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Outliers
I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I really enjoyed Blink, and The Tipping point, and am currently listening to Outliers on audio book. Malcolm Gladwell is great at getting you to think. Outliers explains how successful people got to where there are. He explains that their success has more to do with their family, their generation, their upbringing, than their actual work. His theory is that if you can do something for 10,000 hours, you will be successful at it.
Bill Gates grew up in a rich enough family that he went to a private school that actually had a computer club back when computers were fall from common. He spent all his free time programing computers. By the time computer use started to spread, he had is 10,000 hours in and was a computer genius. Most of his sucess is luck. He grew up in the right generation, had parents that were able to send him to private school, and had access to computers when most people didn’t.
He also mentioned the Beatles. When they first started playing together the got a gig in Germany in which they played for eight hours a night, four to five days a week. They quickly learned how to play well together. They learned what worked and what didn’t. By the time their popularity increased they had their 10,000 hours in. Their success had more to do with the amount they played than anything else.
I don’t know what it is, but I just love his stuff. Here is an old TED Talk he did back in 2004.
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Global Warming is Real
One of my biggest pet peeves are people that automatically don’t believe in global warming just because they are having cold weather. It’s called “global warming”, with the emphasis on GLOBAL! The Earth in general is warming. You are still going to have your seasons. You are still going to have colder local tempatures.
Actually, more snow could be caused by global warming. Global warming doesn’t necessary cause more storms, but it does increase the severity of storms. The higher the ocean temperature, the more energy there is out there to drive storms.
Global warming deniers drive me crazy. Global warming is a fact. It is happening. How much we are affecting it is the real question that nobody knows the answer to. It is pretty obvious that the amount of CO2 that we are releasing to the atmosphere can’t really be helping it any though.
I am not for drastic, expensive changes, but if we gradually reduce out CO2 emissions, we can reduce the human impact. It’s not like global warming is an emergency, but we should get a handle of it before it gets out of control.
Decreasing our CO2 emissions is a no brainer. If it lowers our impact on global warming then good, if not, a cleaner atmosphere isn’t a bad thing either.
I think newer technolgies will arise that will make decreasing our CO2 emissions easier, if not, then our demise might be sooner. It will be a long time before humans become extinct, but that day will come. The Earth was here long before humans, and will be here long after us.
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Spraying Hot Water in Cold Weather
I should have tried this yesterday.
It would be cool to see water instantly freeze, but frankly, I didn’t want to spend much time outside yesterday. Today it’s been warming up all day. It has warmed up to -9ºF already. I am not sure how cold it has to be for that trick to work. Maybe I should try it today?
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Brrrrrr
Yeah, it’s a little cold out today.
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Paying Bills
Another thing that I am going to try and spend less time doing is paying bills. My old system involved me to paying bills every Friday and making sure our accounts were all in order. I have been paying bills online for years, but never really trusted auto paying.
Now I got a new credit card that I am going to put everything on. I set up everything that I possible can to auto pay. Instead of using my debit card, I will now use my new credit card. I will now just have one bill to pay every month. There might be a few exceptions, but my bill paying to be reduced greatly.
Another plus to paying bills this way is that I will be accumulating miles with my credit card. Our hopes are that it will pay for our plane tickets for our next vacation whenever that is. I wish it was now though, -27ºF is not very fun.
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New Theme
So I changed my WordPress theme again. A few things broke on my old theme with the update to 2.7. I wanted something cleaner anyway. It is now nice and clean with minimal plugins. Just one of the many things that I am cleaning up this year.
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New Years Resolution
I am not much for New Years resolutions. I think if you are going to change something in your life, just do it now, don’t wait until the new year. One thing I am going to try to do this year is spend less time online. Less time online for me is probably still more time online than you though. I probably spend 14 to 16 hours online on my days off. I need to cut that back to get more stuff that I want to do done. I have a stack of book that need to be read, XBox games that need to be played, and Netflix movies to watch.
No more just sitting wasting time watching RSS feeds and FriendFeed comments come in. When I am caught up, it’s time to move on and do something else.
I also have a bad habit of wanting to know about any cool thing online as soon as possible. It’s time not to worry about stupid crap. I will find out about all the cool stuff sooner or later. From now on I am going to try to spend my time more wisely doing stuff I want to do.
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Smell Ya Later 2008
This is a pretty cool year in review video.
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Spit Goes Clink
I so love XKCD.
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Saving Money
It was a pretty expensive December for us, with Christmas, my truck breaking down, and record snowfalls requiring a snowblower. Thankfully we have a nice chunk of cash is savings.
I think saving money is just as addictive as spending it. Back in my college years I had the problem of spending too much. I got into a little credit card debt. It wasn’t too bad, but bad enough that I learned my lesson. When we wanted to move into a house we couldn’t because of my credit cards. We settled for a mobile home and vowed to knock out the credit cards.
They have been paid off for quite a few years now, and we have been in our house for a year and a half. Now, every payday, I look forward to added more to our savings. It’s a great feeling to know that if something disastrous were to happen, we would probably be ok money wise.
I am not much for New Year’s resolutions, but I do plan of trying to put more money into our savings. I calculated that we put about 15% of our income into savings last year. My goal it to try and put 20-25% into savings this year.