2014 Year In Review

In a fitting end to the year, I’m revisiting my first post.  In that post, I put together a long-winded list of helpful habits in order to keep a new years resolution.  That list boils down to the following advice: identify, write down, and publicize quantifiable goals with definitions for success and failure that can be evaluated at a regular time interval.  Track your progress, and don’t let a single failure derail the whole goal, but instead consider it a part of the learning process.  Finally, know when to give up.

I then proceeded to follow those instructions all year long.  I put my money where my mouth is, and for the first time ever, it paid off.

Summary page from my goal tracking notebook

As you can see, my goals met with mixed success.  I’ll go through them one by one and provide some commentary and a grade, and then I’ll wrap up with some closing remarks.  Here goes!

Weekly Goals

These are the goals that boil down to “do something X times per week.”  I determined successes and failures on a weekly basis; if I failed to complete the goal for a week, that was a complete failure, but I got a clean slate the next week.

Work out 5 Days

47 / 52 weeks.  I only had one week with less than 4 workouts (the week I was in Vegas), and I basically didn’t miss a week from July on (including holidays and vacations), so I feel pretty good about this.  The raw numbers say A-, but I’m going to give myself an A on this one.  The key was being flexible enough to treat even relatively easy workouts (20 min on an elliptical) as workouts, without which I would have missed a few weeks due to limited time or desire (in particular on vacations).

A

Sleep 56 Hours

This went really poorly.  I did this in only 6 weeks this year, and three of those were on vacation (including the last two weeks).  Here we find a good example of the “know when to give up” rule.  I basically decided that I didn’t care as much about sleeping as I did about the things I was doing while I was awake; I still tracked it, but I stopped trying.

F-, though.

Get to Work Early 5 Days

The criteria for success here was either be online by 7:30 or in the office by 8:00 AM, all five days in a week.  This is another good example of knowing when to give up; although progress on this goal was initially promising, I decided it wasn’t worth disturbing my girlfriend to get out of bed so early, so I just sort of stopped.  I only succeeded 7 weeks this year before giving up.

F-.

One Date

I consider this a pretty strong success.  I got off to a rocky start — for the most part, I managed a date every other week or so — but the whole point was to find someone to go on dates with consistently, which I did (and she’s super great).  Plus, I was still trying really hard during those early periods; as I’ve mentioned before, it was a surprising lot of work to do the whole online dating thing.  I managed 40 weeks with a date this year, plus netted a girlfriend from it.  I’d call that an…

A+.

Contact 1 Long-Distance Friend Per Day for Seven Days

I managed 40 weeks contacting a long-distance friend every day.  For at least three of the weeks where I failed, I was actually out of the country and couldn’t contact anyone at all.  Most of the rest were single day failures.  Without going through my records and counting it up I’d guess I talked to someone on at least 330 days this year, with a possible max of about 345 days — that’s a solid 95%.

A

One Blog Post

I cheated a bit here, because if I wrote something but didn’t post it, I’d count it.  Also, I definitely wrote a blog post on Sunday once and counted it for Saturday.  Either way, I managed to write something in at least 42 weeks this year, which is pretty solid.

I will note that the point was really to get me to start writing fiction again, but I found that writing the blog was more enjoyable (and more readable, probably, since my fiction is terrible).  I give myself a solid B on this — I definitely passed, but it wasn’t excellent work.

B

Two Hours of Music

I only managed this in about 27 weeks this year, but I put those 27 weeks to good use.  I can play pretty passable guitar, which is particularly impressive since I’ve tried to teach myself at least two or three times prior to this year.  A bunch of the weeks that I didn’t get two hours in, I got some time (typically more than an hour), but there are definitely stretches where I didn’t play at all, but could have.  Given the 50% success rate (low) balanced with the results (fairly good), I’m going to give myself a …

C

Yearly Goals

< 10% Body Fat

Hahahahahaha!  No.  Not even close.  I gave up on this one after I gave up drinking for Lent and there was no change.

F –

Olympic Triathlon:

I never even really tried for this one.

F –

Dance Lessons:

I didn’t really try for this one either, although I brought up once maybe with my girlfriend… I think?  I might be making that up.

F –

Band:

I didn’t join a band this year.

F –

Complete 2 Coursera Courses

I completed a Stanford machine learning course on September 1 and a Princeton algorithms course on October 17 — plus I took almost all of an intro to interactive Python course out of Rice, but it ended while I was out of the country so I missed it.

A +

New Job
I didn’t publish this one originally, since I thought it would send a bad message to be like “I CAN HAZ NEW JOB” on the internet while I was still employed, but I did have a goal to get a new job (or leave my current job) by year’s end.  I am happy to report that my last day will be January 7, after which I will be effectively funemployed, but nominally working for myself, for some indeterminate period of time.  I’m looking forward to it!

What has two thumbs and works for himself?

However, because I don’t have a replacement income, and because I’m not quitting until 2015, I give myself a…

B

Conclusion

I gave myself a passing grade in 7 of 13 goals, which isn’t great, but it’s a whole lot better than the 10% or so that was quoted in my original post.  Plus, I think we can glean some more info from this.

Notice that, of the weekly goals, I passed 5 of 7?  In my original post, I mentioned that one of the worst resolutions you can make is to do something by year’s end, since you just keep putting it off forever and ever until the end of the year sneaks up on you.  That’s certainly what happened to me here.  Even my Coursera courses didn’t get completed until well after the halfway point, and I didn’t get a new job until the very end of the year (and at that I didn’t like… look for a new one at all).  Meanwhile, the weekly goals I gave up on I made a conscious decision to give up on — every day I recorded that I didn’t get to work early or that I didn’t get 8 hours of sleep — I never recorded that I didn’t take dance lessons or that I didn’t do an Olympic triathlon.  The key takeaway from this for me is that these goals are stupid and need to be reworked so they can be better tracked.

Due to mixed (but well above-average) results, I give myself a passing grade, but due to my poor setup for the yearly goals, it can’t be a high one.  I’ll scrape through the year with a …

C

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Next week, I’ll reveal my goals for 2015!  Given what I’ve learned in 2014, I’ve come up with a pretty robust set of goals for the coming year that I can hopefully track a bit better than some of the ones I made this year.  Get excited…?

AIRPLANE!

I don’t fly well. I’m writing this at an astonishing 34,000 feet in the air – that’s almost seven miles in the sky. We are currently experiencing what is best described as “mild turbulence” – and it is mild – and I’m utterly terrified.   I keep looking out the window, as though to reassure myself that we are, in fact, still asky – like it would be possible for me to discern that we had changed altitude at all at such a preposterous height. In fact, I’m checking to make sure that the ground is still parallel to the plane’s trajectory, and we are not plummeting nose-first to our doom, or – somehow, worse – nose-up, streaking toward the moon.

This is particularly interesting, because I am, by training, a mechanical engineer*. In particular, I took a number of aerospace courses in school, and always dreamed of becoming a rocket scientist.

I was going to attempt to present a coherent blog post (for the first time ever!), but as I’m writing this, our turbulence has passed from mild to medium, the point at which I FREAK OUT. So instead please enjoy the following bullet points.

• I always thought the scene in … I don’t remember which movie it actually is, so let’s say The Hunt for Red October, where Jack Ryan (probably played by Alec Baldwin) is on some red eye and the stewardess hands him a pillow and he’s like “No, I can’t sleep due to turbulence,” and the stewardess looks at him like “Well there’s an SAT word,” and he has to explain to her what turbulence is. What stewardess doesn’t know what turbulence is!?
• I used to have relatively smooth flights all the time. I have not had one in at least a year, and for years before that the frequency has been decreasing; there is always some patch of rough air, as measured by the fasten seatbelt sign being on or the pilot announcing it. I don’t know if I’ve become more aware of it, or if climate change is causing increased atmospheric energy which has no choice but to punch every plane I’m on, but something in the last few years has changed, and it’s making me worse at flying, since I’m always worried it’s about to get bumpy, and I’m always right.
• They have suspended cabin service. This is a double-whammy, since it means things are getting rougher, but it also means the cocktail I so desperately need to calm my nerves upon hearing that announcement won’t be coming.
• We are either over the coast or North America’s largest uninhabited forest. There is nothing outside the window. I have no point of reference. I have no choice but to assume we are taking this one straight to the moon.
• Did you know that before planes started falling out of the sky in the ‘70s due to microcracks and metal fatigue, they didn’t know that planes could fall out of the sky due to microcracks and metal fatigue? Food for thought.
• Statistically, flying is one of the safest modes of transportation, both in terms of number of accidents and fatalities. Did you know that statistically, most planets are unable to support life? And yet here we are. Improbable things happen.
• And while I’m on the “deaths per passenger” issue, can we talk about how much worse it would be to survive a plane crash? I’m not afraid of dying, I’m afraid of being afraid to die, or worse – of living in unending pain. Both of those are uncomfortable. At least in death you feel nothing. All the most comfortable things feel like they’re not even there, like that scene in Communty where Troy experiences the room in which room temperature is kept, or being naked.

At this point, drink service has resumed, I have my precious cocktail, and the captain has even turned off his fasten seatbelt sign. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

But that’s the thing – do you know just how heavy a commercial airliner is? Because I do. It’s like … super heavy. Now, I understand the principal of lift – it’s pretty key to aerospace engineering — so I get that moving air quickly over an airfoil results in an upward force on the airfoil. I know that this force is (at least) proportional to the velocity over said airfoil. However, I’m also familiar with Newton’s three laws of motions (but apparently insufficiently so to number them? How embarrassing…), one of which is that an object experiencing no net force will continue to move at its current velocity, with no acceleration. Since we are cruising at constant velocity and altitude, there must be no net force on the aircraft. This means that the lift force we are experiencing is exactly equal to the weight of the aircraft, but it also means that our forward thrust is exactly equal to our drag. And drag is proportional to the square of our velocity, which as mentioned previously is essential to maintain our lift. So basically we need to push hard to move fast through the air in order to say aloft, but the harder we push, the less return we get on our additional investment due to drag. How we’re in the sky is a complete mystery to me.

Then there’s the fact that the lift manifests entirely on the wings. The wings are supporting the entire aircraft right now. THE WINGS. Have you seen those things? Those wobbly little spindly things hanging off our plane? Sure, during normal flight they seem peaceful, but hit a tiny pocket of rough air and all of a sudden they’re going “juggada-juggada-juggada-juggada-juggada” all over that foot-tall area where they’re mounted to the body. Don’t worry though, they’re probably riveted there by the most experienced child laborers in China. Mark my slurred words, the next rash of airline disasters will involve whole wings just snapping off the body of the plane and fluttering peacefully the ground behind the spiraling death plume of the main body and its other wing.

And now you understand why I’m (and I’ll admit it, unfoundedly) terrified of flying. Luckily, we’ve begun our initial descent into the Fort Lauderdale area, which means I’ll soon be safe and sound aboard a cruise ship at sweet, sweet sea level. Those things never have any problems, right?

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* Legally I’m not actually allowed to say that. I trained as a mechanical engineer but never took the licensing test, having gone into energy trading after college. Therefore, I think it’s probably truer to say, “I have received mechanical engineering training.”

Privacy Please

Growing up in the ’90s and coming of age in the 2000’s, I was bombarded by old fogeys complaining about the lack of privacy in this digital age, with its Facepokes and interweb retailers asking us for credit card numbers. I — and other young people — typically dismissed this as an older generation that didn’t understand the awesome transformative power of the Internet and the fact that, with Amazon, not only can I avoid all human contact by buying my groceries online, I can set up recurring deliveries so I can avoid all online contact, too.

Now the real question is, what do I do with all this milk?

Of course, the old fogeys had some valid points, but for the most part our generation has accepted that to some degree, we are giving up some small amount of our digital privacy in order to reap the huge rewards of the Internet.  However, over the past ten years or so, the amount of privacy we’re giving away has shot up at an alarming rate (whether or not we realized it at the time).

Ten years ago, (Feb ’04), Mark Zuckerberg launched a social networking website called thefacebook.  While other social networking sites had existed before it, by 2008 Facebook had overtaken its most popular rival and boasted 100 million users.  While morons continue to post racist diatribes and pictures of illegal activity, the savvy (read: non-moronic) user accepts that the information they post is largely public and can be used against them by, e.g,. employers, law enforcement, and the public at large.  That’s a pretty small price to pay for being able to Like™ your friend in Santa Fe’s recent relationship status change from “married” to “single.”

Followed by several Status Updates™ about chocolate ice cream

Around the same time Facebook achieved ubiquity, Apple changed the world by introducing a mobile device that was — reliably and quickly — connected to the Internet.  Again, other smartphones had existed before, but this one was lighting fast; it could be connected to WiFi, and even its cellular-backed data connectivity was faster than anything on the market.  This ushered in the era of smartphone ubiquity (by 2013, more than 50% of American adults would own a smartphone), but more importantly, it meant that small objects — phones and other handheld devices, cameras, monitoring equipment, house lighting systems, cars, anything — could connect directly to the Internet so long as they had some connective (e.g., cellular) service.  As more and more devices connect to the Internet and we approach the awesome realities of the Internet of Things — we’re at around 16 billion installed devices now, and the number is growing rapidly as wearables and other applications take advantage of these technologies — the privacy we’ve given up has crossed from the digital world into reality.

The same technology that will allow me to video chat with my cat while I’m in Puerto Rico next week also allows the NSA to know that I’m in Puerto Rico.  At least in my experience, the news that our government was spying on us was met with a resounding “meh.”  Just another bit of privacy we’re giving up for the awesome power of being able to correct Siri when you tell her to text your dad that your plane landed and she tries to send a text to Jad that your fame is left-handed.  Of course, there’s other ways that these data can be used against you — if put in the wrong hands (as though the NSA are not the wrong hands, amiright?), data about your smartphone usage or the location of your car might alert burglars that you’re not home, or that you were cheating on your spouse, etc.  But that folds neatly into our history of giving up privacy in order to reap huge rewards — and, without really getting into it, I really do believe the rewards are huge.  But the more connected we get, the more real-world privacy we will lose, in ways that we may not expect.

Last week, my cousin came over to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner.  He brought with him a quadcopter drone.  I don’t want to nerd out too much, but this thing was really cool — gyroscopically stabilized, with a swivel-mounted high-def camera (the videos are incredibly stable), and quintessentially a part of the IoT: connected to GPS (it won’t let you fly it around restricted airspaces like airports, and it has an automatic return-to-home feature), and with real-time wireless feeds of the camera sent straight to your smartphone or mobile device.  After he demo’d its flying capabilities, he brought out his laptop to show us some of the videos he had taken.  They were mostly aerial shots of his neighborhood or his friends’ houses; a few pictures he had taken of groups, that kind of thing.

But one of them was, for lack of a better word, somewhat disturbing.  His office is down the street from a rougher part of town, so he had gone out in the parking lot, flown the drone over a few buildings and a couple of blocks down the street, and come across a street corner.  And pretty much immediately you see a bunch of people looking up at the drone, pointing, and running away.  And here’s my cousin, sitting in my parents’ living room, showing us HD video with the faces of a bunch of guys who undoubtedly thing they’re being watched by the police and have been caught on camera selling drugs.  I don’t want to use the words “human rights violation,” but if you assume that humans have the right not to be surveilled by random strangers without some sort of regulated oversight, then I guess I’d use those words.*

This problem — and problems like it — will continue to grow with our connectivity and our ability to process it.  Imagine a future where the Amazon delivery drone has cameras; it uses images to make product recommendations for you based on your perceived tastes and preferences.  As it passes by your window it catches a glimpse of your daughter’s room and all of a sudden your Amazon recommendations are all My Little Pony themed.  Imagine you can stream the feed live so you can watch your package being delivered.  Your neighbors are delivering a birthday present for their eight year old, and they’re recording the video so they can have his reaction.  As the drone flies by your house, they — and their eight year old — watch and record you having sex.  Congratulations on exposing yourself to a minor!

I’m not saying we should stop the connectivity — far from it — I’m just saying that for the next 80 years, I’ll be inside with the blinds closed.

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*Rhetorical; I don’t actually think that we have that right and I’m too lazy to look up what sorts of loops the po-lice have to jump through to surveil.  I guess my point is, maybe we should.