Just had out side shutters added to the house. Only fitted to the west side of the house, the afternoons were brutal in the main living areas. The Results are even better than i expected, the house still warms but is bearable. When the shutters are down the house does become a little cave like.

If I was more motivated i would take some temperature test to see the difference, maybe next summer.

Solar powered assistance bike SOHH Project

In my earlier post 'Business Sucks' I wrote how I sometimes find it difficult to sit down with people and have a decent debate. One of the things that I find the hardest to deal with is when the argument gets changed regularly. I believe that people do this because the original argument does not have enough merit and needs support.

What I just stumbled upon is that there is a term for this, it is known as a Straw man Argument.

From wikipedia

"A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position."

The wikipedia article also has some good examples.

Full article Straw Man.

I just finished reading an interesting article on zenhabits.net. The article was '3 ways to get more done with the power of less.' and who would not want to get more done with less?

Some might call me lazy but I would rather call it efficient. Why vacuum the house this week, I can do it next week and save some time, how bad can it be to vacuum the house every second week? There you go, efficient. But the problem is that if I am bargaining with my self about saving time. What am I then doing with this extra time? What am I achieving? Squat? No, I have made some progress but if I was truly efficient I would be getting 'more done with less'

In Dave Allens book 'Getting things done' he discuss the idea of open loops. When there is a task that you have not completed, even if you are not consciously thinking about it you are in your subconsciousness. This is taking up precious resources, and if there are two many open loops you can feel like there is two much to do and nothing gets done, almost like the problem is to big.

Any one ever use Microsoft Windows? it kind of works the same.

I am the default computer guy at work. I am not a computer guy, I just appear to know more than the next guy and therefore I get called by people with their computer problems. My first response is RTFM or as it stands for 'Restart The Fucking Machine'. (RTFM can also be used as Read The Fucking Manual) 9/10 times this fixes the problem. One of the reason that this works is the computers memory can be filled with crap and it needs to be cleared. Once you think you have closed a program some of that can reside in the memory even thought the process has been terminated.

So if you put this analogy together with Dave Allens open loop idea what do you get? Closing the loops will allow us to put more resources into other projects and we will be able to get things done.

Ok, now lets get back to the original article '3 ways to get more done with the power of less.'

The article has some great advice.

-Have one big goal. “Something that is achievable but challenging, probably within about six months to a year.”
-Only have three projects going at a time
-Every night before you go to bed write down your 3 most important tasks (M.I.T.) that need to be completed the next day.

Now as you focus on getting these tasks done and completed you can get on to the next goal/project/task.

This also fit in with Tim Ferriss philosophy of not multitasking. Something that I have already implemented into my day to day.

So lets get it down on paper so I have to do it.

Main Goal
Get my waste measurement half my height measurement. I stand 193cm tall and my waste measurement is currently 127cm. This means I have to loose a whooping 30cm. How am I going to do this. As detailed on my blog Fat man getting thin, i have really increased my physical out put, now unfortunately i have to dial in my eating. But if I can just find a diet that includes fried chicken :)

I will be making up dates on the fat man page as progress continues.

In my 17th May 09 article 'De Clutter' I spoke of my new mythtv box. Boy I am loving it. With its EPG it has helped me not watch more TV but be a lot more selective of the TV I am watching. This has effectively de clutted my TV watching experience.

Now It has also been working well for the girlfriend. I now have a steady stream of programs for her watch why I am pre occupied (like when I am building Mythtv Boxes.) One thing that my girl friend loves is monkeys and apes. So these two titles have been added to the program finder and automatically recorded. We have had an almost continues supply of primate specials featuring everything from eastern low land gorillas to chimpanzees. But the animal that inspired this article is the orangutan.


"Right Turn Clyde"

My first memories of orangutans was of Clyde, the hard drinking, hard partying, shit on command orangutan from the 'Every which way' films. He was remarkable in his roll with his almost human quality range of emotion and comical timing.

Unfortunately our close relative the orangutan is now under threat, and remarkably its not due to our insatiable need for pretty hardwood floors and bleached toilet paper. But due to our sweet tooth.

Currently the biggest threat to orangutan habitat is palm tree plantations. These plantations have been spreading at a remarkable rate and their product, palm tree oil is used in all maner of food products. While watching the latest episode of the excellent new BBC documentary series 'Orangutan Diary' my girlfriend stated that she from now on would boycott any foods that contain palm tree oil. My reply to her was "how do you know which ones contain palm tree oil?"

My girlfriend was under the assumption that palm tree oil would be listed on the ingredients listing on the side of the food packaging. But, unfortunately I was correct when i stated that it would be listed just under vegetable oil.

Not to long a go my girlfriend sent me the following link to the Palm Oil Action Group shopping guide. I had no idea that so many items were made with the oil. Decisions become a lot harder when tim tams are involved.



But I just cant look at these poor little buggers and be hungry. In the next few weeks I will be looking for items that we can substitute for any thing with palm tree oil and post them here on the blog.

The poor get the picture. The bombs never hit you. When you're down so low." - Read About it, Midnight oil.

In my first post for this blog i stated that I would like to get my weekly spending down to the same as some one that was unemployed and on a government allowance.

Well, I would like to say that i am pretty damn close to that. weekend splashing on the step kids for lunch is the regular expenditure that would take me over this limit.

Why would I want to lower my expense to the 'dole' amount.

- To help funnel my money to pay off my debits. Fuck banks, I aint going to give them a cent more than i have to. Once all my credit cards and loans are paid off, I will try as much as possible to wash my hands of them.

- To see what it would be like to live at such a point.

- But the major reason is this. I would like to have a life style with as little stress as possible, I have a mother, I dont need any more stress than that. By lowering by expenditure to that level I could take the fear of losing my job away. Not saying that I would like to be unemployed, I just dont want to have to worry about car repayments ect.

The interesting thin that i am becoming more aware of is that it cost money to be poor, especially if you have dependents.

A friend was the first to alert me to this. I was visiting him while he was living in London. The first time I visited him he was living in a nice group house in Wimbledon. It was a nice place but quite a trip to soho were he worked. Close to a year after he moved to London he had some very good luck, his father was posted to london and got a nice government funded house in Kensington. Now what does this have to do with my argument? My mate had to live in Wimbledon due to his income. Wimbledon was Zone 3 on the tube payment system and when he moved this went down to zone 1. That is a half decent saving right there. Because he was able to live in a richer part of town he was able to save more money.

Now there were other benefits as well. The amount of services closer to him had increased substantially. Big chain supermarkets with there lower prices, health services ect, He didn't need his car any more, another huge saving.

This link is to a article from the Washington Post. Obversely the US has a larger population than here in Aus so there problems for the poor is a lot worse. But it is same the world over, it cost money to be poor

In my previous article when I reviewed the book 'The four hour work week.' I set a list of what i would like to achieve from what i got from the book.

- Only agree to meetings that have a clear objective and agenda.
I have not had a meeting since the book, yippee. Every time some one has suggested that we sit down to discuss something I request that they out line the purpose and wanted outcome from the meeting. As of yet there have been no meetings. I think a)the reason for the meeting was more social and they had no real agenda. 2)They think that I am a prick and dont want to deal with me. 3)They had an hidden agenda that they want to push.

Now this could back fire but at the moment i am happy to not have my time wasted.

- Stop multi tasking and set stringent times for doing specific jobs.
I used to think that there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't able to just sit down and work at a constant pace through out the day. After reading the book I realised that like others i am better at working in strong burst. The problem with this is if I am working on a project I get quite frustrated when i am disturbed. So to help get around this I have set my most intensive programs for the times when I am least to be interrupted. I have set also days of the week for certain projects. Doing work on the weekend is not may favorite mostly for the fact i dont get payed for it, but the 20minitues of work I did on Sunday would have taken a couple of hours through out the week.


- Remove my self from being instantly contactable.
The only people that i have on instant message are, two from upper management and the my girlfriend (who called also be mistaken for upper management.) :)

On weekends, if I am with the ball and chain i don't carry my mobile. She is the person i really need to be instant contact with. I have also set my phone message to states that I will only check messages at 9am business days and added my work number. After all, it is a work phone, i can talk to any one when i am being paid to care.

- Check emails only twice a day.
Ok, this I havnt been to good with. But I only respond to certain emails at 10am and 4pm. I get a lot of small request from people, setting deadlines for when i am going to respond helps consolidate everything. People are starting to respond the same, it is great. One thing have changed is that I dont check emails on weekends.

- De clutter my house and belongings.
Well, I have done a good job of making piles of goods that I dont need any more, but at the moment they are still just piles. I will work on getting this stuff out of the house. The big problem I dont just want to throw this stuff out, I have to look at selling some items and giving the rest away.

The area that is going to be the hardest is IT and gadgets, how many leatherman multi tools does one need? you would think one wouldn't you. This article describes how some one has done this to make there life more efficient.

To help consolidate my IT I am going to have to spend some money, sounds stupid right? I have always enjoyed getting the most out of legacy equipment but this has left me with multiple computers doing different tasks and the only way out of this is to buy more, still sounds stupid. Here is an example.

I have a home server that runns 24/7. It is a Frankenstein of parts thrown together, every time I find a larger IDE hardive ready for the scrape heap, I liberate it and add it or replace another drive. For a unit that cost me nothing, it has over a terabyte of space. I know that these days this not a lot of storage, but hey, it did cost me nothing.

On the weekend I set up a mythtv box and it is awesome, really awesome. Now this gives the following dilemma. It has made my sony DVR obsolete that only two years ago cost me $800, I am going to have to find another home for, plus I now have another computer that runs 24/7. That is a waste. And due to the computers different ages parts arnt swappable between them. My mythtv box only has 80gig of storage and the tv tuner wont fit into the server.

Solution? I am going to sit down and design and build my first new computer for over ten years. It is going to have to the following requisites to make it worth while and future proof. The positive is that it is going to replace three items with one.

- 2 gigs of storage
- 2 gigs of ram
- HDMI out
- 2x digital tuners
- f'ing quite.
- Low power consumption.
- remote
- Blu-ray player and DVD/CD burner.

I will keep you uptodate with the progress.