najafali.com

Japanalicious Report Part 0: Believing my own bullshit

2011-05-14T16:32:23+01:00

Japanalicious is a little pet project that I'm pinning my hopes on getting me to my goals of 10,000 USD/month and fluent Japanese. In the same vein as Kalzumeus and Balsamiq mockups, I'm going to be as open as possible about the development process.

So far, nothing of note has happened. I've only really started this project over the past month, and that has been spent getting clear about what the product is and what the overall message of my marketing will be.

In this post I'll give a little background as to what Japanalicious is, what I've done so far and what I'm going to do next. It may not be particularly interesting reading for general population, but it's a record for me and anyone else who might be interested in its evolution in the future. Here goes.

Background, or what the hey is Japanalicious?

I've been studying Japanese on and off since 2003, so that means we're coming on to eight years now. At the beginning I never really thought I would become fluent or even remotely good, so I only focused on the spoken language.

Fast forward a few of years and I'm walking down the aisle (albeit in a kimono, with a big long dress hakama), giving my vows in Japanese and having 'The Japan Experience' ™. I have to be near-native now, to achieve my goal of moving back to Japan full-time and having some semblence of a coherent relationship with my future kids.

That means absolute ability with the language. If I had been born and raised in Japan, that's the level of language ability I want to achieve. It will take around twelve years of study (think about it, that's the number of years of full-time education you get in English). My guiding principle for my study of Japanese going forward was if I know it in English, I should know it in Japanese.

But lets be realistic. I can barely keep my focus reading a book or playing a video game. How am I going to learn that level of Japanese, living in the UK, while doing a full-time job with all the other distractions thrown my way? How do I even begin to climb the epic mountain that is studying kanji?

Thankfully, this is a well-trodden path. Many western adventurers before me learned and become proficient with Kanji. Not only have they learned the language well, but created repeatable systems for learning new language that can be modeled and copied by mere mortals like you and me.

One of these systems is spaced repitition. This basically involves creating and reviewing flashcards at spaced intervals. If you do well on a card, it's shown to you at a later date, and if you do badly, it's shown to you much sooner. The more consecutive times you correctly recall the language on a card, the further away the next review for that card is. It's a simple but effective system, that is catered to your particular strengths and maximizes the efficiency of your study time. It's beautiful, elegant and best of all, it works.

Anki is the predominant software used for spaced repititon. It is multi-platform, has a nice user interface and thousands upon thousands of flash card decks that you can add and study. Not only that, but the developer of Anki has perfected the algorithm so that it is as painless as possible for the user. This is an awesome bit of software, and I use it every day to review Japanese language examples.

Japanalicious starts coming together

While Anki is a great bit of kit, it is not without its problems. The program itself is very well executed, but in practice it can become a chore to use.

After my two years in Japan, I came back to the UK and without a job, decided to try my hand at building websites. I wound up as a web developer, and a couple of years later, in my free time, decided to build a web based version of Anki.

Partly this was just to experiment with some new technology I had discovered (rails) and to see if I could do a better job than with Anki. I managed to learn the ins and outs of the framework I was using, but I think saying the finished product was more usable than Anki would be a bit of a stretch.

I did however use my app (CardMonkey) to learn Japanese and got my missus to use it to pass her 'Life in the UK' examination. What I found was that we spent a lot of time entering new content into the application.

Anki mitigates this somewhat by providing public decks that you can import. The problem here is that you lose too much control. You have to take a few thousand new sentences at a time, and at best you'll need to spend hours filtering them for ones you want/don't want at this stage.

To be specific, content entry is the problem I'm talking about. Ideally, I'd like to be able to pick and choose what goes into my flashcard decks but not have to type it in manually.

Since my app never really set out to solve this problem, the app got shelved for a while as I found a new job, and didn't really think about it much after that except in passing.

I knew that I wanted to build something, but I wasn't sure what. I knew that achievements are a fun little addition to any web application so I wanted to build something with those.

A few weeks ago, I was lamenting in the pub to @shuttlebrad that I had no good ideas, and even if I had them, I didn't have the focus and drive to really run with them. Brad is hard at work at his own start-up at splitsies.org.

Brad was kind enough to humour me and let me talk through a few of the ideas floating around in my head when the idea of a Japanese related flashcard app came up. Though I may not have been focusing on it consciously, it appeared as though the idea had been gestating beneath the surface. The conclusion of that little interaction was that I need to get started and make it happen.

About Japanalicious

So where did we get up to? Oh yes, it's going to be a web-based application that allows you to review Japanese language flashcards using a spaced-repitition algorithm. That's the elevator pitch at least. The devil however is in the details.

The problem I identified earlier was content entry i.e. it's a major ballache to have to type out the contents of flashcards by hand. This is a problem that japanalicious will solve, without forcing you to import thousands of cards worth of language at a time.

There exists public domain Japanese dictionary files that have linked and indexed Japanese example sentences, in the order of tens of thousands. In the public domain.

A common situation I found myself with using Anki was going to Jim Breens Japanese dictionary, finding a new word, then clicking through to the example sentences and adding a few of those to my SRS deck. Sentences are as important as words, if not more so, as they do so much good for your understanding of the language. A sentence gives you context for whatever new word you're learning, an example of grammar, and is very likely to provide you with examples of new words and structures that you don't know yet, pushing your mental picture of the language as a whole. Sentences are awesome, and we want more of them.

But too hard and they become useless. Good sentences for learning language have maybe one or two words or grammatical structures that you don't understand. If you understand none of a new sentence, then it doesn't feel particularly useful (though, undoubtedly on a subconscious level at least, your brain will be filing it away as a reference for future use).

You might say that if Anki provided a 'public deck browser' that allowed you to cherry pick cards out of a deck, then it would solve this problem. In 2003 sure. But this is 2011! We don't force you to trawl through data looking for what you want, we recommend it to you!

Alongside acting as a basic flashcard application, we can very easily present content to our users that has a good chance at being 'just about' the right level for them. We could for example, present sentences to a user where they know all but one of the included vocabulary. We know what vocabulary a user 'knows' because of their flashcard behaviour, so we can work with this data and make recommendations to the user as we see fit.

Adding a card would be as simple as clicking an 'add card' button next to a recommendation. If at all possible, I don't even want to give the user a 'manage cards' section. They should just be worried about doing their reviews and not much else.

Note that while Anki is a general-purpose flashcard tool (you can use it to learn any language or subject that requires rote memorization of facts), Japanalicious is focused on Japanese. This makes my market a little smaller, but allows me to focus right down on what features would be awesome for intermediate/advanced Japanese language learners.

Development

The application as I've described it here presents a lot of fun technical problems. As a programmer, architecting a system together, using the technologies I've slowly become familiar with over the years, put together in a novel and interesting way is a hell of a lot of fun. This is great, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's also the reason why I don't think that development will start until late 2011/early 2012.

Why you ask? Because building this application is a fun problem, but not a particularly hard or important one. I can fix the user interface as I go, refine the various algorithms as I go, hone the technology and the architecture. All of those things make sense to me, and I have a clear idea of how I'm going to start, develop and maintain the technical implementation.

The harder, much more important problem is that of marketing the product and actually getting people to use it. CardMonkey had a grand total of two users. Me, and my wife. This time, things are going to be different. Before I write a single line of code, I want to build up a following around the Japanalicious 'brand'. Once I've got that, I will have an audience that I'm hoping will translate into the first users of the beta version of Japanalicious.

To this end, I've started the a blog at http://blog.japanalicious.com/ and I'm using this as the focal point of my marketing efforts. I've put a few blog posts up that I think will be relevant to japanalicious and my target market (i.e. intermediate/advanced students of Japanese).

I've found that video works really well with building rapport on on the internet, so in early June, I'm going to team up with fellow Japanophile and Neuroscience PHD, Matthew Thakur to host a 'Random Japanalicious Topics Show'. I'm not sure how well our meandering Japan related conversations will translate to video but it will be good fun to make.

Much of this month was spent hashing the ideas out with whoever will listen and trying to get clear about what Japanalicious will and will not be. A lot of this work is mental, I can't point to a bit of code or a web site and say 'hey, I got that done'. I have however gained a great deal of clarity as to what I'm building, why I'm doing it and perhaps how to get started.

Going forward

There is no overall strategy for marketing right now apart from 'make a lot of Japan-related noise and be nice to everyone that listens'. For the time being I'm fine with that. If and when the blog traffic and general following behind Japanalicious picks up, I'll let myself get started on putting this app together and making marketing a little more focused on it.

Until then, expect a lot of general-interest Japan related content at blog.japanalicious.com, followed by our topics show in June.

Online Marketing and Self-Promotion for Developers

2011-05-02T18:48:44+01:00

For developers like me who have great ideas for web applications but no ideas about how to market them, there's a lot of frustration to be had in creating web projects and enduring the agonizing silence of zero users.

Marketing, just like programming isn't a skill we're born with. It's something we can learn, and in this post I'm going to see if I can identify a good place to start.

You're going to suck at this for a while

Do you remember what it was like when you first started out programming?

If you were anything like me, it wasn't a simple case of following a bunch of tutorials from start to finish.

For the first few years at least, it involves making a lot of silly, annoying mistakes, time and time again until you don't make them anymore. Syntax or semantic mistakes that took you hours to trace through the first time take mere seconds after you've seen enough similar problems.

Learning any new skill is going to have this initial frustrating phase where you're making lots of mistakes before you have that raw, unconscious competence that allows you to instinctively sniff out common bugs and mentally map out execution path after a cursory glance at code.

The way you got this confidence was by failing, lots and lots, until you became really familiar with the ways you can fail and how to avoid them in the future. Josh Waitzkin refers to this as 'Investing in Failure' in his thoroughly awesome book The Art of Learning.

When you fail in programming, your application doesn't behave in exactly the way you expect it to.

When you fail in marketing or self-promotion, you get crickets. No one is listening to you, no one really cares what you have to say. Much like syntax errors that took hours to solve, a lot of your first forays into marketing might be you shouting into the void, with no one giving you any feedback.

What if you had stopped programming when you came accross annoying, frustrating bugs that you couldn't fix? You'd probably never have made it to being a professional web developer. Instead, you grit your teeth, rolled up your sleeves and rambo'd through your issues until you got your code working. It did what you expected it to do because you learned on the job, found the source of the problem and fixed it.

In the same way , you might have to spend the first few months or even years of marketing your application, online persona or whatever else it is you're trying to get out there in relative obscurity while you make small, incremental improvements that slowly build up your core competence for marketing.

Examples of people better than you

So now that we've established that as an online marketing newbie, I'm going to suck until I get good, what can we do to get started?

Let's take a look at some examples of people that are good at marketing and see if we can steal any interesting concepts, ideas or methods for getting good at this.

Tim Ferris has got self-promotion down to an art form. To me his content is pretty good and I've used a lot of it to make personal changes, but as an example of self-promotion he's got his technique down pat.

We can take a few things away from Tim:

Write good, useful content
Associate yourself with other popular people (e.g. Kevin Rose)
Have a presence on at least twitter, facebook and a personal blog

Another example that I like is Sebastian Marshall. he does a couple of fun and interesting things that you can take away when studying marketing and self-promotion:

Write, a metric fuckload.
Engage readers individually

Sebastian is a good example because he's up and coming and so getting to where he is is not entirely outside the realm of possibility for someone new to online marketing. "Getting higher on the amazon bestseller list" is one of Tim Ferris's goals, "Getting a thousand RSS feed subscribers" is something that we can at least possibly imagine ourselves doing.

While the 'engage readers individually' part doesn't necessarily scale to thousands and thousands of readers, it works really well for building a connection with readers that you do have. This in turn creates an exponential effect, where these readers get to know you and then refer your content on to other people.

Sebastian also writes a shit-ton of content. Almost daily I open up my RSS reader and there's a new blog post from him. While his insights aren't always earth-shattering, he does post the occasional gem that resonates on some level with my worldview and makes for compelling reading.

MyGengo.com is another website I see making the rounds on HN. I get the feeling that much of their blog/marketing efforts are centred around getting developers to work using their translation platform, and to recruit developers to work for them.

Good stuff that they do:

Regularly update their blog with relevant content from across their company

This in itself is important. According to this post, everyone in the company blogs for one hour a week, so they are never short of marketing content.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? I could spout of tens more examples. Ramit Sethi, Seth Godin, Coding Horror. Whats the one basic thing that they all do regularly?

Generate Content

Content is the basic currency of the internet, and in order to build any kind of following, you're going to have to generate a lot of it.

Code is a way of expressing ourselves. We take a lot of complex ideas and break them down, initially in a way that computers can understand them but eventually, in a way that other humans looking at your code can understand them too.

As developers we have this ability to express ourselves in code, but this doesn't necessarily translate to an abiilty to express ourselves in writing.

It's an important skill to have, and the only way to do improve it is to do more of it. This is the same for programming as it is for writing.

An initial problem with generating content is that quite simply, you don't have much to say. This is a problem that needs fixing. This is like saying, as a newbie programmer, that you don't have much to create.

One solution to this that I've found helps is the practice of 'freewriting'. In his book The Accidental Genius, Mark Levy writes about this technique and how it can help you to capture ideas that you have vaguely swimming around in your head and want to pin down and refine.

In a nutshell, it involves spending around fifteen minutes of high-speed, focused writing on a particular subject to get all of your thoughts about it out of your head and onto paper (or as it were, a text file). You're free to meander, to flip whatever concept you're considering on its head and experiment with your ideas without censoring them in any way.

This has a number of benefits, not least of which is getting clarity on your message. Just what worldview or idea are you trying to sell through your marketing activities? Getting this straight in your head gives you a 'centre of gravity' around which to focus your marketing efforts.

Focusing on your attention on the problem of 'What should I create content about' and then writing freely about that problem, almost talking to yourself about it will give you a lot of ideas. If it's focused on a particular product or idea that you're selling, you'll be able to consider multiple angles on the idea and make refinements to your message.

Once you get clear on what you want to write, podcast or create videos about, you can then also apply freewriting to the actual topics you've chosen. And start the processing of generating content on them.

There are a lot of other things to worry about when marketing, but generating content seems to be a common trait amongst those who are doing well at marketing themselves in general. For that reason, on the long road to competence at this subject, learning to generate content in a regular and consistent way seems to be a good first skill to develop.

What next?

If you're regularly pushing out content that people read, comment on and react to in some form or another, then congratulations. You have a 'following'. Everything going forward is just you tweaking your method and increasing your numbers. There's a million and one techniques you can use to grow your following from then on.

If however you're a little like me and you don't immediately get thousands of adulating fans, then it's simple a case of plugging away, creating content and trying new things until someone actually reads and enjoys your content. You might want to experiment with posting your content on news aggregators that are relevant to your niche/topic if that makes sense, tweeting links to them or otherwise promoting them on popular websites that people go to for content.

How to get out of a slump

2011-05-01T22:04:00+01:00

About two months ago I was on. I was getting up at 5am every day, following a strict slow-carb diet, writing four or five blog posts at a time and generally owning life. Times were good.

Fast forward to today and I'm just about squeezing out one post a month, waking up around 8-9ish and have just topped off my second beer of the day after a mcdonalds lunch and a bowl of streaky beef on rice for dinner... what went wrong?

Motivation is Cyclical

No matter how much we want to deny it, motivation is cyclical. Sometimes you line up some of your ducks in a row and get good habits working really well for you, and other times you fall out of them and things detereorate.

Rather than fight against this cycle, it's better to ride it when you can. It's not so much of an issue for ingrained habits, more for things you are actively working on changing.

For example, as a professional programmer, I can start and continue programming projects with or without a great deal of motivation. They don't necessarily require much effort on my part.

Doing exercise, focusing on my diet or writing blog posts are not however part of my core competencies, and so require a little more effort. It's activities like these that fall by the wayside when I'm not feeling super motivated.

Falling behind on your new habits or anything you're putting effort into can turn into a vicious cycle of demotivation. You get into a slump, and don't trust yourself to stick to a plan to get out of it. This sucks.

Learning to forgive yourself

Whatever 'system' you have for tracking your goals or managing your productivity, you need to be able to forgive yourself for not following it to perfection. If you don't, then you'll constantly be fighting the nagging feeling that even if you do set up a new system, you can't be sure that you'll follow it.

Instead, set up your 'system' knowing that you might not follow it sometimes. That way when you inevitably do waiver, you can easily come back to it guilt-free.

A Journaling Habit

For me, a simple 'system' is to write a journal. The journal doesn't have to be updated daily and doesn't necessarily have any structure. After experimenting with various formats, a single file that I add entries works well.

Since there's no structure, and no requirement to make a daily entry, you can dip back into your journal whenever you're feeling unmotivated and assess the current status of your goals, what you managed to get done and how you can start clawing your way out of this slump.

Focus on simple, basic habits

Whatever your goals were, getting down to the simple daily habits that bring incremental improvement is what will pull you out of the slump. While writing a journal will help to get your head in order, actually carrying out the habits you've fallen out of is what's required here.

For exercise that might be going for a 1 mile run every day.

For diet it could be actually sticking to slow carb.

For writing, it could be writing a single blog post every day for the next week.

When you focus on these daily habits, actually carry them out for a while, you'll find yourself on the other side of the slump and the cycle will continue. Enjoy the good times while they last and be ready for the next one.

Finding awe in science

2011-04-10T21:36:45+01:00

Science is a lot more fantastical than anything in religion, but we're not necessarily taught this in school.

What Religion Gives Us

The science we're taught in school is interesting, but can often feel like a presentation of randomly arranged facts and discoveries. Taken as a whole they provide us with what society feels is the bare minimum that we need to understand about the world around us.

It's no surprise then, that this doesn't inspire the same wonder, fervour and passion that religion does. We love a good story, and the mainstream religions provide stories with epic narrative spanning thousands of years.

Religion gives us a lot of emotionally satisfying things. It gives us connection with other people who agree with us. It gives us a colours to wear and a cause to fight for. It gives us stories to believe in, with engaging characters and allusions to a 'higher truth'.

I argue that science gives us these things too, but they are much less publicized than religion. If you want an epic quest, interesting characters, a and connection with the universe, then science has all those things. You just have to know where to look for them.

Finding inspiration in science

For people like me who aren't professional scientists but remember a thing or two from school, popular science is a good place to start.

The documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by the late Dr. Carl Sagan, is interesting in that it's the only series on science that pulls all the threads of human knowledge together into a great big adventure story. Sagan was an astrophysicist who passed away in the late 90's.

What's special about this documentary series is not necessarily the content (which is quite awesome in itself) but the way it's presented. Rather than a dry series of interesting facts, Sagan weaves together a narrative, starting from the first hydrogen atoms in the big bang and ending with humans 'waking up' to the universe and the scientific method in the classical, renaissance and modern eras.

Sagans take on science satisfies a lot of the emotional requirements that religion might have done before.

Connectedness. He makes a point that not only are we genetically the same as each other, but all life is connected, made from the same matter ejected from dying stars billions of years ago. You, me, everything around you, is quite literally 'one with the universe'.

A cause to fight for. As stewards of our planet, how good a job are we doing? Sagan presents this question in a haunting metaphor at the end of his series. As a space explorer in 'Our Ship of the Imagination', he discovers a planet covered in dark clouds. He picks up TV/radio broadcasts, but arrives to find the planet desolated by a nuclear winter, with no life to be found. The planet is Earth.

A Story. There are two stories that Sagan presents that are compelling:

The scientific 'creation story' is epic. Hydrogen atoms in space clumped together into stars, died in huge explosions sending heavier elements into space that turned into planets, the matter on which slowly evolved into life that is now just about clever enough to figure this story out. This includes you, the bacteria covering your body, the people around you, the seat you're sitting on, everything.

Secondly, the 'quest for knowledge'. Starting from ancient egyptions and greek philosophers and continuing to modern discoveries in quantum physics, Sagan shows that the amount we've figured out so far is barely scratching the surface of understanding the world around us. We've come along way since the dark ages, but still maintain a sort of consciousness debt that at times can hold us back as a species.

A higher truth. Science, crucially, doesn't claim to have all the answers. The definition of the scientific method that I'm describing sounds something like this:

Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false.

Wikipedia Article on Karl Popper # Philosophy of Science

In other words No theory can be proved by experiment, and a single counterexample is enough to disprove a theory.

Where Cosmos really does well though is at the end, where Sagan essentially leaves it to the viewer to figure out what happens next. Will we use our new technology to blow each other to pieces, or will we use it to increase our overall quality of life in a sustainable way and perhaps one day venture to the stars?

While Sagans documentary is definitely inspiring, it won't give you a great deal of knowledge that you don't already have after going through a decent education. It would be absolutely mindblowing for someone who hasn't had that experience.

For a little more depth (and completeness) Bill Brysons A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good place to go next. In it he covers much the same ground as Sagan does, along with forays into geology, archeology, genetics and evolutionary biology. Some parts of his book can get a little dry, but he spends a lot of time characterizing the scientists and the often accidental nature of their discoveries.

Some might argue that science should be a cold and dry subject, separate from human emotion. To this I'd answer that, theories in science should be discarded dispassionately if they are disproved by evidence. However for the scientific process itself is part ofthe grand quest to deepen our understanding of the universe, and I'd argue that there's nothing more awe-inspring.

My Goals

2011-03-11T07:00:38+00:00

This post will be entirely useless to everyone but me. Move along, nothing to see here...

Why write this?

Every sunday I scribble out a few notes about the week just gone past. I started doing this when I realized that I was flitting around from one project to the other depending on the week, and was wondering why I never got anything finished.

At the top of every entry, I write my goals. I don't copy from last week, I just re-write the goals to remind myself what I'm working towards. In this post I want to write about why I want these things, what the current status on each of these is and how I'm going to achieve them.

Making these goals public is my equivalent of choosing a pocket before sinking the eight-ball. I want to achieve these things before I turn 30. I'm 25 now.

1: Earn $10,000 USD per month from a web-based, semi-passive income source

This is a reification of the general goal of 'financial freedom'. When I say $10,000 USD per month, I mean an amount that allows me to live comfortably and put away enough to have the security of a big wad of cash in the bank after a few years.

Since I'm a web developer, the most likely method for me achieving this goal is going to be some sort of web based business.

By semi-passive I mean that while whatever system I create to bring in this cash will be largely automated (be that with outsourced staff, clever software etc) it will still require some general overseeing on my part. My primary role will be to automate processes and create new projects.

Why do I want this?

Time. I don't want to trade time for money anymore. While I can use my free time for my own personal interests, my life purpose, the reason I get up five days a week is to work on helping someone else get rich. I want my time for me, to read books, to write, to create fun projects, to learn to surf, to take long hikes, to raise kids and generally live a full and rich life without giving eight hours a day to someone else. No matter how awesome a company or job might be, it's not mine.

Current status

I'm earning a grand total of $0 USD per month passively.

How I'm going to get it

There are a couple of potential avenues.

A paid-subscription web application
Affiliate marketing

I feel more right about building a paid-for web application than affiliate marketing, but my concerns would be easily assuaged by a steady paycheck. If people actually click through and bought something then surely the marketing is working right?

For either of these however, SEO and online marketing will largely dictate how successful they are. That is the purpose of this blog. It is largely an exercise in creating content and marketing it. Once I've got a steady readership with this blog, I'll apply what I've learned here to one of those two potential projects and see what happens next.

2: Live in Japan and function in the Japanese language at a near-native level

When I say live in Japan, I'd like to live in a relatively small city like Fukuoka or Sendai.

By function in the Japanese language, I want to be able to read, speak and write in the language at the same level as a native. I want to be able to laugh at the jokes, get the cultural nuance and generally upset Japanese people who don't think it's possible for a foreigner to do these things.

I will add one caveat to this goal, it has a dependency on goal 1; I need to be paying my own way. I'm not physically capable of being an underpaid programmer, burned out salaryman or carreer English teacher.

Why do I want this?

This one is hard to explain.

I'm card-carrying Japanophile. I don't like anime or JPOP or any of the silly bubblegum things about Japan. While Japan is quirky and fun and all that craziness is good times, there's a deep sense of adventure I get when I think about the place. While I lived there I had more or less free reign to explore and get into all sorts of trouble, so I will always associate it with that sort of freedom.

I have been accused at times of seeing the place in with rose-tinted glasses (this is the opening line of every disgruntled JET to accost me with their complaints about Japan). I'm not claiming it's perfect, there are some things about the country that are rotten to the core and the economy is, in my humble opinion, a sinking ship.

For me, the quality of life is better over there. Good service, cleanliness, tasty food and general standards for politeness are things you really, really miss when you come back to London.

Current Status

This goal boils down to three things. Goal 1, saving about £10,000 for moving and studying Japanese.

On the savings front, while I put away a lot of money every month, none of it is earmarked for the move to Japan yet.

On studying Japanese, my spoken Japanese is pretty good. My reading-comprehension and writing however are basic and my vocabulary is small.

How I'm going to do this

Actually moving to Japan is incident with Goal 1. The freedom to move there is just a question of having cash in hand and an income to support me.

Studying Japanese on the other hand requires daily, incremental work. There's no automated shortcut to this. If I want to become a native, then I'll need the same native 12-year education.

3: Have a body fat percentage of less than 20%

My weight at it's maximum was 120kg at 16 years old. I have always had an impressive set of manboobs, and have never felt as though I was at a 'normal' weight. It's time for this to stop, and my 20s is prime time to get this problem solved for a number of reasons:

I have the testosterone levels and metabolism of a 25 year old (because... I'm 25). I won't have this forever.
I have the discipline to do it. I've worked up to the stage where I can do this.

Why do I want this?

Two reasons:

To enjoy physical activity more. While I've done martial arts in the past, I gassed out at most practices after the first ten to twenty minutes.
To be a complete human being. Letting yourself go is a basic dereliction of your physical self. It's the physical equivalent of not reading books, reading ridiculous right-wing newspapers and watching crappy movies.

Current Status

Not measured, but my current BMI works out to 24.4 (just inside 'normal weight'). I've gone from 84kg to 73kg in about two and a half months, so getting there but slowly.

How I'm going to do this

There are three ways to lose weight:

Diet
Exercise
Drugs

Up until now I have been exclusively dieting to lose weight and it has worked quite well.

I've done no exercise whatsoever, and this is probably where I can make the biggest gains. Now that it's getting warmer and 'm waking up regularly at 5am, running a few miles and doing some bodyweight exercises before breakfast would probably send my weight spiralling.

I'm not entertaining the idea of taking drugs to lose weight. I don't want to lose ALL bodyfat, just enough to be healthy and predominantly muscular. For now, I can do this without drugs and any negative side-effects they might have.

Wrap Up

TL&DR: I want

$10,000 USD per month, automated
To be a native Japanese speaker, living in japan
To have a body fat percentage of less than 20%

If I have these things by 30, I will have a good foundation from which to do whatever I want to next.

How to make an Omelette

2011-02-24T21:52:58+00:00

Omelettes are easy to make, extremely good for you and taste great. As part of the slow carb diet, I have one of these a day, plus an additional fried egg. I'm not all that great in the kitchen but here's my basic omelette recipe.

I've dumbed it down a little to be as easy as humanly possible, doesn't take away from the actual recipe, you still get a pretty damn good omelette. The goal is to get it creamy on the inside but almost al dente on the outside.

After you've done it a few times, it's easy to add the extra goodies in advanced tactics.

Step 1: Prepare the egg mixture

Break two eggs into a small, deep bowl (the sort you would eat a bowl of cereal out of). Add some salt and pepper, and then beat it with a fork for about a minute. You can actually count to 60 in your head, it doesn't need to be exact.

If you want, you can skip the salt and grate some cheese into the bowl at this stage. A bit of parmesan and a lot of some other cheese goes well.

Make sure you get the mixture nice and even, so there's not too much free white goop later. A little bit is expected, but you'll cook it all off.

Step 2: Prepare the pan

Get a small clump of butter (at least enough to cover the pan, no maximum), put it in a small (15-20cm diameter) frying pan, and turn the heat up all the way. You need to get that thing as hot as the fires of hell.

The butter will start foaming and spitting, then go quiet, and then go brown. Smoke will start to come out of the pan. That's when it's ready.

Step 3: Cook the omelette

This will be over in under a minute, so you have to act reasonably fast.

With your fork/chopsticks/cooking implement in one hand and the bowl with the egg mixture into the other, pour the egg mixture into the screaming hot pan.

As soon as it hits the pan, you'll see the edges start to cook. Get your fork and pull the cooked edges at the top of the pan gently into the centre, leaning the mixture into the space left behind if you need to.

Then go to the right of the pan, pull that cooked edge into the centre, and lean the pan right to get mixture into the space left behind.

Keep working around the pan, moving any cooked edges into the center until you've got no more liquid mixture left to play with. The omelette should be creamy in the centre.

Wait ten or twenty seconds like this to allow the outside of the omelette to solidify.

Now hold the frying pan handle with one hand and with the other, using a fork scrape around the edge of the omelette on one side and roll it inwards. Keep rolling until you get to the other edge of the pan and tip the omelette onto your plate.

A few grinds of salt and pepper and that's it, instant tasty omelette!

Advanced Tactics

Once you've got that basic recipe figured out, there's a number of things you can do to make it more interesting.

Heat and mix - To save time, I normally start the pan up first and then break the eggs into the bowl and start beating the eggs. By the time I'm done, the pan and eggs are ready to go.
Less beating - Real omelettes don't need beating. According to Elizabeth Davids French Provincial Cooking a few quick turns with a fork are all you need. Enough to break the yolks and whirl them around a little is enough for me. This makes it slightly harder to round up all the rogue white goop at the end but results in a lighter texture overall.
Slow Cook - To make it a little more even in cookedness gradient, you can start cooking the omelette just after the butter starts foaming. You still want it on max heat, you just start cooking earlier. This makes it harder to tell when to start turning the omelette in, but it's easy once you've done it a few times in 'fires of hell' mode. Combine this with less beating as mentioned above and you get a much silkier, flavour-packed omelette (oh it's good).
Tasty Filling - The trick with this is not to fill the omelette to the brim. Something small and tasty to give it a nicer flavour is all you need. A very thin slice of bacon or ham goes well. Pate-moi's mushroom pate inside an omelette is a veritable culinary orgasm, but alas, not permissable when slow-carbing. Remember that if the filling is salty (like bacon or pate) then you'll have to go easy on the salt when preparing the mixture.
Melted Butter - in that screaming hot pan, after you get the omelette onto your plate, melt some butter quickly and pour it onto your omelette before it goes brown. Mmmmm.

All of this is a waste if you don't use good ingredients though. Good free-range eggs, salt/peppers out of grinders (not shakers!) and good tasty cheese. With ingredients like that, it's really hard to mess this recipe up.

The Slow Carb Diet - the diet I'm on that allows me to each so much egg
Book Review: The Four Hour Body - the book I learned about that diet from

0 to 15,000 visits in 24 hours: How I did it, what I learned

2011-02-23T19:37:14+00:00

Yesterday I posted a rant about how much I prefer ruby over PHP. It wasn't exactly Pulitzer Prize winning material, but fifteen thousand visits and more than a hundred and fifty comments later, it's time to brag about stats!

The Experiment, or how to piss off a lot of grumpy PHP developers

This blog and all the articles on it are a learning exercise. My primary goal is to learn about SEO and web-based marketing. If I become a slightly better than mediocre writer along the way, thats a bonus.

To do this, my plan is simple:

Write lots of posts, and try to make them at least a little interesting
Occasionally submit them to content aggregators
Go to step 1

Up until yesterday, my posts were bringing in about the region of ten visits per day.

With the most recent post on "why php is better than ruby", I submitted the post to Hacker News and tweeted a link to it.

It wasn't a well written post. While some of the more lenient commenters saw the funny side and described it as 'satire', it was really just me being overly cynical about being stuck with PHP for the majority of the day.

I expected a couple of hundred visits, a few angry comments and with a little luck a few comments from people who agreed with me.

The Results, or what the hey? 15,000 hits!!!

The next day, analytics looked like this:

Throughout the course of the day I gained more than forty new twitter followers and there were about one hundred comments on the post. Feedburner shows eighteen new subscribers.

In the grand scheme of things this isn't all that much. But for me it's the singlest greatest number of people that have looked at a website or blog post entirely of my creation. Needless to say, there was much high-fiving going on in the office that day.

Traffic Sources

Direct traffic brought in the greatest number of hits at around 7000. I'm not sure exactly what this represents apart from simply not having a referrer set. I'd like to think that it's people passing the link around in emails and IM windows, but filed under 'unknown' for now.
reddit comes next, which is nice because I didn't actually submit it there. It was summarily trashed.
Hacker News brought in roughly the same amount of traffic. The article didn't go down too well there either.
twitter came next, and it was happily retweeted around by both people who liked it and hated it.

Content

So it looks like a lot of people went from the article to the homepage/about page, and went to a broad smattering of other pages. With an exit rate of 88%, let's say the remaining 1600 spent some time on the site. Out of the remainder, a good percentage appeared to have visited other pages before exiting.

Analysis

15,000 visits but only 18 subscribers? - I need a more prominent link to the RSS feed, probably at the end of each post.
90+% bounce rate - Not sure how to fix this apart from changing the design in a way that hooks visitors.
80+% exit rate - For the readers who are sticking around, they need a place to go when they get to the bottom of a post.

What sucked about it

This is definitely a short term spike in traffic and I'm expecting it to return to something like regular levels by the end of the week. Personally, I'm not too keen on the strategy of posting inflammatory content to news aggregators to build traffic (or at least, the right kind of traffic). I'm going to need to work on a slightly more long term strategy.

I'm not exactly proud of the content of the post. While it was fun to write, I would have felt a lot better if I had made a more... shall we say productive first impression on the internet at large. But hey...

What didn't suck too bad

15,000+ visits! Epic re-tweetery! I probably won't be as excited about this going forward, but it's nice to get a bit of recognition. Like a lot of people, I've been stopping and starting blogs for about five or six years now (and written much better content than what's in that post). It's nice to actually have people read your stuff and link to it. Thanks to everyone who read and commented!

The post itself: Why PHP is better than Ruby

Why PHP is better than Ruby

2011-02-21T14:59:31+00:00

PHP is better than ruby. There, I said it. In this article I'm going to show you why, and probably upset some twenty-something, flip-flop clad, mac-using hippie fanboys in the process.

In Ruby, everything is an object... even literals!

This is just nuts. I don't know how ruby developers can call themselves real programmers. In PHP we don't believe in a standard interface. We celebrate our diversity. Is it hayatack, needle or needle, haystack? Should we call a method on an object or pass it into a function? Should we do both and code in various different styles just to make life interesting?

Compared to the daily adventure of figuring out how PHP works, Ruby is boring. Take string processing functions. To do a simple string-replace in Ruby, you have to call a function on your string literal, not pass it into a string processing function. What sort of object-oriented crack was Matz smoking? This takes all the enjoyment out of programming!

<?php
//replace foo with bar the sensible, PHP way
str_replace('foo', 'bar', 'I eat food and play football')
# I eat bard and play bartball

#What ragamuffin thought up this object-oriented codswallop?
"I eat food and play football".gsub('foo', 'bar')

Also, I get the feeling that the developers of ruby were being deliberately facetious when they thought up the language. Fine, let's go as far as agreeing that everything is an object. But even classes? "Classes are objects of class Class"? Surely someones having a laugh at those poor ruby developers expense.

Ruby's syntax is impossible to understand!

Ruby has some crazy labrynthian syntax quirks that are impossible to understand for normal human beings. Take a look at this for example:

class Address
    attr_accessor :name, :line1, :line2, :county, :postcode, :country

    def Address.valid_postcode?(string)
        #true for valid postcode, false otherwise
    end

    def initialize(data)
        if data[:postcode]
            raise "Invalid postcode" unless Address.valid_postcode?(data[:postcode])
        end
    end

end

This code is incomprehensible... First of all, there are no curly braces anywhere. Curly braces make me feel safe and loved, and I don't see any curly braces here. Also, I lose all sense of balance if I don't have paranthesis. Although too many parenthesis is a bad thing (don't get me started on how much I hate Lisp), surely we need them for conditionals? Function parameters? Can no one else see the madness here?!

PHP allows me to practice my typing skills, ruby doesn't

As a touch-typing enthusiast, I like to practice typing. The problem with ruby is that it allows me to do the same things that I can do in PHP, but with much less typing. Take a look at this example of a simple class with getters and setters in PHP, and then in Ruby:

<?php

class Address
{
    private $name;
    private $line1;
    private $line2;
    private $county;
    private $postcode;
    private $country;

    public function getName() {
        return $this->name;
    }

    public function getLine1() {
        return $this->line1;
    }

    public function getLine2() {
        return $this->line1;
    }

    public function getCounty() {
        return $this->county;
    }

    public function getPostcode() {
        return $this->postcode;
    }

    public function getCountry() {
        return $this->country;
    }

    public function setName($newName) {
        $this->name = $newName;
    }

    public function setLine1($newLine1) {
        $this->line1 = $newLine1;
    }

    public function setLine2($newLine2) {
        $this->line2 = $newLine2;
    }

    public function setCounty($newCounty) {
        $this->county = $newCounty;
    }

    public function setPostcode($newPostcode) {
        $this->postcode = $newPostcode;
    }

    public function setCountry($newCountry) {
        $this->country = $newCountry;
    }
}

And now look at the same thing, with the same access in ruby...

class Address
    attr_accessor :name, :line1, :line2, :county, :postcode, :country
end

That is too short to be of any use to anyone. If I could create classes with public getters/setters that easily in my day-job, my fingers would atrophe and I'd get no exercise at all. I want my keyboard smoking after typing out a class definition, and a paltry three lines of ruby fails to satisfy.

Also, bugs caused by typos are the highlight of my day, and prefer a syntax that allows me to write as many of those as I can. Ignore that blasphemous ruby code with it's concise, expressive syntax. Focus on those warm, safe curly braces. There, that's better...

Ruby doesn't let you create arbitrary public members on objects!

One killer feature of PHP is the ability to set arbitrary public attributes on objects by default. Take a look at this PHP code:

<?php

class Address {
    //as above..
}

$address = new Address();
$address->xCoordinate = 54;
$address->yCoordinate = 73;

So you can put arbitrary data on an object wherever you like in your code! Furthermore, you don't have to declare it, document it or refer to it in any way. Feel free to write code in other parts of your system that rely on these public values being set. This is great for job security, as no one else will want or be able to understand how your code works.

Ruby let's you redefine classes, whenever the hell you want, including the standard library!

In ruby, you can do this:

# the class for integers in ruby
class FixNum
    def +(adder)
        self - adder
    end
end

## that's correct biyotches, I just turned addition into subtraction

There has got to be something wrong with a language that allows you to subvert the rules of basic arithmetic!

On a more serious note, developers are inherently stupid. And evil. Given the opportunity, they will check pure horseshit into version control and simply cannot be held accountable for their actions. Having a feature that allows you to re-write language fundamentals at will is just asking for trouble from all the stupid, malicious developers in your organization.

In the most extreme cases, ruby developers in their natural habitat have been reported to create entire sub-dialects of the language, reshaping the language for their given domain. Whatever you do, don't let this sort of heretical madness into your organization.

Conclusion

I've made my case, ruby is impossible to understand and gives developers seemingly arbitrary control over the language. I thoroughly recommend you reconsider before attempting to learn ruby. It's like a zombie infection, before you know it you'll be using git for version control, working from home in textmate and bizarre functional programming paradigms will start making their way into your PHP.

You've been warned.

Update: Thanks for all the comments guys! Some of them quite funny, others informative and others just downright confused. I'm going to wrap things up with this posts comments now as the conversations dragging on a little. In the meantime, have a look at the traffic stats for this post.

9 Self Help Books That Don't Entirely Suck

2011-02-20T21:52:27+00:00

Self help books suck. They are filled with sales hype, long motivational monologue and little useful content. Some are worth a mention, but even then, you'll need to apply common sense to filter out the tripe from the actionable information.

I started reading about personal development before university and overall it has had a significant impact on how I live. Not all self-help books are created equal, there is a lot of trash out there. After reading a few books with similar themes, you learn to filter out the usable content from the hype.

For each of these books/resources, I've listed the lasting important message that each has left with me looking back. Different people reading the same material will take different things from it, so as we programmers say, your mileage may vary.

StevePavlina.com

Make changes in small steps.

Not a book, but a website/blog, stevepavlina.com. Steves site has a lot of content on it, some of it really, really good. He has very long articles by any standard, so they're good if you want deep examinations of all the big questions. He also has a book out which is quite good, but you can get a lot of really solid content from his website about productivity, personal development, discipline etc.

Can be a bit kookie at times though. His basic take on beliefs is we can't really confirm or deny anything objectively, so we may as well choose the most empowering beliefs. This leads to explorations of lucid dreaming, astral projection, telekenesis and all sorts of other wacky, off-the-deep-end stuff that can get a little ridiculous.

Awaken the Giant Within/Personal Power - Tony Robbins

Don't let your limiting beliefs hold you back.

Ah Tony Robbins, he's the guy you think of immediately when you think of self-help. Truth be told, he does exactly what he promises. Watch one of his talks on TED for example, and it's very difficult not to get pumped. He's a big, confident, seemingly good-intentioned guy, but can at times comes off quite salesy.

His books are filled with an assortment of self-help advice and are a great start for someone who hasn't read self-help books before. While he does have a lot of practical advice in his books, they didn't really feel like things I could implement in my life that would make a great deal of sense for me. Instead, the main benefit for me in his material was understanding that you can change your actions by changing your beliefs, i.e. there's nothing that you intrinsically can't do.

The downside to his books though is that apart from the basic points and concepts he puts across along with the nice motivational peak you feel while reading it, his material doesn't have much lasting effect.

As A Man Thinketh

Your thoughts become your actions.

This is an extremely quick read. The message of this book is that your thoughts are really important. They lay the groundwork for your words and actions, so if there's something you want to improve about your personality or life, your thoughts are the place to start work. I've read it multiple times and each time come away feeling a little more focused.

This book is great apart from the fact that it's written in an almost biblical voice. Wouldn't be able to handle a full-sized book in that tone.

The Richest Man in Babylon - George S Clayton

Save 10% of everything, then make it work for you.

This book should be required reading at school. It sets out a basic groundwork of financial rules that you should adhere to if you want to be at least financially comfortable. It sounds like obvious advice, but it's advice that no one gave me (live beneath your means, save 10% etc). It's also another very short read, so you could finish it in an afternoon.

Again, like 'As A Man Thinketh', the medium needs a little work. The book is written like a guidebook for ancient Babylonian merchants, which can grate after a while and prevents me from re-reading it too often.

Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki

Build passive income streams.

I really really don't like this book. It's message however is important. Get passive income streams to support your lifestyle.

It sells the idea of passive income but doesn't really provide much practical advice as to how to achieve this goal apart from 'buy a house, rent it out'.

The 4-Hour Work Week

It's OK to live to experience everything life has to offer.

This book helps you answer the question 'What should I do with my life?'. It doesn't answer it for you, but does help you realize that 'work really hard for a company, make enough to buy a house, retire with enough to live on' is not a valid choice. In other words, that in this day and age, any reasonably intelligent person should be able to find a way to take the task of making enough money to live comfortably on a non-factor in deciding what to do with their life.

It has a lot of practical advice on how to achieve this, including product development, business management and all sorts of assorted, semi-useful advice. More than the advice though, exposure to Tims general mindset of experimentation, learning and freedom was the main benefit for me.

In the book, Tim can at times come across as preaching an intrinsically selfish message, but I don't think there is any malice in this.

The 4-Hour Body

Experiment with your body to achieve your health/fitness goals.

A cookbook on how to achieve results with your body, fast.

Link to a full review of this book here: linky

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

Don't be a dick.

All the advice in this book is really really obvious, but having it listed out and illustrated with various anecdotes does help to drill in that little difference in the way you deal with people can lead to serious results.

No real complaints about this book, it's another reasonably short book with a lot of good content in it.

The Way of the Superior Man - David Deida

As a man, lead and take responsibility

There is no way to describe this book that won't make it sound sexist, but any woman who I've leant it to or has read a few passages from it comes away feeling that David has a deep spiritual understanding of women. His basic message is that the feminine is light, energy, love, chaos, emotion and beauty while the masculine is the decision-maker, the pilot guiding the ship through the chaos etc. He then relates this model to every-day situations you might have with your partner and how it can inform the way you behave for a smoother relationship.

As you may have guessed, you need to have a fairly open mind to appreciate this book. It also can't be taken too seriously, as we all have a bit of a mix of masculine/feminine within us (otherwise men would never be able to feel anything and women would be stuck in an indecisive vortex). Still, a really important read, more or less showed me how I'm expected to behave around women. For general spirituality and what it means to be a dude, I also liked Dan Millmans, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

Summary

This works out to less than ten percent of the personal development books I've read. These are the ones that have had the biggest effect on me. They're not literary masterpieces, but do occasionally contain little nuggets of advice that taken as a whole, can help you figure out what you want and how to get it.

6 Benefits of Learning a Foreign Language

2011-02-16T18:47:16+00:00

Learning a foreign language is a lot of fun. In this post I'm going to list some of the benefits I've experienced from learning Japanese.

And by 'learning' a foreign language I means being at least conversant if not entirely fluent. Learning a few phrases here and there is not quite the same.

1. You make more friends

Learning a language is an inherently social activity, you make more friends just by doing it. The fact that they are from another country/culture is an added spicy bonus.

2. You become a better communicator

When you have your basic verbal ability taken away from you, you need to rally speak in the simplest possible way to be understood. In the same way when someone talks to you, at the beginning at least, you'll need them to speak clearly in simple language so that you can understand.

Having experienced this, you will become a better communicator in English. You learn how to better simplify your message, especially when talking to non-native English speakers.

3. Carreer opportunities

While translating/interpreting is a carreer in itself, the real benefit to learning a foreign language as a hobby is the carreer paths it opens for you alongside any existing expertise. Japanese/English bilingual programmers are hard to come by.

Also, employers in the UK at least are usually quite impressed with any foreign language ability on your CV.

4. You get a real experience of another culture

There's no way to understand or experience a culture without learning the language.

Sure you can have an superficial knowledge of another culture by reading about it in books, consuming its English-language media and other activities that don't have you directly experiencing it.

But none of those amount to actually living that culture. Learning a language well forces you to accept that culture and let it become a part of you. This can be a benefit or a downside depending on how you want to look at it.

5. You probably get to travel

Unless you've decided on learning the regional dialect of some corner of your own country, learning a foreign language will seriously motivate you to travel. After studying a language for a few months with only sporadic exposure to it, the prospect of unleashing your new-found skills on "the motherland" wherever that may be becomes irresistable.

6. You get immunised against racism

By learning another language and really understanding another culture, it becomes difficult to entertain the idea that human beings around the world are fundamentally different from each other in any significant way depending on their genetic makeup.

You do understand that cultures are different, and while the culture of the language may be very different from your own, you will spot enough similarities to realize that there's more the same than there is different.

Book Review: The 4-Hour Body

2011-02-14T22:29:32+00:00

Tim Ferris is like marmite, you either love him or you hate him. His latest offering is packed with lots of useful advice on how to hack the body.

The Book

The book starts with a suitably motivating chapter about Chad Fowler and his resolution to lose weight after a moment in Harajuku where he realized that it didn't matter what he wore, he wouldn't look good in anything. The key message being, everyone has the ability to take control of their body and become a 'complete human being'.

The rest of the book is structured as a cookbook of sections on how to achieve specific goals with your body. These goals include:

Losing fat
Gaining muscle
Improving sex
Improving sleep
Injuries
Running faster/farther
Increasing strength
Miscellaneous skills (swimming, swinging a baseball bat and holding your breath)
Living longer
Appendices

The overall goal of the book is to get you to start experimenting with your body, measuring your results and achieving health/fitness goals.

Good Stuff

The book is indeed quite motivational, the guidelines simple and backed up by enough seemingly scientific evidence and case studies to make you actually want to try them and see if they work. As with any self-help book, you need to tow the line between accepting everything dogmatically and smugly rejecting the entire book as false.

The sections on losing fat and gaining muscle were particularly good. Though Tim doesn't (and I believe never really has) present anything ground-breaking or that we haven't read elsewhere, he has condensed the information down into the simplest, step-by-step guides possible. This makes it easy to try his techniques out without exerting much effort.

The weight loss section of the book is the only part that I've put into practice, and so far it works. I posted about my progress so far a few days ago. The short answer is, it just works.

The section on improving sex is... interesting. Again, any 13 year old with internet access has probably discovered all of the anatomical information put together in this chapter. His advice on how to have sex can be summed up as 'go slowly' and 'be gentle'.

This section though, has one very very good chapter on increasing testosterone levels. In it he gives simple recommendations for supplements that he's tried (with scientific background) that increase natural production of testosterone. This is the only other part of the book that I've put into practice, and without sharing too much information, his advice here works.

Other Stuff

The other sections of the book were not entirely relevant to me, so I didn't try them out and can't really speak about their effectiveness.

I did have some issues with the inconsistent level of scientific background in the book. While most sections were very well researched, others were apparently based on anecdotal evidence and single case studies. An example would be the chapter on 'building a perfect posterior' where Tim meets a guy in a cafe in Buenos Aires and learns about kettlebells and puts them into practice. While they probably do work extremely well, some explanation as to why they work so much better than any other exercise would have gone down well here.

Also one of the chapter headings, "The 15 minute orgasm", is deliberately misleading. When you first read that title, the obvious interpretation is "an orgasm that lasts 15 minutes", rather than "how to give a woman an orgasm in just 15 minutes", which in my experience is about average anyway.

Wrap Up

Overall the book is good, but might not be extremely useful for you if you're already on a low carb diet and hitting the gym regularly. It's a good read for anyone who hasn't got around to living healthy yet but wants to.

1 Month With Tim Ferriss's Slow Carb Diet

2011-02-08T20:56:38+00:00

Since getting The Four Hour Body I've experimented with the 'slow carb' diet that Tim recommends. Here's my take on it and my results so far. (tl/dr, it works and cheat day is a really brilliant idea.)

The Diet

For me, the main selling points for this diet are:

it's simple
there's a weekly cheat day
you lose a lot of weight fast

While there may be other versions of "Slow-Carb Diet" out there, the one I'm referring to is the set of guidelines set out in the The Four Hour Body. I've modified it only realy by combining it with the recommendations in the chapters about increasing testosterone levels.

Also, while I subscribe to the idea of eating the same, easy-to-make meals over and over again, it doesn't really make sense for my sitation. I have wife who is amazing in the kitchen and it would be an incredible waste not to let her come up with delectable treats within the confines of the diet.

Protein

Proteins I take on the diet include:

eggs
beef
chicken
fish

Most mornings I have a two-egg omelette and a third fried egg. Tim has a video online showing him microwaving some egg whites and calling it a 'three-minute' breakfast.

Learn to make an omelette. Omelettes, done right, can be one of the most delicious, simple, and apparently healthy dishes to make. I also imagine they taste better than that microwaved goop Tim serves up! If I can cook an omelette (and I am a notoriously bad cook) in 45 seconds flat, then trust me, it's not hard.

With meat it's usually beef cooked in butter or grilled chicken. I much prefer fish though, a big grilled salmon fillet or some smoked mackerel.

For snacking, I'm addicted to biltong, and buy it in weekly batches. I eat as much of it as I like whenever I get hungry, and moreso right after any exercise.

Slow Carbs

While I can eat them stuffed in an omelette or sprinkled with a little balsamic vinegar, I'm not loving the beans just yet. They fill you up with calories fast but they don't really taste of much. I think a few more weeks of experimenting will turn up some good recipes though.

Lentils can be good but require a lot more prep to make tasty. They are really nice in meaty stews.

Veggies

Spinach is the go to vegetable. I normally chomp through this before any other vegetables we have in the house. Normally I feel a surge of energy about an hour after a three-egg and spinach breakfast.

Kimchi is my second option. It seriously spices up any meal it's a part of, so it's good when you weren't able to make the beans/protein combo particularly flavorful. Also, it contains all the nutritious benefits of being fermented. I could get this from natto, but there's some things even I won't stoop to.

Brocolli is also pretty good, packed with important nutrients and good roughage. I have this the least often compared to spinach and kimchi.

Typical Day

Breakfast

Two-egg omelette filled with red kidney beans
fried egg
kimchi

Lunch

about a handful of spinach
steak
red kidney beans

Dinner

salmon fillet with daikon oroshi (yummy!)
more spinach
small bowl of lentil soup (if it's before 9pm)

Cheat Day

Cheat day is quite simply a stroke of genius.

One day a week (I picked Saturday) you eat whatever you want. Make yourself ill with carbs if you want to.

This has a couple of really important benefits:

It spikes your caloric intake. Going low on calories for extended periods will cause your body to adapt to the new intake level and lower your basal metabolic rate. Increasing your calories jump starts your metabolism so that you don't fall into this trap.

It makes the rest of the week bearable. While the food on this diet is great, sometimes you just want a pizza, or a really tasty baguette or an ice cold beer after a hard days work. Rather than deny yourself these luxuries, you can simply say "I'll have one on cheat day". It's at most 6 days away so there's no real sacrifice being made.

Trying this diet with all faith, I still had worries about how much weight I would gain after cheat day. Here's how my weight fluctuated over one cheat day(measured in the evening before bed):

Friday: 77.6kg
Saturday: 78.5kg
Sunday: 78.3kg
Monday: 77.7kg

So it appears as though after I went back to the diet on Sunday, it took until Monday evening to revert the weight gain I made over the weekend.

Exercise

I'd like to be really pro-active and add a couple of interval sessions per week to help speed up fat-loss, but I'm not pressuring myself to do this and don't really feel motivated enough. I do get light exercise out of twice a week BJJ training, but aside from that I'm not doing any exercise.

Results

Started a month ago at 83kg

Currently at 76kg

7kg total loss.

Apart from weight-loss, I've also experienced a number of other, harder to measure health benefits. It feels easier to wake up in the morning and I'm less tired most of the time. I normally get sick once a month, usually lasting 2-3 days but the usual cold symptoms seemed to clear up in a few hours. Cuts/bruises are apparently healing faster (though this may have more to do with the tesosterone increasing supplements that Tim recommends).

Book Review: The Four Hour Body - the book in which I read about this diet
How to make an Omelette - how to make a tasty omelette, I have one a day

Stuff I Use

2011-02-05T20:21:25+00:00

This is a rundown of the tools I use to work, play and get shit done.

Hardware

Herman Miller Aeron - If I'm working 8 hours at a time, better be comfortable
Unicomp Customizer Keyboard - Like typing with a machine gun
Samsung 24-inch LCD monitor - Big enough
Amazon Kindle 3 Wireless - I spend hours reading on this
HTC Desire - Like it, but miss my Iphones usability
Playstation 3 - My guilty pleasure

Software

Ubuntu Linux - just works
vim - If I'm typing something into a computer, I'm probably using vim
git - If I'm typing something I won't finish in one sitting into a computer, I'm probably using git
ruby - easy, simple, powerful
jekyll - for putting simple websites online
rails - for putting not-so simple websites online
screen - for doing lots of things at once in a terminal
Google Chrome + vimium - for browsing the internets
php (if I have to) - to pay the bills
anki - to remember and review important stuff

Websites/Services

github - a place to put my code
RevTK - practicing kanji
slicehost - a small 256mb slice
tagadab - another 256mb slice + DNS

Ochanomizu

2010-11-26T13:00:43+00:00

I used to work at an Eikaiwa school in Ochanomizu. This was one of my favourite places in Tokyo, if not Japan. It was awesome because it was Tokyo hustle and ancient temples in one place. There are also some great Edo-jidai eateries lurking in the back streets. Here's fun stuff to do in Ochanomizu going North to South:

Kanda Myoujin

This is one of Tokyos three guardian shrines and there's a pretty big festival every other year. Truth be told once you've seen one shrine... you get the picture, but even then it's nice to have a walk around, admire the architecture etc.

Yushima Seido

This temple is black which is pretty unique. It's also the house of the god of universities and eduction so you'll probably find students paying their respects in the hopes of good exam results.

Yabu Soba

Serving traditional Japanese soba since 1881. Rock gardens, in an edo era building where the mama-san sings your order into the kitchen. Was around 2000 for a tasty soba tei-shoku. That's cheapedy cheap for Tokyo. Next stop...

Takemura

Traditional Japanese sweet shop. More edo-era goodness. They serve this sickly-sweet anko soup which sends your taste buds reeling. At the same time they server this ultra salty sakura (cherry blossom) tea that instantly clears your palette with one sip. The idea is to go back and forth.

A little bit further afield, you'll find the following:

Koishikawa Korakuen Garden

Slap bang in the middle of Tokyo, easily one of the most beautiful parks I saw in Japan. There's a tea-house built in the middle of a lake where you can drink real matcha (not the green sugar-water that they serve tourists in Kyoto, bleugh).

Tokyo Dome

I'm not a sports fan, but going to see a Giants game was fun times. Obviously not that exciting if nothings on, but there's a theme park (again... right in the middle of Tokyo) with rollercoasters built into a shopping centre.

Akihabara

High tech electronics and maid cafes aren't really my thing, but hey don't knock it till you've tried it right?

Book Review: Roads to Sata

2010-11-10T12:53:30+00:00

This book is the story of Alan Booth, a British writer in Japan, and his quest to walk from one end of Japan to the other. He makes a point of walking every single inch of the journey, even through bad weather and health. Along the way he gets into the all-important wacky Japan adventures that he made the trip for, along with getting to see some parts of the country that not many foreigners do.

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-mile Walk Through Japan (Origami Classroom)

To start with, the subject matter alone is quite a big plus point. To be honest its the sort of adventure I would hope to do myself at some point, but for the time being I'm happy to settle for Mr.Booths second-hand account. Japan is an exciting place, and the potential adventure walking from one end to the other is worth the ticket price no matter where it leads.

Alan spends the majority of his trip walking. When he's not walking, he spends his time looking for and staying in small family-run inns in the Japanese countryside, and these are the places where the majority of his interesting encounters with the natives take place.

These include, being refused lodging for being non-japanese on multiple occasions (despite speaking fluent Japanese), inadvertantly causing a truck to crash in a tunnel, being shouted at in the hiroshima war museum for being a foreigner and countless beer-fueled evenings sat around a kotatsu with the owners of the minshuku he stayed at during his trip.

Because Alan spoke fluent Japanese when he made the trip, the trouble he gets into isn't the typical 'Baka Gaijin in Japan' fare. He's a seasoned Japan traveller, and sometimes this exposes him to the not so friendly side of Japanese people that you may be able to rationalize away as being part of the language barrier if your Japanese isn't that good. Still, he handles himself with dignity in the various situations he gets into.

The book is dated. Alan made the trip more than twenty years ago, but having walked country paths in the Japanese outback and stayed at small family-run inns before, I get the feeling that things haven't changed a great deal. Perhaps by the time I got to the same places, they had seen a few more foreigners, but the reactions are still largely the same in the sleepier parts of Japan.

Towards the end I get the feeling that Alan stopped enjoying the trip, he seemed to have less patience for Japanese people who had never seen a foreigner before, but I suspect after months on the road anyone had the right to start being a little grumpy.

Overall its a good read if you're a traveller or have some interest in Japan. Its interesting to compare what Japan was like when the book was published and how it is now.

najafali.com

Japanalicious Report Part 0: Believing my own bullshit

Background, or what the hey is Japanalicious?

Japanalicious starts coming together

About Japanalicious

Development

Going forward

Online Marketing and Self-Promotion for Developers

You're going to suck at this for a while

Examples of people better than you

Generate Content

What next?

How to get out of a slump

Motivation is Cyclical

Learning to forgive yourself

A Journaling Habit

Focus on simple, basic habits

Finding awe in science

What Religion Gives Us

Finding inspiration in science

Further reading

My Goals

Why write this?

1: Earn $10,000 USD per month from a web-based, semi-passive income source

Why do I want this?

Current status

How I'm going to get it

2: Live in Japan and function in the Japanese language at a near-native level

Why do I want this?

Current Status

How I'm going to do this

3: Have a body fat percentage of less than 20%

Why do I want this?

Current Status

How I'm going to do this

Wrap Up

How to make an Omelette

Step 1: Prepare the egg mixture

Step 2: Prepare the pan

Step 3: Cook the omelette

Advanced Tactics

Related Articles:

0 to 15,000 visits in 24 hours: How I did it, what I learned

The Experiment, or how to piss off a lot of grumpy PHP developers

The Results, or what the hey? 15,000 hits!!!

Traffic Sources

Content

Analysis

What sucked about it

What didn't suck too bad

Related Articles:

Why PHP is better than Ruby

In Ruby, everything is an object... even literals!

Ruby's syntax is impossible to understand!

PHP allows me to practice my typing skills, ruby doesn't

Ruby doesn't let you create arbitrary public members on objects!

Ruby let's you redefine classes, whenever the hell you want, including the standard library!

Conclusion

9 Self Help Books That Don't Entirely Suck

StevePavlina.com

Awaken the Giant Within/Personal Power - Tony Robbins

As A Man Thinketh

The Richest Man in Babylon - George S Clayton

Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki

The 4-Hour Work Week

The 4-Hour Body

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

The Way of the Superior Man - David Deida

Summary

6 Benefits of Learning a Foreign Language

1. You make more friends

2. You become a better communicator

3. Carreer opportunities

4. You get a real experience of another culture

5. You probably get to travel

6. You get immunised against racism

Book Review: The 4-Hour Body

The Book

Good Stuff

Other Stuff