Accountabilities

Paying attention is what I didn't do for a moment :)

If something's not correct, should you fix it? Or should you leave it be, and learn from it the next time? Obviously, not everything in life is as binary as this, or as simple. 

Roots and freedom

I see you

Spreading light

Discovery

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery" 

-James Joyce

A month of writing

Despite following its journey since it's launch, I had no idea what to actually expect from the AltMBA.

I'm glad I leaned into the experience after the first conference call, because it has been, without doubt, one of the two best courses I've done in the last decade (the other being Dr. Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn). I've met some amazing people, dismantled several assumptions I've held:  both about myself & about how connections between people happened in general, & discovered how much time I actually have in the day that goes to waste. 

I've written every day.
Whether it was responding to the 13 "prompts", or feeling some sort of emotion that needed to be transferred from my brain to paper, I've been writing incessantly. Cathartic, in many ways.

The AtlMBA officially ended yesterday.

Analogies

My son's cello tutor, while trying to explain how to keep his 9-year old fingers on the finger-board:

"Imagine an O made with your thumb and middle finger, separated by the fingerboard. It's like the fulcrum on a see-saw, lets you move your other fingers without losing their balance"

He understood it instantly. The power of a relevant analogy.

Now if only I had the right analogy for him to keep up his practice.

Recommendations list from the "warm up project"

Good lord, I'll never have the time to go through all these, but here's a list of things /books/ resources recommended by first few warm up projects on AltMba37.
I'll update this list as I go along

Books

Contagious - why things catch on (viral marketing)
A Technique for Producing Ideas - James Wood Young
Obviously Awesome  - April Dunford (product positioning)
The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli

Sites

http://startupstatus.co/ - Australian startup ecosystem
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ Radically inclusive effective meetings

Podcasts

Episode: Homes for the homeless

Tools

Visualise your work, aka mindmapping:  Whimsical 

Biteable 

Mindjet Mindmanager 

Save hours of repeated text typing. TextExpander 

Others

Improve your handwriting

This was my warm-up project on the 37th cohort of the AltMBA.

I’ve been fascinated with handwriting for as long as I can remember. Ornate letters, written neatly often using a reusable (!) fountain pen, the words as beautiful as the sentiment they gave shape to. Most of the adults I knew back then seemed to have that ability to write beautifully, and very few of my pre-teen peers seemed to care.

Fast forward a little over three decades. Internet access, time, curiosity all aligned late one Friday night. Browsing through the returns for a web search for “calligraphy”, I came across https://www.iampeth.com/ (The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers & Teachers of Handwriting).

What blew my mind was this quote: “In the tradition of the Zanerian College, Master Penman inductees were required to produce their own certificate as proof of their ability.” There are only 16 living Master Pen(folks) in the world.

The treasure trove that is the library of rare books (https://www.iampeth.com/rare-books) inspired me to re-learn how to write better. Simple as it is, it’s craftsmanship that I find worthy of trying out myself. It’s helped my kids and a few of their friends start learning how to write better - a process that seemingly isn’t greatly encouraged these days.

I must be getting a little better after a few years of inconsistent practice: our family’s Christmas cards are, according to my wife, getting more attention than (in my opinion) the absolutely delicious Christmas savories she spends hours making :slight_smile:

On Learning habits

I'm sure I'm not alone in doing this.

Something catches my attention, & I want to learn more about it.
I immediately jump to the resources that seem to appeal to me.
I try to do it.
I fail.
I give up.
Ad infinitum.

I think there's a word for it: dilettante. A pejorative.

Occasionally, something sticks with me long enough that I learn the basics well enough that they become habits. "know enough to be dangerous".

On a quest now to figure out, mid-life, what motivates me to want to learn something new, and how to learn about it so it sticks.

Learning to type

My son, all of 8 years old, has started learning to type.  He's figuring out what the home row means, & how his fingers don't have to move all that distance to type just one letter, that he can do it with both hands, and things are not as complicated as the jumbled letters on the keyboard.  Sure, it confuses the bejesus out of him, but he keeps going on.

What's the point of this post? Who knows, I just found it fascinating that age is just a number when it comes to learning. Kids probably learn much faster than than we give them credit for.

Random thoughts throughout today

Nearly 3 weeks into 2019, & it already feels like a whole year has gone by.

What do you do when you feel like there's no more energy to get through the day? At mid-day?

How often should I take a break from work? Or from whatever it is I'm doing?

How much is enough?  How do you know?

Why is motivation so often intrinsic?


Quote of the day: 
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

the MailChimp founders, a profile

A profile of the MailChimp founders:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/10/08/the-new-atlanta-billionaires-behind-an-unlikely-tech-unicorn


Keyhole surgery

A goldmine

https://www.r-bloggers.com/in-depth-introduction-to-machine-learning-in-15-hours-of-expert-videos/

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asadoughi/stat-learning/master/ch2/answers

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Skills for the next 5 years

Vala Afshar's outlines the transformation going on right this moment in time

Transitioning towards a data science career

These two articles made for good reading/ reference

Rafael Knuth blogged about his transition into a data science career. He inspired someone else to follow his footsteps, & write about his experience.

Comparing read_csv with spark_read_csv

Reading in a csv file into R using dplyr's `read_csv()` function is so simple. The syntax & parameters of dplyr are fairly easy to remember, once you've done it a few times.

read_csv(file, 
    col_names = TRUE, 
    col_types = NULL,
    locale = default_locale(),
    na = c("", "NA"), 
    quoted_na = TRUE,
    quote = "\"", 
    comment = "", 
    trim_ws = TRUE, 
    skip = 0, n_max = Inf,
    guess_max = min(1000, n_max), 
    progress = show_progress()
)



I've only just started working with big data sets, & was began wondering if what I know about the dplyr syntax can be carried over to sparklyr's spark_read_csv() function.

While not exactly the same, but if you know one, you can quite easily pick the other. There's an additional parameter `sc`, aka spark connection, that's required.

spark_read_csv(
    sc, 
    name,
    path, 
    header = TRUE, # FALSE forces a "V_" prefix
    columns = NULL,
    infer_schema = TRUE, # to infer column data type
    delimiter = ",", 
    quote = "\"", 
    escape = "\\",
    charset = "UTF-8", 
    null_value = NULL,
    options = list(),
    repartition = 0, # number of partitions to distribute the generated table.
    memory = TRUE, 
    overwrite = TRUE, ...
)

Inspirations for humorous speech contests

and John's Anatomy of the speech here


More movie based speeches - Johnny Cash - Walk the line 


and this one on any speech in general - David Henderson

Reading list - week ending 30 Sep 2018

https://stratechery.com/2018/instagrams-ceo/

https://fs.blog/mental-models/

https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085 & related https://solid.inrupt.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/amazon-s-clever-machines-are-moving-from-the-warehouse-to-headquarters

Asking Life's Questions

This ad from UBS was thought-provoking. A seamless flow of questions that nearly everyone can relate to.

Reading list - week ending 23 Sep 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/guides/smarterliving/be-better-at-parties

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/frasier-25th-anniversary-oral-history

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/well/family/why-you-should-stop-yelling-at-your-kids.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/09/spending-personal-finance-pain-of-paying/569575/

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/09/dont-get-weighed-down-by-idea-debt/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/kurt-vonnegut-the-drone-king/537870/

https://www.business-science.io/business/2018/09/18/data-science-team.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2018/08/30/bezos-unbound-exclusive-interview-with-the-amazon-founder-on-what-he-plans-to-conquer-next/

https://www.conservethesound.de/en/

https://medium.com/@bryancostanich/the-future-is-tiny-44dea02e4517

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/business/media/the-markup-craig-newmark.html

Ray Dalio at Google

speaking about his book Principles. Fascinating talk.

Why bother writing here?

That is a question I ask myself every day. The answer, quite often, is "I don't know. Maybe I won't". And so I don't.

A few weeks ago, a colleague spoke at a meeting about feeling like an impostor. I think that is a feeling that I have lived with all my life. I know I don't know much, & I'm afraid all the time that I will be found out. So I say, or do, very little. And I suspect - no, I KNOW - that this fear has cost me an enormous deal.

Instead, I've been writing in my journal most days for the last 9 or so years. The journals I write in are a cheap ruled notebook I picked up in bulk for the kids to write. The words are banal, & describe very often my rather routine boring day. Other times, I'm caught in the emotion of the day, or the previous day, & it shows in my writing. The vocabulary changes. The handwriting changes. I just have to see the slant on the page to know how I was feeling that day :)

Over the last three years or so, I've gone back to my school days, & what I loved doing most - calligraphy. That focus has found itself showing up in my everyday handwriting. 

What's the point of this post?
Really, there was absolutely none. It was just a feeble attempt to get the words flowing again.

The hand of friendship

Yes Toastmasters Club celebrated it's 10th Anniversary with a simple, out-of-cycle meeting on Friday the 14th September.

No big deal, right? After all, Toastmasters is approaching its centenary.  There are hundreds of clubs that have been around for decades, so what's all the fuss about?

For me, it is. And I'm writing this down for my own memory's sake.

I'd moved with my family to Australia in 2009.  I'd struggled to find work, make friends & all the other challenges that a new migrant finds themselves in in the first year or so, sometimes longer. In my case, a chance meeting, about 4 months into this life-upending move, with someone who worked at Optus, turned into a 3 week contract, & then a  6.5 year stint there for me. A life-changing event but this story is about something else.

I'd been at Optus for a few months, when I realised that there was a Toastmasters club in there. I'd married into a family of Toastmasters, & had it inflicted on me previously :) so I knew what it entailed. So I decided to go along to a meeting. It was at work after all, lunch time, & I knew how welcoming these people are, so what I did I have to lose?

I walked down to the room that was listed on the campus info email. I don't think I've been that nervous even at my own wedding. The room was at the end of a long corridor, & there seemed to be a handful of people in there. Yeah, I can do this, I thought to myself. And then, I have no idea why, I had butterflies. What if they don't understand me? English is my fourth/fifth language, & these people are all going to judge me. Nope, not worth shattering my already frail self-esteem, & I literally ran back to my desk.

I did that for at least four months after that - every Wednesday at lunch time, I'd walk down that hall, pretend I was looking for a different meeting room, peer inside & then walk away. It was on my 17th attempt that as I was peering into the room, a man simply put his hand out, introduced himself, & said, "Welcome to Yes Toastmasters. Have you been here before?"  I have no idea if he'd seen me on my previous aborted missions, or if it was an innocent banal question.  I mumbled something, & sat down in that room that day.

There was no timer that day, so I offered to do the role. It is, for those who've never done it before, a fairly difficult role, especially when you don't quite know who's speaking, or the club's customs, but I remembered getting praised for my effort, even a little comment about how I seemed to be a natural, even though it was my "first time" :) Little did they know I'd done this many times before!

I remembered the feeling at the end of that meeting.  The group, made up of Aussies & migrants & second generation Aussies & for some for whom English was like me a second or third or fourth language were friendlier than I'd expected. In fact, a couple spoke to me for a while after the meeting, most likely missing their lunch.

I joined that first meeting simply to make a few friends, & grow my confidence in public speaking. That meeting changed my life.  It has done so for all my time there, & then some. I've served every year on the committee in some official or unofficial role. I've given tens of speeches, struggled through hundreds of table topics & given as many evaluations. And I remember none of them. What I remember though is the hundreds of people I've been privileged to listen to, meet, & in many cases, to call my friends.

And most importantly, I've never forgotten the feeling of having Suben reach out & offer a heartfelt welcome. It's something I've tried to remember at every Toastmasters meeting when we've had guests. It's become a part of me at every work or social event that I've found myself at, when I notice someone on their own.

I'd never told anyone about that first meeting. Coincidentally, it was in the same room that we were celebrating the 10th anniversary meeting. I stood up as the last impromptu speaker, & memories came flooding back. They gushed forth, leaving me choking. And I could feel everyone of the 30 or so guests in the room egging me on. Suben was in the audience, & I may have seen a pair of moist eyes.

Happy 10 Years Yes Toastmasters. And with the legacy you're built on, I have no doubt, you'll last a ten-fold more.

Writing to describe problems

A large part of problem-solving is the ability to see a problem in its true form. If you're able to describe a problem in a sufficiently clear and precise fashion, most of the solution will become evident.

Writing helps. Write about your problems. It's more precise than thinking

— François Chollet (@fchollet) April 22, 2018

On Keeping Promises

Are all promises worth the same?
How do you know?
If they aren't, how do you discern which ones are worth making, & which ones should simply be a "Sorry, no, I don't have the time to make it happen".

******************

Day 1 of my 2 week break has been fabulous.  Made a promise to myself that I'd not be working, & I'd be fully devoted to the family. Took the kids to the local library for term holiday activities that are usually set up. We had breakfast & lunch together, which was so much fun.  We bought a new phone for mum, & did all the chores we'd planned for the day. We played a game of badminton. It was unstructured, & it was fun, & it was liberating.

I did, of course, break my promise - kept browsing the phone, pining to keep abreast of the things I've set in motion before I decided to get off the wagon for a couple of weeks.  The phone turns off tonight.  Will I keep that promise?

Looking back

It's been just over two years since I started my role at Australia's largest infrastructure project. My title suggests I'm a finance analyst, supporting the revenue earning arm of the Government Business Enterprise behemoth that is the company. I'm about to wrap this two year stint to move on to another role shortly.

I've been asked a few times: what has it been like?

The early days:
The team I joined two years ago had three other analysts, so it was a really small group. Our manager has a reputation for being one of the better managers around, and it was quite evident right from the first week. 

It so happened that I joined right in the middle of the annual long-term forecasting cycle, so I was right in the thick of things. Despite my previous experience in a similar industry, the  tasks I was assigned were new, different & frankly sometimes quite obtuse. I also had a regular role that I was to shoulder, as well as take over the weekly & monthly reporting. To top it all off, one of the team was going on leave for three weeks so it was a definite baptism by fire.

I did have a few things going for me:

• I knew many of the people I needed to interact with (staying in the same industry helps enormously!) or could fairly easily build a relationship with through introductions from mutual connections
• Data wrangling & analytics were two of my secret weapons & I wasn't shy about using the right tool for the job. I also knew my way around the IT department, thanks to a couple of my good friends who'd preceded me into the organisation. 
• I do have a commercial background after all, so I knew precisely what the numbers I was reporting would mean to the recipients

So while the first few weeks felt overwhelming (I also got the distinct impression that I was being pushed to the limit), I had landed on my feet within a couple of weeks, & was learning the ropes quickly.  My manager was regular with both feedback & praise, building my confidence & helping me get very clear with what I needed to deliver. 

It's been my personal mission to learn something new every week.  While still early days in my new job, I still kept up with my learning. I had also just finished reading Nancy Duarte's blog post on slidedocs, so was messing around with the corporate slide templates the organisation had recently issued to see if I could use them more effectively in my work. I had just started reading about the Google Places API. I wasn't quite sure if I would ever use it but it seemed interesting to me. 

By the end of month one, I'd put up a template (with some VBA) that made preparing & presenting the long-term budget a far-more effective & efficient task. The solution was simple: make the presentation a book-like form, laid out in landscape, with the even-numbered page showing the graphic & the odd-numbered page showing the numerics. While there was some initial resistance (finance processes, anyone?), the exec team loved it when shown a draft, & it was a resoundingly successful production effort. 

Less than 2 months into my primary job supporting a team with commercial reporting & analysis, I was told of the peculiar challenge that this team faced: they had no idea who their end customers were. It was like a light-bulb went off when I heard that.. why couldn't they use Google Places API? I spent the next few train trips to & from work using R (another tool I was teaching myself to use) and the Google Places API for R building a prototype that might possibly be a solution.  I shared my prototype with my manager, who immediately sent it on to the head of that team, but also reminded me that it was not my job to solve that specific problem.  Let's just say that prototype, & a few follow up actions on my part, earned me a trip to Google offices in Sydney. 

note to self:  Solve problems, even if they aren't in your specific job description. The value gained personally in the learning far far outweighs the politics of the situation. 

By the time I had completed my official probation period, I had already made my presence & value felt around the organisation. I'd saved a bunch of people a few hours of work, & not just in reporting, showcased some analytical capabilities, & build a bunch of reporting frameworks that made reporting very boring :) 

What does a good manager do? Find a challenging project, & throw it the bored employee's way. Alongside my day job, I was thrown into a pricing project that was struggling for modelling skills. Three months or so of intense optimization modelling later, the proposed pricing structure went into the market and dramatically changed the industry's behavior, but without endangering the revenue prospects of the company.  I value the learning on this project hugely - the mental models of thinking about problems, the approaches to solving them, & the wide variety of factors that were considered in the final solution, all within a deadline that seemed insane at the time. Most importantly, the relationships that were built in that project have grown into friendships. 

 

I've since been involved with some mind-mending business problems. I've been thrown into projects that seem irredeemable in the time available to solve them. I've learnt to see the problems of a behemoth operating at scale in many different angles - regulatory, commercial, operations, strategy, financial, and human. I've seen many of those angles considered and ignored, ideated & forgotten.  In any case, I think these last two years have shown me how much I can accomplish in a very large organisation, how much I can collaborate with people far smarter than I will ever be. I've also learnt about (& felt the impact of) the politics that accompanies a large organisation, of rewards & recognition (or the lack thereof), of personal & team motivation, of technological opportunities & technology's self-inflicted wounds, and a whole heap of things that won't ever make it to a blog post. 

The discipline of finishing

It must be a common trait - we begin doing something, & before long, it is left by the wayside,


*************

Ironically, I started writing this first sentence a few months ago, & didn't do any more than those words!

Tools of the trade...

For someone who works in finance & commercial, Microsoft's Excel & PPT are the glue that hold most organisations together. Forget the multi-million dollar BI implementation approved, ironically, by the CFO, when some analysis is required, its 'open an Excel spreadsheet' time every single day.

This week I found myself talking to a grad in my team about the tools worth getting familiar with, & I shared with her how my thinking has evolved over the last two decades:

Stage 0:
What's this Excel thing? And who on earth needs a million rows & 256 columns?

Stage  1:
Wow, I can get some pretty decently presented tax computation worksheets. The IF statement, especially those 6 nested conditions cover nearly all my likely needs.

Stage 1.1:
Why didn't someone tell me I could use VLOOKUP  instead of those nested conditional statements?

Stage 1.2 to 2:
There's so many more formulas? And you can combine them?

Stage 3-7:
Whoa!! Alt  + Ctrl + Shift + number keys + arrow keys + Page Up/Down keys can move me around the worksheet/ workbook faster than moving my hand to the mouse & then clicking!
Ok, time to learn to touch type because I can do things at x times the speed of mouse clicks.
Formulas, referential indexing, Data Analysis add-in.. holy f**8!!!! Pivot Tables, External Data, connecting to databases, MSSQL, formula auditing, charting......  there's more stuff here that will make my reporting life easier than ever..

Stage 8:
What's this 'macro' thing? It's totally pointless, does all sort of nonsense when I record something & then push play..

Stage 9:
I can take someone else's macro & copy it & then change it to suit my needs? I can integrate it with OLE & ODBC & SAP & Hyperion & other VBA reference libraries to automate some of my daily tasks? What am I going to do with all this spare time?

Fast forward several versions of Office release later, & all the power I need for my day job at my finger tip memory (PowerPivot, PowerQuery, PowerBI),  - there's no need to learn anything else... & well, Tableau came along that made visual analytics easy as point & click (grrrr, no finger memory possible, but I think that is deliberate to make you think while you click around dimensions & measures)

So if you're starting out in your career, it's probably best to get really good at three things with your tools:

1. Touch Typing (there's probably reams written on why this is important). Keyboard shortcuts in Excel will save your a$$ at midnight when all you want to do is shut the damn thing off instead of reaching for the mouse once again. My experience is that you will not even be working at midnight once finger memory takes over.

2. Navigation shortcuts using keyboard.  Get as familiar as possible with:

• Windows application keyboard shortcuts (that Win key + numbers can fire up the application you need)
• Excel keyboard shortcuts (and don't bother memorising these - watch the screen light up when you hit the Alt key). 
• Any other application - before you start playing with the application, read through the help file for keyboard shortcuts  (yes, even Tableau has a few!)

3. Get at least a basic understanding of how code works. You don't need to be a coder or programmer (you hate it so much & it also explains why you'd rather be an accountant :)) - but knowing how the thing you work on works (it is software after all!) will give you a few ideas when you're struggling to do something that seems nearly impossible (which will happen soon enough, anyway)

As the creator of D3.JS Mike Bostock says: "Code is the most general tool we have"

Progress... slow, but progress

The last few days, I've been spending a lot of time on teaching myself to think through problems in a different area.
The course on Deep Learning is pushing the boundaries of my comfort zones.
Every day, however small the progress may be, it feels like a breakthrough.
Waking up way before dawn again today, I spent just under two hours tackling the implementation of backward propagation in python code, vectorised no less.
It was very very hard going for me, yet, after I submitted the assignment & saw the score, there was a tiny sense of accomplishment.

That feeling, amid all the weariness, is very valuable to me at this point.
That, & the music I surround myself with.

Of course it is only month-1/ course-1 of a 5 part course, so things will only get harder from now on.

Public transport conversations, & a minor personal breakthrough

A lady sat down next to me on the train this morning. She was already on the phone when she got on the train. I knew because she had a distinct voice that carried. She was 'coaching' someone, from what I could overhear one side of the conversation.

Two things stood out: In the course of her conversation, she advised her 'mentee' that someone had to just go out & talk to people, & just do some work. There was no question about why that was needed, just that something needed to be done.

The other was her story of a conversation she had with someone a few years ago, on dealing with stress. The person in question worked at a hospital, & would walk around the place, to get a perspective that whatever was causing them stress wasn't causing people to die.

*******************

I've been putting off doing an assignment on the Deep Learning course because I simply couldn't get my head around what seemed a basic concept. The lack of motivation in the last couple of days was partly that too, perhaps?

Anyway, after dinner, & reading to the 6yo, I approached the problem using paper & pen. It took an hour or so to draw out the concept, & about 10 minutes to get through what seemed to be the hardest part of the assignment.

Which reminds me, I used the same technique at work today to design a report that I'd been putting off.  Broadly, the #Tableau report needed to keep track of where each customer lay on a price curve, with the price table axis at irregular intervals. Writing out the steps in full make it amply clear where the problem was & how to solve it.

A new week

Toastmasters had their World Championships of Public Speaking last week, over a 3-day period. Congratulations to Manoj Vasudevan, who won the third place in 2015, won this time round. I've not heard the other speeches, but Vasudevan used the same speech again, with a different title. The same speech on the world stage twice - I'm not sure I agree with the strategy, but clearly the judges thought otherwise. 

***********

The kids have their public speaking finals at school this week. Both are totally stoked (& very rehearsed) with their speeches. I'll get the chance to see the 11yo deliver hers today.

***********

Struggling with motivation the last few days, & it's been the lowest I've felt in a bit. My threshold for bullshit has sunk to a new low, & plenty of it around lately. Or maybe I'm just noticing it a lot more.

I've challenged myself to do some exercise every day, physically & mentally - and it's slowly starting to bear some effects. Doing the Week 3 homework on the Deep Learning course is quite an intense effort, and certainly having some effect on my motivation clearly. 

This & that

Pessimistic? or cynical? Or healthy skeptic?
Or as George Bernard Shaw pointed out: "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who don't have it".

also related; consultants - help or scourge?


A great interview: Om Malik talks to Louis Rossetto of Wired fame
https://pi.co/louis-rossetto-cofounder-wired-magazine/

things on my mind

Leonard Cohen. His magic with words.

Cartoonists. Their ability to use so few words yet get their message so sharply across.

Motivation.

Happiness.

Speeches. Good ones. Not so good ones. The ones that shouldn't have been done. Others that should have.

Internet arguments. Their futility. Actually, the futility of all arguments.

Time. And how it's running out. For everyone.

Kids. and this quote from C.M Wallace: 'If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff they tell you when they're little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they're big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff'.

and this post on addictions by Seth Godin "we needed the eggs": "Just because it appears productive, just because you bought it in a store or got promoted for it at work doesn't mean it's not addictive and worth managing."

The week that was

The week gone by was peculiar.

Someone apparently thought it worth their while to comment on the speed (or lack thereof) of my work. It got me a bit flustered because I usually get commended for turning around pieces of work fairly quickly. Having done many of these tasks previously, I've a fairly good sense of how much time something will take, traded off against how often that task will need to be done again (and that has been a recurring theme, pun intended).

What made the feedback troubling was that it was from someone who, on several occasions, been one of the commending folks. What changed was apparently behind the scenes.

C'est la vie

*****

Both my kids have their speeches ready for their class contests - written, polished, read and memorized. It will be an awesome week, regardless of how they place in those contests.

*****

I've signed up to Andrew Ng's Deep Learning course on Coursera. It's challenging because it is outside my domain expertise, and it's exciting because I am picking an understanding of things that made little to no sense even a few months ago. Neural Networks built using Python - a snake gotten into my brain.

FOMO be damned *

* credit for the title to the good folks over at the New Escapologist

Three weeks of holiday from the humdrum of being employed.
Three weeks with the folks we love most.
Three weeks of enjoying the moment.
Three weeks of solving problems of basic survival.
Three weeks of fascination for the kids.
Three weeks of great (& not so great) food.
Three weeks of fun conversations.
Three weeks of little sleep.
Three weeks of watching little people interact (bond, then fight, then make up, then fight, then make up, then miss each other)

Three weeks of being disconnected from most devices.
Three weeks of no 'news'.
Three weeks of not missing out on anything!
Three weeks of living the most important things in my life.

Links 2017-06-18

Stuff I found interesting over this week.
Your mileage may vary

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170612-why-you-should-manage-your-energy-not-your-time

http://www.raptitude.com/2017/06/want-more-time-get-rid-of-the-easiest-way-to-spend-it/

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/06/kill-your-old-ideas-so-you-can-be-more-creative/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/technology/one-way-to-fix-uber-think-twice-before-using-it.html

https://electrek.co/2017/06/02/elon-musk-tesla-injury-factory/

https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031

Feynman notebook

I'm tackling calculus, with Silvanus Thompson's Calculus Made Easy. A subject that I entirely detested, but have since found beauty in. But learning is hard.

Cal Newport has a blog post about a study hack method called Feynman's notebook. The idea is simple: translate your growing knowledge of something hard into a concrete form and you’re more likely to keep investing the mental energy needed to keep learning

A notebook with handwritten notes has sprung up. THINGS I DON'T KNOW ABOUT. Indeed.

Weekends & mindfulness

This weekend, for the first time in a while, we spent the time doing family things - binge watching some shows, eating, teasing one another, laughing, catching up on sleep, reading and enjoying one another's company (until we got on one another's nerves!). The weekend still has an hour or so left in it, and the house is calm.

I also did something that seems terrifying - I uninstalled most social media apps from my phone. Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn (why do I still have that?). Given that I seem to be checking one or the other for unmentionable periods of time, including as soon as I wake up, or just before falling asleep, this purge is well warranted.  I'm going to give it a shot, anyways. Given my experience (& failure) with these sort of experiments, I'm trying it out one day at a time.

Being mindful.

Creaking bones

Last week, my wife insisted that I spend 45 minutes with her at the community exercise program on Monday morning. She's been going a few weeks now, & says it's been awesome, so why don't I give it a try?

I get lot of exercise - focused very much around my fingers: scrolling across the screen on my mobile or typing on a keyboard, for most of the day. This year, as I slide into an age demographic that's properly considered middle aged, the disconnect between how my mind feels about my body, & how my body responds to such feelings couldn't be more clear.

I work from home on Mondays, so I could manage this time. I let my wife convince me that going to this was a good idea. Many people come along, she said. Most of them are like you & me, have had no proper exercise, or the time to get any of it either - children, partners, dogs & life in general tend to get in the way. My wife, the rock upon which our family's structure rests, has for the first time in over a decade been able to actually get some time to herself, after both kids get bundled off to school.

Trusting as I am of my wife, I signed up for this last week. The sign-up page required my physical metrics, & in the 'why' section, I selected "would like to get a few kilos off my frame".

Nothing could prepare me for this morning though. My wife was right. There were many people, sure. Young, old, shapely, shapeless. Something seemed a bit out of place though: THERE WERE NO MEN! When the session finally began, one other male, a retired gent who looked about 65, joined the group.

Everything after that was a blur. We warmed up, did several reps of exercises, cooled down, & got home. As I'm typing this out, even the bones on my fingers are hurting.

BUT:
The 45 minutes of exercise went by quickly.
I've been exceptionally productive all day today, getting through most of the tasks I'd set out for myself.
And for the first time, I'm actually feeling good after having done some exercise that wasn't something other than walking.

Will do this again next week.

Learning anew

How much I hated the rote learning of formulas, especially when it came to trigonometry & calculus!

For one, I didn't understand why it was remotely useful for those of us who'd taken up accounting / commerce as our primary learning area (no, we couldn't do double degrees - one was bad enough!) Worse still, was the (now apparent) lack of understanding of some teachers themselves, in so far as being unable to explicitly tie the things we were learning to something in the visible world.
There was neither the intrinsic motivation to learn, nor did it seem relevant or important to just get on with it, & get an intuition for it.

There may have been a few of my fellow students who innately understood it in relation to their technical interests, but I strongly suspect they cared about as much as I did, which was very little.

A couple of weeks ago, Rasmus Baath, a researcher, tweeted a link to a 100+ year old Calculus text book, which he followed up by tweeting that his one post that went viral was a book on maths, not cats! I was curious why that may have been so, & spent a little time looking for the pdf of the book that is now clearly out of copyright, & therefore freely available.

Two pages in, & I was hooked. I mean, how could you not be, when the book is titled: "Being a very simple-est introduction to those beautiful methods of reckoning which are generally called by the terrifying names of the differential calculus and the integral calculus by the RFS".

The quote on the next page simply states: "What one fool can do, another can" (Ancient Simian proverb)

The prologue is even more relevant: "To deliver you from the preliminary terrors, which chokes off most (kids) from even attempting to learn how to calculate", with a lucid explanations about the dreadful symbols for differentiating & integrating!

I've now spent at least a good few hours of my time learning about the fascinating teaching style of the author, a man named Silvanus Thompson! I know he'd have gotten an incredible amount of needling from the boys he'd have taught (if my classmates were any reflection of the cruelty reserved for teachers). I'm grateful that he took the time to write as he has, & that the book is still available.  I know it is, because I bought a used copy off one of my favourite online bookseller.

Learning

My 10 year old taught me to do somersaults in the pool today. She was chuffed I could do it after drinking the pool a few times :)
And then she taught me how to do back-flips.  I learnt that too. Much harder than the somersaults. I'm sore, and tired. And pleased. And very happy.

She was a good teacher. I may have been an okay student. Should ask her when she wakes up in the morning.

Stuff

Your house is a just a pile of stuff with a cover over it - George Carlin

A google search for decluttering brought up 1.9m results.  There's links to creative ways to declutter your home, decluttering secrets from professional organisers, what not to do when decluttering, how to cut clutter from your home, decluttering your home AND your head & even questions whether the cult-like rise of decluttering is even healthy!  

Turns out that simply buying less shit (stuff?) isn't an option even worth considering. And lest I sound like I'm on some moral high ground, here's an inventory of the stuff that's on my desk alone!

• Two monitors
• A wireless modem
• A webcam
• Three speakers
• Two camera battery chargers 
• A laser pointer
• 5 USB sticks
• 11 Calligraphy pen holders
• 15 bottles of ink
• 12 bottles of gouache colors
•  A lamp
• A clock
• 3 Photoframes
• A mug full of pens (20?)
• Lens cleaning liquid
• A laptop
• Headphones
• Toastmaster magazines
• A dictionary
• A thesaurus
• 6 other books
• A remote
• A mobile phone
• An in-tray with stuff I don't want to look at just yet
• A keyboard
• A mouse
• A mousepad

When I tell my kids they have far too many toys (or anything else), I'm reminded that I can't preach what i don't practice. 

The last few days have been spent cleaning out stuff that was most likely a spontaneous purchase. Three garbage bin pickups, a council cleanout booking, two recycle bin pickups, & some stuff we'll never use given away to friends who have some use for it- all in the last three weeks. There's still an enormous amount of stuff that will continue to depart our household over the course of the year, but I have no doubt other stuff will take its place.

Memorial

Time flies.

It's two weeks into the New Year. That means enough time has passed for a large number of New Year Resolutions to have been broken.

Late nights, broken internet connections & general busyness around the house has been my excuse for the last week.

But it's no longer last week.

**********************

15 years ago this day, my grandpa passed away.
I loved him dearly.
A kind man. He made my childhood memorable.
With stories of his childhood. Tales of tigers & elephants where he grew up.
Taught me how to enjoy a coffee. To this day, dipping a rusk into a hot mug of coffee is still the best for me.

I miss you Aba.

Breakthrough

The sun's out today. After four days of incessant rain.

As I ran up the stairs to the train station, I stopped in my tracks (pun intended).  A magical sight - a rainbow that suddenly became two rainbows. I pulled out my phone & snapped this picture up, just as it started to drizzle again.

By the time I got to the platform, it was already beginning to fade away. Moments later, it was gone.
For those three minutes, it was a surreal view.

The day's been much brighter today.
The world looks much greener.
Challenges that were insurmountable seem to have been washed away..

Pendulum waves

An old video of pendulum waves - Randomness still shows some pattern.

"Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion."

Pick any one pendulum & try to focus on just its movement.

Soliloquy

How do we know when we're having a conversation?
Does it require the presence of another person?
Does it require them to actively participate? To speak? and/or listen?
How do we know they're listening? That what we've said has been heard?

Trying to get the kids out of bed this morning (the dreary weather continues) got me thinking about this.
I knew they were awake because I could hear them whispering amongst themselves.
Singing out a cheery "good-morning kids" got me no respnose.
Calling out each one by name from the hall got me no response.
Raising my voice got no response.

Make a blog entry online is a similar challenge.
The motivation to write is so I can get these thoughts out of my head & into the ether.
However, rarely (never) has anyone replied to anything I've written.

The kids spoke to me when they were ready.
I guess the same is true here too.

Nostalgia

Always take the weather with you.. - Crowded House

It's been bucketing down for the last 24 hours. The forecast says two more days of this. There have been flash floods reported, and half the extended holiday period for some people is now guaranteed to be spent indoors.

The weather is making me nostalgic about my pre-teen years. 

The smell of freshly deep fried jackfruit papads.

The sound of rain lashing on clay tile roof. 

The mesmerising patterns of water flowing off the roof onto the ground, leaving tiny conical impressions on the soft red soil.

Card & board games with my sister.

Curling up on a bench with a rug & a hot cup of milk.

More often with a grown-up kind of book that would take days to read at regular pace.

The nights would be spent in the light of a flickering candle or a kerosene lamp, hearing stories from our parents about their childhood.

Occasionally having my grandparents would be over. Grandma would tell us tales about the house she grew up in, which was the house we were living in at the time. Pets around the house. A mini dairy farm. Wild animals roaming freely at the periphery of the compound. A tiger or leopard occasionally making off with one of the animals.   Stories about lightning strikes as we looked out at the not yet dead coconut tree in the front yard. And stories about the tenants who lived in the now damaged huts.

Exploring the rooms in the (what seemed like) enormous house, a portion of which were strictly off-limits to us children.

Off-limits not because of the treasures they contained (they did), but because of structural damage to the walls.

It was a magical time because there was so much to do even when you were stuck indoors, without a radio, or a TV or an internet connection.

Somehow, as we grow older, that magic is lost.

The rains become an inconvenience.

We get drenched. Roofs leak. Things get wet. Sometimes to the point of being unusable.

Transport services are delayed.

We can't get to our important / urgent meetings on time. Or without looking like we just got out of the shower.

Clothes don’t dry as fast. And perfume can't / won't suppress the smell of damp clothes.

Some type of screens provide a distraction. Rarely does the power go out.

Sometimes, we are reminded that we aren't in control.

All those memories came flooding as I watched Mother Nature showering (or drowning) her children with unrequited liquid love. 

Renewal

There's something about the change of one (or perhaps two, & once in my lifetime, 4) digits of the calendar that urges most of us to make promises to ourselves.  They tend to be well intentioned promises - lose weight, eat better, love more, live more, do something crazy ad infinitum.

I've done this for as many years as I can consciously remember. It seems like a peer-pressure thing - I'd get asked what my new year resolutions were. The person doing the questioning would usually have a dozen of his/her own that they wanted to share. Not to be outdone, I'd make up a bunch of my own, with about as much hope of achievement as a wisp of smoke in a hurricane.

As I grow older though, I find myself making tweaks to my ongoing plans & systems.  As Scott Adams says, a system is better than a goal  - it's more likely that I will achieve what motivated me to set the system in place in the first place.

My routine changed in the last two weeks of 2015 - I switched off my computers for most of the waking day, focusing on doing physical things. Helping my wife with her garden. Repairing & restoring stuff. Reading a book. Talking to the kids. Playing games. Reading an occasional blog on my phone. Restricting the intake of food & drink during a season devoted to excesses. Sleeping longer (& not wearing a fitbit to monitor it). Noticing my thoughts. Writing longer entries in my journal. Reading old journal entries. Rearranging. Cleaning. Discarding. Rearranging. Redecorating. Reliving old memories.

  

And in the midst of all this, I remembered a decision I made a while ago to stop posting to this blog. I had forced myself to post every day, & did so meticulously for a year. Then ennui set in. It seemed like a pointless exercise. So I stopped. The posts were links to stuff I read & found interesting. But there wasn't much I had written.

Writing is cathartic for me. I write in my journals, or on blank sheets of paper. I use a fountain pen. There's an element of control. My arm moves. The ink flows out. Words are formed. Ideas come to life. Or die.  Resolutions happen at that moment for me. The act of writing things down.

Different context, but "Stop writing everything down" are among the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song that's playing in the background as I wrote those last six words. 

Human? Or Chimpanzee?

Five judges in a New York court rule chimpanzees don't fit definition of a "legal person" http://t.co/lfYsJjWBw5 pic.twitter.com/9Sk7a8Di34
— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) December 5, 2014

The events occurring (as they have been since whenever) across the supposed "developed"  or "first world" countries give sufficient cause to think that the judges are mistaken.
After all, chimpanzees do kill their own species. Not very different in that sense, are we?

Everything's amazing, and yet everything's mundane

Progress is how the miraculous becomes mundane. Many of our ancestors would have given limbs for the privilege of seeing what’s on the other side of our window shades in the sky. Glad all we need is to give up our cynicism about flying.

from a blog post by the inimitable Doc Searls. 

Very often, I forget that if only I stop staring at some screen or book I'm engrossed in & look up, something fascinating is happening all around me. Whether it is people's conversations, or Nature's thandava, something always is happening. The mere fact that I can type this on some plastic-y object, & things magically appear on a screen that's glowing, & with the push of a button, all 12 of my blog readers can see my thoughts - isn't that miraculous?  

What other miracles have I missed today because I'm so busy pretending to be the center of the universe? What have you missed?

Bonus link: Everything's amazing, but nobody's happy

Finding a voice in public

I've never forgotten the first time I did it.

I was in in year 3, & apparently the teacher thought me the brightest kid in class. I'd changed schools that year (& had failed in at least two subjects in the previous class, so how that happened remains a mystery to me).

Being the 'brightest' automatically meant that you were selected for any competitions - debates, speech contests, sports etc. I was terrible at sports and not much better at anything else, although I loved reading & math.  I got selected for a speech contest. I don't remember what my subject was. But I do remember standing on a stage that seemed twenty feet above the ground, looking at an ocean of people I did not know, freezing up, forgetting every word of what my mom had helped me prepare & rehearse. The worst part was being booed off the stage by a sea of cruel faces, most of who were just as old as I was.

I remember my fateful decision that day to never, ever get in front of a crowd to speak again.  It has had nearly catastrophic consequences.

Fast forward to the 2000's. I discovered Toastmasters through a series of co-incidences, found the love of my life who was the daughter of my mentor, gave up Toastmasters for half a decade as life got in the way, rejoined it when I moved countries, & have nearly gotten over the fear of talking to most crowds, however big or small.

Nearly, I said.

I've been reading/ listening to a lot of blog posts & podcasts of late, & have been wondering why I've not really done things that I'm rather reluctant to do because of those voices in my head.  One of them is doing presentations/ public speaking at work. Talk (pun intended) of coincidences  - an opportunity arose to host the monthly team meeting, & I found myself thinking about a particular podcast, & volunteering when no one else in the room wanted to. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do.

I'm fortunate that I have built some really strong relationships at my workplace. As soon as I told them what foolhardiness I had embarked upon, I had some incredible support from my friends at work. I came up with a few of my own ideas & my colleagues were happy to suggest theirs too. The leaders were also really supportive, despite my reservations about doing this.

One of those podcasters / blog posters that have really kicked my ass into gear has been James Altucher. I messaged James on Twitter, telling him just that.

I was awestruck when James replied back, asking how the event went, & reminding me to breathe from my diaphragm, not my chest! He probably has already forgotten his simple act, but that did incredible things to my confidence when I was beginning to think that I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

The meeting went well, & while I was still nervous & a bit out of sorts, I've been getting feedback from a few who attended the meeting about how fresh it was, & that it was the first time they thought it was a worthwhile use of their time. Wow!

And thank you again, James.  I think I've found some courage to raise my voice in public again.

Not tongue tied: An elevator experience

What do you do when you get into an elevator at work, & don't really know who the one other person in there is?

My usual reaction (and one that I've been consciously trying to overcome) is to whip out the phone, & stare at the screen (I've done it even when I've run out of battery).

For the last few weeks, I've made a conscious effort to talk, even if it is something mundane like the weather (and the weather has been anything but mundane lately).

Happened again, yesterday.   He was responsive, had no phone in his hand either! We chatted and got out the same floor. 

And only when we parted did I realise that the reason he looked so familiar was because I'd seen his picture so many times. 

I hope to be as calm when conversing with anyone as I was yesterday when chatting away with the CEO.

A good reminder. Again.

I wrote this quote out this morning. A quick check on my favourite quote researcher  and it appears that this quote has been wrongly attributed to several other people, most prominently Maya Angelou. Documentary evidence unearthed by the Quote Investigator identifies Carl W. Bruehner as the originator in 1971.

I also did something quite out of the ordinary for me. I made a few copies of this & shared it with a few senior leaders at work that I was in a meeting with. Who knows what impact it may have? Regardless, I think as a communicator (aren't we all??), it is important to remember the emotional valence of our words & actions.

 photo posted by Neil (@pointedpen) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:39am PST

What does "focus" really mean?

I regularly have days that I can't seem to find focus. 

It is a struggle because my day job requires me to complete certain tasks whether I am focused or not.  

It's on days like these that motivation levels drop off a cliff. 

It seemed like today was one of those days.  To make things worse, I had a lunch that didn't do any help for my energy levels.

So I did what I'd not done in a long time. Took my laptop & notebook, walked outside the building I normally work in, & sat outside. Took a deep breath. Actually, quite a few. Took in the view. Of people smoking in a corner, chatting away over coffee. Eating solitary late lunches, hunched over their phones. The weather looking ominous, the dark clouds gathering to drop their heavy load any minute now. 

And in the next 30 minutes, I got done the three crucial things I was unable to focus on since the morning. 

Leo Babauta had a blog post a while ago on this subject a few months a year ago. About Finding Focus.  If you'd rather not click that link, here's a summary:

Now sit there with your task. Dive in. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted.
You’ll have the urge to go check something. That’s a nice urge — just watch it and smile. Don’t act on the urge. Just smile. Now go back to what you chose to do.
Do it for 10 minutes, however long you feel is pushing the boundaries of what’s comfortable for a little bit.
Then give yourself a nice reward: ...
Now go back.
Repeat. With a smile.

 It worked.

Energy levels & food: an observation

Aaargh... 

The joy of being aware of something is that it also brings silly things in sharp focus. 

Rice, mongolian beef curry & schezwan chicken for lunch. 

A great recipe for drowsiness. 

And also an opportunity to sit outside & enjoy the weather while working on an important task. 

Back to work. 

Revival: My recollection of the year gone by since the last active post.

It began with a long-awaited holiday. Going away from life as usual. Seeing family. Meeting friends, at least the ones interested enough to catch up for a coffee.  Lots of dental visits. And little, if any, "online" activities. And a conscious choice to not post anything for a while. 

That "while" has turned out to be a year. A whole year. 

In the meanwhile, not posting as much meant I had the time to pursue other things I wished I had the time for. 

Calligraphy. Using the traditional dip pen & ink kind. After a bit of mucking around with various styles, I chose to go with copperplate calligraphy. Bought a few nibs. Brought out the fountain pen inks that I'd never used in a while. Quickly realized I had an awful lot to learn. How to hold the penholder. That nibs are called pens. The right way to draw guide lines. Or where to find & print them. Angles, ovals, flourishes, majuscules, base lines & headerlines.  Learning to make sense of the jargon. 
And more importantly, where to look for help. Iampeth (that site is under renewal right now). Zanerian. A whole host of penmen (and women) around the world who were as fascinated with the simple art of writing letters using, not a keyboard, but an old-fashioned pen. A whole host of brilliantly talented people who make their own pens & penholders. Even a TEDx talk devoted to calligraphy!  I've made some progress on this, & have begun using Instagram to hold myself to account, writing a quote a day for practice (and to lurk around those other awesome inspirational penmen around the world for eg Dr. Joe Vitolo, the insanely talented Schin Loong & the very generous Leenah. 

Python. Not the snake. The programming language.  A couple of reference books to teach myself basic stuff. Install. Search for help. Write some basic programs. And how to learn code the hard way.  
R. Not the letter, but the Statistical programming language. Again, not big progress but enough to understand the language.  This book has been my reference.

Helped write a training handbook for Tableau users.

Physical activity. Simply walking around the block. Walking longer distances to & from public transport. Short & long bushwalks. Never boring when the kids are with me, and great practice of motivating very tired young legs. 

Time with the kids. Amazing how quickly they grow up. Stellar how they bond when I have undisturbed time with them. Quantity is important, & "total attention" is the quality. Both are crucial, imho. 

Lots of reading. That addiction didn't really go away. Began with one published in 1940, called "How to read a book" by Mortimer Adler. The most useful so far: How to fail at almost everything and still win big by Scott Adams. Fiction:  So Long See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Reference (mostly unsuccessful attempts at disciplined effort): Norman Lewis' Word Power Made Easy. Incessant references to Reddit & my Feedly subscriptions (not sure how I can share that OPML link). 

Gazillion music videos on YouTube. Favorite subscription find so far - Josh Turner, NPR's Tiny Desk Concert, & Candy Rat Records. Shout out to the World Music subreddit. Beth Hart. I probably have a whole post devoted to the process of discovering music this year. Maybe I will. A fantastic performance by L Subramaniam, Jean Luc Ponty & Billy Cobham from a while ago. 

I even watched a movie with my wife. Lunch Box. Probably a few others without me really noticing, which is a very common occurrence since I don't really care for them. 

Podcasts, starting just a few weeks ago. A friend commented "Welcome to 2007" when I said I'd finally got a few subscriptions. Thanks to Ken Black who blogs at 3danim8, I decided to listen to this podcast interview with Slomo by Rich Roll. James Altucher, the idea machine, has my vote for his no-nonsense, sometimes quite brusque interviews that are always fantastic value for time invested. I am hooked on the weekly releases of Serial.

Work kept me preoccupied & out of trouble most days. Appreciation of the beauty of nature along my daily journey helps keeps my sanity. As does the daily practice of meditation, which of late has taken the form of my daily habit of writing quotes in a calligraphic hand. 

This post began with me tearing the last few strands of my hair off my balding pate, wondering how on earth was I going to rekindle my blog with. I think I've done enough for a first sitting. Hopefully, I will have more to share in the days ahead. 

If you really took the time to read this far, thank you.