This year was pretty awesome. It was my first full year as a real employee, I started contributing to my 401k, and for a brief period, I had my credit cards entirely paid off. I had a girlfriend, I started taking better care of myself, and I now have a semi-decorated apartment. Downsides: my car drastically declined in value, pushing my net worth down 15% of year end of 2008. Lets take a look at the numbers:
Overall, I think I did pretty well. For this year, I would give myself an awesomeness of:
This is score is composed of:
Using these weight factors, I hope to bring my awesomeness to around 80-85%. I’m not going to aim for the top just yet, I just want to be better than average.
Happy New Year.
Try frm.Tag = lt frm.RefreshCharts(lt) Catch ' do nothing; this operation was just a gesture of kindness anyways. End Try
I love my car. The engine warning labels are written in Japanese. It is incredibly well engineered. It gets good miles per gallon. It has a keyless RFID system. It can determine its own location globally to within ten feet. It has power windows and can get radio signals from fucking space.
Daylight savings time, however, escapes its grasp.
Upsides of Cooking Sausage & Maceroni and Cheese with Same Lid:
I saw this a few years ago, but I’m re-reading it because it’s good. Also Paul Graham is kinda meh. It was written in response to Hackers and Painters, which was decent at best. A sample, from dabblers and blowhards:
The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports (“Management secrets of Gengis Khan”, the “Lexus and the Olive Tree”) that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.Lines like that make a great post.
When I originally upgraded to Vista and Windows 7, I could not get my Rocketfish Bluetooth keyboard to connect. This was incredibly annoying as the keyboard decently expensive (~$100) and pretty nice. I ended up reverting back to the crummiest cheapest $3 keyboard I could buy at Microcenter, and it sucked. Eventually, I grew sick of it and spent today figuring out how to make my Rocketfish keyboard work. After going through the usual bluetooth device connection wizard and making it hang, I ran across this thread on technet. Buried past all of the double-posts from MSFT employees was this gem, by KAMOTEQ:
When you go to add a device, right click on the keyboard icon and click on properties. in the services tab check the box that says Drivers for keyboard, mice, etc (HID). The keyboard will install automatically.This fixed up my keyboard super-fast and everything is wonderful. I just wanted to repost it because it’s hard to find (buried in a Technet thread) and I know other people will be looking for the fix.
I updated my main website, dsokol.com with an approximate update frequency. This λ value is the exacted number of updates per day, sampled from the last one year period. Given that my blog has had eight or so updates, over the past 365 days, my future frequency is calculated to be 0.02192. (λ = 8 / 365)
This is not an accurate prediction of frequency, as data for the past 11 of 12 months is missing. In reality, it should be sampled as (8 x 12) / 365, which gives λ = 0.2630 . This is a more accurate model for my blog posting frequency. The same goes for my github frequency, which has only been gathered for the last week or so. My twitter, reddit, stack overflow, zune profile and resume are all accurate, though the reddit number is a lot of guess work.
These λ values should be supplemented with a confidence figure; I’m more confident that my zune and twitter frequencies are around the given λ then my blog or github status. If I were to build a model to simulate my next year of internet activity (which I plan to do, after another month of data is gathered), the lack of background data for these two data series will have to be accounted for.
Why did I even post frequency? I believe it shows certain parts of my character you wouldn’t otherwise see. The fact that my resume is updated very infrequently (λ = 0.00274) shows that I’m pretty happy with my job and not looking. I listen to a lot of music. I’m a pretty steady poster on twitter (unless i spammed certain days, a weakness in my analysis), and I’m decently active in a few communities specific to programming. More importantly, it shows you where to find the most up to date me, which is what the end goal.