David J. Sokol

Year End Statistics Roundup

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:

2009 (Numerically)

• I performed 2,643 pushups, an infinite increase over the previous year.
• I finished 7,160 crunches, another near-infinite increase over the previous year.
• I completed 101 games of bowling; I raised my average from a 120 something to a 160-something, a 33% increase.
• I was an average of 6 minutes late for work. Sadly this totals for 23 hours of missed morning work. Good thing I stay late. My goal for next year is to reduce this number to a 3-minutes-late average.
• I weigh an average 184 pounds in the morning, 186 in the evening. I apparently carry about 2 pounds of easily removed water weight.
• I drank a total of 346 days out of 365. In other terms, I spent 94.87% of my days last year imbibing at least one alcoholic beverage. Increased contact with family could not be mathematically correlated due to measuring techniques.
• I lived in 3 different apartments in two different cities.
• I had a real girlfriend for 5 months, a length that hasn’t been equaled since 2005.

Overall, I think I did pretty well. For this year, I would give myself an awesomeness of:

73.0551458% Average (C)

This is score is composed of:

• Drinking – 40%
• Financial Security – 20%
• Fitness – 20%
• Having a Girlfriend – 20%
• Fudge Factor – 10% (I rated myself a 2 out of a possible 10)

Plans for 2010

These statistics, of course, only serve as a baseline. For the next year, I have different goals and different aspirations, and my awesomeness will be computed based on the following factors:

• Drinking – 16.67%
• Awesomeness - 33% (variable factor, 10 point self-assessment)
• Girlfriend – 16.67%
• Fitness – 16.67%
• Professionalism – 16.67%

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.

I Crack Me Up

Try
  frm.Tag = lt
  frm.RefreshCharts(lt)
Catch
  ' do nothing; this operation was just a gesture of kindness anyways.
End Try

Concerning the Lexus LTA

me: i want that car
me: real bad
James: amazing shit
me: only $350k
James: thats all!
me: ain't no thang
me: i'll ring up the homies and get them to put in extra shifts on my corners
me: gotta expand that trap son
James: oh i hear ya
James: i expect my dudes to get that for me for christmas... they saw my tweet, they know what that means.. time to hustle harder
me: time to hustle harder or you're gonna hafta regulate on `em
me: just one of those things you ain't gotta say, ya feel me?
James: oh i know
James: game recognize game, and you looking mighty mirror image right now

“I Drive a Dodge Stratus!”

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.

Twitter Lists: Ready for Abuse

me: oh man, twitter lists.
me: http://twitter.com/dsokol/lames
James: doesnt work for me
me: awww
me: man
me: get on that
James: IM trying
me: (ps it's a list of just you, named 'lames')
me: lolololol
James: figured that
me: man
me: that's gonna be great
me: cause you can arbitarily name lists and add people
me: i could have a list named 'Dick Lickers' and BAM
me: everybody goes in

Cooking

Upsides of Cooking Sausage & Maceroni and Cheese with Same Lid:

• Awesomness
• Maceroni Tastes like Sausage
• Feeling good because you’re saving water and resources like those goddamn hippies told you to.

Downsides:

• None

This Showcases My Conversation Skills

me: if you're that bored, i've got an article on software estimation that needs writing
James: oh word!
James: yeah lemme get to that
me: yeah
me: formula is
me: Estimate = Min x -Max + Min + ScaleFactor x Max
me: ScaleFactor being between 0 and infinity (but probably around 0.7)
me: basically centers around this distribution:
me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_(continuous)
me: which has unique properties that allow the inverse CDF input to be greater then 1!
James: i was gonna blog about good rap thats out
me: that'd probably be better then my boring shit
me: at least someone would read that.
me: "oh man numbers THBBT"
me: (but my technique allows you to easily use stratified latin hypercube sampling for determining the best estimation time!)
me: (or straight monte carlo if you want to run more trials!)
me: yeah
me: you can see why i've been just ITCHING to write about it so hardcore
James: for sure
James: totally passionate about it
me: it's gonna be extra boring
me: yeah
me: because i'm going to trash joel's theory of software estimation and debunk betaPERT as ineffectual as it doesn't handle small increments well
me: not to mention i'ts completely biased against the 'most likely' which is probably wrong.
me: i have the most boring life ever.
James: i stopped reading what you typed a while ago
James: lemme know when you're back on that rap talk

An Excellent Rebuttal of Paul Graham

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.

Fixing Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard on Vista/Win7 x64

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.

My Own Personal λ

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.