Category Archives: personal

My Thrice-Daily Walks

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Back in March 2012, I started taking a walk at 10 am every morning. It was right about the time I got my first FitBit device and the walk served several purposes. It allowed me to get in some exercise. It broke up my morning so that I wasn’t stuck in my office writing code or sitting in meetings all day long. It allowed me to clear my head. I was very diligent about this walk, going regardless of the weather conditions. In the winter, this was a little more difficult especially when it was cold, windy, and rainy, but I still would get out when I could.

Then, in February of this year, I became an Audible subscriber and started listening to books while I walked. My walk is not long, just a mile. It goes around the block on which my office building sits and generally takes me 15-20 minutes. But I loved the fact that I could spend that time walking and listening to a book.

My walk has evolved since then. In late February or early March, I started repeating the walk at 2 pm, getting it in twice a day. Then, as the weather warmed up and improved, I added lunchtime as well. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been walking three times each day, at 10am, noon and 2pm. Sometimes, at lunch, I’ll walk around the block twice. These three walks pretty much ensure that I’ll hit my 10,000 step goal each day. Usually, my FitBit Flex buzzes (letting me know I’ve reached my goal) just before the end of my 2 pm walk. They’ve also had the side effect of breaking up my day into more manageable chunks: 7:30 – 10 am; 10 am – noon; noon – 2pm; and 2pm – the end of my workday.

I’ve grown fond of these walks that on days where I work from home, I miss them. Indeed, I’ve been feeling slightly under the weather the last couple of days. When I woke up this morning, I felt downright rotten, and ordinarily would have considered staying home. But I didn’t want to miss my walks, so I came into the office. (I also have a bunch of meetings this morning that I would have had to reschedule.)

At this point, the walks are the only real regular exercise that I get, and I think it is good that I’ve managed to make them serve so many useful purposes at once. I really look forward to them each day I come in. And sometimes, when the sun is particularly warm on that first walk of the morning, I take it a little bit slower than usual, just so I have a little more time to soak up that sunshine.

More Notes from the Weekend

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Some other things of note from the weekend because I feel bad for not posting at all on Saturday or Sunday. Here are some of the things that kept me from posting this weekend.

Installed a new cable modem

On Friday, I realized that I’d never heard back from Cox Communications when I accepted their offer of a free cable modem upgrade. I’d accepted that offer on April 2 and received an order confirmation that same day. And then nothing. Now, I’ve dealt with cable companies that had deplorable customer service, most notably, Comcast. But I’ve always had excellent, even outstanding service from Cox. So I was surprised when I called to get a status update that I got a bit of a runaround. I called the number in the email I was sent and was told that I’d gotten the wrong department. I was connected to the “right” department, which still turned out to be the wrong department. I got someone who said their manager was out but they’d call me back.

At that point, I decided to start from scratch. On that second try, I got someone who could handle my request. They not only apologized but said they were Fed Ex’ing a new cable modem and that if it went out that day (Friday) I might have it by Monday. After that call, I had a message from the person I’d spoken to previously, given me the number I was supposed to call. So props for following up.

I didn’t have to wait until Monday. The modem arrived Saturday. I got it installed, called Cox to activate it, and it is working beautifully.

It goes to show that not only does Cox really have good customer service, but when they slip, they make up for it quickly.

Still listening to Craig Wasson read 11/22/63 by Stephen King

I re-read 11/22/63 back in February but since then, someone mentioned that Craig Wasson did a phenomenal reading and so I’ve been reading the book again, this time via Audible and Wasson’s reading. And it is a phenomenal reading. I listen to this reading, and the performance that William Dufris gave for John Scalzi’s The Human Division and I wonder at how wrong I was when I scoffed at audio books as something less than actual reading. The performance dimension, especially when those performances are subtle, add a dimension to the book that simply doesn’t exist when I read the book on the page.

I’ve got several more books lined up after I finish this one, including:

  • The Shining by Stephen King1
  • Danse Macabre by Stephen King
  • The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
  • Double Feature by Owen King
  • Joyland by Stephen King
  • NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

There’s more, of course, but these, in some order, although possibly not as listed above are among those books coming up.

Writing and slogging

Yesterday marked 75 consecutive days of fiction-writing for me, although the last week or so has been difficult. Not finding the time, but finding the will. The story–the longest one I’ve ever written–is slogging a bit and I feel a bit like a man stuck in quicksand. My initial reaction was similar, too, which was a writer’s version of panic. I tried rewriting some scenes that I didn’t think worked. I tried considering a view point. I tried several things, but what occurred to me was that I think I was trying to tell this part of the story from the wrong character’s point of view. I am going back to the original character’s point of view and moving forward from there and we’ll see what happens.

Notes

  1. This is a re-read in preparation for the release of Stephen King’s sequel, Doctor Sleep, later in the fall. ↩

Mother’s Day 2013

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Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and the kids got into it this year a little more than in past years. Kelly went out for a girls night Saturday and when she got home, both kids were asleep in their respective beds, a feat that I’ve now pulled off twice, on each of Kelly’s last two girls nights. I think this was a pretty good pre-Mother’s Day present and it also shows that I am improving1.

One thing the kids did before I got them to bed was to make a Mother’s Day card for Kelly. In the past, I’ve bought a card for them to “sign.” But this time, they made their own card, each of them decorating it in their unique fashions and the cooperated quite nicely while doing this. In the morning, when we were all awake, we gave Kelly her Mother’s Day cards and her Mother’s Day present. This year, I thought I’d come up with a rather clever present. A while back, Kelly directed me2 to a hilarious parenting blog she’d been reading, Crappy Pictures. Some time back, I noted that Amber Dusick, creator and proprietor of said blog came out with a book called Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures. This is what we got for Kelly.

Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures

In the morning, the Little Man played in his first t-ball scrimmage game. It was held indoors, in the gymnasium, because the rains had made the ballfields muddy. He played one inning at first base, and another inning at shortstop and third base. He came to bat twice and I think on the whole, he had fun. It was the most engaged I’d seen him in t-ball so far.

Kelly picked where she wanted to go for brunch and we made advanced reservations, knowing how places book up on Mother’s Day. The place she selected: Bilbo Baggins, a small pub/restaurant in Old Town Alexandria. This was great! They had an amazing beer selection. They even had Old Speckled Hen on draft, so of course I had one of those. I also had their Wooky Jack Black IPA. And to eat, I had their Monte Cristo sandwich, which was very good, and came with an equally good salad.

Afterward, we walked around Old Town for a little while. The Potomac was a rich, muddy brown from all of the recent rains. I think that is my favorite look for that river. There is something about that muddy cast that makes me think of Mark Twain.

In the evening, after we’d all napped, we wrapped up our day with a walk around the park.

I think it turned out to be a nice Mother’s Day.

Notes

  1. Well, what it really shows is the result. It’s like looking at the book on the shelf in the bookstore without seeing all of the trashcans full of crumpled false starts and deleted scenes. It can get pretty chaotic trying to get both kids calmed down, ready for bed, and then into bed and finally asleep. But if the result is the appearance of suavity, I’m cool with that. ↩
  2. I was going to say “turned me on to” but I was afraid that might have been misconstrued. ↩

My Latest Automation: Password Management Plus Improved Security

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One of the benefits I’ve found of going paperless is that it becomes much easier to automate things when the data in question is in digital form and not scribbled on a yellow notepad sitting on your desk. Since I am entirely paperless now, except that paper that comes in over which I have no control, I have been focusing my attention more and more on automating things in my life that shouldn’t require my time. I’ve done this a few time. I’ve automated how I captured data from my writing. I’ve also automated a daily almanac that tells me what I managed to do each day.

Now I am moving into more practical automation. The most practical kind of automation, for me, does a couple things:

  1. It automates something that I do frequently so that I don’t have to do it.
  2. It frees up the time I spend doing #1 so that I can do other things.
  3. It sometimes comes with added bonuses.

In thinking about what to automate next, I tried thinking about what I do during my day, and looking at those things I do frequently. One thing I do frequently is use a lot of online sites and services, each of which has a different account, password, etc., and that means that I am entering various passwords multiple times throughout the day. It also means I have to remember a bunch of passwords, and if I get lazy and reuse passwords, I do so at the risk of compromising my online security.

So I decided to spend this weekend automating my password entry and at the same time, improving my overall security. Below, I describe what I did, but I warn you now, this is not for the faint-of-heart. I probably spent 6-7 hours this weekend doing all of this. I fully expect to recover that time through the automation it allows. But it did take an investment of time.

Before automation

I track all of my online account usage in a spreadsheet. I track the website, the login I use, a code that represents which password I use, when I last changed the password, etc. On Friday, I had 107 sites on my spreadsheet. These represented all kinds of online services, from streaming services like NetFlix to email and productivity services like Google Docs.

Before the weekend, my strategy for passwords was to use about half a dozen of them, and scatter them across all sites by differing levels of security. For sites that required high security, I would use one password; for very low security sites (that I didn’t care much about) I’d use another. This grew to about 6 over time and they were divided up so that if my password was compromised for, say, my social networking sites, it would not be compromised for my email.

I found that despite things like remembering passwords on my home machines, I was still entering passwords a dozen or more times a day. In many of these cases, it was for sites I didn’t access as frequently, and I was constantly checking my spreadsheet to see which login and password to use.

My goals for the weekend were as follows:

  1. Create a unique, strong password for every site. Put another way, never reuse a password. This is the highest level of password security you can get. If someone gets my password for, say, Twitter, that password is only good on Twitter. It won’t work anywhere else. What’s more, it’s a long, randomly-generated string that includes all four classes of password characters (upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols).
  2. Use 2-factor authentication wherever possible. This adds a little overhead to some sites, but it greatly enhances security. What 2-factor authentication means is that when you log into a site, you put in your password, you are then prompted for a code, which is sent to you directly by another means–text message to your phone for instance. You enter the code texted to your phone and then you are allowed into the site. Usually, you only have to do this once per access point. It makes things much more secure because even if someone got my password, they’d be asked for a code and that code would be texted to my phone.
  3. Find a tool that would allow me to automatically log into sites using these passwords. There is no way I am going to memorize 107 unique, long passwords, but there are tools out there that can do this for me. What’s more, they do it securely, and can be added right into my browser so I don’t have to think about it.

After some research, the tool I picked was LastPass. LastPass is a cross-platform browser plugin that does everything I describe above. It manages all of your passwords, it provides a security assessment of your passwords. It can generate passwords for you on the fly, according to a configurable set of rules. It stores the encrypted version of the password in the cloud. But–and this is important–the encryption and decryption is done locally as opposed to LastPass’s servers–making it much more secure. There are apps for the iPhone and iPad, and it works on my Google Chromebook.

How I automated this process

1. I downloaded LastPass, watched the instructional videos and read through some of the documentation. (I am a documentation-first reader.)

2. I installed the LastPass plugin for Google Chrome on my iMac and Chromebook.

3. I created my LastPass account. This involves creating a master password which unlocks everything else.

4. I opened up my spreadsheet, and for each of the 107 accounts/sites listed, I went to the site, logged into the account with my old password, changed the password to one randomly generated by LastPass, updated my spreadsheet and tested out the site to make sure I could still get into it. This took a long time. I think the bulk of my weekend was spent doing this.

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Is It Sunday Evening Already?

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I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe that it is already Sunday evening, the weekend is mostly over, and it all starts over again tomorrow. It has been a busy weekend for me. It started Friday night, when I watched the kids while Kelly had a much-deserved girls night out. Saturday is mostly a blur to me. Today there was t-ball, and watching the Little Miss while the Little Man went to a birthday party. I spent much of my weekend working through my to-do list, and in particular, nearly completing a significant automation project, about which I will have more to say tomorrow.

And I have spend the weekend using my new FitBit Flex, about which I will have more to report on in the near future.

I also managed to break not one, but two pair of sunglasses this weekend, also about which I will have more to say tomorrow.

One of the weekend’s saving graces has been the fact that I’ve been reading–and now nearly finished, The Human Division by John Scalzi. My review of the book should be up at InterGalactic Medicine Show late this week, or early next week, but preview: I am absolutely loving it!

I did get my writing in each day and as of yesterday have now written for 67 consecutive days, although the quality of the last few days leaves something to be desired.  But really, the important thing at this point is that, despite everything, I managed to get the writing done.

How was your weekend?

The Personal Analytics of My Writing and Reading

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It has been a little over 2 months since I put in place automated processes for capturing data about my daily writing, blogging and reading. And given that I have reading, written, and blogged nearly every day for the last two months, it seems like a good time to share some of the numbers with you. First, a quick summary for folks who might not have been following along with this. In addition to having automated scripts to collect my daily activity, like data from my FitBit device, I decided I wanted to collect some data about my other daily activity, particularly my writing and reading. I was able to automate most of this so that I don’t have to think about it.

Collecting the data

I do my fiction writing in Google Docs. I have written a set of Google App scripts that do the following:

  1. Capture each day’s writing in Evernote. This includes highlighting any changes and deletions I’ve made so that I have a complete record of what I did on any given day.
  2. Count how many new words I wrote each day and record them in a Google Spreadsheet.
  3. Summarize my daily writing in an almanac entry that gets sent to Evernote.

Here is what my almanac note for yesterday’s writing looks like:

Daily Almanac for April 30

In addition to the scripts mentioned above, I have another script that grabs how many words I wrote on my blog for a given day. It does this by parsing the data from my RSS feed.

The only part of my process that is not automated is the daily update of my reading data. Since the vast majority of my reading these last few months has been via Audible, I use the stats produced from the Audible app on my iPhone. Each morning, I update a Google Spreadsheet with the previous days stats. While this is a manual process (for now) it takes less than a minute each morning.

Audible Stats

My daily Audible stats

All of this data resides in Google Spreadsheets, and with the exception of the Audible data, I don’t have to do anything to collect it. I write each day, I blog each day, and the data is collected automatically. That is important because I don’t want to have to spend my time gathering it manually.

Examining the data

First, some basic information about my writing over the last two months:

Month

This table shows how much I’ve written and read over the course of the last two months. As of yesterday, I’ve written fiction for 63 consecutive days. The same is not true for blogging. Still, I’ve written nearly 60,000 words of fiction and 43,000 words of blogging for a grand total of over 100,000 words in 2 months.

When it comes to my fiction writing, I just try to write every day. More and more, I am for at least 500 words. There are days that I don’t hit that mark and others that I far exceed it. In the last two months, it has averaged out to a little over 900 words per day of fiction writing and 700 words per day of blogging.

Many professional full-time writers aim for 2,000 words per day. That’s roughly 10 pages. Between my fiction writing and blogging I am maintaining 1,600 words per day. The thing is, I am not a full time writer. I have a full time day job, and two little kids on top of that. So I think 1,600 words per day is pretty darn good. Of course, only 900 of that is fiction, but if I converted the time I spent blogging to writing fiction (something that I have no immediate plans to do), I could come close to that 2,000 words per day while still doing everything else I do.

On top of all of that, I still manage to get in about 100 hours per month of reading. This is only possible because I started using Audible back in late February, which allows me to read book while I do other things throughout my day. I can read on my morning walks. I can read when I pick the Little Man up from school. I can read when I am doing chores around the house. I can read while I am doing yard work or grocery shopping.  Turns out, I manage to read a little over 3 hours each and every day.

Day-to-day

Plotting all of this data over time allows me to see what a typical day looks like for me when it comes to my writing, blogging, and reading. Below I’ve stacked plots of my fiction writing, blogging and reading over the last two months. Look down across all of them, you can see some interesting things. For instance, surprisingly, it looks like on days when I write a lot of fiction, I also do a fair amount of blogging. I wouldn’t have thought that was the case:

FictionWriting
 Blogging
 Reading

Not only that, but my daily reading also follows the pattern. Peak writing days also appear to be peak reading days. Maybe I get into some kind of zone. Maybe the writing feeds the reading or vice versa. I did a few scatter plots to take a look at this more closely.

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Another Busy Weekend

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Wow, things have been busy! This weekend flew by with barely time to breath, it seemed. On Saturday we took the kids up to the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore to see Thomas the Train. We’ve done it before and they enjoy it. The weather was nice, which was an added bonus. We had a picnic lunch up there with some friends. Then we had to rush back home so that the kids could go to a birthday party Saturday afternoon.

I didn’t go to the birthday party. I used that time to try to relax for a little while. I didn’t read, I didn’t write. I gave my brain a few hours off. I ended up distracting myself by watching Skyfall, which I hadn’t seen yet. It was entertaining, but nothing special. The most remarkable thing I find about James Bond pictures these days is that they’ve been around so long, entire generations have entertained themselves with the films the way I did on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday was another busy day. The Little Man had t-ball bright and early at 9am. When that was over, we had to dash over to a local park for another birthday party. And then, later in the afternoon, we had some friends over. The evening was even more chaotic than usual for a Sunday evening.

I managed to get a good writing session in on Saturday, writing more than 1,100 words. Yesterday, I was lucky to get in 250 words, given how crazy things were last night. But I did get the writing in as I have done now every day for the last 61 days and that makes a big difference.

Even my reading suffered over the weekend. I had been averaging 3-4 hours/day listening to audio books, but I don’t think I cracked 1-1/2 hours either Saturday or Sunday. And of course, I managed to do absolutely no blogging. But I am back today, and tomorrow I’ll have a new Going Paperless post up. I’m really looking forward to my vacation right about now.