Pantograph Router

Dude, this looks cool.



I think this would be a perfect project for gridbeam.  And in that way I could get into making traditional wood-working joints more quickly and at better quality.

How to Accomplish Anything (a General Process)

Get into the habit

In my experience, it is best practice to start a habit by doing a small amount of work, in fact a laughably small amount of work as an every day minimum.   For example, to start back writing, I started with the goal of writing one sentence a day.  That's it.  And you know what?  I still sometimes was fighting myself to start.   But once you have started, you have made a giant leap.  As is pointed out on All Japanese All the Time (AJATT), "1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. "

You've got to start somewhere.  

Track.  

Next, engineer follow-up and follow-through.  One method is Seinfield's trick where you take a calendar and mark each day you follow your goal, eventually forming a chain.  You get a little attached to the chain, and a little more so the longer it grows.

I don't print out a calendar, however. I simply make my own chart by turning a piece of lined paper on it's side.  Each line becomes a day, and in this way I can make a chart tracking as many habits as I'd like. It looks a little like this:

Here's a sample chart of the goals I tracked over a 10-day span. I must admit it was the best 10-day span I have had as of the time of this writing; I have never had a perfect week, nor have I needed one in order to watch this improve my life greatly.

If you have some burning life-focus that you just can't seem to get started I would use the Seinfield trick.  I find a chart is better for tracking several goals in a general course of self-improvement.

Procrastinate Your Evaluation, Not Your Action

When I was a speech coach, one of the keys to my success was to take the pressure off the novices.  Specifically in the event extemporaneous speaking, I instituted a rule that a student wasn't allowed to say whether or not they thought they were good at the event until they had given 20 practice speeches.

You can apply some version of this to whatever it is you are working on.  At first, your focus should be on building the habit.  You could set a time in the future that you will allow yourself to evaluate (this Ted Talk is an illustration of why 20 hours is usually sufficient.  But even better is to allow yourself the luxury of growing slowly while maintaining faith in the knowledge that you will improve.  

When Inspiration Strikes, Do More

This step more or less will probably happen on it's own, but it might be worth a few words to encourage it further.  

Before you started you project, you were still filling your days somehow.  While, yes, it is possible to squeeze more out of time, at some point you will eventually have to push something away.  That's your real test.  Once you've allowed inspiration to guide you past some distraction, you can safely say that you have formed a habit.  Keep going, keep tracking, and one day you may look up and notice you're where you wanted to be when you started dreaming and setting goals.

Everything Else is Optimization

There are a lot of bloggers who gain eyeballs (and ad revenue/book sales) by in effect saying "Look how great I am, and look how fast I can learn anything!"  From my own experience I can say that it can be very discouraging to consume too much of that.   It's a kind of pornography of other people's productivity.  I would look to them when my passion was at its highest, but then as my passion waned, their examples would only lead me to see my efforts as a failure. Eventually I realized that these amazing, better-than-you-and-me life-hackers are really only talking about optimization.  Oh . . . they can learn a language in 3 months?  Cool. However, I probably can't do that because 1) I don't want to move to another country, 2) I don't want to study 8 hours a day and 3) I'm probably not as talented as them (also, read the fine print, so to speak, about what they are willing to count as a "successful mission").

Another example is exercise.  I have at times only lifted one day a week. On the plus side, this protocol allowed me to optimize for muscle growth and cycling my diet. However, it made it too easy to get out of the exercise habit. When I wanted to start back exercising, I set up my tracking for every day and broke up exercises so it was possible to exercise everyday without soreness.  Optimal?  I don't care; I'm building back up a habit.

It is certainly good to read up from time to time about techniques for things you are working on.  It can show a healthy interest in the subject.  But my advice is to not give up on the system you are tracking while you are experimenting with new techniques.  For example, if you have been learning a foreign language by going through a certain number of flashcards a day and then you learn about a whole new philosophy of language learning involving just talking to natives (ie wasting their time so that you may benefit), I would recommend that you keep up with your flashcard discipline and experiment with the new moves.  In this way you absolutely prevent being a wannabe. Whether acting optimally or not, you are always a work in progress. Which is what you should be.

2017 . . . The Year of Making?

I had made some half-hearted attempts to start toward "wood working" last year, but nothing came of it.  The main hang-up was some time before my half-start I had heard about this great system of modular design, and that was really all I was interesting in learning about when I set my goal to have "intermediate skill" in woodworking -- I wanted to be able to build bookshelves and work benches and the like.  However, I had lost the name of the system and could not find relocate where I had read about it in spite of several attempts.

Well, I finally stumbled upon the term, and I think I may never be looking back.

It is called Grid Beam.  I am going to make a winter Solstice gift for myself out of the book How to Build With Grid Beam.  With that I should be able to gumption-up to get my projects started, including, I think, a windmill.

There's an old video which gives some context for the process, and there are just so many thought-and-emotion provoking images of what is possible to made 3-D lived spaces.


Bonus

Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme on bootstrapping tools.  This is something I am very interested in as I keep moving to be a resilient Renaissance Man, but it is for more motivating to build some *big* stuff first.  And so that's where I will start.

Spanish Audio Content

Just trying to make a more immersive environment for Spanish, and I really to to improve language -- quickly, slowly, however it happens.  I plan to add to this list

Musica

• Latino 90s Pop Mix
• Rock en español 80 y 90

News/talking heads

• Radio España (Rtve)
• IMER (Mexican Public Radio)

Religious

• Santa Biblia

When I get some, I check out these podcasts.

Making Room for More Spanish

Getting better at Spanish is a big deal to me.  But, so is living a balanced, happy life.

I have a lot of things I am trying to do: being a good husband, lose weight, cut my spending so that working a half day makes sense, landscape.  So my language-learning time has limits.  Thus I have decided to move Esperanto to the back-burner (ie maintain the cards in Anki, but not add any new ones).  I will give the time saved to Spanish.

I love Esperanto and look forward to learning it to the point I can journal in it in the future, but Spanish is the more practical language, and I love it just as well, maybe better.

One move I am making is to give Spanish the prime real estate of my bookmarks on my browser.  I am removing the Esperanto sites for now.

So away goes my table of Esperanto Correlatives (God, the correlatives in Esperanto are so brilliant, once you understand the code.)

Also away goes CRI online in Esperanto, great source of small news articles.

They will come back up when Esperanto is my focus again.

Continued Esperanto . . . after Spanish

I'm working on this million word challenge for Spanish for now.  I fully admit I might get off the pace and not be able to get there by the end of the year.  But no worries, because I'm going to continue on with Spanish into the new year, and, really, the plan is to always maintain Spanish.

To make more time for Spanish, I am only going to maintain my Anki decks in Esperanto, but not do any additional reading or sentence-adding.  However, at some point next year, I plan to put in some work on Esperanto.  I found a great youtube channel, Evildea.  It has videos in Esperanto with English subtitles.  I can watch those videos for good comprehensible input and record the sound and listen to whilst going on walks, etc.  Also, in response to something I wrote on a youtube channel, someone wrote me back about this course they had put together.  I will look at it when I am dusting back off the language.

Knocking off "fluent reading in Esperanto" as a goal is at this point a matter of dozens of hours, not hundreds.

A Million Words Before 2017?

My free time was pretty consumed for a while getting my "investment" house sold off.  (Now I feel a lot better for when the financial system has it's next crisis -- one that I bet shows 2008 was just a warm up act).

Oh well, only so much time can be dedicated to "prepping," and I'm already at nearing the top end of what I want to do with it for now.  My time instead channeled into foreign languages.  I started hitting the Esperanto pretty hard on the 'ol Anki deck, and I saw a chart on the correlatives that blew my mind and help me get my understanding to the next level.  

I also pulled down some books in Spanish to start the ball rolling again on my 1,000,000 word goal.  And as is often the case, just starting was all it took to lead to a productivity explosion.  I just feel in love with what I was reading and that enthusiasm transferred to all of Spanish.  I really have come a long way over all of these years of working on Spanish off and on (the worst way to learn a language).  There are a lot of texts where I can figure out my missing words by reading around them and using context. . . and learning the vocabulary under those circumstances is just a joy.  

I did some calculations and if I read a little over 8,300 words a day, I can hit my million word goal in Spanish by the end of the year.  And sure, I will be able to cross a goal off my list, but more importantly, I know I'll be much better at something I love by taking this challenge.  If I do hit the reading goal by Jan 1st, I still will devote the next year to Spanish, taking on composition and conversation, and reading old books in Spanish -- I am a sucker for the classics.  

While I have really enjoyed using New Years as a way to kick off a new skill, I don't think I will this year.  It'll be more work on Spanish.  I've reached a point of proficiency that I have basically fallen in love with it.

Update:  Nope.  I'm not going to get there by the beginning of 2017.

Sketch of a Future Protocol

Watched an interesting interview that got me thinking . . . 

I am still committed to following a CRON (Calorie-Restriction Optimal Nutrition) diet until I hit 170 pounds.  But after that I am going to try to pursue the following diet/workout protocol:

Saturday -- skip lunch and stretch fast into the evening.  Resistance train in the evening.  Eat a bunch of ice cream and protein.

Sunday -- Eat a bunch.  Party.  Enjoy all tasty-tasty junk our society has come up with.

Monday through Friday -- some kind of low cal regime.  Perhaps just continuing what I am currently doing, but I am open to experimentation (but not to unduly inconveniencing my wife).

My reasoning behind staying with CRON is that I am trying to achieve anti-cancer hormonal changes, which may very well be a product of lowering my metabolism. 

I also plan on going on a two-day water fast at some point, during a school break.  Again, for the anti-cancer properties.  I am working under the assumption that bigger moves have to be made to set up systems than to maintain them. 

And I openly admit that losing my grandfather and father within a year and a half has me spooked.  

A Future Blogging Plan

Working on my rental to sale is just kicking my butt.  I have not had much of that "summer off" that you'd think I'd have as a teacher -- you know, sipping pina coladas   But this is the last hurdle to clear from me living the way I want nearly every day for the forseeable future.  

After that, I think I might be more active on the web, perhaps twitter and reddit. 

After my dad died I went down to blogging once a month as a kind of update.  This school year, I am thinking of doing more of a log of what I am doing, and trying to engaged in answering people's questions and getting in the back and forth of human life. 

I am doing this to see if I can help 100,000 people to manage time better.

Woodworking. My First Step: Knowledge.

I am going to try to chronicle my process of learning how to make stuff with wood.

The first step to woodworking is some knowledge.  To the Google!

I just looked up what tools I need to get started.

First, Youtube.




Yes, Youtube.  It is a friend of mine.  Seeing faces makes me feel less alone, in the same way that people watch insipid shows like the Today Show.

But, reading is on balance more efficient for general goal nerdery.  They are easier to scan through, and much easier to make notes off.

Here is one article.  Here is another.  

The hierarchy of learning often goes like this:

• real experience 
• reading
• videos

But, and a huge but, motivation and inspiration are elastic.  Watching a lot of videos is infinitely better than doing no reading.  And that is what people often do with reading they should do.  So, yeah, Youtube can be a fantastic resource.

A  concern at this information gathering step is to avoid getting stuck in a paralysis of analysis, but that is what to-do lists and reverse Sabbaths are for.

Playing With Speed Reading

What's a personal development blog without eventually talking about speed reading?  As my life affords me more time to play, I have been playing with speed reading using spreeder.

I do best reading between 450 and 500 words, with 2 words displayed at a time.  This is still better the average for someone word-reading, but no where near the whiz-bang 1,000+ words a minute that seems to be the dream of people who get into speed reading.  And that kind of speed, while maintaining comprehension, is probably a myth.  Going at 1,000 words a minute, I can get the "gist" of the text, but I can save more time with the following:  1) being strategic enough to know what I have to read, 2) scanning through a text to find the parts I need, or 3) reading the first sentences of paragraphs only (occasionally the last sentence as well). 

For any reading that you want to really get the language at the level of, you know, what the sentences are actually saying, I would recommend not pushing the reading these kinds of software over 500 words a minute.  

But there is a another problem.  Because the internet now sucks, even finding material that is easy to copy and paste into speed reading software is a challenge.  If I have to go around every few paragraphs to avoid ads, and if the side bars get into text out of order, it makes for a screwed-up experience.  Again, I can just do better with scanning techniques.  

I find the best things to put through speed reading software are the same things on my best of the free internet list.  

And when I think about it, it makes sense.  These are the sites where there is the most good content, rather than bullshit.  Thoreau said : "Read not the Times.  Read the Eternities." The best of the internet still affords you that ability,  But it is getting harder and harder to find.

So this is my best speed reading tip: avoid the bullshit.  Don't even read it.  Don't even be on a site that has the temptation.  Hell, be on the internet less.  The internet becomes more and more click-bait, and you are much better off not reading most of it, no matter how fast it is thrown at your eyes.

Push Up Strategy

I am going to make an earnest run at the push up goal.  I will do it in two steps.

Step One.  For the rest of the school year I am on the following protocol:

On Saturday, I work out with an Escalating Density routine.  The sets I am alternating are push-ups and kettle bell swings.  Starting right after the workout, I immediately start drastic overfeeding to get some hypertrophy.  A real winner is ice cream mixed with a scoop of whey protein.  For the entire day I go into a binge mode and eat something between 4,000 and 6,000 calories.

Sunday, I stack this up with seeing my grandmother for lunch and eating dinner at my mother's.  I eat more like 3,000 calories on Sunday.

Monday through Friday, I don't eat breakfast and for lunch I have two spoons of extra light tasting olive oil.  This being the Shangri-La Diet.  Around 3:30 I try to eat something very high in fiber and then I try to basically "be reasonable" with dinner -- leading to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 calories consumed on those days. 

The strategy here is build up some muscular infrastructure for more push ups.

Step Two: During the summer, I will be greasing the groove for push ups.  Most days, I'll stay in with the heat and organize my days into hours, doing some push ups each hour.  On the days that I need to rest from push ups, I could walk to the Bizzell library at OU in the morning and hang out there.

Also, I have a lot of weight to lose (*sigh, again*) and so I will be doing the Shangri-La lunch of two spoons of extra-light tasting olive oil every day and eat a nutrient-dense, yet restricted-calorie diet.  (I may take Sunday lightly "off" because I of the family visits, but I'm not looking to hit those really high calorie marks that I was looking for in step one.)

If I don't reach the goal of a set of 100 push ups by the end of summer, I will probably need to take a break from push ups, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.  But I think I have a good chance of getting to 100 push ups this summer.

The Next Few Goals

I actually have found that I am not very good at predicting what order I will accomplish my goals.   Nonetheless, it does help to have a game plan.   And, after all, this is the whole point of the blog.

Here are the goals I am going to work on heavily this summer

• Do 100 push-ups in one go
• Be able to read smoothly in Spanish
• Be able to read smoothly in a 3rd language (it will be Esperanto)
• Learn intermediate woodworking skills

The last one is a somewhat interesting case.  I am going to try to buy a good deal of the tools I need while I am on contract for full days.  Next year, with me working half days, I'll, clearly, be making less, so I will be heavily economizing.  I might try to cut my expenses so far that I will be able to say I have at least proved the concept of

• Make active stream of income that pays my side of bills in 8 hours weekly work

Because I have recently realized there is a loophole in the way that goal is worded.  I do not have to stop working each week when I reach 8 hours; I just have to have bills low enough that I can pay those bills in 8 hours a week.

I think it is possible to get there.  I plan to walk to work most days, cook all the meals on the days I am to take care of dinner, downgrade my phone, and all around go on lock-down with my spending.  The fact that I am free of any debt also really helps.

Update (Dvorak Has Taken Over)

Looking back over the summer, I might not have cooked quite as much I planned (though I have started again in earnest lately), and I might not have done as much work in Spanish either, but some things have gone right. 

This summer saw me work out regularly and now I work out every day.  I have been much better at keeping up with household chores, which doesn't impress others, but does make life better. 

But most of all, Dvorak has ingrained itself to the point that I cannot set down on a qwerty keyboard and touch type.  Instead my instincts, at least on the most common keys, are Dvorak.  On a Qwerty key board, I hunt and peck with my head down looking at the keyboard.  It keeps the two keyboard patterns separate, and encourages me to do more Dvorak, and in fact to improve at Dvorak, because it looks like it is now as easy to go forward in Dvorak as it is to go back to Qwerty.

Looking forward six months, it looks like I can have the house paid off.  That goal opens up work on several others on the list.  If I was hungry enough, I could finish the million word Spanish challenge.

Though I doubt I am hungry enough.  (Update: I wasn't.)

It's What You Know That Aint So

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Mark Twain.

This sums up my problems in Dvorak.  I have noticed some mistakes that I am making almost systematically

I hit "e" instead of "o" (actually, I make a bizarre "n," then "e," then "o" sequence)
         "f" instead of "y" (this one is because of the location of the key in qwerty )
When going fast, I type "." instead of "e" -- also because of where it is in qwerty.

The key now is not learning, but unlearning.  Typing in exclusively in Dvorak gives me a purpose to learn -- each of these mistakes cost me time.  So often while typing I will repeat a mnemonic a few times after I make a mistake.  For example, my mnemonic for "o" is that it is a ring on my ring finger.  In this manner I hope to rewrite the habit more quickly than bumbling around.

So It's Summer

On the bucket-list, I will be moving toward lower body-fat, being able to read Spanish fluently (after finishing my million word challenge) make progress on 100 push ups, and turning my Roth IRA into equity in my home (getting us close to having the whole thing paid off).

Also, on Monday, I plan on making the cold-turkey switch-over to Dvorak typing.

Other than that, and working on cooking (especially after I build a rocket stove), my over-arching project will be working on meditation.  I need to elaborate on it more in the future, but to give a sketch here, I have 3 meditation projects: 1.) be able to mediate for a long time, as part of the goal of decreasing wants 2.) go through a protocol to be able to get "in the zone" instantly 3.) be able to mediate through noise.  All three are about taking where I am and gradually building up, or the in the case of the "zone protocol" working down the time it takes.

Another way of saying it is that I'm working on self mind-control.  And while that's the ultimate free hobby, I am really doing it to make the best life possible.

Walk to Work

It is well known that I love the site Early Retirement Extreme.

I wish I could do more of it.  For example, today I walked home from work.  It'd be nice to do that every day.  If it were feasible, I could get rid of a car (saving thousands of dollars in the process) and I'd be much more physically fit.  

Those thousands of dollars aren't exactly chicken feed.  Once my house is paid off, the biggest expense I will have will be transportation.  Or at least, this is true considering I do know how to cook and garden, and will continue to expand my skills over the summer.  In fact, I should get chickens and use those transportation costs as chicken feed.  

Anyway, I really could lower my yearly costs to something like $3,000-4,000.  Which I know sounds crazy, but I honestly believe holds up.  I'd be healthier, less cluttered, more spiritual, and possibly happier.  

And a cost basis like that makes it so much easier to find a way to achieve goals like active employment that pays my bills in 8 hours of work a week (because I am only half as smart as Tim Ferris, of course).  It also means I need a small fraction of the same reserves to have enough passive income to live off as well. 

That's enough talk about that.  For now, I'll just do what I can.

Progress in a Time of Decline

This is an idea I'll probably need to expand on some other time, but I wanted to get it down. I believe that civilization is on the decline. I believe we are in a time of pretense where that truth is going to be pushed more and more out of the collective conversation. Americans are going to have to give up their absurd waste habit -- and they will go down kicking and screaming the entire way.  So be it.

I want to point out that a person can make progress in their health, spirituality and social life even in a time of political and economic decline.  In fact, on all three it is almost certainly easier.  Happiness and virtue remain paths that can be walked even as the mass production of stuff weakens. 

Also, realizing the truth of this decline -- reminded forcefully by reading the article linked to above (please read the 2nd to last paragraph) -- makes me want to spend a lot less time playing Diplomacy and more time working on my garden, and learning to cook with a rocket stove.

An Unspeakable Dream

As much I love the site Early Retirement Extreme, I have noticed that it really unsettles people when I talk about being retired at the age of 40.  My first instinct is to want to say, "hey, listen, Jacob at ERE was able to to retire at the age of 30.  I mean, come on,  I'm committing myself to working 10 years more that!"

But I have found that in communication -- especially when the stakes are highest -- your first instinct is usually wrong.

One trick I have found is to not talk about "retirement," but self-employment.  And while you, fair reader, could stretch the meaning of word "employment," in my case it is actually strictly speaking true. I want to plan on working on average 8 hours a week to get money to pay my expenses.  This will allow my money to compound in case an emergency comes up, and as insurance against infirmity.

I set the number at 8 hours on the theory I am probably half as smart as Jacob at ERE (article on his 4 hour work week), and hugely less cunning and self-promoting than life-hacker extraordinaire Tim Ferris (look up the 4 Hour Work Week for yourself; the dude has enough links).

Another way to speak of my dream is to speak of it as an unspeakable dream.  This has become the euphemism of choice around our household.

I am well on track for my unspeakable dream of bumming around with some causal work thrown in self-employment by 40.

Added: Reading in 3 Foreign Languages

I have made 3 additions to my bucket list: being able to read smoothly in Spanish, Dutch, and French.  So that establishes who will do it, but let's go through some of those other W-5 and H questions. . .

What?

I will define reading smoothly as being able to understand on sight 98% of the words on pages aimed at average adults.  I know from Spanish that once you hit that 98% point, you actually can figure out most of the words by context, or at least get through the text with one or two quick glances at a dictionary.  Anything below that is pretty much tortuous for me.  I don't have a personal tolerance for the not-knowing.

Wikipedia articles are a good benchmark.  Novels for a general audience (not classics or "literary works") also fit.  Though I want to read some classics, that kind of reading is usually very arduous, even for languages where you are a native speaker.

How 

When I finish my 1,000,000 word challenge in Spanish, I am going to cross it off the list.  I am probably at the 98% level in reading right now, but I am going to hold crossing off a finished goal as motivation for my challenge.

I have a large personal library of Spanish books and the public library has a good selection as well.  Finding interesting stuff to read, even more my picky tastes, is not that difficult at all.

I own 7 physical books in French, and will let myself supplement that number when I get to French.  Also, by some miracle, I own 3 printed books in Dutch.  Lastly, there is quite a bit of good materials available for free online in all three languages.

Since I have an obsession with thinking about methods, and organizing those thoughts, I will present the extended version of my plans:

First, while finishing the previous language, I start playing with the next one on Memrise.  I find the only thing I like there is the "no typing courses."  When I hit the winter of feeling comfortable with a language, I will switch to  doing a tweaked version of Iverson's wordlist method.  I did a trial run with it on some Dutch words, and found it much more time efficient, or least far more pleasant, than doing a memrise course that requires typing.  Also, it should be noted that my goal is really reading only -- I want the best version of people's ideas and I have no desire to pump more small-talk into the world, especially in another tongue.  With enough words, you really start puzzling out texts, even if your grammar is far shakier.

After 5,000 or so words in this method, combined with 2,000-3,000 words and sentences from Memrise, I will start reading parallel texts as soon, moving up from children's literature to more and more authentic, grown-up texts.  I am going to do this first in Dutch, then in French.

When

As long as it takes.  If my wife and I have a child, then my focus will clearly be elsewhere.  So I estimate that this could take 10 years at the maximum, and 2 and a half at a minimum.  We'll see.

Where

Just at home.  I really don't like travel.  I wont be chatting online.  I will keep getting conversation practice in Spanish, so I do plan on being bilingual, but after that I am only working toward being poly-literate.

Why? 

It's fun.  It's good for the brain, and looks as impressive as nearly any of the other bucket-list goals.

No, seriously, why Dutch?  

I heard it was easy for an English speaker to learn, so I have played with it in the past and saw I liked it.  One thing I really dig is how the "g" makes a very phlegmy "hhhuuu" sound.  I like how Dutch has more agglutination than English (without going all agglutination crazy), and I like how it as least gives me a taste of the Germanic side our language (and sure, I might learn other Germanic languages one day as well).

Dutch is a really fun language that deserves some of my play-time.