical practice, and I'd really like to start doing some professional blogging under my real name instead of doing it anonymously like I have been lately. (That'll take quite a shift as there is some freedom in anonymity which allows me to post stuff I otherwise might not be able to — though perhaps less than one may be inclined to think.)

But at the same time, there's quite a lot of content here, and not all of it would I want potential clients and business partners to see, so I've gone back and pruned out probably 75-100 blog entries that are either nothing but fluff, or so contrary to the person I am today as to be "not me" anymore. Or just so negative I'm embarrassed to have written them.

At some point in the near future, I am probably going to change the look of the site as well.

inboX yuB yaM tfosorciM (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Xobni is an Outlook add-in that basically adds search, conversations and profiles to Outlook. When I first heard about Xobni, I was really excited to try it and was ecstatic when I got an invite a few months ago (I still have a few invites left, if anyone wants one).

That said, I'm about ready to give it up. The search, while better than Outlook's default search, is still no match for anything Google or Apple offer, and almost painful to use since while in "search mode" almost a quarter of the sidebar is covered in a completely out-of-place Yahoo web search. Conversations are also nice, but limited in usefulness due to their being restricted to the sidebar. Further, since I deal with only a limited amount of people via email, the profiles lack utility (though the auto-discovery of phone numbers is nice). To top it all off, Xobni often makes Outlook unresponsive (though responsive enough to tell me that it's not responding).

I still like the product, and despite it's flaws, I'm still using it since it's features (ever so slightly) outweigh its drawbacks, and was glad to hear that Microsoft may buy Xobni. This can only be good since proper integration into Outlook would likely fix any performance issues and enhance Xobni's feature set. As a lukeworm fan, I can only hope that Xobni continues to see improvements and a Microsoft acquisition looks to be one pretty sure way of making that happen.

Technorati Tags: Xobni, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Outlook, email

Fixing Broken Windows (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

The "broken windows" theory comes from a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article on strategies to reduce vandalism.

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

My theme for January (and possibly February as well) is to fix broken windows (or as GTD puts it, open loops). That is, to clean up all the half-finished miscellanea in my life. This ranges across everything from finishing books I've started to cleaning out that last box from my move six months ago to ongoing things such as not letting dishes, garbage, and laundry pile up for too long. Having broken windows not only draws energy, but also subconsciously let's you know that it's okay to not finish what you've started. Starting with a clean slate is a necessary condition for success in any new endeavors. In addition, the tiny successes brought by fixing broken windows create a positive feedback loop and it helps you complete even larger projects.

For the transition period, I think it's probably a better idea to save New Years' Resolutions until March. Take the first couple of months of the year to patch up anything left outstanding from the previous year(s) and start fresh, even if you are a few months late. I'd love to hear what other people think about this approach, so if you've had experience doing something like this, drop me a line in the comments or via email.

Technorati Tags: broken windows, lifehacks, GTD, Getting Things Done, open loops, New Years Resolutions

More on The Media Fast Experiment (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Today should be day 5 of my media fast experiment, but as I predicted/promised in my previous post, I would sneak a peek on Sunday. And so I did. In about an hour and half yesterday, I made it through 182 posts in Google Reader, less than half of the ~400 a day I was averaging prior to the experiment. Still, despite only lasting three days into the experiment, I've come away with some valuable insight.

First, and perhaps most importantly, bumming around the internet is no longer my go-to action when I've found myself with nothing to do. Even yesterday, when I spent time in Google Reader, I also found time to catch up on some posts for my other blog and even process and upload some photos to Flickr from my trip to Puerto Rico last March.

Google Reader's expanded view, which shows full posts in a river of news format, is a great way to sift through a bunch of garbage while finding the few gems you really enjoy. In an effort to be more selective, I've switched to list view, which shows me headlines for about 25 posts in a way similar to Gmail. Picking and choosing is much easier when you've expanded the number of headlines visible on screen 15-25 times.

The only thing I wish I could do was mark items as read without giving them credit for being read. There's a bunch of stuff in there that I will probably never read, and it looks like it'll build up unless I do choose to mark it as read. A minor complaint, but on the bright side it should make unsubscribing from low signal-to-noise ratio feeds much, much easier (Engadget and the rest of the Weblogs, Inc sites, I'm looking at you).

In response to William's comment, I do think he's right to a degree. If your job is news-driven (you work on Wall Street, in PR, in journalism, etc), then you do have to keep up with the news. Even still, not every news item you come across is 100% relevant and the experiment helps to make that clear. And for those of us whose jobs aren't exactly news driven, much of it isn't relevant - we simply consume it for enjoyment. For most, consumption is way out of balance with production. As with any habit-altering experience, we must often go too far in one direction in order to ultimately end up in the middle.

Technorati Tags: 4 Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss, media fast, experiment, productivity

The 4-Hour Work Week Media Fast Experiment (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

I recently began listening to Timothy Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week. The book proposes many interesting ideas, but by far the most immediately applicable are his productivity tips. The one I want to highlight in this post is the media fast experiment, which forces participants to avoid all news for a week. Instead of being the one to relay news to others, be the one asking others what's in the news.

I'm on my third day of the experiment. I've avoided visiting Digg and reading feeds on Google Reader. In an effort to be completely honest, I will admit that I did hit Techmeme yesterday and CNN today for about 5 minutes. I felt guilty both times and that feeling a good sign.

The effects have been moderate, but promising and encouraging. I've been getting more done at work and completing more personal to-do items out of work. Wasting time online is a slave to Parkinson's law (which Ferriss mentions in his book), which basically states that a task will grow to fill the time allotted to it. This is especially true for my RSS subscriptions, which are literally never-ending. Since I wouldn't allot a set time limit to my time-wasting (by definition), my time-wasting would grow to fill time until I got bored or tired.

Depending on how comfortable I feel with being able to control myself, I might allocate (by alarm) an hour or so sometime this weekend to go through Google Reader. Even though the experiment calls for a complete fast, an hour a week is a huge improvement over the multiple hours a day and I should be happy that I haven't gone mad yet with all this newly-recovered spare time.

And I just came across this blog post with a great summary of the book. Check out the productivity tips under Step II: E is for Elimination.

Technorati Tags: Timothy Ferriss, 4 Hour Work Week, news, experiment, media fast, wasting time

Sometimes it’s like chasing your tail… (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

…even when you’re actually not.

With working 6 days a week, I find myself in a position with more money than I need to get by. Theoretically, anyway. Since I just barely started working enough hours, that leaves me with precisely zero financial flexibility in these first couple of weeks. Pretty much every paycheck goes to pay a bill that is due in the next 10 days, and while I’m not behind, it IS kind of annoying. Working all these hours and you look at your account balance, and it’s hovering uncomfortably close to “E”.

I suspect the week after next will be the time when I finally get a nice buffer in there again. Having made my car payment 4 days before it was due, and then paying rent right after that… well that means I’ll have to make another car payment within two weeks. I like to pay my bills as soon as I’m able. Plus it’s getting towards the middle of the month, which means that my car insurance will be auto-debited in two weeks. Urgh, annoying.

I’ll be out of credit card debt by the end of next month, which is a relief, but it still feels like I have a long way to go before I can breathe easier. I’ve had to contract my lifestyle in the last six weeks because of not having any leeway, which was a bit of a challenge at first. Working six days a week means I basically just want to sit at home on the seventh, which is good for the wallet.

Tl;DR: Basically I’m cramming two months worth of bills into ~3 weeks, and it’s frustrating because you don’t get to see the fruits of your increased labor. I’m looking forward to being out of this position. The plus side is that I’ve been saving regularly throughout this time, which means that my savings account balance is growing rather than shrinking.

Technorati Tags: Money, debt, savings

Selling used books on Amazon rules (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I sell most of my old textbooks on Amazon, especially if I think I’m not going to use them again. I listed two organic chemistry books last night. Within 45 minutes of listing the textbook, it was sold.

I think I paid ~$160 for the book, and it was sold for $140 used. Talk about recouping costs on used books!

The secret is to sell it as soon as the class is over lest another edition take its place and undercut its resale value…

The other secret(s) are to 1) not abuse your books and 2) sell it at a reasonable price that’s on the lower side, but not the lowest price you see. People automatically shy away from the absolute lowest price because they think they’re going to be getting an inferior product. Use that to your advantage. Price it on the low side, but don’t make it the lowest price.

Blogging Tip: Declare Tab Bankruptcy (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

As a result of all the things I had going on towards the end of school, I kept accumulating Firefox tabs of things I'd like to write about. I never got around to writing about any of them, and the number of tabs kept growing as I neglected to take action on any of them. I did manage to trim them once in a while, posting ones I'd like to look at sometime in the future on del.icio.us and closing others whose time has passed.

Even when I left Philly to come back home, I emailed myself links to the 22 tabs I had open on my iMac so I could open them again on my MacBook. Of course, I never got around to opening them because I had opened new tabs! Yesterday, Firefox crashed and I didn't get a chance to "Restore Session" and all the tabs I had opened disappeared. I wasn't devastated; I was free. The stasis I was experiencing because of my First In, First Out mentality disappeared. I could read a new post and comment on it without having to worry about the 20+ posts I wasn't commenting on.

Declaring email bankruptcy is a great tip for those paralyzed by an overflowing inbox. Similarly, I found that declaring tab bankruptcy helped me overcome my blogging paralysis and finally get a blog post out there. And that opened the floodgates, since this is my second post in less than 24 hours.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to force yourself to close all tabs at the end of the week. Archive the ones you want on del.icio.us, etc, and kiss the others goodbye. Your audience (what's left of it, anyway) will thank you.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, writing, productivity, bankruptcy, email bankruptcy, tab bankruptcy, Firefox, tabbed browsing, del.icio.us

Ma.gnolia as an information manager (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by michaelb

Ma.gnolia as an information manager (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by michaelb

Over the next few weeks I’ll be experimenting using Ma.gnolia as an information manager for myself. By using individual and groups of tags as an adaptation of Merlin’s 43 Folders system I’ll be able to create tasks, notes and reminders. There will be some limitations on what I can place in this system like emails (unless I can find a service that provides a permalink for each individual email), but I think it be a good starting point to explore how to adopt Ma.gnolia for other uses.

With support for Upcoming already built in and feeds available for individual and groups of tags, I see bunches of potential in how this could work like a script that would pull that days feed. Add to that proper use of the description, rating and privacy option for each bookmark and add to that groups and discussions and you’re on your way to a useful information manager.

It’s 8:30am… (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

And I’m doing math listening to the soundtrack to A Beautiful Mind. How oddly appropriate.

I’ve got tutoring at 10am…

Technorati Tags: math, a beautiful mind

Keep your cell phone happy with email at Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Using your mobile phones email address to keep you from checking YOUR email account every five minutes while waiting for an important email.

Tags: productivity, email, mobile phone

Planning for what’s real rather than what’s ideal (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I’ve made a lot of plans over the last six years. Dozens of times I’ve made a plan only to change it later, or discard it entirely. I’ve finished maybe 25% of the things that I’ve started. That’s not a good record. Yeah, I’ve got ADD, but that’s not excuse in my opinion. It can perhaps explain the problem but it certainly doesn’t help solve it. On the plus side of these failures, though — I start lots of things. Probably 3-4x as many projects as the “average” 20-something. So I’ve probably had a similar number of successes as the average person my age.

Looking back over all the discarded ideas, I’ve noticed a trend: I’ve always planned for what my ideal self, rather than my real self.

In short, I’ve planned to fail.

Having a fairly simple life over the last 18 months, I’ve had a lot of time to do self-inventory, assessing my own weaknesses and strengths. I’m happy to report that my strengths more than outweigh my weaknesses, but to be truthful, consistency is not one of these strengths.

I’m getting better, but I’m nowhere near my ideal. Which brings me to the point of this post — every time I have planned to:

• Return to school
• Be consistent with my finances
• Start saving money on a set schedule
• Go to the gym or exercising regularly
• Et cetera

I have not accounted for my own inconsistency in the original equation. I am great at digging myself out of holes, but I suck at climbing mountains.

So for someone who is largely on flat ground now — neither in a hole nor on top of Mt Kilimanjaro — how do I proceed? I’m at a crossroads in life right now, in a very real sense. I have two paths before me: one leads to great wealth, and one leads to a lot of hard work and an uncertain future.

The path to great wealth is the path of least resistance, ironically enough. But I don’t care to choose this path. The other path requires much more work, but the personal rewards are far greater.

I don’t have any solutions to my conundrum. How does one build in mechanisms to overcome one’s own shortcomings? Wanting something badly clearly isn’t enough. I have some possible solutions, but I don’t know how well they will work in practice. In this regard, I am looking for some advice from people wiser than I am, who learned at some point how to get out of their own way.

Accountability

I like building systems. Systems take the thinking (and sometimes doing) out of everyday tasks. This can be simple: write down the instructions on how to program the garage door code so you don’t have to re-figure it out every time. Or it can be complex: set up an automated task to execute which removes 1) doing the task by hand and 2) remembering to do it on time.

I like systems. Building systems in my personal life has helped me overcome many of my weaknesses in the last 18 months. But I never build in accountability, so I have failed at the Hard Stuff.

I always accomplish more when there is an outside force compelling me to do or accomplish something. I succeeded in high school simply because you’d get detention if you skipped class. (No, I never really studied.) College, of course, is a different story. Hence my spectacular academic implosion since I graduated from high school — I never went to class and barely studied.

But accountability is uncomfortable.

Inconsistency

I blow with the wind. This doesn’t mean I follow the crowd, it just means that I’m not consistent about doing anything. Whether that’s backing up my computer, or going to the gym, or writing for Ars for an appreciable length of time — inconsistency is my biggest weakness. I am starting to chip away at it with the help of the people in my life, and by immersing myself in positive media, but I’m still far from where I’d like to be, and I am afraid that this inconsistency coupled with a lack of accountability will continue to haunt me moving forward.

So much so that I am almost afraid to try something new, or plan something truly ambitious, because looking at my past, I know what I will do: give up about 3 weeks in, or at least start seriously slacking off. This is a new feeling for me, because I’ve always been one to jump in with both feet, probably because easy come, easy go, right?

I don’t want to be that person anymore, and I am about to embark on something that is *completely* outside my comfort zone.

My 52 goals before I die (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I thought I’d write down a list of my heart’s desires. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I’ve not done it for some reason, even though doing such things is motivating.

All of these desires are near and dear to me. Some of the items on this list I’ve wanted since I was a small boy (possessions, mostly), and some of them are newer desires (higher-level desires like love and fulfillment). Many of the list items appeal to my vanity, but they aren’t the most important things on the list by far. The traveling is more important to me than owning a Ferrari and a helicopter, for instance. The people I travel with are just as important as the destination, because it wouldn’t be the same without them. Things like that.

Some of them won’t happen until I’m much older. Some of them are ongoing things and can never really be checked off.

Dreams are goals with time limits attached. I have time limits attached to many of these things, I simply didn’t put them into the list. I’ve struck off the goals I’ve already accomplished.

1. Fall in love and get married
2. Stay married
3. Have a son
4. Have a daughter
5. See them both become self-actualized, successful people at whatever they choose to do
6. Meet my grandchildren
7. Never stop moving towards self-actualization and always make forward progress in self-improvement
8. Own my own business
9. Start my own financially-successful website
10. Open 12 VA offices in NY
11. Be out of debt by age 26
12. Have a net worth in excess of $1 million by age 30
13. Have a net worth in excess of $50 million by age 39
14. Have a net worth in excess of $1 billion by age 65
15. Be on the cover of a prominent business or news magazine
16. Write a fictional book
17. Go to South Africa with my dad
18. Visit Egypt and the pyramids with Fabien
19. Own a collection of fine watches. (God I love watches!)
20. Get my helicopter pilot’s license
21. Own a Robinson R44 helicopter
22. Go to a professional driving school
23. Drive an open-wheel (Indy) car
24. Design my own home and have it built for me.
25. Own a new Ferrari
26. Order and pick up a brand-new Porsche 911 Turbo in Europe
27. Participate in a Porsche event on two seperate continents
28. Buy a Dodge Viper for Rich. Just to say “Thank-you.”
29. Visit Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand with my dad
30. Visit Antarctica
31. Visit Iceland
32. Visit Norway
33. Go on an African safari (non-hunting)
34. Get my SCUBA license in Guam and go diving with Nick there
35. Dive the Great Barrier Reef also with Nick
36. Spend two months in Europe back-packing
37. Go to China and see the Great Wall
38. Throw a huge birthday party for myself when I’m old since I’ve only had one in my life.
39. Get rid of the bittersweet feeling that the holidays brings by having my own family where we stay home and celebrate and people come to us, rather than having to figure out where I’m going on what day. Be the center rather than participate in other people’s centers.
40. Own a beautiful home somewhere in New Hampshire
41. Contribute something meaningful to a great charity or organization
42. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox-Yankees game
43. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox World Series Game
44. Go to the summer Olympics in another country
45. Go to MacWorld with David and/or Paul (Nerd alert!)
46. Do something truly extravagant with my close friends, just for the hell of it.
47. Create a full college scholarship to a worthy institution based on need and merit that can only be won by a white male.
48. See a Josh Groban-Charlotte Church duet. Live. In the front row.
49. Start a news-media company
50. Touch the lives of 5 children less fortunate than myself in a meaningful, personal way.
51. Start an angel/venture capital fund for startups
52. Retire and run my own (or someone else’s) charity.

Technorati Tags: Goals

Well this is quite a change (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I was going through some old image directories the other day, just to see what I had., and it turns out that I have pretty much every screenshot I’ve ever taken from 2002 until the present. I was looking through some of them, and I came across some screenshots of Outlook 2003 — specifically of the “To Do” list functionality. (I used to be a huge O2K3 junky.)

Looking back then, to see what I had to do (I was a second year in Pharmacy school)… man it’s a freakin’ joke. I used to think I was so overwhelmed back then. Now it’s like “Hmm, I’d take me maybe 2 days to get all that stuff done now.”) The 4 screenshots span 12 days, and most of the stuff didn’t get done in the timeframe that I wanted it done in.

Click each thumbnail for a larger view.

Seriously, the amount of stuff in screenshot 1 would be done in literally three days at the most today. I waste so little time now, it boggles my mind. Even compared to just six months ago.

I guess starting your own business will do that to you, though, won’t it?

Technorati Tags: Outlook 2003, GTD

Gmail is *not quite* perfect (yet) (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

Despite what TechCrunch says, Gmail is not perfect.* It’s missing two more key pieces of functionality that I (and many others) would likely use. They are:

• Sort mail by attachment size
• Delete attachments (but not the entire email message)

I’d like to be able to sort by attachment size, so I can delete attachments which are large, and/or I’ve already downloaded to my computer, which is the second bullet on my list. I just sent out an attachment that didn’t work as expected, and I wanted to delete the attachment from my email, and leave only the working version. Can’t do that the way that Gmail is currently set up — I can delete the whole message, but I don’t want to do that.

Maybe they’ll add this functionality later on. I surely hope so. I’m not running out of space, I just don’t like keeping superfluous junk in my email — I like to pare everything down to the bare essentials, and broken email attachments aren’t essential.

* This of course, is ignoring the fact that some 60 Gmail users lost almost all of their email in recent weeks. Oopsie.

Technorati Tags: Google, Gmail, email, Internet

Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive 11 Tips for Time Management in a Web Worker World « [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: productivity, time management, Web Worker Daily

Printing to PDF: the awesomest thing since sliced bread (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I haven’t written anything in a while, mostly because I don’t have much to say that others would find interesting. However, I would just like to say that printing to PDF absolutely kicks ass. I discovered this nifty little thing a couple of months ago, and I’ve been using it religiously ever since.

For those of you non-Mac users, and those who are but haven’t noticed, OS X has a built-in print to PDF feature — made much more useful if you click the print page link, or printer-friendly link that most sites have before printing to PDF. (Click for full-size.)

For the last couple of months or so, I’ve been creating my own little library of research papers of things I’m interested in, or have had occasion to use:

I’ve actually been accumulating material faster than I can read it thanks to school and work, but I’ll have time to catch up in the coming weeks. When I want to find something that I know I read, just Command-Space and I can search the contents of all of the PDFs instantly using Spotlight.

Lots of people complain about Spotlight, but it’s better than anything Windows has out-of-the-box.

All of this can be accomplished on Windows, as well, but it’s just easier on a Mac. I save CEs, journal articles, whatever I find interesting. It’s also interesting that a lot of what you read in medical news and journal articles is 1) uninteresting 2) unremarkable and 3) useless. It seems it’s always fun to compare things to placebo when it would be much more interesting (and useful) to conduct head-to-head tests of drugs.

There is no “best-of-breed” drug for a given condition most of the time, thanks to the near-infinitely variable nature of complex higher organisms. There are very few absolutes in medicine, but there are trends that usually emerge. It’d be nice if researchers started going out of their way to look for them. That’s somewhat difficult, though, when most of the big studies are funded by large pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in seeing their drug perform well. You’d be a fool to hundreds of millions of dollars for a big study only to have your drug not perform as well as a competitor’s… Sometimes the NIH funds head-to-head studies — the only entity besides Big Pharma with pockets deep enough to do so — but only when there is a significant amount of money to be saved by establishing a “winner”.

If I get bored someday soon, I’ll post some of the names of the huge studies to which I refer in this mini tangent…

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Spotlight, Tiger, Mac, PDF, library, digital library

In the last 4 months… (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I’ve got about 10 minutes to kill before I need to make a phone-call, and I’ve not written in a while, so I figured I would write a quick entry since I’ve been feeling introspective of late.

It’s October now, and in the last 4 months, I have made several significant changes in the way I go about my life. I made a conscious decision back in June to stop doing things the way “they’re supposed to be done” and have opted instead to do the things that bring me happiness and fulfillment. There’s been some overlap, but there wasn’t a whole lot. Not at first.

Bulleted lists are always fun, so here’s one so I don’t ramble for paragraphs:

• I left pharmacy school
• I decided to only do things that make me happy
• I have realized that sometimes it’s better to bite your tongue and do things you don’t like rather than trying to fight The Man. Not all battles are worth fighting. It’s not worth it on a personal or professional level.
• I’ve gotten rid of all unnecessary overhead in my life. A concept I will go into more detail about on my blog here later. Briefly, though, that refers to getting rid of extraneous distractions in one’s life, not lowering one’s electric bill.

Somewhere along the way everything started to change very quickly:

• Instead of barely passing grades, I’m getting straight As.
• I’ve decided I want to go back to MCP. (Readers of this blog with a memory know that’s a mind-boggling statement.)
• I have decided that I’d rather learn than do almost anything else.*
• I think I may go to med school when I am done with pharmacy. But not before.

There were several catalysts for some of these changes in action and attitude. The main one has been that my mom told me that she won’t cosign on all my student loans any longer. That made me angry at first, but now I’m grateful for two reasons: I already have a mountain of debt; and it has really made me get my priorities right in a more meaningful way than “gee maybe I should stop clowning around in school.”

* In terms of “learning” I mean that I have taken to reading my physiology book for fun. Really. I took our therapeutics book home from work, and I’d take Drug Facts and Comparisons home too, if I could get away with it. I spend all of my free time not occupied with work or school reading and researching things. Because I want to. In fact, I have a list of things that I want to learn about on my Desktop.

In my Facebook profile I have said that “Rian is feeling spongy” or “Rian is a sponge”. This is because I have re-developed the ability to read and retain almost all information after only reading it once: an ability I lost somewhere in the early stages of high school. Along with this has been an ability to study and absorb heavy information for long periods of time. On Saturday I worked hard for about 13 hours straight with no artificial help save 2 cups of coffee in the morning. I haven’t done that since I was taking t, I didn’t know I could do it without stimulants.

Suffice it to say that I’m happier now than I’ve been in a long time. Most of my days are spent in a state of autotelic flow, and it’s not even a battle to get to that point any longer.

Bumps in the road aren’t a problem any longer, either. I spent a significant chunk of free time with someone whom I love very much this past weekend who needed company. This meant having to re-arrange my remaining free time drastically to accommodate. I didn’t mind at all, but six months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to adapt like that. It’s a refreshing change.

Technorati Tags: Flow, psychology, self-actualization

QOTD by Frank Tibolt (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

One of the modules I have on my Personalized Google Homepage is the Quote of the Day. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes it’s stupid. And sometimes it speaks to me. This is one of those rare times.

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

- Frank Tibolt

As I writer, I’ve found that to be more true than almost anything else.

Technorati Tags: QOTD, quote of the day, Frank Tibolt

There’s a reason dictionaries exist (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

When I’m writing, I’m very conscientious of the words of I’m using. Generally, I choose each word specifically for a reason. As I’m taking online courses, most of the work is written, which is good for me. I don’t have to drive to class 3 days a week and sit and be bored out of my tree. It’s a lot more efficient to sit at home and do the reading and writing all at once. 3 hours of work condensed into 1.

Anyway, I read other people’s work sometimes — it’s encouraged — and sometimes I wonder if people know what the words they’re using actually mean. In OS X, there’s a little dictionary built-in. If I don’t know all of the subtleties behind a given word, I won’t use it, or I’ll look it up just to be sure. And then I’ll re-work the sentence or paragraph until I like it. (Blog entries excluded sometimes. ) There are similar tools for Windows. And about a million Internet dictionaries on top of that.

My writing is a lot like my speaking. I’ve been told in the past that I speak “like a book” — whatever that means. I’ve always taken it as a compliment because I choose my words carefully both in speech and writing, and I strive to have my writing be as much “like me” as possible. I try to be authentic.

But when you read papers — even at the college level — it becomes apparent that people cannot write nearly as coherently as they can usually speak. They use words that they wouldn’t if they were talking. This is bad because it’s usually painfully obvious. It’s okay to be plain-spoken. You don’t need to have a Shakespearean vocabulary to get your point across; no one’s going to look down on you for not using flowerly language. Yeah you might not be able to be a “professional writer” — whatever that means these days — but you won’t look dumb, either.

This begs the question… why not simply speak your mind on something and then transcribe what you’ve said? It’s real, it’s usually not bad, and it’s probably quicker than trying to bridge that disconnect between speech and written communication that seems to exist in some people — and it’ll sound genuine AND intelligent.

Really, it’s just better.

Technorati Tags: communication

A day without clicks (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone a full 24 hours without having any AdSense clicks on any of the 3 sites I run. I don’t really mind since I’ve demolished my earnings goals for the month, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

In fact, it hasn’t happened since… June 24. Hah!

I suppose that’s actually pretty good for just getting started. OTP, as usual, remains my biggest earner by far, despite having been slashdotted here on rianjs.net. Now that IS surprising, even though tech-savvy traffic typically doesn’t click on advertisements.

Technorati Tags: AdSense

I need 12 writers and $69,240 (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I’ve been doing some back-of-the-envelope math lately, based on estimations after my recent slashdotting, calculating, on average, how much a page impression is worth based on Google AdSense from a relatively tech-savvy demographic. I’ve told some of my close friends my plans for world dominationbuilding a media empire (something I’ll eventually expound upon here), and I’ve calculated that with minor AdSense optimization and a decent amount of tech-savvy readers (that tend to not click ads), a page impression is worth $0.0033495.

Based on my calculations (number of posts + infrastructure costs + authors + misc.) I need $66,240 to operate for 12 months, assuming I didn’t make a single cent in advertising revenue, and figure an extra $3,000 for expenses I didn’t think of.

Assuming a page is worth that fraction of a cent, I’d need 1.6 million page views to break even, assuming Google AdSense was my only source of revenue. (Which it wouldn’t be, but I’m figuring worst-case scenario.)

Oddly enough, technology infrastructure at this point is but a drop in the bucket compared to what paying good writers would cost, so it would make no sense to skimp on the backend. Serving pages on a robust platform costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent in an all-in-one package that most dedicated server packages offer. (The machine is yours to serve as many pages as your bandwidth will allow.) Colocation, on the other hand, tends to charge more in terms of bandwidth. In other words, 1GB of colo bandwidth tends to cost more than 1GB of dedicated server bandwidth thanks to overselling. Colo customers tend to have a better handle on how much bandwidth they’ll use in a given month — in theory, anyway.

Fun, fun.

Technorati Tags: Money, entrepreneurship, writing, start-ups, business, media, Internet, AdSense