Should you switch over to e-books?

You already know the big reasons to get an E-Book - which I can
summarize by saying I'm reading the brand new 900 page Stephen King book
on something that weighs less than a paperback, and it cost less than
the paperback will when it's released months from now - but maybe you're
still not sure about buying one, or at least not sure about making it
your primary way of reading books. I'm very much considering making a
nearly-complete transition, as a result of the trauma of my last move. I
still haven't been reunited with the couple-dozen wine cases full of
books I painfully packed up and moved to my friend's basement, and the
idea of accumulating more of that weight of *stuff* is awful to me. Like
my laptop carries every album I've bought in the last 2 years, my Kindle
Touch currently holds 50 novel-length books, and could hold hundreds and
hundreds more.
It feels good to be travelling light, but if reading is as important to
you as it is to me it's a huge step, and you don't want to make it
lightly. I want to lay out some very real cons that you may not have
thought of, but then also provide pros you might not have thought of to
counteract them.
But first I want to deal with an invalid con: "I just love the
look/feel/smell of books" Do you really? Or do you love them because
they are *associated* with the texts you love? If you had never heard of
Catch-22 and there was an empty notebook with the cover art and cover
text, would you buy it and revere it? We're fond of books as objects
because of the words they contain. But once there's an alternative it's
easy to see lots of things you don't like about them: much of the sf I
like to read gets covers that are terrible paintings of spacey stuff
that has nothing to do with the contents. Paperbacks are kind of damaged
by reading them even once, especially big ones; they get dirty and can't
be cleaned. They often have garish promotional material all over the
covers, and university library books often have writing inside. And for
people with asthma, being in a room full of books is the worst thing.
Basically most modern mass produced books are not that beautiful as
objects, and there's nothing stopping you from buying the ones that are
to keep around as ornaments, like turn of the century cigarette cases.
If you love reading you'll embrace whatever is the most direct route to
wonderful books.
My Kindle Touch is not particularly beautiful, but it does what it needs
to do which is stay out of your way and not feel like a computer. With
the e-ink display the e-book is just about as pleasant as reading a
paper book (though the contrast isn't as high, so it's somewhat like
reading on light grey paper) It doesn't hum or pop things up, and it
lasts for at least a month on a single charge.
Ok now for the real ones, focusing on the Kindle Touch since it's what I
know.
CON: You don't own the book in the same way.
Amazon.com sells books encumbered by digital rights management, meaning
it can't be used on non-amazon devices, can't be copied freely, and will
probably not be readable in 10 years. That sucks, and hopefully will go
away some day like the DRM on the iTunes store, but I can understand why
they do it at least initially, since books are insanely easy to pirate.
The lower price helps a bit, and you should also know it's possible to
lend books out to friends with Kindles, and unlike lending real books,
you don't have to be in the same place - and it comes back to you
automatically. It's also the case that if a book you bought is
accidentally deleted, or your Kindle is stolen, you can get it from
Amazon again.
PRO: Public domain books are free and instantly available.
Do you like Edgar Allen Poe, Somerset Maugham, PG Wodehouse, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, HP Lovecraft, L Frank Baum, Lewis Caroll,
Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau,
Voltaire, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, or any other author who wrote before
1920? Well now you can can carry around *all* of them with you for free.
Amazing when I think about the hundreds of dollars I spent buying books
by these authors. There are also tons of free modern books, by sf writer
Cory Doctorow and many many people you've never heard of, plus lots of
great sales. One more point is that many public libraries now have
e-book collections. My library in a medium big town has thousands of
books, including very new ones, basically equivalent to a large airport
bookstore. Holds on popular books take longer to become available than
the corresponding paper copies, and the terms of borrowing are not quite
as good, but there's no picking them up, and no remembering to return
them - it's literally impossible to get an overdue fine, they just
disappear from your device.
CON: Whenever you connect to the wireless network, your books could be
taken away by amazon.com, or even invisibly altered.
In a feature that people didn't even know existed, Amazon has the power
to pull a book that you bought right back out of your Kindle, as it did
oh so ironically with 1984 and Animal Farm in the summer of 2009:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/25/kindle_conundrum/
It hasn't happened again since, and it may be a good thing that it
happened relatively early and there was such a big shitstorm about it,
since that provides some protection. They've promised they won't do it
again. But since it's a corporation, that promise is worthless, and
they're unlikely to do the only thing that would make it better: make it
technologically impossible for them to take books back. Even more
frightening, if this capability exists it means it is very possible for
them to reach into your E-Book and alter the text of books after the
fact, much like Bush's Whitehouse invisibly altered transcripts on their
web page. It's already apparently common practice for authors to tinker
with the text of their book as sold on Amazon, such that people who buy
it subsequently will get a slightly different version.
PRO: The wireless connectivity means that it can act as an emergency web
device, and on my Kindle Touch the keyboard works quite well, if I
needed to send an emergency email or look up an address. Of course with
the e-ink it is incredibly clumsy to use the web, which I actually like:
it discourages the rampant multitasking I tend to do when I have a web
browser in front of me. It very much replicates the quiet, focused
feeling of sitting down with a good book.
CON: Your reading habits are being logged.
This is troubling. There is a file on your Kindle which logs the time of every page turn, and even your geographic location if yours has 3G, and this file could potentially be uploaded to Amazon:
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132058735/is-your-e-book-reading-up-on-you
According to the hackers on the MobileRead forums, there is no evidence so far that the file is ever transmitted to Amazon. But that could change as easily as a tiny update to their code. I really hate the idea that my privacy in this most intimate activity could be invaded.
However there's hope on the horizon,
since someone's already found a way to jailbreak the Kindle Touch. I'm
putting it out of my mind for now, but crossing my fingers that it will
only be a matter of months before I can take control of my device and
make sure it's not acting as a spy sending whispers back to the corporation.
PRO: Books are searchable, quotable, and enlargable.
It's very cool to not only be able to carry around all your books with
you, but to quickly find exact passages. I foresee a new era of annoying
people by reading them my favourite bits. When you select a passage, not
only does it stay highlighted, but it copies the text onto a file that
is easily copied off the Kindle when connected. Bookmarks work great,
and this is going to be very helpful in the years to come, you can
instantly change the text size by pinching with two fingers, as well as
other text attributes. You can blow the text up huge!
CON: You can't read it during takeoff and landing.
I had a lot of trouble with this one, since it makes no sense. Even if
cellphones were a threat to airplanes, a Kindle with the wireless turned
off couldn't possibly pose a threat. When you're not turning pages, it's
practically a dead hunk of plastic. But I look at it two ways. First,
it's the airline's rules so they can do what they want. We are a guest.
Second, even if the flight attendants and pilot know what an e-book is,
do you think every person around you who is dying to use their iPhone
will too? Some idiot would definitely cause trouble. I just look at it
as a proving to myself that I can survive without entertainment for 20
minutes, and in fact so far it's always turned into a chance to meet my
seatmate, which has been nice.
PRO: You can read with one hand.
This is huge. This is something I've wanted my whole life. No matter how
big the book is, you can easily read it with only one hand free. In fact
I only have to graze a fingertip, knuckle, or nose across my screen and
it turns the page. I can read while eating barbecue chicken wings. I can
read while brushing my teeth. I can read while holding onto a subway
pole in a crowded car. If I'm a bit careful, I can read in a bath. And
this one really hit me: I could potentially read while running on a
treadmill. I don't plan on running on a treadmill, but that's cool.
If those cons are things that are important to you, I can completely
understand if you would not want to put all your eggs in the e-book
basket. But now that they cost less than an ipod nano, I think it should
be well worth considering along the lines of a Netflix subscription:
it's a bit creepy, sometimes frustratingly limited, but a great service
if you're into the content. But if you choose not to get one, please be
aware that it is much too late to take a philosophical stance against
e-books, in hopes that people will take you for a mysterious, supercool
free thinker.

A Solution for if Google is Creeping You Out (And if it Isn't, Why it Should Be)

My homepage and default search engine is now Duck Duck Go. Unlike Google, it makes it a selling point that it doesn't track your searches, or "bubble" you - and if you aren't concerned with those things then you should click on the "track" and "bubble" links on the main page for a very clear explanation (it's even worse than the concerns I express in my old entry on web privacy)

https://duckduckgo.com/

I've been using it for about a week now, and for pure search the results are at least 80% as good as Google's - it almost always gives me what I'm looking for in the first few results. It doesn't have as slickly dovetailed features as Google, especially the integration of Google image, news, etc, but there's a search syntax that makes it easy to conduct the same search on Google. And it has a couple of nifty touches of its own.

I feel more at ease knowing that my searches during this period are not contributing to the giant database of intimate knowledge Google has assembled about me. Of course I have no independent confirmation of the claims that Duck Duck Go makes for its privacy measures, but I find the slight homemade quality of the site and the earnestness of their privacy essays encouraging on that front. And at least we now have a way as consumers to say to Google, "being creepy will cost you hits."

Freedom from Internet Self-Distraction

If you have a mac, and struggle with internet self-distraction like I do
("I just don't think I can write another word until I find out what
Phoebe Cates has been up to lately") there's a beautifully simple
application that might help you called Freedom. It blocks your
computer's internet connectivity until a predetermined number of minutes
has passed, or you restart - which is nice as a barrier high enough to
stop me cheating, but low enough enough that I'm not terribly
inconvenienced in an emergency.
http://macfreedom.com/
For some reason the idea of becoming too dependent on it makes me uneasy
(shouldn't I learn some self-control eventually?) but used like
caffeine, as some extra mojo to power through something once in a while,
it's awesome.

What To Do About Bed Bugs

So you think you might have bed bugs. I'm terribly sorry. I had them, and they are a major pain. The good part of it is that through my experience and my very motivated reading, I can offer some advice to get you started. I'm putting forth a program I call EPL, for Education, Pest Control Operative, and Laundry. I'll expand on each of those, but first some immediate Don'ts:

DON'Ts
- Don't throw away all your furniture, in particular your bed. It almost certainly won't solve the problem (bedbugs can be in places other than the bed), it's not necessary, and it risks dropping them on the way or having them come back in. Beds can be treated with enclosures, and upholstery can be treated by steaming.
- Don't stop sleeping in the bed, if you can possibly stand it. Bedbugs will eventually travel to other rooms if they don't have anything to feed on. But the good news is that they like to live together in one location as close to the food source as possible. If you can make them think they've found a wonderful home, it will be much easier to wipe the majority of them out at once.
- Don't go by word-of-mouth treatment ideas until you've researched them. My dad said the thing for the job, he'd heard somewhere, was diatomaceous earth, and that it was entirely safe and effective. I learned from the sources I list below that both of those claims have been strongly questioned.
- Don't, *under any circumstances*, try to fight them with store-bought pesticides (especially not "bug bombs"). They are known to be entirely ineffective at killing bedbugs, they can be harmful to your health, and worst of all, they can make the bugs scatter around the room and the rest of the house. The very next day after I sprayed a thick layer of something nasty my landlord gave me called Black Jack the tenants in the apartment directly above started getting massively bitten. That was probably the worst mistake of all the mistakes I made.
- Don't remove anything from the room. Especially fabric and wood might be current hiding places, and you could spread them. Even worse is sealing them off somewhere away from the treatment, whatever it is, meaning that they will be released some day and reinfest.
- Don't worry about who's to blame, and don't panic. They are not a health hazard whatsoever, just an annoyance. And with education and some forbearance, you will get rid of them.

EDUCATION
Before you do anything else, include reading the rest of this post, you should watch this video series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHux9IHDaVQ
and read this:
http://bedbugger.com/faqs/

The Bedbugger.com forums will be your friend throughout this time. I'm a little uncomfortable about the presence of paid sponsors for particular products, but it is a genuine grassroots community website, on which many pest control operatives and even academics post. You can find answers to pretty much any question you might have by searching the forum, and if you don't find it you can post and people are very nice about answering. There are some scary worst-case-scenario stories on here that you might want to stay away from for now, but there are also plenty of stories from people who successfully beat their infestations.

One of the things you will learn from these sources is that it's impossible to diagnose bed bugs from bites alone. Any rules people tell you for what are and aren't bites are probably not very useful, given the different life stages and the differences in individual reactions. They can be confused with a number of other causes, such as:

mosquitoes
fleas
mites
scabies
carpet beetles
chiggers
zits and ingrown hairs
other kinds of allergens

There's also recent evidence that bed bugs might be nowhere near as easy to transmit as publicity would suggest, particularly from public places.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2011/10/bedbugs_how_contagious_are_they_really_.single.html

So it's a good idea to get some kind of confirmation, by looking for physical evidence, before going into full-on warfare mode. (I was lucky enough to spot one crawling away from my bed on the very first day) On the other hand, if you are noticing new big red welts every morning, especially if they occur in lines of 2 or 3 close together, that could be a good reason to call someone in for an inspection at least. There are also trained dogs that can locate bed bugs, which could help with this stage, but be sure to check the bedbugger FAQ on this before calling.

PCO
If you have a non-trivial problem, there is no substitute for calling in a pest control operative. If you are renting, in most parts of north america it is the landlord's responsibility to pay for it. This might mean that you don't get to choose who it is, but try to have a say in it if you can. *Insist* on a professional exterminator, not the landlord's uncle or buddy. This is non-negotiable. If you have trouble getting the landlord to act, there is a government agency you can go to. Where I am now it's the Department of Health; here's some information for Ontario:
http://bedbugsinfo.ca/tools/bed-bugs-tenants-download

I put education before this step, because having some knowledge will help you to hire the right company. Since the bedbug reemergence is relatively new, some PCOs that advertise bed bugs as one of their services are not really experienced or knowledgeable. If you're lucky, there are recommendations for PCOs in your city on bedbugger.com. If not, here are some things you might look for:
- They should conduct an inspection first, not just spray everywhere automatically. A good PCO will look everywhere very, very carefully, and tailor their solution to the specific situation.
- As another facet of that, they should probably advertise an Integrated Pest Management approach, which basically means the same thing as the previous point.
- The plan will include multiple treatments, spaced at least a week apart.
- A guarantee is nice (though it will always come with a time limit), although not offering one shouldn't rule out a company.
- They insist on spraying adjacent rooms as well.

A very important criteria is that they seem willing communicate with you and tell you about the plan. This discussion would be a good time to try to suss out their knowledge of bed bug life cycles and other facts, and see if it matches up to your reading.

If they decide to go ahead with treatment, my experience was that the PCO asked us to buy enclosures for our mattresses and launder and bag all our clothes (more about those later), as well as to move furniture away from the walls. All the rooms in the house were sprayed with a residual pesticide, and we had to be out of the house for several hours but we were able to come back the same day. You have a right to know the names of the chemicals they are spraying, so make sure to write those down. At the same time, you should follow every one of the instructions they give you, even if you believe it to be useless based on your reading - it could void the guarantee if you don't. You shouldn't put all your hopes in one company either. It's awful to contemplate, but you might have to go to a second company before you find one that will solve your problem permanently.

LAUNDRY
Laundering clothes in hot water, and then drying it on hot, is known to be one of the few extremely effective ways a non-PCO can kill bedbugs and their eggs (squishing might be the only other one). See:

http://www.pctonline.com/Article.aspx?article_id=38047

Since bedbugs like to live in bedding and folds in fabric, if you launder it all carefully you should be able to kill at least some of them. It got to the point where whenever a new bite appeared I would wash my sheets again, just in case I could get one of the fuckers clinging onto my fitted sheet. It felt good to have some action I could take. I would very gently untuck all four corners and collect it into a ball in the middle of the bed the bed, and transfer it into a clear plastic bag I got at U-Haul, after first making sure the bag was airtight. I sealed it with this kind of clip:


http://www.amazon.com/Ikea-Bevara-Sealing-Clip-Set/dp/B004HHATDU

Then I carefully emptied the bag into the washing machine, and checked the bottom of it through the clear plastic. That's how I did all my laundry to prevent them jumping off on the way. Even better might be dissolvable laundry bags. There's a lesser, but still large non-zero chance that they might be in clothes somewhere in the vicinity of the bed, so again, it's worthwhile to do combat laundry (as I started thinking of it) on a regular basis. Things that can't be washed might be able to be dried, like slippers and duffelbags. The report says 30 minutes in the hot dryer will kill all the bedbugs.

Since bedbugs can travel on clothes, e.g. to your workplace or other people's houses, it might be a good idea to save your washed clothing in sealed plastic bags, only to take out when you're getting dressed. But this is stressful to keep up after awhile, especially if you're a tidy person (or like non-wrinkled clothes), so my intuition is that clothes stored in a dresser far from the bed are probably relatively low risk. But I don't know for sure.


NON-LAUNDRY THINGS TO DO WHILE WAITING FOR YOUR PCO
Here are some ideas for things to try to fight the bedbugs at home, while waiting for your PCO - or for evidence to convince your landlord to get a PCO - that *probably* won't make things worse (of course don't do any of these things if they would interfere with your PCOs treatment plan)

* BB Alert passive monitor
This is an interesting, relatively new idea, which is designing something that seems like the perfect home to bed bugs so that they will move into it. Once they do, their feedings will be marked by black spots on the edge of the thing, and you might even be able to kill a bunch by grabbing their home while they are hiding in it.
http://www.usbedbugs.com/BB-Alert-Passive-Bed-Bug-Monitor_p_45.html
I'm a little skeptical of whether these would really be effective, particularly as an all-clear sign - for one thing it just looks like a piece of corrugated cardboard. But it is not a big investment, and, importantly, it seems almost impossible to get false positives. Here are some experiments showing the monitors' effectiveness (though these are reported by the PCO who developed them):
http://www.bed-bugs.co.uk/passivemonitorresults.html

* Climbup Insect Interceptors
These are plastic dishes that the legs of your bed fit into. As the bed bugs come after you, they fall into a little moat and are unable to climb out because of slippery walls. Note that this is a better idea for treating the legs of your bed than say placing them on a circle of sticky tape, because even if the bugs are dumb enough to permanently stick themselves, apparently when they get stuck they send out an alarm pheromone which warns others away. I read that the climbups don't have the same problem. Again, I can't comment personally on how well they work, but they are fairly inexpensive ($3-4 each). Here's a thread with some different opinions:
http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/climb-up-success

* Mattress enclosures
It's important to understand that enclosures play only a limited, if perhaps important, role in fighting an infestation. Their purpose is to seal in any bugs living inside or on the surface of the mattress, and to create a surface that is inhospitable for them to hide in. However bed bugs living elsewhere in the room or the bed frame can still easily walk across it to get to you, and in some cases may be able to live in folds of the enclosure. Of course if the PCO tells you to get them you definitely should. Be sure to buy the pricier one that specifically mention bed bugs and feel like fabric: we bought the $15 vinyl ones, and they tore almost immediately.

* Your own inspection.
This one is a little higher risk, since if you disturb their hiding places they might spread out and find better hiding places. So if you decide to try this you should at least be armed with something that can kill them on contact, if you discover a whole hive and they run for it. I put some 90% rubbing alcohol into a squirt bottle. You will also need a flashlight, and ideally a magnifying glass. Here's a video of how to go about inspecting a hotel room, which you can also apply to your own room:
http://vimeo.com/15551763
and here are some more images to help you to know what to look for (warning, grossness):
http://www.bed-bugs.co.uk/gallery.html

If you have a very minor infestation, laundry plus some combination of these maybe, possibly, conceivably, might be able to wipe them all out. But I definitely wouldn't count on it. Get those PCO wheels in motion.

It can be a long process getting every last one of them, and it is stressful when you are getting munched on regularly. But take heart and know that it won't ever be as bad as the pre-bedbug post-bedbug transition, and that you will emerge from this a seasoned warrior who will be able to help others. I'm going to finish up with two quotes I found on the forum that helped me put it into perspective:

"bb's don't really hate you they depend upon you for thier own survival). So I try to keep in mind that they are more like fairly mindless 'bug-germs' rather than beasts out to drain you of all of your blood."

"The bedbug has nothing against you. It's a simple creature that needs to eat, and does so relatively quietly and conservatively. It takes only what it needs, when it needs it, then goes home. Perhaps one day, humankind might even find that bedbugs hold the secret to some medical or other benefit."

and if they're *really* giving you a hard time, try this thread that begins, "I have a live bed bug in a jar. How can I best torture it without killing it?"
http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/i-have-a-live-bed-bug-in-a-jar
You might even end up feeling some sympathy!

Steps for Canadians to enter the U.S. under a J-1 Visa

I've just lost some time and money figuring this out, and so I'm putting this up in hopes that googlers in my situation will find it and benefit. This applies to a J-1 visa specifically, but should also generalize to many other types. This information is current as of the date on this post.

My main source of information is this webpage from the U.S. consulate in Canada:
http://www.consular.canada.usembassy.gov/usa_visa.asp
The most important point is that if you are a canadian citizen, you don't need to schedule a visa interview in person. "Most Canadian citizens can travel to the United States with a valid passport and without a visa", and that includes working and studying (though there are some exceptions). However you do need to have documentation with you at the point of entry (e.g. the airport or the border). Here's what I need for entry under a J-1 (selected from the list on the same webpage above). Later I'll talk about what you need to do to get these things.

• Valid Passport (for at least the next 6 months after the arrival time).
• Older passports containing previous visas.
• DS-2019
• Proof of sufficient funds to cover all expenses while in the U.S.
• SEVIS fee receipt
• DS-160.

The DS-2019 form will be sent by your sponsoring institution, and contains information you need to follow the other steps. I believe it should cover the "proof of sufficient funds" too, since mine lists my salary.

You'll need your passport to follow all of the subsequent steps.

HOW TO PAY YOUR SEVIS FEE (and thus get a receipt)
Go to https://www.fmjfee.com/i901fee/ and fill out the form. You need your SEVIS # (starts with an N), your Exchange Visitor Program Number, and your Exchange Visitor Category, all of which are on your DS-2019. You must have the physical receipt that is mailed to you (3 weeks) or couriered to you (1 week) if you pay an extra $35. Besides that I had to pay $180. If time is tight and you're waiting for your DS-2019 to arrive in the mail, all you need from it is the information I listed above, so you might be able to get that directly from your hosting institution.

HOW TO FILL OUT A DS-160
This is your application to enter the country, a Nonimmigrant Visa Application, and it is found here: https://ceac.state.gov/GENNIV/
It is a long (and nosy) form, plus a buggy web application, so I suggest clicking the save button frequently and also using the option to save the form data in a file on your own computer, so you can save your progress if you find there's something you're missing. Besides everything described for the previous steps, here are a few of the things you might need to gather before you start:

•  A digital photo of yourself following very rigid passport photo requirements. I uploaded a scan of my actual passport photo, and that seemed to work.
• The date and duration of your last 5 US trips
• The address and phone number of your US contact
• The address and phone number of two people in canada who can vouch for you
•  The " Passport Book Number", which according to several online sources is the number that appears on a canadian passport above the barcode on page 3. I have not been able to verify this from an authoritative source, but I decided to go ahead and use it. Hh

You will need to print the DS-160 out and have it with you, as well as the SEVIS fee receipt. Good luck, and add a comment if there's anything I missed here!

Essential Software for a Scientist

I was thinking about the tools I use every day and which ones I would insist my students learn when they arrived in the lab. Here's the list I came up with:

- Microsoft Excel (or OpenOffice) and PivotTables (called something else in openoffice). So, so helpful for analyzing data in tabular format. I would even call them magical. With this and a few other Excel tricks and formulas you can avoid SPSS for pretty much all undergraduate-level statistics - and go from raw experiment output to final inferential statistics in under 30 seconds.
- Inkscape. Terrific free vector graphics editor. So useful for preparing figures and diagrams, especially with programs that let you export to its format from Matlab (search for svg and matlab)
- Version control software (if there is going to be code involved anyway)
- Software-based calendar program, not paper based. That way it can be backed up, and you can do things like schedule repeating blocks of time for classes etc. Then you can feel confident that it really represents your committed time and you won't double book.
- Citation-management software, that integrates reasonably with a word processor. I've talked about EndNote here, but if you're just starting out I'd suggest the free, browser integrated Zotero instead.
- Dropbox
- Automated backups to an external hard drive (I might handle this as part of the lab infrastructure, but if *any* data is to be stored on lab members home computers then they need to have this). For the mac, Carbon Copy Cloner has worked well for me.

30 Minute Writing

I'm very excited about this approach to writing right now:

http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2010/12/write-in-how-can-i-get-more-writing.html

Essentially, you write every single day, and for 30 minutes of concentration without switching away from your word processor. I've been doing it for about 3 weeks now, and it's helping me just crush through difficult bits of writing, with almost no angst. (I do more than one 30 minute block per day, but widely spaced apart) Awesome stuff. I hope to keep it up for the rest of my professional career, no matter what stage my research is at.

I think the 30 minute unitasking approach could help in other areas of life too. This week I've been doing 1/2 an hour of housework a day, and that has had amazing results too. Hard focus is the magic sauce that makes tasks easy and even pleasant. More and more I realize how precious it is.

Science-based Advice on the Strategies that Work to Achieve Your Goals

http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/02/reaching-life-goals-which-strategies-work.php

• Make a step-by-step plan: break your goal down into concrete, measurable and time-based sub-goals.
• Tell other people about your goal: making a public declaration increases motivation.
• Think about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal (but avoid fantasizing - see this article).
• Reward yourself for making progress in your goal: small rewards help push us on to major successes.
• Record your progress: keep a journal, graph or drawing that plots your progress.

I like this first because it's based on putting these ideas to the test, and because it generally coheres with other things I've learned (and occasionally posted about) I'm not sure about the advice about avoiding fantasizing. I'm quite interested in the idea of positive imaging, that you should visualize what you want in as much detail as possible, and my intuition is that it could help. Of course that intuition could easily be wrong.

The Best of How I Work

This blog now has over a hundred entries, and there won't be too many more. It's basically served the purpose I hoped it would, which is to capture the working processes I was customizing for myself, mostly derived from David Allen's Getting Things Done but also a few other sources (and also to serve as a kind of release valve so I didn't bore people with this stuff in conversation) The problems in my life that this level of tactic can solve are pretty much solved. Which I'm delighted about; it's a happy reason to be wrapping this up! So right here is the place to put links to the good stuff for anyone who might stumble upon this blog. I've broken them into two categories:

The essentials of my personal system, things I've figured out that I make use of almost every single day:

PROJECTS AND TO-DO

The Project List: How to Be Like the Memento Guy

Making a Super-effective To Do list

The Weekly Review

The Zillion Folder Filing System

5 Things To Do When Starting a New Project

"I Have Decided"

The Ropebridge Method for writing projects

CITATION MANAGEMENT

My Citation Management System: The Basics

My Citation Management System: Read

My Citation Management System: To Read Someday/Maybe

EMAIL

Mastering Your Email

Mastering My Email REVISED

EVERY OTHER PART OF LIFE

The Minimum You Need to Know about Negotiation

My Photo System: Archive and Souvenirs

Another (Probably Better) Approach to Backup

Souvenir Folders, Pouches of the Past

Saturdays Are Off

The Joy of Outboxes

How Much Money Do I Have? The Concept of Discretionary Income

Breaking Bad Web Habits with Privoxy

Anti-procrastination: "(10+2)*5"

Dropbox: The Solution to Home-Work Sync?
Memorizing with Smart Flashcards: the Freakish Power of Anki

And then some posts I'm proud of and think are useful (or at least interesting):

Achieving Your Goals the Lee Marvin Way

How To Run A Brainstormer

Computer Dollars: Why to always Upgrade instead of Buying New

How to Sell Yourself in a Letter

Never Wait

How to Ask for, and Listen to, Feedback

How to Conduct a Super-search

Magpieing: How my collectors work

Can you call on doozer power?

Fiery Inspiration from Teddy Roosevelt

I Heart My Draft

Much Better Error Bars for Within-Subjects Studies

For any scientists reading this blog, and of those, the ones who use within-subjects designs, this will be a revelation. Everyone else should skip. There's a problem that came up in our last set of reviewer comments, that if you have a within-subjects factorial design, standard error bars or 95% confidence intervals on your bars representing means do not portray the results of the repeated-measures ANOVA. Basically they're way too big, because they don't incorporate the benefit of comparing people to themselves; they include the between-subjects variance. So the basic trick for comparing two means by eye to determine significance, as described here

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/07/most_researchers_dont_understa_1.php

(in a nutshell, if they represent standard error the error intervals have to be separated by about 1/2 interval before the difference between the means is signicant at alpha = .05)  doesn't work. You lose the very desirable property of being able to tell the story of your results purely in your figures.

To the rescue comes Cousineau (2005)'s within-subject confidence intervals.
http://www.tqmp.org/Content/vol01-1/p042/p042.pdf
The idea is so straightforward and easy to implement: if your data is organized with participants as rows and conditions as columns, simply take the mean of each row and subtracted it from the items in that row, making a new table. Then add the overall mean of the original table to all the entries of the new table. Each column will have the same mean as in the original data, but the row means will all be identical to each other and to the overall mean. Now construct your standard error bars or 95% confidence interval bars in the usual manner. Then the error bars will represent only the difference due to condition differences, and visually comparing any two error bars in the manner described above is the equivalent of doing a paired-samples t-test between the means (I haven't doublechecked that) When we did this to our latest paper, the difference was like night and day: all of a sudden nearly all of our significance findings were clear and easy to read off the bar graph.

There's a risk here, that your readers may not know what the heck you're doing, or even be suspicious that you are trying to make your results look better than they are. But the visual pairwise comparisons will be very close (not necessarily exactly the same) as the pattern of results from the corresponding ANOVA (and at least one reviewer out there is certainly applying that kind of visual test even when inappropriate, that is, for a within-subjects design), and there is a paper to cite for the idea. It has now been cited 67 times so it appears the idea is catching on.

Read the Cousineau paper first, but as a late breaking correction to it there's this paper, Morey 2008:
http://www.tqmp.org/Content/vol04-2/p061/p061.pdf
It appears that the error bars are slightly too small when done the Cousineau way, but can be fixed by an easy numerical correction.

Basic Privacy Precautions on the Web

We've all absorbed the idea by now hopefully that everything we do on
the web is in public - that email is roughly equivalent to a postcard,
that anything your name is attached to will come up in routine vetting
by employers and dates, and that facebook and other sites you might use
regularly will turn over all your activities and interactions over to
the authorities with the slightest encouragement. "Privacy policies" are
not binding, and subject to quietly change without notice. If you want a
truly private conversation, you and the other person must take
responsibility for encrypting it (fortunately this is not too hard these
days - for instance this email client, Thunderbird, has it built in)
But even if you've accepted the fact that your web activities occur in
public, as in a public square, if you keep imagining it, it gets more
concerning - that this public square has thousands of cameras trained on
it; those cameras are operated by giant corporations; the cameras are
capable of recording your every movement, word and gesture; and storing
them in a database forever, tied with your identity, suitable for
various sophisticated crossanalysis to extract nuances of your life and
behaviour patterns.

The point where I started to get the creepy crawlies was when half the
websites I visited added Facebook "Like" buttons, and all of a sudden
they were greeting me by name - and telling me whether my friends had
"Liked" that site or not. I'm used to the feeling that when I'm browsing
the web I'm just observing, as in a library. Instead I was not just
observed, but recognized, by an entity . I also recently learned that
clearing cookies is not enough - two new types of cookies have been
discovered by internet sleuths, flash cookies and HTML5 cookies, that
advertisers were sneakily using to track people who even specifically
did not want to be tracked. Clearly we need a little protection.

So I did a little research and found a few steps that can significantly
increase your web privacy with less than 20 minutes of effort all in
all. The criteria is that they shouldn't interfere with the web
experience - though as the links will show, a few changes in habit are
necessary - and that they be open source, so that we can make sure
they're the good guys. Finally, they're free, which is important both
because I'm cheap and because I'd prefer my tools to come from people
motivated by an even greater paranoia than me, rather than by profit
(for example, if you have Ad Aware installed, ironically it will pop up
its own ads from time to time)

Note that some of these can cause websites not to work, so that you
might have to fiddle around with the settings, but that's the tradeoff.
1. Switch to Firefox. It's open source, and since it's popular it's
under great scrutiny by privacy freaks. It also is necessary for many of
the easy steps below. I think the above-average awareness of security
and privacy issues by its user and developer base will keep it close to
the forefront of incorporating these kind of protections into its user
interface.
2. Read this webpage (I got a lot of this stuff from this and other
pages by the Electronic Frontier Foundation):
http://www.eff.org/wp/six-tips-protect-your-search-privacy If you think
about it, what you search for is one of the most intensely personal
things you might want to protect. As I read somewhere, "People are never
more honest than in the search box"
3. Get your cookies under control. Otherwise you are easy to track
across the web. EFFs recommended settings for Firefox:
1. From the "Edit" menu, select "Preferences"
2. Click on "Privacy"
3. Select the "Cookies" tab
4. Set "Keep Cookies" to "until I close Firefox" 12
5. Click on "Exceptions," type in the domains of all of your search
sites, and choose "Block" for all of them
I think it is also a good idea to uncheck "Accept 3rd party cookies",
which sounds like it would help protect against advertising companies.
4. Install the firefox add-onBetter Privacy. This appears to be the best
protection against the flash cookies I mentioned earlier, which are
*not* affected by the previous tip or by clearing cookies. It also seems
to provide protection against a few other things that can help to track
you. It's here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/ I
can't find out whether it's open source actually, so that might be a
reason for concern. But the people behind it seem motivated by their
hatred of what they call "super cookies", so that's a good sign.
5. Take a lot of care with your facebook privacy settings. If I was a
couple degrees more paranoid, I wouldn't touch facebook - remember that
you are telling a giant, for profit company much of the detail of your
life and social network - but I do get a lot out of it. But I would
estimate that a large majority of people who use it are making public
things that they wouldn't want to be public (at least after a little
reflection). It's also constantly shifting, in a way that almost seems
designed to trick you into being more public than you intend, but
googling should point to recent guides on steps to take. Like this one:
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-privacy-2009-02
This used to be a good tool to automatically check your settings, but as
of writing is not up to date and so not functional.
http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
Two more little fb tips to be aware of:
- Make sure that *all* of your photo albums are set to "Friends only" -
in particular your Profile album, which seems to be public by default.
That means that anyone on the internet could click your picture and see
your who past history of profile pictures.
- Be aware that your "Likes" are completely public - anyone googling
your name can see them. That was probably the most pissed I've been so
far at fb, when I realized that fb had suddenly, without my permission,
published my favourite movies, music, and tv shows across the web,
rather than to just my friends. After that I tried to be a lot more
careful about what I told it.
6. Consider taking steps to not be tracked by your IP address. If you
browse from home, your internet connection has a unique identifier that
could easily be used to cross reference you. It also pinpoints your
location within a hundred kms or so. Apparently unplugging and plugging
in your modem after a wait will give you a new ip address, so that might
be good to do from time to time. If you are a little bit technical, and
being recognized by your ip address bothers you, look into Tor, a
sophisticated system for anonymizing your point of connection with the
internet. I don't know enough to comment on it, but these people look
really freaking serious.
(UPDATE: Through learning a bit more, I now believe this one is not that big of a deal. When you browse from a university network or a workplace, you usually show up as having the same IP address as everyone else on the network. So even though your home broadband internet IP usually does uniquely identify your computer, it is not a reliable way to track peoples' identity in general, so big companies probably put their efforts into other means of tracking. It could be used if you were being personally targetted, but as I say below if you're active on the internet there are a ton of privacy vulnerabilities you would need an  expert to close properly, not these basic precautions.)

So it's an ongoing war: corporations are going to keep coming up with
sneaky ways to spy on us on the internet, and we're going to have to
keep alert and be mindful of tradeoffs we're making. (though I'm more
bothered by this stuff than the average, like with fb and amazon.com I'm
willing to "pay" in privacy for services I really want - I just want to
understand the deal) Perfect privacy isn't possible if you're a net
addict like me, in fact there are many little things I do that would be
easy to piece together into a way more complete picture of me than I'm
comfortable with (and writing this blog is one of the riskiest things,
privacy-wise, I do). But taking these steps should at least put some
speed bumps in front of the spies and help with the in-your-face
personalization.

Valuable tips on graduate school

I can say now as I approach the end of my PhD that from my experience
and trial and error these sound about right (and I should be following
these more):

http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/03/12/some-thoughts-on-grad-school/

Thought #1: Research Trumps All
Thought #1.5: Don't Let Courses and Quals Distract You From Thought #1
Thought #2: Don't Be a Firefighter
Thought #3: Stick to a Fixed Work Day
Thought #4: Three Projects is Optimal…
Thought #5: …But Don't Work on More than One Per Day
Thought #6: Listen to the Married Graduate Students and Ignore the
Unmarried Students Who Live in the Dorms
Thought #7: Promise People Deadlines Then Follow Through
Thought #8: Challenge Yourself Once a Month
Thought #9: Don't Mistake Experience for Smarts
Thought #10: Take Days Off

Memorizing with Smart Flashcards: the Freakish Power of Anki

Memorizing is my achilles heel. I think avoiding memorization even
shaped the course of my life, away from things requiring that kind of
factual knowledge and towards things that mostly require understanding
systems. I shuddered when I heard the stories from my friends in medical
school about being examined on the names of hundreds of bones - I felt
like I just couldn't do it. But now I have a tool that I think could
achieve that for my brain, called Anki. It's technically a spaced
memorization program, derived from the original called Supermemo. But
Anki is free and has a *much* less complicated interface, while still
having tons of great features, including the ability to sync over the
internet (it is also open source and has good import & export
capabilities so that you're not locked in).

The best intro is probably via the youtube videos on the website where you can also download it:

http://ichi2.net/anki/
But I will try to describe it here. Anki is essentially smart flash
cards. It's good for learning any kind of knowledge that can be
summarized as a short answer or fill-in-the-blank. You input the front
and back of a lot of these "cards" (can be imported from a simple
spreadsheet), and then Anki gives them to you at exponential intervals:
say every day for a couple of days, and then 3 days later, 7 days later,
21 days later, 2 months later etc, to infinity and beyond. The interval
is modified by whether you got it right (and how hard it was) or wrong:
it presents you with the front of the card, you try to think the answer
to yourself, then press the spacebar to reveal the back, and click or
press a key to say whether you got it. If you get it wrong, you get it
again after the day's normal review, and then probably tomorrow too. The
theory is that if you get reminded just before the point when you would
naturally forget it, then you can retain knowledge indefinitely. And
pretty much an unlimited amount.

That's assuming you actually Anki every day, and I was wondering if I'd
be able to keep it up. Turns out I didn't need to worry: it's something
I look *forward* to, even procrastinate on things with. For the number
of cards I have it only takes 6-10 minutes to do, and it's very
satisfying to see how quickly progress comes at mastering these facts. I
started 40 days ago by adding a few different sets of facts just to try
it out and because I wanted to have them in my brain (plus most of these
were already in a format that was easy to enter): metric conversions,
the International Phonetic Alphabet, constellation names, the greek
alphabet, some numbers to do with vision science and facts about 19th
century vision scientists, and some constants and timelines that I
wanted to use as reference markers. In total 450 cards, which are added
to my study schedule 10 per day, so that I've almost seen all of them now.

How are the results? Well the wealth of stats and graphs that Anki
provides to warm my nerdy soul give some hard evidence: when I first see
cards I get them 57% correct (remember that I already read these facts,
in order to enter them). However my average success rate for non
first-time cards - most of which I've seen a bunch of times now - is
87%. That's a more than 50% improvement! And it's still relatively early
for these facts. I feel like I can easily get to point of answering them
95% correctly, and with every one occasionally turning up months and
years from now, keep that rate. What about subjectively? Knowing these
facts with so little effort feels a little freaky. Like Neo getting kung
fu uploaded into his brain, or the subliminal training in Brave New
World. Without checking: The sun is 150 million km from the earth. One
teaspoon is about 5 ml. The big bang was 14 billion years ago. The peak
response for the short, medium and long wavelength cones are 430, 540
and 570. Despite what people assume, except when it comes to movie
character actors and 1950s science fiction I've never been a fact and
trivia guy. It's a new feeling to get enjoyment just running through my
command of these numbers in my mind.

Some things are proving tricky to shove into my brain even using this
method, and I'm finding it useful to go back to this great document from
the somewhat crankish creator of supermemo:
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm
Essentially the important points are to understand before you memorize,
try to break things into the simplest possible chunks, and avoid
learning lists. How I wish I'd had this in school! So many classes could
have been a piece of cake, because their knowledge was susceptible to
being formulated as fill-in-the-blanks. And I might have actually
retained the knowledge (ever heard someone say, "I'm just going to
forget all this right after the exam"?). Further advice for those tough
cards (and the beautiful part is that they identify themselves, since
they keep coming up while the easy ones are cast far into the future) is
that spaced memorization works *great* with mnemonics. For example the
star Mirphak was giving me a lot of trouble, and coming up every day,
until I made up the mnemonic that Perseus (the constellation it's in)
used a MIRror to PHAK up medusa. Bam, now I'm acing that card. I also
put a reminder of the mnemonic on the back of the card, easy to do even
in the middle of reviewing.

You might be questioning at this point how far memorization can take
you. Is it the same as real knowledge? It's definitely not the whole
story, but I've come to believe that it goes hand in hand with
understanding. Even with my somewhat silly starting set I'm already
seeing how having facts at my fingertips can help me make connections
and inferences. For instance when I was on the plane and saw how far
we'd flown on the way to amsterdam, I automatically compared it to the
circumference of the earth (40,000 km). When a book referenced
creationists denying that dinosaurs existed 65 million years ago, I
realized that that's around the time when they went extinct. And more
substantially, remembering the active periods of a few different vision
scientists made me make all kinds of comparisons of who came first and
who were contemporaries when I was reading a bit more about them. Even
though all these facts are accessible within seconds on the internet,
there is something incredibly powerful about having them all in your
head at once. I think it's a foundation for creativity and true depth of
knowledge. I have big ambitions for using it to memorize hundreds of key
concepts in my field, not to mention references I might be asked about
in my PhD defence. And because it's so easy to use, there's no reason
not to boot up Anki at a moment's notice and add anything you want to
remember, including facts from something you're reading (especially
useful for mass anki-fying: the "cloze" feature)

Give it a try, and then tell me what you've got in your deck!

Be Pushy

The most important advice for me personally I've heard lately, from
writer Dave Holmes.

http://myyearofeverything.tumblr.com/post/607422936/b-e

"BE AGGRESSIVE. Pretend you're giving it all up and going back to school
in a year. Act like you have one year to make it work before you give up
and try something else. What haven't you done? Where aren't you being
aggressive enough? Go do it and embarrass yourself with your pushiness-
after all, you'll be doing something else in a year anyway, so who cares
what people think? Push until you feel uncomfortable, and then double
it. The trick is: when you do that, good things start happening right
away, and you get yourself to a point where you can't imagine giving up,
one year from now or ever."

How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking

Eyeopening stuff from Peter Bregman's essay:

http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/05/how-and-why-to-stop-multitaski.html

WHAT YOU GET FROM NOT MULTITASKING:
- It was delightful. "I never realized how significantly a short moment
of checking my email disengaged me from the people and things right
there in front of me."
- My stress dropped dramatically. Research shows that multitasking isn't
just inefficient, it's stressful.
I made significant progress on challenging projects
- I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time
"Since I wasn't doing anything else, I got bored much more quickly. I
had no tolerance for wasted time."
- I had tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable.
HOW TO DO IT:
- the best way to avoid interruptions is to turn them off. Write in the
morning, disconnect. "most of us shouldn't trust ourselves. "
- Use your loss of patience to your advantage. Create unrealistically
short deadlines. Cut all meetings in half. Give yourself a third of the
time you think you need to accomplish something.

One strategy I thought of just now for helping myself stay on task:
write down on my pad of paper: "I AM writing a blog entry" or "I AM
reanalyzing the gaze data" At least then I can't fool myself into
thinking that doing this other thing is what I'm supposed to be doing.

How to bid for things on eBay: be a True Max sniper

I've tried half-heartedly to buy a few things on eBay in the past, but
always ending up not winning the auction. Thanks to a webpage I ran
across by Tyler Jones, I now understand what the right strategy is, and
have since bought several things very much to my satisfaction. It's here:

http://members.cox.net/cruentidei/ebay/snipe.html

The important thing to understand is eBay is not a going-going-gone
auction like on TV. It uses a *proxy bidding* system, which is like
sending an agent to a tv-style auction to bid for you. You tell the
agent how high you're prepared to go, and he keeps raising the bid by
the *minimum* possible amount to get in the lead (beating all the other
agents' maximum bids), $1 at a time, stopping when he's either won or
hit your maximum.

What's great about this is that you don't have to actually *do* anything
during the auction: you put in your bid and it either gets it for you
for the best possible price, or passes if the auction goes too high. But
you have to make sure to bet what Tyler Jones calles your True Max - and
what my book about negotation calls your Best Alternative to Negotiated
Agreement. This would be a good spot to read my entry on negotiation if
you haven't:

http://howdanielworks.blogspot.com/2008/11/minimum-you-need-to-know-about.html

But in a nutshell it's about figuring out how high the price would have
to be before you walk away from the deal. And there's always an
alternative: the internet makes it easy to look for other places to
purchase an item, so if there's another website you trust that carries
it your bid definitely shouldn't be any higher than that (taking into
account shipping). Think Craigslist, Facebook, Kijiji, Amazon, etc. And
make sure to look at the other eBay listings for the same type of item.
Also, there might be a substitute solution you'd be willing to settle
for if the price got too high. Or you might just be able to do without
it, for a while or forever. Think all that through, read the item
description very carefully (does it have all the accessories? What kind
of condition is it in?), and figure out an exact dollar amount beyond
which it's not worth it. That is your True Max. (Tyler Jones provides an
interesting exercise to help you figure out your True Max as well if
none of those other things apply). Of course you hope that you will get
a better price - and if you win you usually will - but at least you will
never go over your budget.

So all you have to do then is as soon as you've decided to go for the
item, type in your True Max and click to enter it as your bid. Then walk
away and wait for the results of the auction. (NEVER bid on more than
one of the thing you want at a time, unless you're willing to buy both.
Only go after your second choice listing once you've lost the first one)
You don't even have to log on, except once you've won to arrange
payment. In theory this is the optimal strategy, called Proxy bidding,
and it works well.

However Tyler Jones recommends a different strategy if you have the
time, which is sniping. Sniping is waiting until the last possible
minute to put in your bid, still your True Max. If you understand eBay's
system you can see why this is not unfair: if someone else has a bid
registered that's higher than yours, they'll still win. It sometimes
helps because not everyone is following the optimal strategy, and so you
can beat them with sniping. Jones names two bad strategies, low balling
and nibbling, that involve not bidding your True Max, but the price you
*hope* to get. The distinction is that nibblers continuously raise their
bid, when they see that they're not in the lead anymore, just enough to
get back on top. This makes no sense, unless you are using the auction
process to figure out how much you really want to pay for something,
which is a very bad idea (well documented psychological phenomena
strongly bias your judgment). By bidding at the last minute, you beat
them, and also help to protect yourself against dishonest practices like
friends of the seller conspiring to run up the price.

How I've done it so far is to put something on my watchlist when I want
it, rather than make a bid, and make a note in my calendar about the
closing date of the auction. eBay sends you reminder emails for watched
items when the auction is about to end, so you could probably rely on
that too. 5 minutes before the end I sign in, watch the timer on the
eBay listing page count down, read the listing again *carefully*, and
then enter and confirm my bid in the last 30 seconds. (Any less than
that is probably cutting it too close, since there might be unexpected
complications like having to type in your name and password again).
Sniping is fun! You seem to have a good chance of winning, and also some
idea of what you're getting it for (though the bid might jump more than
$1, to $1 more than whatever the next highest bid is)

There's a few more things to think about, in terms of paying and what to
do if there's a problem, but that's how to bid. A few more tips I've
discovered in my short time on the site:
- The Watch button is really useful both when you're trying to decide
whether to buy something, or when you want to compare a bunch of
listings of the same type of thing.
- If you have no idea how much an item is typically worth, a good way to
research it is to look at the closed auctions on eBay for similar items.
How to do that, and a lot of other important information, is in the eBay
education center, which you should definitely read through (it's not long)
- I've developed a few ideas about what is a trustworthy seller besides
the percentage positive feedback: that they have a large number of
sales, that they have a kind of professional graphic on their listing
page, that it's a photo of the actual item you'll be getting and not a
stock photo of that model, and that it seems they specifically wrote
text for that item and didn't just copy and paste it.
- I bought something from a really sketchy looking listing: bad grammar,
short on specifics, and the seller had few transactions and a website
that was some kind of very dubious real estate consulting business. I
thought there was a fair chance I'd get ripped off. But I factored that
risk into my True Max, and bid 25% less than I would have for a more
solid seller. It came, and worked, despite some cosmetic damage that
wasn't visible in the photo, so I consider it a good deal.
- Make sure to sort lists of items by Price + Shipping, not just price,
because shipping fees can vary wildly, especially to Canada.
- It might make sense to bid non-round numbers: if you bid $61 (or just
add a few cents) then you'll win over someone who's betting $60. If
there's a tie the earlier bidder wins, so this is relevant to sniping.
- Listings come and go fast. It's a good idea to search over a period of
at least a couple of weeks, being prepared to possibly miss out on some
good deals in the process of learning what kinds of prices come through.

You Should Probably be Using Version Control Software

If you're working on a coding project that more than one person *ever*
is going to be contributing to, you should definitely be using version
control software - in fact you would be a fool not to, just because of
all the headaches it will save. Even if it's just the two of you, with
some kind of system to not step on each other's toes, if it's not proper
version control, your system sucks and it will waste your time
painfully. But I'm going to say why it might be worth using it even if
it's just you and even if you don't need to do any programming.

How version control software works is that there is one "master" copy of
the project folder stored in something called a repository, which should
be on a shared server. When a programmer begins working on it, he or she
"checks out" that folder, into what is called a working directory on
their local hard drive. When a significant change has been finished and
tested, and the code is now back to working, they check the code back
in, updating the repository. The great advantage to using version
control software is that it handles the situation where two people are
working on the same folder or the same file - it identifies places that
were changed by both people and then aske you to manually merge together
the changes to make a program that makes sense.

What makes it super useful even if you're writing code solo is the
version tracking aspect of the software. The repository stores in an
efficient format the state of the project at all previous check-ins, so
you can always retrieve an old version. Much better than ad hoc ways to
hang onto old code (the worst being the "copy the folder and add 'old'
to the end of the name" technique, which I've definitely been party to).
You have a detailed log message (well it should be detailed)to identify
the version, and also powerful tools to tell you which files were
changed and exactly which lines were changed and how between the current
and any past version (or between two past versions).

I resisted putting my experiment code under version control for years,
but I noticed an immediate change in my behaviour when I did: I became
bold. I could plow ahead when I saw a change I wanted to make, without
worrying about how I might get back if I changed my mind. And I no
longer had many copies of the same code lying around, all with different
conventions to their names, with no idea which ones work or (if you
leave it long enough) which is even the final version. With version
control there is only one "real" version. But the whole history of the
project is well taken care of. (I'm not even going to get into the
ability to create and maintain alternate versions of a project, known as
branches, which is a more advanced topic) It even vastly reduced the
number of useless .m files around, since you have to explicitly add the
files you want to use to the repository.

Which brings me to the cost of starting up version control, which is not
insignificant, and kept me from bothering with it all this time.
Subversion, or SVN is what I use - it is free, very widespread, and
relatively simple, but it's still pretty intense for people not used to
using it. You have to create, move, and delete your files differently,
and think about checking in and updating your local copy, not to mention
learning to resolve conflicts. Most important is to really understand
the underlying concepts of what's going on, which in itself can take a
half day of reading and experimenting. You should *definitely* read at
least chapters 1 and 2 of this before starting:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-book.html
I was lucky enough to be trained in using version control in my software
engineering jobs, but even people who are ok with programming I might
have warned away from this because of the complexity, except that I've
found an excellent GUI for Windows that makes it much more intuitive and
accessible, and solves a lot of the headaches SVN itself introduces,
called TortoiseSVN:
http://tortoisesvn.net
It integrates beautifully with Windows explorer, and allows you to
easily surf your repository and past versions as well as some tricky
things (like importing an existing folder) that are hard in SVN. However
it's still very important to understand the underlying concepts, so
definitely read the background chapters in the TortoiseSVN docs. (it is PC only, but apparently there is an equivalent for mac OS called SC plugin, http://scplugin.tigris.org/, which should be uusable to interact with the same repositories and checked-out directories since they are both based on SVN)

TortoiseSVN also means for the first time that even people not doing
programming should think about using SVN, for one feature: Microsoft
Word versioning. SVN is ok for storing non-text files, it just can't do
comparisons between versions, or resolve conflicts. However Tortoise SVN
*can* do that for Word files, and amazingly: differences between
versions show up as though they were changes made with Track Changes
turned on, so dead simple if you're used to that. So version control
worth using on manuscripts you will be working on for weeks for the same
reasons as code: so you can boldly strike out in a new direction with
the text, and be sure that all the old versions will still be safe if
you need to backtrack or you need a complete older version to send to
someone while you're ripping apart the current one. It's happened so
many times, me and/or my advisor decide we should go back to an earlier
take on some material. Because of that, looking in a folder for a
current paper of mine, I have literally 10 copies of it with different
version numbers in the name. No more. From now on, with Tortoise SVN,
only one Word file for this manuscript. (plus I don't have to make up my
own version numbers)

Note that this solves a different problem than backups (which I cover
here), though it is related and can help with that. If you really know
what you're doing you might be able to use Apple's Time Machine software
to replace some of this functionality for the solo user.

--

The biggest challenge with adopting version control software beyond learning the basic concepts, and the one that can get you into snarls, is that you have to reteach yourself to do all the regular file manipulation operations in a new way. To that end I have made a summary of how to do the basics in TortoiseSVN:

Create a file or folder - just create it, and then later right click it, go Tortoise SVN -> Add...

Delete a file - right click and choose Tortoise SVN -> Delete.

Delete a folder - right click and choose Tortoise SVN -> Delete. Note that in this case the folder will not disappear until you commit the changes.

Move a file or folder -

1. select the files or directories you want to move

2. right-drag them to the new location inside the working copy

3. release the right mouse button

4. in the popup menu select Tortoise SVN -> SVN Move versioned files here

Renaming a file or folder - Tortoise SVN -> Rename

More detailed instructions at TortoiseSVN's user guide, http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/index.html

One more trick is that using TortoiseSVN it's easy to place folders that already exist under version control (copied from the manual):

1. Use the repository browser to create a new project folder directly in the repository.

2. Checkout the new folder over the top of the folder you want to import. You will get a warning that the local folder is not empty. Now you have a versioned top level folder with unversioned content.

3. Use TortoiseSVN -> Add... on this versioned folder to add some or all of the content. You can add and remove files and make any other changes you need to.

4. Commit the top level folder, and you have a new versioned tree, and a local working copy, created from your existing folder.

Dropbox: The Solution to Home-Work Sync?

This is a superneat utility that seems to solve a bunch of problems I've
been having:
http://www.dropbox.com/
It's basically a magic folder that exists mirrored on any number of
computers you want, and also can be accessed via the web, with 2 GB free
storage. I've tried it out for moving files between work and home (it's
windows, os X and linux compatible) and it's a big improvement over
having to plug in a USB key. It also worked well for sharing a bunch of
large photo files with a friend (although it took a little while for all
the files to show up, with no indicator that there were more to come).

Sleep On It

I've discovered something about myself that is very simple but very
powerful: problems get easier when I sleep on them. If I'm feeling
hopelessly stuck on something, I won't necessarily feel like that when I
sit down to work tomorrow, and must remember that and not despair. I think
this because of what creativity researchers refer to as incubation - the
thinking that happens when you're not working hard at it, while you're
walking around, taking a shower, doing your morning routine, etc. Also it
could be related to how my brain rehearses things during REM sleep - I'm
certainly better at presentations if I've had a sleep after memorizing it
and rehearsing it.

However it works, good reason to start as early as possible so as to allow
a good number of sleeps as I bang away on a problem. What's important is
to keep focus on just one major problem at a time, over a few days, and to
put in the work to get really and truly stuck on it - stuck hard. Only
then will this process get to work. Next, go to bed.

10 online apps for scheduling a meeting online

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/the-top-ten-apps-for-scheduling-a-meeting-online.php

I've tried Doodle at least, and it worked pretty well!

Achieving Your Goals the Lee Marvin Way

At the library the other day I randomly picked up the book Get Up: A
12-Step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks and Weirdos by Bucky
Sinister. Though I've never had a drug or alcohol addiction, it turns out
to have lots of wisdom about living in general, told in entertaining, no
bullshit style. I especially liked his discussion of setting goals and
pursuing them, using the movie Point Blank as illustration:

"In this film, Lee Marvin is after $93,000 that was his share of some
unspecified heist. What stood out for me was his use of a step method to
get his money back. He calmly yet violently moved from one step to the
next in the quest to retrieve the money owed him.

We have two main lessons to learn from this: Be specific in your
goal-making, and be ardent with each step. Marvin doesn't look to get any
more than a specific amount. He's not interested in getting $100,000, he
wants what's coming to him. His resolve goes no further than what he needs
to do for that part of his journey."

Bucky Sinister goes on to talk about how asking "What would Lee Marvin
do?" helped him get through the horrible process of getting back into
school as a 35 year old 4th year dropout, and eventually getting work that
would earn him $40,000 a year. He resolved to do something on this quest
every day, whether it be a short phone call, or filling out a form. No
matter how complicated and intimidating the subgoal, he tackled it step by
step. After all, Lee Marvin started his quest with "nothing but one
address of one person who was slightly involved in the old caper. He went
from there, step by step, to figure out what he needed to do."

Clearly the really hard part is setting the right kind of goals, molding
them out of the amorphous blob of wants and fears for the future that are
always floating around inside my head. This is something I struggle with a
lot. Some of the subtle things I think make the Bucky Sinister type of
goal different than some of my past attempts:

-the specificty, to the level of what kind of car you want, what *colour*
it will be, the exact amount of money you want. That way when you achieve
it, you *know*. The specifics can be adjusted over time, but there's
motivational value in making yourself *see* what a goal will look like, in
great detail, when it is finished, *feel* what it will feel like. Some of
the decisions in visualizing it are arbitrary of course, but I think
there's power in making those decisions.

- There shouldn't be too many at a time. Even three might be too many.

- Each big goal has a smaller goal in front of it, blocking it from view
and from my mind, that I can start on *right now*, and that when done
will get me closer. Something that shouldn't take more than a few weeks.

- Sometimes thinking really big, like decades-long. Bucky talks about deciding that 10 books is a good lifetime's work for a writer like him, and getting started on the first one. Get Up was the second.

- At the same time, not setting deadlines for them (except, of course, death). Deadlines can be discouraging to me, at least if I take them too seriously (here we're talking about projects that don't have actual deadlines). If you keep going after each small goal steadily, a little bit every day or week, the rate doesn't matter that much.

- Still it's good to have automatic, indisputible metrics of your progress. For instance Mr. Sinister can count how many books he's written. A friend set up an automatic script to update the number of words in his thesis file on the front page of his website every day. Making every smaller goal have a very specific end state, so that you're very clear when it's done (and can celebrate!) is a big part of that.

There's more great stuff in here, for instance about using your inner
hustle monkey for good and how you need to nurture all four aspects of
your personality symbolized by members of the A-Team (this is not your
everyday self-help book) but I'll stop for now.

Huh, almost convinced myself watching point blank is my most important
next step...

The Cult of Done

I printed this poster out and put it on my wall:

I love the spirit of this because of its emphasis on *finishing* projects
so that you can move on to the next. I don't really understand #1 or #11,
but I like all the others, even the ones I semi disagree with.

In text format:

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing
what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if
you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea
done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things
done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you
right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a
ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

How to Nap

I've discovered naps! (when I told this to a female friend she rolled her
eyes and said, "every man I know says that at some point. What is it with
men and napping?") When my head is drooping down to the keyboard, instead
of forcing myself to go on I have a nap on our great lab minicouch,
and leap up 20 minutes later as my watch alarm goes off, totally
refreshed.
It's all thanks to these tips my man Jim sent, source
http://longevity.about.com/od/sleep/a/napping_tips.htm

* Nap Time: Prime nap time is from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., when your
energy level dips due to a rise in the hormone melatonin at that time of
day.
* Darkness: Use a face mask or eye pillow to provide daytime darkness and
make your nap more effective.
* Not Too Late: Napping within three hours of bedtime may interfere with
nighttime sleep.
* Quiet Place: Assure that you will not be disturbed for the duration
of your nap.
* 30-Minute Maximum: When taking a nap longer than 30 minutes, you run the
risk of heading into deep sleep, which will leave you feeling tired and
groggy. Naps as short as 1 to 2 minutes could be effective for some
people.
* Set an Alarm: You will eventually train yourself to nap for the
amount of time you set aside. Until then, set an alarm or ask someone to
wake you up.
* The Caffeine Nap: Some people claim that drinking coffee and then taking
an immediate nap works well. The caffeine kicks in somewhere between 10
and 20 minutes, waking them up. They feel extra energy from both the nap
and the coffee. Researchers in Japan found that subjects using a caffeine
nap rated highest in decreased sleepiness and increased productivity when
compared to subjects taking a nap and washing their face, or taking a nap
and being exposed to bright lights.

One more thing I like about naps: as my conscious mind releases, I often
have bizarre, dream-like thoughts, which I love - it's a surreal break in
the middle of a mundane day, like an episode of The Office had a few
minutes of Yellow Submarine spliced into it.

Mastering My Email REVISED

Since I wrote the post about Mastering Your Email, I've made a significant
change to my system. It's to do with that problematic email folder
Deferred, where I would put things that I couldn't deal with in a few
minutes. It kept getting bigger, and causing more subliminal anxiety.

I've eliminated that folder, in favour of *actually* dealing with every
item in my inbox as I process it. If it really is going to take more
effort, I add a to-do item for it. Which means I have to have my palm
pilot every time I process my email, which is a good thing. Sometimes the
email itself contains stuff that I will need for the to-do item, but not
afterwards (I would have no reason to file it away for reference). For
that I've created a folder called TS, for temporary support. (I also now
use this instead of Deferred for my harddrive system and physical paper
system)

This has been a big improvement, because it now means that only my todo
lists have to be tamed and managed, and not the contents of Deferred as
well. It also means I decide what actual action needs to be taken as soon
as I encounter the email.

Making a Super-effective To Do list

One of the things that absolutely sold me on my Palm pilot (vs paper
solutions) was the way it keeps todo lists, with things disappearing off
the list with a satisfying strikethrough. It makes it possible to keep
ongoing todo lists, that you never lose and just continually update. So
that's the first thing, but here are some other helpful practices I've
figured out over the years to make it work.

First, to have multiple todo lists, organized by location/ability to carry
them out. The idea being you can look at the list and see only things you
can take action on right here and now. So, using task categories, I have
one for home and one for office, and one for internet, that is, things I
can do anywhere I have a net connection (so also home or office). Then I
have one for Call - you wouldn't believe how effective it is to go down a
list calling all the numbers on there one after the other, like when
you're walking someplace, especially if you store the number as part of
the todo. Others are Downtown, Groceries, Library, and Anywhere, which is
great for those things that I just need to brainstorm or figure out with a
pen and paper, for instance during a boring lecture.

I also just last week figured out a really good way to use the priority
system that Palm has built in. Basically I divide todo items by urgency
and importance. It goes

1: Needs to be done today or tomorrow. Really urgent!
2: Should be done within the next few days, somewhat time sensitive.
3: Important to my work or to the smooth running of my life, should get
done within a week or two
4: Not important to get done, but fun or interesting, or may pay off way
down the line. Like a website someone sent me to check out.

Especially having that 1 category has helped with not doing the thing that
causes anxiety, which is storing important tasks in your head. I come into
the office and check my Palm first thing to see if there are any 1 items
that I have to tackle the second I sit down.

I haven't found a use for the due date feature - it doesn't really apply
to the way I think about todo items.

Finally, the most important thing to keep them working and not gummed up
is to frequently review all the todo lists, checking off things you've
done and things you no longer intend to do, and trying to do something
with the items that just stay on the list forever. They might need
to be changed into simpler, more concrete tasks, or - and this happens to
me a lot - it's not really a todo item, in the sense of a concrete,
physical task, but rather a project, that will take multiple steps, and
should go on the project list instead.

The Joy of C Projects

One of the great things about a project list is that it lets you keep a
hold of little, less important projects (C priority on the ABC priority
system), and be just as persistent (if you want) about those as about the
big ones. Without ever putting these front and center and using up my
attention or high quality thinking time, just by doing one little next
action after another - pick up this thing at the store, take this thing to
the office, write this person an email, brainstorm about this - all of a
sudden I find it's done, even if it took *many* of those steps. This gives
me a neat little sense of efficacy, frees up a slot for a new
always-wanted-to project, and can have unexpected and nifty consequences.
Here are a few examples of things I've made happen, seemingly without
trying, and t hese are just the nonacademic ones:

* Found some awesome podcasts
* Built two new shelves to repair a bookshelf
* Learned tree identification at the local arboretum
* Bought a nice overcoat
* Developed a routine for cleaning my apartment
* Organized a bowling night and a Vincent Price film marathon
* Made a present for a clinical psychology PhD friend that was two stamps,
one that said SANE and one that said INSANE
* Started a garden
* Memorized all 10 verses of Desolation Row

Many of these may sound trivial, but they brought me pleasure and really
required very little extra time or attentino, basically just extra clock
cycles I wasn't using anyway. (it's amazing how often something will just
show up that will suddenly help you with one of the projects that have
been on the list for a while) And committing to projects and finishing
them can lead to many great consequences, even if at times you don't
really know why you're doing them (besides "it's on the list" - again like
the memento guy) For instance making the bookshelves taught me about all
the resources that are available at home depot, which could be useful
later on. And there was a call for submissions at a community art center
for a show on the theme of bob dylan, and having memorized and thought a
lot about Desolation Row I put together a performance about it which went
over really well. Which just goes to confirm my belief, which is also the
theme of a favourite book Son of Interflux by Gordon Korman, that the most
satisfying and fruitful way to spend leisure time and money is not on
simply amusing yourself, but on projects - especially ones that enlist the
help of other people.