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.