sacha chua :: living an awesome life

How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners

Sacha Chua — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:45:00 +0000

I thought I’d draw some of the things that people often ask me about or that would help people learn Emacs (and enjoy it). You can click on the image for a larger version that you can scroll through or download. It should print all right on 8.5×11″ paper (landscape) if you want to keep it around as a reminder. Might even work at 11×17″. =)

You can find the image on Imgur and Flickr too.

Feel free to share, reuse, or modify this under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!

Possibly counterintuitive point: It’s good to learn at least the basics of Vim. Despite the perception of a “Emacs vs. Vi” holy war (one of the classic battles in computer science), it makes sense to know both editors especially if you work with people who use Vi a lot. Know enough Vi to find your way around, and then learn how to customize Emacs to fit you to a tee. That way, you’ll avoid the pressure of not being able to work well with your team or your infrastructure, and you’ll have the space to explore Emacs. =) Emacs is totally awesome.

Need help with Emacs? Feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me. I’m often in the #emacs channel on irc.freenode.net , and I also occasionally schedule time to help people one-on-one. Also, the Emacs community (mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC channel) can be wonderful, so definitely reach out to them too. =)

Meta discussion: How can I make this even better? What else would you like me to draw a guide for? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Also, thanks to dash, nicferrier, fledermaus, ijp, hypnocat, Fuco, macrobat, taylanub, axrfnu, Sebboh, thorkill, jave_, jrm, and the rest of #emacs for suggestions and feedback!

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Thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go with this blog

Sacha Chua — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine is a big fan of Firepole Marketing and other blog-related marketing sites, so a lot of his advice for me has been focused on building audiences and information products. It’s been quite useful—look, I finally got around to all these little design tweaks!—but there’s something niggling at the edges of my brain, and that’s usually a sign I should slow down and reflect on it. I notice that I hesitate.

I need to sort out what I’m hesitant about just because it’s unknown or something I’m shy about, and what I’m hesitant about because I want something different.

The things I love the most about this blog are:

Sharing all these small, varied things I’m learning about, and not worrying about sticking to one topic, making sense, or writing too often
Having these amazing conversations spanning miles and years (Raymond Zeitler, Clair Ching, Chris League, and a few other people have been commenting for more than five years – I’m so lucky!)
Bumping into all sorts of amazing people through chance conversations and connections
Following the thread of our shared curiosity into new questions
Answering people’s questions with blog posts from when I was trying to figure things out too
Knowing that no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s something I can learn from and possibly share

There’s a lot of good advice out there for people who want to “monetize their audience” or build a business around blogging, but… maybe I have the space to explore something different. What would this blog look and feel like in another ten years? More of this, I hope, and better. Better at learning, better at sharing, better at organizing, better at connecting.

Sometimes people pay more attention to what they pay for. Hmm, maybe optional payment, or saving payment for individual help? I don’t have a mental hangup about being paid for consulting, because that’s stuff that clearly creates a lot of value for my clients and doesn’t really give me things I can widely share as a way of helping others. I don’t have a hangup about earning a little bit from affiliate sales (since it’s entirely optional, and only the stuff that I like, and I point out non-affiliate links or alternative ways to get things like borrowing books from the library). I’m sort of okay with the idea of making collections of blog posts and sketches and selling them for a nominal fee as an experiment, although I’m tempted to just make them all freely available and then perhaps add a pay-what-you-can system or a donation button.

Anyway, we’re doing well, so I have some space to focus on learning and sharing. =) I want to make the most of that opportunity. Can you help me figure out what would make this better while keeping it real?

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Poll: How often would you like to receive e-mail updates? Also, quantifying my blog posting history

Sacha Chua — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:27 +0000

I’ve been posting practically every day for the past 3.5 years, and I write about a variety of topics. I’ve been thinking of ways to make it easier for people to keep in touch without E-mail newsletters seem to be a Thing. Right now, the e-mail subscription form on my blog is the default provided by WordPress, so people get daily updates (which is probably a bit much). I’ve been thinking of making it easier to subscribe to weekly or monthly updates. Would you find something like that useful? I’d really appreciate it if you could answer this poll!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

(Don’t see the poll? Try viewing this post on my website.)

Aside: I was curious about just how long I’ve been keeping up with this ~1 post a day thing, so I graphed my blog posting history. It turns out that I’ve been pretty consistent, although there were days when I didn’t have anything new posted. I schedule my blog posts using Editorial Calendar and I sometimes send people sneak previews of upcoming posts using the Share a Draft plugin. This lets me smooth out the spikiness of my writing habit into a more predictable publishing schedule.

To generate this graph, I extracted the timestamps of all my published posts with the following SQL query:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(post_date) FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post' AND post_status='publish' 
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/timestamps.txt';

… and then I graphed it with cal-heatmap, removed in-between labels in GIMP, and used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to hand-write new labels. =)

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From cats to keystrokes

Sacha Chua — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Whenever we sit on the couch to watch a movie, the cats inevitably gather. Neko prefers to sit on W-’s lap if he’s available (I’m only slightly jealous, harumph), but will curl herself up on my lap if W- is working on his laptop. Luke will jump on my lap for a bit if Neko isn’t there, or he’ll nap beside me if my lap is occupied. Leia prefers to play monorail cat along the back of the sofa or on the arms. If one of us stands up, the warm spot is almost immediately taken by a cat (usually Neko).

W- usually works on his computer while watching a movie. I’m tempted to do so as well, but since Neko doesn’t usually seek out company, I figured that it’s fine just spending time with her on my lap. Sometimes I try to type or draw on the side, and that’s not particularly ergonomic.

I could relax and focus on the movie, making it practice for being in the moment. Or I can play around with the possibilities, since not all movies need full attention. Knitting and crochet are out of the question because the cats are crazy about string. I can flip through Japanese flashcards on my phone. I can dust off my Twiddler one-handed keyboard and see about learning that again. I can skim nonfiction books to see which deserve deeper reading.

Hmm… This Twiddler thing looks promising. It’s amazing how much muscle memory can retain after so many years. I think it might be interesting to develop both right- and left-handed facility with this. Who knows, it might even come in handy while sketchnoting, so that I can trigger keyboard shortcuts.

This is me from 2003 or so, with a Twiddler one-handed keyboard and an M1 head-mounted display (on which I looked up stuff in Emacs, naturally). My dad took this picture. =)

It’s funny how things come together: cats, wearable computing, writing, drawing… We’ll see where this goes!

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Learning update May 2013

Sacha Chua — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Every so often, I make a list of things I would like to learn or work on. Not only does thinking about what I want to learn help me decide how to spend my time, it also makes it easier for me to ask for help. I don’t refer to the previous lists while making a new one, because the differences between the lists gives me valuable information. If my new list is missing some things that were on my previous list, that tells me that my priorities and interests have changed. I can decide whether I want to go back to those old priorities, or if it’s okay to shelve those ideas for later.

Here’s my current list:

Business

Consulting for E1: Plugin development might be an excellent new skill to add so that I can hit even more home runs when it comes to client requests
Tech skills: This is too good an advantage to waste, and I enjoy it.
- Automation/productivity hacking: More text, data, and image processing! More macros and shortcuts and application scripting!
- System administration: It’s good to have a solid platform and a streamlined development process. I want to learn more about managing multiple sites, setting up reliable backup and restore systems, automating deployment, and keeping up with security updates.
- Web development: It’s so nice to be able to quickly build my own systems. I want to get better at writing neat, solid code that follows best practices so that I can rely on tests to keep me from breaking things that I infrequently modify.
- Web design: I really like using HTML5 and Javascript for data visualization, and I want to get even better at doing that.
- Other geekery: 3D printing, electronics, sensors, speech recognition, scripting… there’s so much to play with. =)
Writing: It’s a fantastic way to learn.
- Collecting and organizing my blog posts, then filling in the gaps: Right now, people discover lots of my posts through search engines, and I write new things based on what I’m learning or what other people ask me about. I want to get better at making an outline and filling it in so that I can guide more people along their journeys.
- Exploring more visual formats: This takes more work up front, but it can be more enjoyable and more accessible for people. Someday it would be great to be comfortable making comic books and illustrated guides!
Drawing: It’s becoming more and more fun, and people find it useful too.
- Drawing people and situations: It would be fun to learn how to draw manga characters well, because that will give me anchors for my imagination.
- Animated sequences: Wouldn’t it be nifty to be able to put together short explanations and tutorials that help people learn useful things?

Relationships

Cooking: I want to try lots of recipes so that we can enjoy a variety of yummy and healthy meals at home.
Gardening: I’d like to learn how to work with the seasons and the soil for a productive and happy garden.
Enjoying time with and helping family and friends

Life

Languages: I’d like to be comfortable enough with Japanese that I can read manga, watch animé, listen to tech podcasts or read articles, and go to technical conferences. Super-awesome level would be to sketchnote something in Japanese – that would be a challenge! I also want to be able to chat with W-, neighbours, and shopkeepers in Cantonese. (And let’s throw Latin in there for quirky fun…)
Exercise: Learning good exercise habits will have lifelong benefits.
Learning: I could get even better at learning by building habits around spaced-repetition study and practical application. I could expand my range by learning how to learn from online courses. I could get deeper into learning from books, blog posts, conversations, and experiences. I could get better at reviewing, consolidating, and sharing what I’m learning.
Making decisions: Quantified Self, tracking, applied rationality, all sorts of other good things…
Sewing: Useful skill, and might be a way for me to work around clothes shopping. =)

Thoughts

Compared to my list from January, it looks like traditional sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship skills aren’t as large a part of my list at the moment. Delegation is lower too because I’m less interested in scaling up beyond myself (at the moment) and more interested in making the most of my flexibility. I haven’t dug into Android development, so I can probably shelve that for now. Connecting is still somewhat interesting, though.

Now, how do I want to learn?

I like the idea of working on personal projects, and possibly applying the skills commercially if people get inspired. Being able to follow my interests is one of the advantages of this semi-retirement, so I should make the most of that. Maybe that looks like this: “Hmm, that seems like an interesting idea… Let’s see if we can build a quick prototype… Here it is, and here’s a blog post about what I’m learning along the way!”

I’m not very good at asking for help. I’m too comfortable with my limits. I might learn something more slowly, or not as effectively as I could with other people’s help, but that’s okay. If I rely only on myself, though, I think I’d miss out on all the interesting opportunities that happen when you learn together with other people. I’m not entirely clear on what that might look like. I imagine that it would be along the lines of, “Hey, check out this thing I just learned!” “Oooh, that’s serendipitously close to what I’ve been learning – check this out!” “That’s super-helpful. What did you think about this other thing?” … Which is actually what I have through this blog, so I guess it works out after all. Onward with the blog posts, then.

I also tend to feel a little scattered, mostly because I work and write in short chunks (~2-4 hours of learning). The blog’s chronological format obscures the growth in various areas over time, unless you look at a category view – and that’s not really a map, either. I’ve been maintaining a topical index to make it easier to see blog posts, but it might be interesting to mindmap the key things I want to know, look at what I already know, and identify the specific small gaps I want to address first.

Mm. That might work. If I map out the questions, I can pick from this grab-bag of curiosities. Who knows where that might lead? So much good stuff out there!

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Stepping sideways into Alternate Universe Sacha

Sacha Chua — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

My parents were having problems with their company’s recent web hosting migration. No e-mail was getting forwarded to the e-mail accounts that they had set up previously, and the two blogs that were separate from the main site didn’t get transferred either. My mom asked me to help restore the blogs. They needed someone to sort out the email and other system administration issues, so I suggested that she find a local system administrator who can also take care of upgrading WordPress and other sites as needed.

I don’t particularly enjoy system administration. I feel terrible when I make a mistake on my own server, and I don’t want to be on the hook for anyone else’s. I’ve done some system administration work as part of web development, since I was usually the person with the most Linux experience in my teams. Setting up is easy, but maintenance could be fiddly, and keeping up with security updates can be no fun. (I’m looking at you, Rails.) Add to that the time zone differences and the inability to just lean over and fix things, and, well…

So I was feeling conflicted and unfilial about wanting to help my mom but not wanting to commit to being the company sysadmin. The problem needed to be fixed, though, and they probably wouldn’t find a good system administrator in time.

As an experiment, I tried imagining an alternate universe in which I would be comfortable making those changes and being The IT Guy (or Gal, in this case). If I lived near my parents, I would help them, of course. I do that for friends and family here. If I had the routines for managing many sites, then it would be easy to maintain another site and another company. I can imagine that for Alternate Universe Sacha, this kind of work might even be easy and enjoyable.

Having imagined this Alternate Universe Sacha, I tried “stepping sideways” into that role. Sure, I was half a world away, but I could mentally move the house to my hometown. Time zone differences and distance can make it difficult to communicate because it’s hard to tell how busy someone is and when you get the information you need, but it actually worked out well because I worked on it in the evening while people were at work back home. If I stopped worrying about the possibilities of messing things up worse and instead took the same methodical approach that I would use if I had a lot of experience in this (and I guess I do, compared to many people), then it would actually be pretty straightforward. Besides, I reassured myself, everything will turn out all right. Even if I messed things up, family’s still family. For gaining experience, it’s hard to find a more forgiving client.

It turned out to be straightforward, although it did involve a lot of clicking around. E-mail works again, and the blogs are both back up. Not only that, I now have an alternate universe Sacha whom I can think of myself as if I need to do more system administration work. I’m using that idea to make it easier for me set up proper maintenance for my personal sites as well. If I was an experienced and constantly improving system administrator who enjoyed doing this, how would I do this? It’s no substitute for actual experience–I’ll still miss things people learned the hard way–but it helps me reach that point of learning what I need to learn the hard way.

I wonder what alternate universe selves I might play with in the future. Do you use any?

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Cherry blossoms in High Park, and playing with digital watercolour in Artrage 4

Sacha Chua — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

High Park has a lot of cherry trees. They bloom for such a short time and it’s hard to predict when peak bloom will be, so it can be difficult to organize a get-together with friends. The park is just a few minutes away by bike, though, so it would be a shame to miss it. This year I guiltlessly went on my own to see the cherry blossoms, enjoy the brief spectacle, and marvel at how busy the park is during those few days.

I like the delicacy of watercolours, but have never quite gotten the hang of doing them with actual water. I fuss about with water and paints, and then I end up with this brownish-grey mess that doesn’t look anywhere near what I wanted. Drawing on my tablet PC is helping me learn to enjoy drawing, so maybe my tablet PC can also help me learn to enjoy painting.

Here’s the rest of what I drew/painted:

I used Artrage 4 because it can mimic brushes and other cool things. I don’t have the level of real-life watercolour experience that would make me frustrated with the tool’s limitations, so I’m learning by trial and error. I want to make etagami – picture letters! Here are some examples:

etagami-inbox
kiirakirsi’s pinterest
Dosankodebbie’s etagami notebook
Maybe I can send my friends and family digital hand-painted letters, and then eventually move to doing them on paper… Or as print-outs, but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

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Weekly review: Week ending May 10, 2013

Sacha Chua — Sun, 12 May 2013 01:21:00 +0000

Blog posts

Accomplished this week

Business
- Earn
  - Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  - Earn: Consulting – E1 – Do some consulting this Wednesday
  - Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
  - Discuss curriculum sketches and workshops with M
  - Start drafting a curriculum sketch for M
  - Send invoice
- Connect
  - Help Cena Mayo with Emacs
  - Join ALU Lisp meeting
  - Attend Toronto Agile Support Group
- Build
  - Accounting
    - Set up accounting thing
    - Ask accountant about QST
    - Send Interac transfer to accountant
    - Check out and send accountant’s copy of my Quickbooks records
    - Apply accounting changes
    - [#A] Call Revenu Quebec – Waiting for call back
  - System administration
    - Copy my home directory
    - Copy all the files for my website
    - Copy ~/all_dbs.sql
Relationships
- Family
  - Upload database
  - Recreate basic WordPress
  - Synchronize e-mails
- Go to HackLab open house
- Host tea party
Life
- Japanese
  - Register for a Japan Foundation library card
  - Study a Japanese song
  - Learn new Japanese song
  - Read a volume of manga
- Gardening
  - Buy tomato plants from corner store
  - Plant tomatoes and other vegetables
  - Add compost and topsoil to grass and backyard
- Set up dentist appointment
- Game: Make progress toward endgame
- See cherry blossoms
- Draw for the fun of it
- Declutter
- Fill up my TFSA and RRSP

Plans for next week

Business
- Earn
  - [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  - [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
  - [ ] Talk to Shawn about sketchnoting FITC
  - [ ] Sketchnote GIST tech conference
- Build
  - [ ] Practise drawing for two hours
  - [ ] Sketchnote a book
  - [ ] Interface for goals
  - [ ] Figure out org2blog publishing using Org 8
  - [ ] Set up virtual box
- Connect
  - [ ] Talk to Matt about what he can help me with
Relationships
- [ ] Get together with W-’s family
Life
- [ ] Collect 50 sentences for my Japanese-English deck
- [ ] Take notes on “Strategies for Reading Japanese”
- [ ] Plant lavender
- [ ] Have dental new patient exam

Time review

Business: 35.8 hours (Earn: 18.2, E1: 18.2, Connect: 3.1, Build: 14.5)
Discretionary: 43.6 hours (Social: 8.6, Productive: 15.5, Writing: 3.7, Emacs: 2.6, Play: 3.4)
Personal: 20.9 hours (Routines: 11.3)
Sleep: 54.1 hours – average of 7.7 hours per day
Unpaid work: 13.7 hours (Commuting: 1.5, Cook: 4.6, Tidy: 1.9)

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Monthly review: April 2013

Sacha Chua — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Last month, I wrote:

April will be more about slowing down and following up, I think. But this is good.

It took me a while to sort out a good workflow for processing the videos from the Emacs Conference, but I was glad I did so, even though there were a few miscommunications along the way. I got back into the swing of consulting and sketchnoting too, so that was great. =)

It’s almost a third of the way through May already! I’m looking forward to more consulting, sketchnoting, and illustrating. The weather’s warmed up, so friends are starting to organize more get-togethers. Then there’s planting the front and back garden, studying Japanese (my goal for May: 500 lines in my spaced-repetition deck), and drawing some more… May’s shaping up to be terrific.

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Use the weekly review to give yourself permission to do things you want to do

Sacha Chua — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

One of the habits I’ve formed through my blog is the practice of doing a weekly review. This is where I celebrate what I accomplished and get a heads-up on what’s next. I do this almost every Saturday, which turns out to be a great day for reflecting and preparing.

I also use the weekly review to make sure I spend time on things that I want to do. It’s easy to forget that in the endless ping-pong game of responding to other people’s requests, or to scatter your attention among lots of interests and not feel like you’re making progress in any particular one. Give yourself permission to work on something you want to do, and carve out space for it in your to-do list or calendar. I divide my to-do list into three categories: work, relationships, and life. The work category is easy to fill. Relationships take a little more thought, but other people make it easy by asking. Life, on the other hand—the skills I want to develop, the hobbies I want to explore—that requires me to step up and choose to do something instead of having my time filled by things that other people have chosen for me.

Lots of things are interesting, but I try to pick one or two things to focus on during each week. For example, I’ve been focusing on planting the garden and studying Japanese. I might explore other ideas during the week, but it’s good to make slow and steady progress in my focus areas.

I make that space by managing my commitments. It’s easy to get used to a hectic, time-starved status quo, and it’s gratifying as well—busy-ness helps you feel valued. For me, “normal life” includes time to breathe and time to play. I avoid being busy. When I notice I’m starting to make mistakes because my calendar is too full, I slow down and see what I can say no to.

I add “want-to”s to my to-do list instead of just keeping it to the “must-do”s, and I remove or change other tasks until things look like they’ll fit. It makes reviewing and planning more fun, and it gives me something to look forward to during the week.

Might be something that can help you establish that habit. =) Happy to hear your thoughts and to read your weekly reviews!

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Quantifying my habit of writing, and things I’ve learned along the way

Sacha Chua — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Leo Babauta wrote about the power of writing daily, sharing what he’s learned from about five years of daily writing. It got me curious about how consistently I write.

Since I schedule my blog posts, my blogging history doesn’t give me useful data. Fortunately, I can get that data from my time-tracking. Here’s a graph showing how much time I spent writing between January 2012 and April 2013, with the greenest areas for days of about 4 hours of writing. In total, I spent 346 hours writing, for an average of 0.7 hours per day or 5 hours a week. I wrote during 254 out of 486 days (58% of the days), or roughly every other day.

My longest streak of non-writing was 8 days of not writing (September 2012, when I was on a trip with my family). My longest streak of continuous writing was 12 days of writing every day (June 2012).

I usually start writing between 7 PM to 9 PM (after dinner), but I also write at other times. With the more flexible schedule I get to have these days, I go on a writing sprint whenever I want to.

One of these days, I should put together a graph that takes into account how long I spend writing, too.

It turns out that I write a lot, although it doesn’t feel that way looking at it one day at a time. In 2012, I wrote around 133,000 words for my blog. This is slightly more than the number of words in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but nowhere near as awesome. I clocked 268 hours for writing during that year, so that works out to a really low 8 words per minute. I already know that the bottleneck is my brain, not my typing speed, though. =) The time includes writing non-blog stuff as well as discarded posts, but hey, it still gives me a good general idea.

Anyway, some quick non-data thoughts on what Leo said about the benefits of writing, and what I want to add:

“Writing helps you reflect on your life and changes you’re making.” I do this a lot with my blog – looking backward to review decisions, looking forward to explore the possibilities. Not only is writing a good excuse to ask yourself these questions, but having a record of your reflections, reasons, assumptions, and predictions also helps you make better choices.
“Writing clarifies your thinking.” It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand something if it’s just inside your head. Once you try to explain it to other people, though, you’ll quickly find gaps. Writing is one of my ways of thinking out loud. My thoughts are fuzzy and elusive until I sit down and write a blog post, a note, a list, or draw a mindmap or a sketchnote. I figured that it’s okay to be wrong in public from time to time, and it’s better than never knowing about mistakes.
“Writing regularly makes you better at writing.” I suspect that rewriting is an even more useful technique for better writing. I don’t do as much rewriting and editing as I probably should, although I often revisit and write about old topics based on new questions or ideas. That said, writing is great for practising organizing your thoughts and figuring out how to communicate them, and regular blogging is a great way to experiment with different techniques.
“Writing for an audience (even if the audience is just one person) helps you to think from the perspective of the audience.” I like writing for myself, and I also like writing for other people. It’s fun to answer questions or to build on other people’s thoughts.
“Writing persuasively — to convince others of your point of view — helps you to get better at persuading people to change their minds.” I’ve mostly given up on persuading people to change their minds, having read quite a few argument/rhetoric/persuasion books that made a lot of sense to me. Now I go for the low-hanging fruit of sharing tips and ideas for people who’ve already decided, and helping illuminate the possibilities for the people who are on the fence. =) Still, practice in examining and organizing my thoughts helps a lot when it comes to making better decisions or helping other people with theirs.
“Writing daily forces you to come up with new ideas regularly, and so that forces you to solve the very important problem of where to get ideas.” Since I write about whatever I’m learning about, writing encourages me to keep learning. I don’t promise a particular set of topics, though, so I don’t feel that pressure to keep coming up with good material. Besides, there’s so much to learn and share!
“Writing regularly online helps you to build an audience who is interested in what you have to share, and how you can help them.” This is actually pretty darn awesome. Connecting without small talk, yay! =)

Writing is well worth the time for me. I wonder what would happen if I doubled the time I spent on writing, maybe splitting the extra time between research and editing… Hmm.

Is writing worth it for you, too? What’s your experience like? How would you increase its benefits?

zenhabits: Why You Should Write Daily

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Hacking my motivation for workouts

Sacha Chua — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

There was a recent Lifehack.org post on tying something you love to workouts so that you feel more motivated. It’s useful to know how to hack your motivation. =) W- and I joke about this. After going to fitness class, we make sure there’s a little positive reinforcement. Sometimes we go out to eat. We cook most of our meals, so it’s a real treat for us to go to a restaurant. Sometimes we’ll prepare comfort food at home. Sometimes I’ll reward myself with time spent playing video games. It doesn’t do much for my motivation during the workout itself (I still feel like I suck!), but it’s good for getting me out the door and for cheering me up again afterwards. I try to skew my reward system towards free or low-cost things so that I don’t end up associating spending with pleasure: a pho date is wonderful, but so is watching a movie at home.

There aren’t many things in my life that need this kind of extra motivation. Sometimes I need to use extra motivation in order to start giving a good presentation if I’m not feeling up to par, but it’s a scheduled commitment, so that helps me get going. Once I’m in the flow, crowd energy usually leaves me buzzing. Dealing with system administration issues and embarrassing mistakes is tough, but it is what it is, so I just have to knuckle down and do it. It’s just optional tough things that need this kind of external motivation-hacking, like exercising or shopping for clothes. (Yes, I’m weird.) There’s clearing my inbox, which I usually get around to doing once a week or so. Business mail gets faster replies, but I’m not super-responsive, and I think that’s actually okay with my priorities.

I have six sessions left on my 10-session pass (which is my second), and I plan to go once a week with W-. (Maybe even twice, if I can work up to it – I used to before I sprained my ankle.) I wonder how much I can hack my motivation, and if I can get to the point of wanting to get another 10-session pass. In that time, I’m probably not going to be able to enjoy the feeling of keeping up properly with the rest of the class. I usually modifying all the exercises so that I can do them without getting so tired that I might injure myself. But I can increase my enjoyment of being able to check off one more session (maybe with a nice big visual reminder?), especially combined with biking to and from the gym. I can line up treats for myself (such as books or stretching), and then focus on tying the positive feelings back to the exercise. I can also look for other forms of exercise that I might enjoy. Maybe lifting small weights or hula-hooping while playing games?

Lifehack.org: How to Trick Yourself into Loving Your Workout

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Sketchnoting: Finding a balance of details and diagrams, and calibrating your writing to time

Sacha Chua — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Cheryl Lowry wrote about something many sketchnoters struggle with: running out of sketchnoting room during a talk. It got me thinking about the style I lean towards in my notes, and how I deal with too much or too little content.

My sketchnoting style is more information-dense and more linear/column-based than many other sketchnote styles I’ve seen. You can compare my recent sketchnotes with the ones on Sketchnote Army or the Flickr Sketchnotes pool to get a sense of how they’re different. I take information-dense sketchnotes because I want to remember and I don’t trust my memory. If I want to create a summary later on, I can do that from my sketchnotes, but it’s difficult to go the other way around. I’ve learned not to trust that events will have video, that I’ll have the patience to sit through a recording, or that slides will make sense after a quick flip-through. My notes are all I can rely on if I want to make sure that the time I spend listening to a talk doesn’t just evaporate into forgetfulness. =) So even if my hand cramps a little after sketchnoting a full-day conference with few breaks (hooray for quick finger exercises and stretches), it’s worth it because I come away with much more and I can remember a lot.

I paraphrase a lot because I want to make ideas more concise, particularly when it comes to Q&A sessions where people haven’t rehearsed what they want to say.

I’ve thought about writing less and drawing more, but I’m actually pretty happy with where I am. Summarization comes afterwards, when I know what’s important to me. Most presentations do very little sign-posting of what they’re going to cover and how important each part is, and even the ones that do can sometimes go on interesting tangens. When I’m sketchnoting a presentation, I don’t want to prematurely lock into the structure or metaphor I think the speaker has (even if they say they’re going to talk about 7 things, for example). That takes me out of the moment and makes me second-guess myself when the speaker says something interesting that doesn’t fit into the pattern I want to draw. A column-based layout may feel less creative, but it frees me up to listen.

I might go back and move things around a little during the gaps in the talk, but I generally don’t go back and reorganize everything. I want to publish things as quickly as possible. My target is to publish the sketchnotes within 10 minutes after the talk ends, and I usually do. It’s a great way to delight people over social media.

I write simple letters on a plain white background. My images and text tend to be separated by whitespace so that I can move things around as needed. I draw uncomplicated figures. I generally use one or two accent colours and maybe a lighter shade for highlighting or depth. Again, I’m optimizing for speed and attention. I’ve thought about going back and revising some of my sketchnotes to be more visually engaging, but then there’s so much new material that would be interesting to draw instead. Besides, I don’t want to give people the impression that that kind of detail or layout is what they’ll get from me when live sketchnoting. I really like being done with a sketchnote shortly after a talk. This also means I don’t have to worry too much about following up and I don’t have to juggle multiple ongoing projects. I do occasionally revise sketches and help people turn them into proper illustrations for reuse, but that would definitely be a paid gig. =)

I draw over a light dot grid, and that helps me fill a page at a more consistent rate. I know that if there’s an hour-long talk, I can draw letters at my normal size. If it’s a short non-interactive talk like an Ignite presentation or a TED talk, I might put several talks on one page, or I might increase the size and be a little looser with the layout. As I listen, I adjust my writing depending on the rate that people are speaking. If they speak slowly or they repeat themselves a lot, I’ll draw more images. If they speak quickly, I’ll try to capture as much as I can, and then go back and add highlights and some icons afterwards. Because I work digitally, I can remove the grid before publishing the image.

Working digitally makes it easy for me to compensate for different talk densities. If a speaker ended up saying less than I expected, I can rearrange the text and images around to look more balanced or I can crop the image at the appropriate point. If a speaker says more, it’s easy to add another layer and save a separate image. Autodesk Sketchbook Pro isn’t a vector program, so enlarging things doesn’t work particularly well, but I can move around or reduce parts of my image if I need to squeeze in some more information.

Other sketchnoters have great tips, too. Some people write down just the first few letters of a word or phrase, and then go back and fill the rest when there’s time. The Bikablo books encourage you to practise drawing key icons the same way each time, so that you can quickly sketch the first couple of strokes to remind you of what to draw. The Sketchnote Handbook talks about using your audio memory to hold on to thoughts as you draw. These tips work for me, too, and I’m getting the hang of using them. Hope they work for you too!

One of the interesting things about sketchnoting is that now I have a better sense of how much space there is in most presentations and conversations. It’s like seeing key words light up and thinking, “Oh, I want to capture that,” and also seeing the gaps where you can write or draw. You develop a sense of how much you can squeeze into each gap. If you find that you’re picking up more keywords than you have the time to capture, you can increase your thresholds for interestingness or reduce the complexity of your capture.

You can develop this sense of timing by practising with talks of specific lengths. For example, if you go to a lot of 1-hour talks, you’ll get a sense of how much people typically cover in an hour. Every so often, it’s good to practise with something that’s really information-dense: a well-written nonfiction book, an intermediate- or advanced-level talk. Like the way you can improve your speed-reading performance by occasionally reading at a rate faster than you can comprehend, it’s good to scramble in sketchnoting from time to time.

Hope that helps!

Cheryl Lowry: “Drawing is easy. Thinking is hard.”

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Thinking about movies

Sacha Chua — Sun, 05 May 2013 13:20:00 +0000

It’s getting harder to spend on leisure, because I’m getting so much better at talking myself out of it. There are just so many other good alternatives.

For example: Iron Man 3 has started showing in Canada. I’ve skipped watching most movies in the theatres, but I do like superhero movies, and theatres are great for superhero movies because they make the movies larger than life. I like the outsized situations that the writers put the superheroes in and how they have to get them out. I like the way the movies push visual effects forward without taking themselves too seriously. So I’m going to watch it at some point. I just have to decide…

Do I watch it in the movie theatre during opening weekend, as a vote for more movies like that, maybe with W-?

$26 for two tickets
Can lead to rich in-joke material
Good sound and perfect playback (no worries about scratches)
Larger than life / immersive
Immediate gratification
Focused attention

Do I watch it in the movie theatre as a social event, which probably means a weekend get-together with friends?

$25-35, depending on dinner
Bonding time with friends – find out what’s going on in their lives
Buying tickets and organizing seating can be difficult
Good sound and perfect playback (no worries about scratches)
Larger than life / immersive
Short-term gratification
Focused attention

Do I watch it in the movie theatre off-peak, which probably means mid-day sometime during the week?

$13 by myself, or possibly with other friends who also have flexible schedules
Better seats
Good sound and perfect playback (no worries about scratches)
Larger than life / immersive
Short-term gratification
Focused attention

Do I wait for it to be available in the library, so that I can watch it with W- at home?

Free
Can lead to rich in-joke material
Writing time or cat time
Can watch with subtitles
Can pause and rewind
Can watch extended material, commentary
Can talk to W- while hanging out (extra in-jokes and movie references!)
Comfy seats, clean floor (no spilled popcorn or drinks)
I can read IMDB trivia and tvtropes entries or research interesting ideas

And you know, that library option is looking pretty darn tempting. The biggest downsides are a less immersive experience and a longer wait. I don’t need big sound or big images to get into a story (I can imagine things from books). Watching musicals from closer to the stage was much better in terms of being able to see facial expressions, so there’s something for that.

It takes a while for movies to be released on DVD, and some more time for the library to obtain copies. The DVDs are available on a catch-as-catch-can basis at various branches, and then they’re available for general holds after a year. New items are released on the 15th of every month. W- and I check the new listings on the 15th or 16th, by which time there are sometimes hundreds of holds for popular movies. For example, The Avengers (2012) has 992 holds for 107 copies. Movies can be checked out or renewed a week at a time, and transit between branches takes another day or two. That means that requesting a popular movie like the Avengers would mean a wait of maybe a year and a half from when the movie was released, which is actually not that big a deal because we’ve got a ton of other things to watch. Besides, sometimes we luck out. In this particular case, the Annette Street branch is the home branch for one of the Avengers DVD copies, so we spotted it during our regular library walk and we checked it out even before it was available for general holds. =)

Popular movies tend to be well-stocked, and I have three branches in easy reach: Annette, Runnymede, and Jane. The Hobbit was another movie that I decided to wait for as a library release, and writing this blog post reminded me that I should go look for it. It’s not available for general release yet, but one copy is due at Runnymede tomorrow and another is due at Annette on Monday. I might bump into it one of these days. If not, I can wait for it to become available for holds on October 15. (Hmm, time to set a reminder…)

Besides, there’s so much else to do, and so many other movies, shows, books, and games out there. We can keep ourselves endlessly entertained if we want to with just the things we have. So it really comes down to the question: what do I want?

I want to be delighted by and learn from storytelling.
I like the way that shared movies turn into great in-jokes between W- and me, layers of references building on other references.
It would be nice to spend time with friends, but there are other things I can do to spend time with friends.

So probably library, then, for this and most other movies. W- says, “That’s a lot of thinking about $26.” But it’s this gradual shaping of wants and desires that creates the space for even more possibilities later.

The less I want, the more I can enjoy.

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Weekly review: Week ending May 3, 2013

Sacha Chua — Sat, 04 May 2013 19:51:14 +0000

So much writing, yay! That felt wonderful. It was great to follow my curiosity and write about what i’m learning. Mmm, more of this next week…

Blog posts

Accomplished this week

Business
- Earn
  - Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  - Consulting – E1 – Thursday
- Build
  - See about setting up Quickbooks review
  - Pick up package from store
- Connect
  - Talk to Jo’Ann about sketchnotes
  - Talk to Patrick Finucane about sketches
  - Sketchnote Hackernest/Girls in Toronto talks
  - Co-host Visual Thinkers Toronto meetup
Relationships
- Measure cushions
- Have coffee with Evan Willms
- Send letter to Mike
- Send letter to Clair
Life
- Buy seeds
- Get my PCFinancial savings account out of dormancy
- Have a massage
- Declutter
- Checked my finances

Plans for next week

Business
- Earn
  - [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  - [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
  - [ ] Discuss curriculum sketches and workshops with M
  - [ ] Start drafting a curriculum sketch for M
  - [ ] Call Ministry Quebec
- Connect
  - [ ] Join ALU Lisp meeting
- Build
  - [ ] Set up accounting thing
  - [ ] Sketchnote a book
  - [ ] Interface for goals
Relationships
- [ ] Host tea party
- [ ] Drop by HackLab.to on Monday
- [ ] Go to HackLab open house
- [ ] Drop by HackLab.to on Friday
- [ ] Make second test cover for cushion
Life
- Japanese
  - [ ] Register for a Japan Foundation library card
  - [ ] Learn new Japanese song
  - [ ] See cherry blossoms
  - [ ] Read a volume of manga
- Garden
  - [ ] Plant tomatoes and other vegetables
  - [ ] Add compost and topsoil to grass and backyard
- Other
  - [ ] Draw for the fun of it
  - [ ] Declutter
  - [ ] Game: Complete another three missions
  - [ ] Figure out org2blog publishing using Org 8

Time review

Business: 29.2 hours (Earn: 13.2, Connect: 7.5, Build: 8.5)
Discretionary: 46.1 hours (Social: 3.7, Productive: 25.0, Writing: 13.8, Emacs: 0.8, Play: 3.0)
Personal: 24.8 hours (Routines: 13.9)
Sleep: 58.1 hours – average of 8.3 hours per day
Unpaid work: 9.8 hours (Cook: 4.8, Tidy: 0.4)

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Visual book review: Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation (Debra Kaye with Karen Kelly)

Sacha Chua — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

How can you bring together different ideas in order to innovate? Red Thread Thinking (2013) shares guidelines for coming up with new ideas and recombining old concepts for profitable innovation, with plenty of stories of real-life products and services. It also includes some chapters on how to package the innovation for greater appeal (including simplicity, engagement, and design thinking), and how to train your brain and your intuition in order to make better decisions. Whether you’re an idea person in a big company or a solo entrepreneur in a microbusiness, you’ll probably find good questions and examples to jog your creative thinking. If you’re tired of brainstorming sessions going nowhere or resulting in small, incremental improvements, try out what this book says about relaxing and generating ideas on your own before bringing them to a small group for expansion and refinement. (That said, incremental improvements can also be a good thing!)

After reading this book, I plan to experiment with the obscure feature method and the generic parts method. They might be great ways to sharpen my observational skills and see opportunities for everyday creativity.

You can click on the image below for a larger version.

Feel free to share this visual book review! (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Amazon affiliate link: I earn a tiny fraction if you buy something from Amazon’s site after clicking on the link, even if it has nothing to do with the book. =)

If you have a library near you, you can check it out there too. (I totally love the Toronto Public Library.)

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Keeping in touch

Sacha Chua — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Come to think of it, I used to worry more about ways to keep in touch. I customized my address book so that it would keep track of the last time I e-mailed or met someone and so that I could see whom I hadn’t contacted in a while. Some people are easy to connect with because you interact with them frequently or bump into them a lot online, but there are lots of other interesting people who don’t – and so you’d need to reach out to them in order to find out what’s going on.

After I stopped being able to use Emacs for my mail, I tried out different personal contact relationship management systems like Contactually and Nimble to see if I could have that kind of contact tracking there. It was pretty interesting, and sometimes I used the prompts to focus on one or two people I hadn’t heard from in ages. I checked their Facebook page or Twitter to see what they’ve been up to and looked for excuses to help them or reach out to them. Sometimes that led to interesting conversations.

I often deleted the reminders, though, and I decided it wasn’t worth paying something like $20/month for that kind of a reminder service. I’m becoming more comfortable with the way people flow into and out of one’s life. There are some old friends I get to talk to once in a while, which is wonderful, but I’m in no rush to develop old acquaintances into friendships.

There are lots of awesome people out there, so I can go with the flow – to respond to people, and to reach out when something prompts me. I’ve gotten pretty good at being open and comfortable with people. I remember what it’s like to be around close friends, and I get as close as I can to that as I can even with new groups. I don’t have the same kind of everyday camaraderie I had in my old circles of friends, but that makes sense in this part of my life. (Although Hacklab feels like an instant barkada too, with the way they’re friends with each other. ^_^ Hmm…)

So instead of worrying about keeping in touch, I keep part of my budget for coffee, lunches, dinners, tea parties, and stamps, spend time with friends in leisurely conversation or shared activities, and read people’s blogs and Facebook updates. I’m a little sad that it means my circles tend to be tilted towards people who are active on the Internet or who are in the same city as I am, and I know there are wonderful people whom I’m missing. But life moves in mysterious ways, so let’s see!

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Sketchnote: Solving Wicked Problems with Dialogue Mapping (Chris Chapman, Toronto Agile Support Group)

Sacha Chua — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:33:42 +0000

Click on the image for a larger version. Feel free to share this! (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

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Learning how to deal with mild panic

Sacha Chua — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Another mild panic attack in fitness class yesterday, jolts of worry and tears that I wiped away as sweat. I knew it was just my lizard brain in overdrive. I couldn’t stop it by reasoning it away as irrational. All I could do was breathe and keep on going, dampening my emotions by spacing out while going through the motions of the exercise. W- checked on me frequently, cheering me up from time to time, and I finished the class.

It’s not so bad, actually. It would be better to not have to deal with panic at all, but since it happens, it’s better that I know what it’s like in a safe(ish) controlled environment and I can start figuring out what to do about it. Part of the reason that I’m susceptible to panic attacks is probably because I’m using willpower instead of motivation to get through the fitness class, and that can get quickly sapped in a stressful environment with negative self-talk. I don’t intrinsically enjoy this form of exercise, although I like spending time with W-. Also, It turns out that I’m pretty good at imagining how something will hurt, like the time I freaked out over a leapfrogging exercise a month after I’d sprained my ankle, and that sends me into a whirl even as I’m reassuring myself that pain is both unlikely and temporary. The good thing is that I seem to get panic attacks only in fitness class these days, and not all the time either.

What would better look like? I’m good at knowing I’m having an unreasonable panic attack. Wouldn’t be interesting if I could label it and put it on a shelf for the time being, procrastinating the analysis for a quieter and more composed time? I’m good at plodding through the class anyway, even though I’m embarrassed at the thought of quietly sniffling in class. If I can let go of that embarrassment, I can use that energy for other things. I don’t get panic attacks all the time. I can get better at understanding the contributing and mitigating factors, and tweaking things to fit me (a mental soundtrack? a mantra or prepared objections to drown out negative self-talk?). Eventually finding another kind of exercise that suits me better will help in the long run so that I can build confidence along with strength, but I still have to hack stressful situations.

This, too, is part of life, and I can embrace it and make it mine.

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How I got started in investing

Sacha Chua — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000

When I was growing up, I raided my mom’s bookshelves for whatever I could understand—and quite a few things that I didn’t at first, but which yielded under repeated reading. In one of her personal finance books, I came across an anecdote about someone who bought stocks of the companies of which he was a frequent customer. When my mom decided it was time for us to learn a little about investing and offered us a choice of several Philippine stocks, I used the same reason to pick Jollibee. Although I didn’t eat at Jollibee that often, I knew lots of people did, so I figured that it would work out the same. I haven’t been tracking Philippine stocks since then, but apparently Jollibee has been doing pretty well.

When I moved to Canada for my master’s degree, I was fortunate to have a combination of research assistantships and scholarships. I never spent more than I had – another lesson drilled into me by my mom. Living frugally helped me graduate without student debt. By that time, I’d grown to love W-, which made it easier to accept IBM’s job offer and go through the permanent residency process here in Canada.

Once I started earning money here, I wanted to apply the best practices from the personal finance books I’d been reading all this time. I set aside a portion of my income for long-term investments. After lots of research, I settled on TD e-funds as an inexpensive way to get started with index funds. I didn’t know enough about individual companies to feel comfortable buying stocks, and books and blogs said it was really hard to beat the market anyway. Index funds were a less intimidating way to get started. Small steps – a tiny investment here to see whether I’d set things up correctly, then more as I became more comfortable with the idea.

I figured that if I hold the funds for decades and get average performance, that’s still all right. If the funds lose value, well, that’s life, and I wouldn’t be any worse off than if I hadn’t been saving. I joined the workplace and started investing just as the financial crisis broke, so it was a little tough buying while people were losing so much, but it turned out all right.

Canada has a Registered Retirement Savings Plan program (RRSP) where you can shelter some of your investments and savings on a tax-deferred basis, so I put in as much as I could. When the Tax-Free Savings Account program started, I moved my emergency fund into that, and then started using it for some of my investments too (also in TD e-funds). For my long-term goals, I needed non-registered investments as well, so more TD e-funds there.

The stock market has been up and down since then. The market value of the portfolio is occasionally below the book value, which looks a little discouraging. When I use the XIRR formula in Excel or other spreadsheet programs to analyze my actual returns, though, it works out okay because the reinvested dividends are also accounted for. Besides, as long as I keep an eye on the money I may need within the next five years, I can let the long-term investments go up and down without panicking.

Investing with uncertain income was a little more difficult for me to get used to. At the beginning of my experiment, I was worried that I might not have enough in cash despite my budget, and I wanted to keep as much as possible in savings accounts just in case. Lately, though, I’ve been able to relax a little and say that at least 10% of this should be put in long-term investments. I look forward to being able to increase this proportion as I become more comfortable with managing finances during this experiment.

It’s getting easier and easier to postpone present spending for the abstract idea of enjoying extra time and flexibility later on. For example, we were at a thrift store looking for books, and we came across some DVDs for movies we had enjoyed. After some consideration, we put the DVDs back because we get a lot of free movies from the library anyway. It’s easy to keep my lifestyle simple now so that I have the space to keep exploring things later.

I still haven’t sold a single stock or index fund I’ve ever bought. Well, I guess the transfer of my Sun Life funds (from the IBM defined contribution pension plan) to TD counted as a sale, because it needed to be transferred in cash, but I put it back into investments once the transactions got sorted out. I haven’t tried doing the paperwork for capital gains in non-registered accounts yet. I might do it one of these years just so that I know how that’s done and so I’m sure I’m keeping all the records I need. At some point, I should probably convert some of these e-funds to exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for even lower management expenses. Bonds and stocks still boggle me, so it’ll be quite some time before I get around to buying these. (If ever!) Many things to learn! My sister is a lot more sophisticated when it comes to investing, I think, but as long as I can figure out something that’s comfortable for me, I’ll be fine.

Investing can be scary for lots of people, but if you can create some space for yourself so that you aren’t as worried about the ups and downs, it seems a little bit easier. The biggest risk of loss comes from having to sell at the wrong time, and that space can help. Many people struggle with saving even just a little, but if you can manage it, it might be worth trying investing. Like in gardening, it’s fun to see things grow without much more effort from you, even though sometimes the seasons can be tough. As long as you don’t have to use up your seeds for food, there’s always next season.

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