Homemade KIND bars - improving the process - Part II

I had a lot of fun developing my version of the KIND bar - those expensive but tasty nut/grain bars that are sold at most Starbucks. My initial recipe is here: Homemade KIND bars - my own recipe, far cheaper and healthier - Part I.

Since then, I've made lots of improvements. That's the pleasure of developing my own recipes, and keeping good notes - I get to continually tweak the recipe to make it easier and better. This recipe in particular needed lots of tweaking because of the inconvenience of dealing with a sugar syrup.

The main improvements are these:

• I always use a wooden spoon to stir up the ingredients, and every time I stirred (you need to take it out from the microwave and stir every minute or so), I would spend a long time scraping the mixture off the wooden spoon with a knife. It took a long time. Now, I just LEAVE THE SPOON in the bowl while it heats up in the microwave! No scraping off required except at the very end, and lots of effort saved.
• I'm making much larger batches now. I enjoy these, they keep forever in the freezer, so why not make more?
• I halved the amount of raisins and/or cranberries I was putting in, and may skip them altogether. They seem to make the bars too sweet.
• I added coconut. At my favorite grocery store (WINCO) they have unsweetened coconut flakes, which are a little difficult to find, so I stock up when I'm there. Coconut gives a really rich flavor to the bars.

So here's my updated recipe.

INGREDIENTS:
Syrup ingredients
½ cup sugar
¼ cup corn syrup
1 teaspoon salt

Nut/grain ingredients (mix and match whatever dry ingredients you like, as long as it totals 6 cups)
1 ½ cup parched wheat
1 ½ cup peanuts
½ cup cranberries
1 cup almonds
1 ½ cup unsweetened coconut flakes

DIRECTIONS:
Spray non-stick spray on tin foil on cookie sheet, also spray the bottom of a drinking glass for pressing down the mixture
Nuke the sugar, corn syrup, and salt first for 30 seconds, to make it easy to stir
Leave wooden spoon in bowl - no scraping off!
Add the dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly.
Microwave for a total of 3.5  minutes, stirring every minute or so
Empty the bowl onto the cookie sheet, spreading with the wooden spoon and pressing down with the drinking glass
Let cool 15 minutes, and then cut into bars. Don't leave it longer than 15 minutes, because it will harden too much, and crumble when you cut it.
Wrap the bars (I put them in snack size ziplock bags)

My new side-gig: converting books in the public domain to Kindle format, and publishing them on Amazon

I have a new side-gig now, which is taking old books that are now in the public domain, converting them to Kindle format, and then publishing them on Amazon.

My most recent book

What the heck is public domain, anyway? In a nutshell, books that are "in the public domain", are books that were published before 1923, and whose copyright has expired. This includes all the old classics such as Pride and Prejudice, and Tom Sawyer. However, there's hundreds of thousands of other books also in the public domain, that never got anywhere near as popular, and are not regarded as classics.  But they're are still interesting to read nowadays—partly for historical interest, and partly because good storytelling is timeless.

How did I come up with this idea? I was going through some forums on side businesses, and came across a post from someone who said she was making a small, but completely passive income just from some old books she'd converted to the Kindle format and uploaded to Amazon. The idea intrigued me because I've been a reader of old public domain books for a long time, usually from Gutenberg.org.

My first experience with old books in the public domain was in college. When I was writing my senior honors thesis, I had a study carrel that was right next to a selection of Horatio Alger books. Alger was the original "Rags to Riches" writer, whose specialty was hard-working boys and young men who, through hard work, optimism, and perseverance managed rise up  from poverty to—usually not riches, but middle class respectability. They're pretty formulaic, and the themes tend to repeat themselves. Still, I found them interesting enough to read—anything to procrastinate on my thesis. And ever since then, I've had a special interest in old books.

Back to the original forum post that got me interested in the possibility. She had gotten started via a job at her college, scanning a bunch of old books. Instead of just leaving it at that, she also formatted them for the Kindle, and put them up on Amazon. Most of them got no sales at all, but one of them regularly made about $100/month.

The idea intrigued me, partly because I love old books, and partly because there's a gambling aspect to it. Most of the time you make nothing, but every once in a while, you hit a chunk of gold—in her case, a popular book!

So far, I haven't hit any gold nuggets, but I have made a tiny bit of money—embarrassingly small, but it's very satisfying to make any money at all using new skills. And speaking of skills, the really fun part is that I've needed to develop expertise in many new areas. The main ones are image processing (mainly Gimp), Canva for creating book covers (very user friendly, somewhat limited in capabilities), and OCR software for "reading" the page images and converting them to text. Also copy-writing, for creating an attractive description for the book. That's the most gratifying part, and what I like the best—becoming competent in new areas for an immediate need.

Over the long term, I'm pretty sure that this isn't actually a viable business or side-gig. There's just too much of an initial time investment to get a book online in a salable condition, for a public domain book that you can't price very high, and which may not sell at all. Plus, Amazon takes a much larger chunk of the revenue for public domain books—75% instead of 35%. But as a fun hobby "business" that may lead to new ideas, this is very worthwhile.

Here are a few of the books I've put online:

The Finding of Jasper Holt - an old romance novel, so far my best-seller
Julius, the Street Boy - by Horatio Alger, the story of a street urchin from the New York City of the late 1800's who had an opportunity to improve himself by moving out west.
Max and Moritz - Here's what I wrote up for the description of this one:

The story of Max and Moritz is a never-to-be forgotten classic of German culture. This time-honored story has entertained children and adults for over 150 years, and has not lost any of its irreverent humor. The story is not for the squeamish —the two boys do come to a bad end, and are not mourned by anyone in the village—but the pranks, the delightful verse, and the illustrations together make a jewel of a tale. 

This particular edition is actually not in the public domain anymore, because I redid the original old translation (and improved it a lot, I like to think). So even though the illustrations are old, the text is mine.

Interval training - magic in 30 minutes!

I'm eager to do more backpacking after my 5 day trip in the Olympics recently. I definitely feel the need to be in better shape, though. The friends I hiked with had been training a lot, and it really showed, although I made up for it a little bit by being really anal about pack weight, so I was carrying a lot less than them.

The problem is, I'm not really that excited about exercising. More bluntly - I hate to really work out hard, unlike some of my friends, who love it, and get the famous "runner's high". Not me. I like walking, and I exercise (almost) every day, but it's generally just a brisk walk on the treadmill, about half an hour, while I watch some of my favorite shows on HGTV (currently House Hunter International). And very occasionally, I motivate myself enough do a few push-ups and sit-ups. Yep, I need to kick it up a notch!

So I decided to try interval training. In a nutshell, interval training is working out very hard, but just for a short time, and then going back to a regular pace. Rinse, then repeat. Here's how I did this, training on the treadmill:

• 5 minutes walking at a regular pace
• 5 minutes at a regular pace, but a 11 degree incline - very steep! And tiring.
• Repeat, for about 30 minutes total

The magic to interval training is how very speedily it increases your aerobic capacity!  I could really tell the difference yesterday, on a local hilly walk in the neighborhood. Previously, I got a bit winded on it. And now it's not a problem at all, I was powering up the hilly section. And this is all with only 4 sessions of interval training over the course of a week.

The key to making this work is that the strenuous part of the workout is very tolerable, because you only have 5 minutes to do!

Pros and cons of renting an RV from Cruise America

We just got back two days ago from a long RV trip - almost 3 weeks - in which we rented a 25 foot class C RV from Cruise America. I'm not going to go into the details of the trip, but I do want to jot down a few notes on how the actual RV rental worked out. Also, since the trip was also meant to help us decide if we should buy an RV, I'd like to jot down a few notes on that as well.

In Canyon Creek campground, close to Bend

Overall, I was happy with the trip. We had great experiences, the weather was outstanding almost all the time (baring a forest fire here and there!), and we saw some really beautiful sights. Now, for a more pro/con way of looking at things.

Pros

• It's good to have everything with you, there's not the dislocation of moving from one hotel to another, and hauling luggage around. Over a longer trip, this makes a big difference.
• You can cook food in the RV. We did eat some meals in restaurants, but mostly we ate very simple meals (think spaghetti noodles with spaghetti sauce, with a can of fruit) in the RV.
• You stay in campgrounds, which are generally very friendly places. We had great talks with people just walking around the campground, and striking up conversations. If you're staying in a hotel, that just doesn't happen.
• You can also stay in campgrounds with a tent, but putting up and taking down a tent as for as many different places as we stayed at - that would have ended up being a huge hassle, and a trip like that wouldn't have worked.
• You don't need to plan as much as you would if you were staying in hotels. Mostly we just showed up at campgrounds, and were able to stay there. A couple times (usually Friday and Saturday nights, which, as summer weekends, were much more booked than other nights), we just pulled off the side of the road, or at a trailhead, and spent the night there. This kind of flexibility wouldn't have been possible if we'd stayed in hotels.

Cons

• Driving this big, very rattly RV was exhausting. Eric did all the driving, and even though we kept the hours of driving very low (some days we didn't drive at all, some we drove 1 or 2 hours, only the first and last day did we drive more than 3), it was a strain, much more so than driving a car would have been.
• You don't have a small car with you, to do little trips. No matter where you want to go, you're taking the big rig with you.
• Renting an RV like this is expensive! It would have been quite a bit cheaper to take our car, and stay in hotels.
• The actual RV that we rented was a disappointment. Everything worked, more or less (except the cold water faucet handle on the shower came off, we had to use a pair of pliers!), but the RV was VERY old, rattly, like I mentioned above, and not very clean. Every time I sat down on the upholstery, I shuddered a bit because it was really just grungy. A rental car is much, much cleaner in comparison.

Cato University!

I attended Cato University this past week. It was a tremendously illuminating time, I met all kinds of interesting people that I would never run into in my normal everyday life, and I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the speakers. I've been exposed to a lot of the economic and philosophical theory behind libertarianism before, but this week was truly special, and I also learned just how much I didn't know.

These are my people!

Notes from our trip to Costa Rica

Just a quick blog post with a few notes on our trip to Costa Rica, to visit our good friends Steve and Ilana, with their kids Benji and Marina. They've been teaching at an international school there for a year now, and are happy and tanned, but we really miss them!

Most of the pictures are here, but I put a few noteworthy ones below as well.

Here's a couple things that struck me:

• My Spanish reappeared! I used to be fairly fluent (almost 25 years ago!), and it substantially came back. It helped that, before going, I had watched a lot of the TV show Arrested Development on Netflix, in Spanish. I was planning on doing more - trying to find a tutor for conversation practice, etc - but I'm glad I didn't, since my Spanish was good enough.
• The currency is Colones, and there's about 500 to the dollar, so it's easy to figure out the approximate price in dollars
• In San Jose, there were security people all over the place, the "guards" to whom you pay money to watch your car, also lots of security personal at the stores (for instance, the tiny little Claro cell phone store had their own security guard who opened the door for us)
• Our kids had an awesome time playing with Benji and Marina. Peter usually played with Marina, and Kenny with Benji. Peter said, "It's kind of like we're two teams, me and Marina, and Kenny and Benji".
• We really liked the "Soda" home style restaurant. Usually food was very well cooked, and really reasonable. I usually had rice, beans, platanos (baked sweet plantains), some salad, and some type of meat (chicken or beef). 
• Road closure can suck. The lodge we stayed at in the La Fortuna area was behind a road which was closed by a landslide, so we had to do a long detour many times during our stay. 

After boogie-boarding, building a fort with the boards

One of many dinners at Soda Osiris - we loved that place!

A mud bath

Road closure - No Hay Paso!

Squeeze pouch beans for lunch

Zipline tour

Arguments for and against the minimum wage

I follow a lot of libertarian blogs, which are of course against increases in the minimum wage (and usually against a minimum wage entirely). And then I also occasionally read articles in the New York Times on the minimum wage, and the comments on those articles. The New York Times and it's readership usually skews very liberal, so they're in favor of increases in the minimum wage. There's lots of  talk about inequality, how increasing the minimum wage will help the poor, etc.

The comments highlight various studies, some of them finding that increases in the minimum wage do NOT increase unemployment, and some finding that they do. Everybody, both the pro and the cons side, has an ax to grind, and provides only the research and data that supports their side.

I was trying to think of effective, non-confrontational ways of convincing people that the pro-minimum wage argument is fatally flawed, and that passing a law making it illegal for people to accept a job paying less than $15 an hour is not a good thing. (Notice how I framed the argument artfully to support my point of view there, i.e. "making it illegal for people to accept a job paying less than $15 an hour" vs. something like "forcing fat cat employers to pay poor people a living wage".)

It's challenging, and frankly I don't see how somebody with any background in economics can not understand that making something more expensive makes it less likely that people will purchase it. Labor is a product very similar to other products.

But here's a thought experiment for the minimum wage supporter, who doesn't believe that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Think back to those times when you were actually an employer. For me, this comes mostly from when we still needed babysitters for the kids. If I could have hired a trustworthy babysitter for about $5/hour, I would definitely hired babysitters far, far more often. But babysitters, especially reliable ones that I liked, usually charged far more than that. So, I didn't have them that often. I didn't purchase the labor that they were selling, because it was too expensive. Instead, I just did without the babysitters unless I really needed them.

The same thing applies when a minimum wage is set, or raised. Employers have options too. They'll invest in more technology instead of employees, or just not expand. One way or another, they'll do without the labor, if it's too expensive for them. Or they'll just go out of business.

Service trips to third world countries - useless or not?

I was in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport yesterday, and saw two large groups of teenagers wearing t-shirts that identified them as traveling with a church group on a service trip. One of the service trips was headed towards Costa Rica, and the other, Haiti.

My immediate reaction to group such as these is - how could they possibly do anything useful? They almost certainly don't speak the language, or have any skills that could come in handy. So how are they serving?  That's really the only part that bugs me - that they call it a service trip. Call it a homestay, language learning, something like that - that's fine. I think it's very good for pampered teens to see other parts of the world that aren't so wealthy.

But calling it "service" is false, because they're not doing useful work. I've heard of orphanages being painted, and repainted, and repainted again, all because groups such as these need service projects to work on, and the orphanage receives a substantial donation in exchange for hosting these "service" trips. Also, mostly on these types of service trips, the teens stay together in groups - easier for their chaperons to manage, but they interact much less with the locals.

Here's a couple links on these kinds of trips:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans-cambodia-aids-holidays-madonna
http://pippabiddle.com/2014/02/18/the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys/

In the interest of full disclosure - I was on a trip somewhat similar to this many years ago, in Nicaragua. It was in the 1980's, I was in college, and this was a "solidarity" type group, against the US-supported Contra rebels. I wouldn't have considered myself a socialist at that time, but I was far more liberal than I am now, and didn't have nearly as much skepticism (cynicism?) about government in general. The trip was 6 weeks, and it was the first time I'd been in a third world country. It was incredibly interesting, I had a lot of memorable experiences, and met people that I never would have been exposed to without this program.

For part of the trip, we were meant to be helping out at a Habitat for Humanity project. That was the service component of the trip. They were organizing and funding a project to build low cost cinder block homes in the area we were headed to, and all of us in the group (about 6) "helped". The helping part was truly ridiculous. There was a group of locals who knew what they were doing, mixing cement. They had an interesting trick to make the shoveling easier. One guy would actually be holding the shovel, and another would yank at a string tied to the shovel, right where the wood handle meets the metal, to make it easier to lift. They had to be very much in the right rhythm to make it work. Perhaps they just didn't have enough shovels.

Anyway, us volunteers had never mixed cement, and also had very little experience with shovels. We were entertaining to watch, I'm sure, but pretty close to useless.

When "green" doesn't mean "frugal"

A friend who works at Google was commenting on all the extensive remodeling that they've been doing in the past few years - tearing buildings down and rebuilding, or doing extensive reconstruction, always ostensibly to make it "greener".  He was grousing about how very not-green it was to be constantly sending massive amounts of building materials to the dump.

That struck me as a good example of what I'd been thinking for a while - that a lot of what's marketed as being "green", is actually a holier-than-thou version of conspicuous consumption. For instance - some people would only buy the most eco-friendly plastic food container, heavily marketed as being made from all post-consumer waste. But they would never consider reusing, say, a plastic sour cream container for their leftovers. Or more likely, they wouldn't even save leftovers.

Another example - some parents wouldn't blink an eye over their children throwing out much of a meal, instead of saving it for later. But they would insist on buying all organic foods because they believe it's better for the earth.

What does being green actually mean? I just looked it up online. The big online dictionaries don't appear to recognize what appears to be the most commonly used meaning nowadays, that of being eco-conscious. The definitions just refer to the actual color aspect of being green. Maybe because it's too difficult to define. I think most people would say that going green means using fewer resources, and recycling more. But using fewer resources - are you using fewer resources to save money, or are you using fewer resources to...what? What if the resources are like the blackberries that grow wild in a field behind our house? If we used fewer of those resources...is that a good thing?

Okay...I'm not going to win any awards here for persuasive writing. But what I'm trying, inelegantly, to say, is that when being "green" is not at all related to frugality, then it can be a faddish thing. Like people buying a Prius when you could get a much cheaper car that isn't necessarily electric, but uses fewer resources (less of your own money, in any case!). It's just another form of conspicuous consumption.

Summer "point" program for the kids

Over the years, as the kids have been growing up, I've tried a couple "programs". For instance, a marble jar, where the kids get marbles for doing certain activities that they're supposed to, and have to use those marbles for activities that they want to do (for instance, watching TV or playing video games). I know some families where these kind of programs worked well, for years. But for us (maybe more for me), the amount of monitoring and bureaucracy that was required was too much for me, and I usually gave up within a few days.

I'm trying again, though. This one is a little different. Our latest "program" is one whereby the kids earn points for activities that I deem worthwhile. Then they can use those points to redeem Magic the Gathering cards, which they're really interested in now. Otherwise, without points, they're not allowed to buy them.

Here's a sampling of the activities and their point values:

Make a great stop motion video and upload to youtube 5
Juggling with clubs 10 catches 4
Juggling 10 catches for Peter 4
Do a long bike ride 3
Do a long hike  2
Finish CodeAcademy program for Python 5
Sew something for teddy 2
Learn how to dive 2
Learn to tie 5 knots from memory 2
Organize and promote family game night 1
Cook dinner for family 1
Make cookies without help 1

Kenny's gotten all the way to 25 points, which he wants to get some kind of Magic the Gathering "expansion pack". Peter's not quite there, but he's doing pretty well.

Is this a success? I'd give a qualified "yes" to that question. It motivated them to try some new things, and didn't require a lot of oversight.

The different types of dysfunctionality in organizations

At a small company I worked at many years ago, their database had been designed by someone who had no inkling about database design. In the main database, there was a Company table.  The primary key was the email address of their main contact. If you're not a database professional - this is a really rotten design, and will cause lots of problems. And this was only one of many serious database - and other - problems they had. Overall, the organization was pretty dysfunctional, and the site was always failing. But this was "small potatoes dysfunctionality", because they didn't have resources to waste.

At another organization I worked at more recently, there was an entirely different level of dysfunctionality. Millions of dollars were spent on projects that everyone knew would eventually be cancelled, multiple people were doing a job that could have been done easily by one, and there entire armies of consultants and contractors spinning their wheels, producing nothing. It was a weird place, and I may write more about it sometime. This was big time dysfunctionality.

Of course, there were many differences between these two organizations. But the one thing that struck me most was that the second organization had few resource constraints - i.e., they had plenty of money. And THIS was a big cause of the extremely high level of dysfunctionality. If you have no constraints, all kinds of weird things happen. And people start exploiting the lack of constraints and unclear goals for their own purposes. That's why there were armies of consultants and contractors - because the vendor agencies, the companies that brought in the consultants and contractors, had very clear goals and motivations. But those were only to place as many of their employees at the organization as possible. That's why there were so many people doing so little work.

This situation reminds me of Parkinson's law - "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". Just as work expands to fill the time available for it's completion, it also expands to fill the resources - i.e. budget - available for it's completion.

Another android app with MIT App Inventor - this time, gambling

When I was a kid, we had a little toy top with 6 sides. Each side had an outcome like Take One, Take Two, Give One, Give Two, Everyone Gives, and Take All. We'd all get some coins, sit down, and spin the top to see if we'd get lucky. It was a very innocent form of gambling. I looked it up online, and it's called the Put and Take, or in German (ours was a German toy) Nimm-Gib. Also very similar, but 4-sided, is the jewish dreidel.

Anyway, I remembered it fondly, and decided to make that app my next project. It was fairly simple to put together (although what would it have been like without the internet to help you through rough spots?), except for one bug that I ran into that required a good night's sleep before I was able to resolve it.

This is the kids playing the game. It's a very simple app with only one button that shows the options bouncing around the screen, which gradually disappear until only one is left. The kids would chant, "Take all, take all, take all" when it was their turn, and "Give two, give two, give two" when it was somebody else's turn. We played first for dimes (Kenny won everything!) and then for nickels (it went on a long time, I had to fold, Peter had the most coins left).

The kids were very enthusiastic about it, and it was lots of fun for me to write. But I'm not sure how many more of these little apps I'll be doing with the App Inventor. The graphical interface, while very intuitive and easy to learn, is less useful when you're doing more elaborate projects, and there are no real debugging tools.

The link to install (along with install instructions) is at the bottom of this page.

Why "eating local" is not necessarily a good thing

I was shopping at the Fred Meyers grocery last night, and saw something new in the produce section. For much of the produce, they had a little sign saying where it was from. For instance, there was a sign for the cabbage that we bought, stating that it was grown in Puyallup, Washington, about 50 miles away. I assume that they only put these signs up when the food came from somewhere nearby. I've seen these kinds of signs at high-end places like Whole Foods (also known as "Whole Paycheck"), but haven't noticed them so far in Fred Meyers, which is more an everyday grocery.

Also, we had a celebration dinner at the Herb Farm recently, a high-end very fancy restaurant in nearby Woodinville. They made a big fuss about everything that was local - apparently they were even able to find shrimp that were from within 100 miles - and also told us that they were planning a meal in which absolutely everything would be sourced from within 100 miles. Instead of lemon, they'd have to use lemon scented herbs, they'd have to find a special local source for salt, alternatives for pepper, etc.

These things, among others, have made me realize that "eating local", or at least attempting to, has become the accepted morally superior choice. I have no problem with people eating local, or raising their own food, going to farmers markets, or wanting to visit farms, etc. That's a perfectly valid choice. 

I do have a problem, though, when choosing to eat local is portrayed as a morally superior choice. The assumption is that if you don't really care where it came from, if price and quality and convenience are what's important to you, and not how far away the food was raised - then you are deficient in morality. This has definitely happened with eating local - it's become what morally conscious people aim for. 

Also, when the government starts promoting and subsidizing locally sourced foods, forcing schools, prisons, etc, to buy a certain percentage of their produce locally - that's when it really gets bad. The current secretary of agriculture - Tom Vilsack, has said, "In a perfect world, everything that was sold, everything that was purchased and consumed would be local, so the economy would receive the benefit of that". Huh? The guy is completely ignorant of basic economics.

Here's a couple reasons why I think that's baloney.

- It's very expensive to raise foods away from where they naturally grow best. Regions naturally specialize in the foods that grow well there. For instance, potatoes grow very well in Idaho, but poorly in Alabama - it would take twice as much land to grow the same amount of potatoes. We could grow absolutely everything, including tropical fruits, in every region, but it would take much more energy and land, potentially growing things in greenhouses, making the food much more costly. We lose the whole comparative advantage of people (and regions) doing what they're best at.

- Transportation costs are a small portion of total costs for food - usually less than 5%. The inefficiencies you cause by producing things locally far outweighs reduced transport costs. Also, distance shouldn't be the only metric - efficiency should. A farmer driving an old pickup to bring some boxes of vegetables to a farmers market could have a vastly higher transport cost and carbon cost, per unit, compared to a tanker that brought many tons from overseas.- If you're serious

- By pushing "eating locally", you're depriving farmers overseas - usually much poorer than farmers locally - of the income provided by trading with us.

I can totally understand the desire to visit and buy food from a local farm or farmers market, and be more aware of the basics of food production. It's fun, and interesting. But asserting that it's a morally superior choice, instead of a different way to shop, and/or conspicuous consumption is a flawed path.

There's a lot of background information in The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, a really well-written rebuttal to the whole local foods movement.

Homemade KIND bars - my own recipe, far cheaper and healthier - Part I

I had lots of fun yesterday creating my own version of the KIND nut bars that you can buy at Starbucks. I buy them occasionally when I need a snack, but not very often, because they're crazy expensive - $2 for a tiny 40 gram bar, which comes out to $22.68 a pound - yikes! 

To develop my recipe, I cannibalized some of the recipes that can be found online (for instance, Homemade KIND Bars), but I modified them to make the process a little easier. 

Are these bars nutritionally better than just a handful of nuts and raisins? Not really. Actually, if you're trying to eat less sugar, they're probably a little bit worse. But there's the fun and convenience factor of having a bar instead of a handful of nuts, and also making something so much cheaper than the store bought version. Nutritionally, mine have less sugar than the chocolate dipped version, which most of them are. 

Here's my recipe. This is for about 6 bars, somewhat larger than the original.

Ingredients:

¼ cup sugar
⅛ cup corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt (or more, depending on whether nuts are not salted)
½ teaspoon vanilla

½ cup roasted peanuts
½ cup roasted almonds
½ cup roasted sunflower seeds
½ cup dried cranberries

Instructions:

Microwave the first 4 ingredients for 30 seconds, to make it easier to stir the sugar and corn syrup together
Stir, then add the last 4 ingredients
Microwave for 30 seconds, stir
Microwave for 30 seconds, stir
Stir, then quickly empty to a cookie sheet covered with tin foil.
Spread out the mixture and flatten it out, until it looks like this:

Let the mixture cool somewhat, then cut it into bars and put it into snack-sized baggies. I store them in the freezer. The nuts stick together well with the sugar syrup.

And voila! I estimate the cost on this bar to be about 25 cents. This is based on costs at my favorite grocery store, Winco. They have the best and cheapest bulk section around - for instance, roasted peanuts for about $1.60 a pound. 

Note that you can use any type of dried fruit, nut or seed. Since taking these pictures, I've made this recipe again, but this time using parched wheat instead of sunflower seeds, to add a toasted flavor. 

The next time I make the recipe, I'll cook the sugar syrup a little more before adding the nut mixture - I want to see what happens when the sugar gets to a higher temperature. And I'm planning on tripling the size of the recipe, which means I'll need to increase the cook times. 

I think I'll also try seeing how little sugar syrup I can get away with. All I really need is enough to keep the nut mixture from falling apart. Less sugar would be better.

One more note - storing nuts in the freezer is an absolute MUST if you buy in bulk. Otherwise they can go rancid in a surprisingly short time. I've never had nuts go rancid in the freezer.

The original KIND bars use brown rice syrup and honey to bind the nuts together. They're just as nutritionally empty as sugar, so I'll just stick with sugar, which is cheaper and easier to find. 

Here's a picture of my first attempt. It's basically a clump of sugar syrup with a few nuts adhering to the outside. It's also why I switched to mixing the sugar mix with the nut mix before I finish - it's a lot easier to stir.

Incentive systems and how they are immediately gamed

I was annoyed recently with my two boys, ages 8 and 11, who were bickering non-stop about trivialities. So I came up with a "system" on the spur of the moment. The system was, that for every negative thing they said to one another, they had to say 5 positive things.

Well, that worked about as well as I might have imagined, had I thought about it for more than 5 seconds.

Kenny:  "Peter, you're beautiful, you're beautiful, you're beautiful, you're beautiful, you're beautiful!
Okay, now I get to say something mean!"

Bottom line - any time a system is created, the VERY FIRST thought that most people subject to this system have, is how to game it.

Another example - I was reading some forum posts recently on the Mr Money Mustache site, which I check out frequently. There's lots of interesting stuff there.  I read a post recently about a workplace that instituted a reward program to get people to stop smoking. The reward for stopping smoking was substantial - around $700. The forum discussion was about smoking for a day, then quitting, in order to be able to claim the $700 reward for quitting smoking. The consensus appeared to be - look very carefully at the details, and make sure your health insurance rates wouldn't go up, etc., etc., but once you've done that, then go for it.

I had a similar situation come up recently. A company that I worked for offered a $1000 wellness bonus, that could be used for health club membership or exercise classes. I'm generally in good shape, and am also diligent about exercising on my own, without a health club or exercise classes. It's far more convenient to exercise that way. But because I didn't want to do group classes, there was no way for me to get that $1000. And that really pissed me off!

UPDATE - Why I'm not longer interested in solving challenges for Innocentive

I wrote a blog post a few months ago about entering problem solving competitions on the crowd-sourcing website Innocentive - Exercise your brain by solving problems for Innocentive. I was psyched about working on the challenges back then, and entered a bunch of Innocentive competitions. I didn't win any of them - so you could potentially call this a case of sour grapes - but in any case, I'm considerably less enthusiastic now. There's a few problems that I see with the whole setup.

The most recent challenge I thought seriously about entering for was this one: Seeking Improved Document Identification and Verification Methods. It's about automatically identifying documents that are submitted by customers (usually financial records that are scanned in and uploaded).

It sounded interesting, and I put many hours of thought into it. But when reviewing the challenge, there were many, many unanswered questions. There's a forum for asking questions on Innocentive, so I did. But the answers I received were perfunctory and had no depth. It struck me that for a question of this complexity, involving all kinds of internal company processes and systems, you can't write a single page document presenting a problem. Solving this kind of problem requires you have full and complete access to the details of a problem - potentially sitting at a table with people who understand the problem, or experiencing it yourself. Then you make proposals, set up trials, do experiments, do some tinkering. That's how you come up with more ideas to test, and more potential solutions.

The limited information that you have about the challenge, the lack of interaction with the people that have presented the challenge, and the lack of feedback on the actual challenge - and the fact that you hear nothing back about your own solution, or the solution that was chosen - that makes the whole experience less than satisfying.

Interesting - I found this post on LinkedIn when I was doing some research, which goes into the same points that I made above. The writer actually received a few Innocentive awards, though.

My first android app with MIT App Inventor - what a blast!

I'd been thinking for quite some time that I'd like to write a simple Android app, just to see what it's like. And what do you know - it's a lot of fun!

I was tired of the timer app that I've been using for a long time - it takes too much work to start it up, and then it has annoying ads that keep the screen turned on. So, I decided to write my own. Also, a timer app would be one of the simplest I could write.

I used the MIT App Inventor program. It uses a click-and-drag programming model which is easy to get into, but has all the disadvantage of graphical programming frameworks - great for small apps, but burdensome when it gets more complicated.

I specifically designed this timer app to be very simple, and called it Timer - Super Simple. It has just 2 buttons - Add 5 minutes, and Clear. And there's a display that shows the amount of time left. This is probably not an app many people would want to use, because the time can only be increased in 5 minute increments. But it's what I wanted.

Here's a link to download the app: https://sites.google.com/site/timersupersimple/

And also, here's a link to my very first video screencast that I uploaded to YouTube. I was having a hard time figuring out how to center things in App Inventor, so once I figured it out, I decided to make a video for it, using the free version of Screencast-o-matic. But it turns out there's a much easier way of doing it, so I made the video unlisted.

Post mortem—teaching an online database programming class

I was very excited when I got an email from the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education program last year, asking me to be one of the instructors in the SQL Server Developer's Certificate program for Spring 2015. I jumped on the opportunity.

I've finished the class now - it's a big relief to finish it.  It was a great experience in terms of doing something very different from what I normally do, and also, teaching a class was on my lifetime bucket list. But there was also a lot of stress involved, and far, far more work than I anticipated originally.

Any experienced teacher will laugh at this, but I calculated the hourly pay based on the number of hours I needed to be online, doing the class session, which was three hours a week. I completely ignored the amount of prep work that I'd need to do, the interactions with the students, and the grading. All of these took a tremendous amount of time.

The prep work in particular usually took more than a full day, for every single session. I had a set of PowerPoint slides from the previous instructor, and the assignments. But, I thought the flow was not as good as it could have been, and there was too much emphasis on things that weren't very important, and not enough on things that were. So I decided to redo it. I still think that was a good decision, but it made preparation far more time consuming - I was almost starting from a blank slate.

For the textbook, I ended up choosing the most highly ranked book on SQL Server database programming from Amazon. It would have been great as a reference book, but it didn't work very well as the basis for my class, because it didn't proceed in a logical sequence for a class, and also grouped a lot of topics together that would have been better split up into separate chapters. So, that was my first mistake, and it continued to cause problems throughout the class.

I thought I would have more flexibility in the class structure than I ended up with. I ended up having to be online, presenting the lesson, for about 3 hours, every session. I tried to make it as interactive as possible, with labs, quizzes, etc. However, 3 hours is a very long time to talk, even with breaks! I had to prepare a tremendous amount of material, and be prepared with cough drops and water bottles for my throat. I, as the instructor, was talking most of the time, and the students were interacting via the chat window, or the quizzes. I felt bad for the students, because I know it must have been boring for them to listen to me for that long, no matter how I tried to jazz it up.

Education is changing quickly, that's for sure. In the short lifetime of this certificate program, about 7 years, it started out as an in-person class, then went to a combination in-person/online class, and now it's entirely online. I'm sure that transition to online was driven by student demand to not need to commute to congested locations, with scarce parking, during rush hour. It makes total sense.

However, they've preserved some aspects of the in-person class that don't make sense anymore - namely the 3 hour segments where the students are required to be online, listening to me give my presentation. It's boring for them, difficult for me, and there are much better ways to absorb information. I think a better route would be to have a very well thought out syllabus, textbook, selection of online videos and reading, and most importantly, labs and assignments that have deadlines, and are carefully graded. Then, have 1 or 2 optional online office hours a week, where you cover questions and review assignments.

Another downside of online learning in general is that it's hard to develop a community feeling, to connect with people. For me, that was one of the main drawbacks. I felt like I was talking to an empty room much of the time, and it was hard to feel connected with the students when I only got emails from them, and saw comments and questions written by them in the chat window of the class session. I imagine the students felt the same. It's not like you're going to make friends easily in an online class, unlike in a regular class. I'm not sure that I have any bright ideas to fix that problem, though.

The actual course management was done in a software program called Moodle. It was a real pain to use, the user interface was very clunky and non-intuitive, with a steep learning curve. I did eventually get used to it, and figured out the best way of setting up the assignments, and the interface for the class. It felt like the software hadn't been updated in about 10 years, though.

The online class sessions (as opposed to the classroom management website) were hosted in Adobe Connect. That was another software package that I'd prefer to never use again. I had some major connectivity issues - almost every time I did screen sharing, I had a random connection problem, and the screen share on the students side turned black. After the first few times, I realized that exiting and re-entering the online session seemed to fix the problem  But it was very disruptive for the students, and completely stressed me out. I had some discussions with the previous instructors before I started teaching, and the clunky software used for the class was one of the things they warned me about.

The courses weren't cheap for the students. There were three courses in the certificate program, at about $1000 each, so a total of $3000. What were the students buying? The information that I was giving them is out there online—more current and complete than what I gave them. Also, they could get a book for less than $50 that covered the same information.

Here's what I figured. The students are buying the following:

• The prestige of being able to say that they completed a certificate in SQL Server Development at the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education
• Having somebody curate and manage what they need to learn - although everything they need to learn is available for much less elsewhere, having someone knowledgeable slice through the jungle of information and pick what's critical is very helpful.
• Here's the critical one - the pressure to perform. I set homework assignments every week, and graded them stringently. If those assignments weren't completed by a particular time, the students would lose points.  

There were a couple things that surprised me. One was that there was a very broad range of skills in the class. On the high end, I had people with 15 years experience with relational databases, just not Microsoft SQL Server. On the low end, I had complete novices who didn't understand many of the basics, even though they'd been through the introductory course already. So even though most of them got certificates, they have very different skill levels.

Also, trying to make the course useful to students of these varying skills levels - i.e differentiation - is very difficult. In reading about education in general, I had come across this concept of differentiation, and how that's something that teachers should be doing more of. But it's really difficult. What I ended up doing is creating the regular assignments for each lesson, and then also creating what I called bonus assignments, which were optional, but had much more challenging materials. The problem was that since they were optional and didn't affect the grade, only the absolute most motivated students completed them, which ended up being very few - from about 1 to 4 students a week, out of a total of 29 students. The lesson being - if you don't HAVE to do it, most students will NOT do it, even though it would be very useful to them. 

My stress level when teaching the class was sky-high. I was way out of my comfort zone - which is good, occasionally - but I was quite anxious. That faded towards, the latter half of the class, thank goodness. 

One last note - I had 6 women out of 29 students total. However, they were my most diligent students by far, in terms of completing or attempting the bonus assignments. I don't know if that's anything that could be generalized, but that's how it was for this class.

A quote from Upton Sinclair on self-interest

I read this quote from Upton Sinclair years ago, and it really resonated with me.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it."

This is another one of those quotes that is both true on the surface, and also true at a deeper level. At the surface level, people believe that their jobs should be protected. 

For instance, union steel workers will agitate against free trade in steel, because they don't want their jobs to disappear due to lower cost imported steel, even if it would benefit everyone else. And teachers don't want to admit that it should not be as difficult as it is to fire a bad teacher. As an example - a teacher friend of mine told me about a math teacher colleague who was a truly horrible teacher. A two year process was ongoing, which would likely culminate in the firing of the teacher, but still - two years! My teacher friend, through connections, managed to engineer it so that his children didn't get this teacher. Other children weren't so lucky.

It reminds me of a project I once worked on. Because of some peculiarities in the company, it was wildly, insanely overstaffed. It was also a very poorly conceived project, which is another story.

But I was talking to a project manager on the team (there were about 5, there should have been 1, max). We were talking about the over-staffing on the team - which we both agreed on. But it turns out that in her opinion, it was not HER team, and in particular not HER job that was unnecessary. It was everyone else's jobs.

At the deeper level, what this illustrates to me is that self interest is paramount in people's minds. And it's not just about money, it's also about reputation, power, all those things.

There's probably some evolutionary cause for this. I remember reading a book on evolution, which suggested that people are hard-wired to believe in a version of events or a philosophy that  benefits them, even if it don't necessarily make sense. The theory was that this would make them more vehement and convincing when they're arguing for their "rights".

The Grass is Greener on the other side - more profound than it seems

One SAT question from many years ago sticks in my head. In the question, we were asked to rank common sayings and proverbs by how profound they were. I can't remember most of them, but I do remember the one I ranked least profound - it was, "A stitch in time saves nine".

A saying I've been thinking about recently is "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence". I think this one is more profound than it seems. Sometimes it's used to refer to jealousy of other people possessions, but it's also used to refer to the idea that something else is always the answer. For instance, if you're in high school, you think that once you graduate everything will be great. Or when you're working, that a vacation will make you happy. 

I'm not a fan of staying in situations that cause misery, and I'm also a big believer in change, trying new things, and challenging yourself. But one thing I've also learned is that even situations that seem great can lose their luster. For instance, I worked at Haleakala National Park on Maui one summer many years ago. A big part of my job was to walk traplines for invasive species. 

So there I was, hiking on this beautiful mountain on a beautiful island, usually with some stunning views. Occasionally there were yummy ohelo berries to pick, which are very similar to blueberries.

At times it was great. But over the course of a few months, it got old, and the annoyances that were minor at the beginning (living on a small island, everything being very expensive) began to grow.

Later I traveled for many months in New Zealand. It was challenging, interesting, and beautiful, but after 4 months the constant travel started wearing on me, and I yearned for a regular job and an apartment.

Both of the experiences - the work in Hawaii, and the travel in New Zealand - were ones that I wouldn't trade for anything. And maybe this is more a personality trait rather than human nature, but for me, I'm always looking out for the next thing. There's always something out there that I want to do or try. I won't be happy if there's not something on the horizon to look forward to, even when that "something" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

To conclude, here's a quote from the book The Depths - the Evolutionary Origin of the Depression Epidemic:

Happiness itself is not a goal - it is the fleeting by-product of progress towards other goals. 

Visiting the New York Botanical Garden, where I worked 25 years ago

As part of a family trip to New York City, I went and visited my old boss, Brian Boom, currently a director at the New York Botanical Garden. It was great to see him again - he's a friendly, welcoming guy, as evidenced by how I got the job. In 1990, I had developed a very intense interest in botany after doing fieldwork with the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska the previous summer. I cold-called everyone related to botany whose number I could find (no internet back then - finding information was much more difficult!), and Brian offered me a job at the New York Botanical Garden, and a place to stay - not knowing me in the slightest. I worked with him for a few months, learned about plant classification, mounting specimens, all kinds of stuff.

Then he gave me the opportunity to work at a field station in Puerto Rico for the summer, identifying trees in what was called "The Big Grid", based at the El Verde Field Station of the University of Puerto Rico. I just did a bit of research on it, and found this blog post: https://treesandfish.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/field-work-in-the-big-grid/. I don't remember it being nearly as difficult as this person found it. Granted, any type of repetitive work will get boring after a while. But I don't think it was physically that hard. I do remember needing to watch for the stinging nettle relative - urebac - which was very painful.

Anyway. I had a very enjoyable time visiting with Brian. He showed me some of the rooms I worked in, and some of the specimens I collected in Puerto Rico ( It's interesting the paths that people's lives take. I didn't end up pursuing botany as a career (there's close to zero jobs in botany, anyway) and am actually not even that interested in gardening, even. But it was a very interesting little interlude in my life, that I will always appreciate.

Here's one of the specimens I collected:

My first experience teaching online - Database Programming using TSQL

Almost a year ago, I sent an email to the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education program, asking if they were looking for instructors for their database certification. I heard nothing from them for about 3 months. Then during the summer while we were on vacation, I got an email basically offering me a job as an instructor, without an interview or anything.

I was thrilled, and wanted to write a really well-thought out letter, accepting their offer. So, I waited about 4 days until we came back from vacation, and sent my well-written email back. By that time, they had gone on to the next person on their list, and the position was no longer available. Ha-ha.

Life lesson - if you get an opportunity, jump on it!

After they told me the job was no longer available, I offered to be on their wait list, or available as a substitute. A few months later, the person who had originally accepted had to turn down the position, and it was offered to me again, and I accepted. So, it turned out well in the end.

I'm teaching this class 1 evening a week for 10 sessions, via Adobe Connect, an online presentation platform. I was nervous - more nervous than I thought I would be - leading up to the class, but now that I've done my first session, I feel much better about it, and hope to make my next session more engaging and interactive. The previous instructor did a 3 hour session, but I'm just doing one, with an online "office hours" another day of the week, to be available for questions.

I was considering a question - why do people take an online class like this? All the information is certainly out there, in books and online. Why pay almost $1000 for a class? Here's the reasons I came up with:

• Accountability - there are homework assignments, and if you don't finish them on time, you won't pass the class.
• Knowledge curation - yes, the information is out there. But there's a lot of it, and it can be very difficult to figure out what's important, and what's not. I provide a trusted source of knowledge.
• Social interaction - this is a little lacking in online classes. There is a bit, since there's an online session that they MUST attend, and I try to address them all by name during the session. But it is mimimal.
• Certification - They get a SQL Server Developers Certification from the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education program. That will hopefully give them a leg up in job hunting, and of course, practical knowledge of SQL Server development.

Better living through getting rid of stuff

Now that I've reorganized in the kitchen, I can usually put away everything from the dishwasher in less than 2 minutes. Before, it could take quite a bit longer. What I did was put everything that's commonly used (my most commonly used glasses, plates, bowls, and cutlery) in the cabinet that's right next to the dishwasher. This way I can stand in one spot, stack a bunch of like items from the dishwasher in my hand (easier because they're lightweight Corelle), and put them away, all with very little movement. Only one type of thing goes in a stack, and there's no delicate rearranging needed to get things into that space.

I didn't really get rid of that much stuff, despite the title of this blog post. I did get rid of a few things, but mainly I separated them into the "very commonly used" area, and the "not so commonly used" area. The most commonly used items are VERY accessible, as they should be. And the others are on the other side of the kitchen.

One other guideline that I have is consolidating on one type of plastic storage container. For instance, the only plastic storage containers that are allowed in the "very commonly used" area are ones that stack easily, and use the same size lids (though the containers themselves are different sizes). I happen to use the Rubbermaid Easy-find Lids variety, but there's others that are similar.

At the house of some relatives, it can take a long time empty the dishwasher, and clean things up in general. There may be multiple sets of dishes, multiple sets of cutlery, dozens of knives, each with a separate home, some on the other side of the kitchen. I'm absolutely not saying that my kitchen setup is better, but it's definitely suited to me - someone who's more efficiency-minded than most.

Want to avoid weight gain? Make snacking inconvenient!

Like most of us, I have to work at keeping my weight at a reasonable level. Especially in the last 5 years or so, it seems like any indulgence causes the scale to go up more quicker than previously. My conclusion is that I need less indulging in indulgences!

But my strategy in many areas of life is to make things easier and more efficient. At one point I thought I'd be efficient and frugal, stocking up on snacks, while keeping them somewhat inaccessible.

No surprise - that's not a good idea. Stocking up is for staples, and regarding snacks as a staple causes too much snacking. Even keeping the snacks in a relatively inaccessible upper pantry wasn't inconvenient enough.

What is inconvenient enough? Making it fresh, each time I want a snack!  So, instead of making a family-size pan of brownies, and having them sitting on the counter for as long as it takes to polish them off, I make a microwave mug cake. It's still rich and delicious, but it involves getting out all the ingredients, measuring everything out, using the microwave, etc. Even if I give myself permission to make it whenever I want, I don't go to the trouble more than once a week.

I recently saw a recipe online for a version that only has 2 ingredients - cake mix, and water. I was tempted to try it. But then I realized - no! The point is not to make it convenient and easy, the point is to make it more difficult - effort-FULL instead of effort-Less.

For a salty snack, I either make microwave popcorn (with a special microwave popcorn bowl that we've had for years, and that works fantastically), or these cheddar cheese crisps in the microwave.

People today are much, much heavier than we were 100 years ago. That's not because our nature has changed to become more slothful and gluttonous. It's because our environment has changed, and being slothful and gluttonous is so much easier. When treats take more effort, we're changing our environment to be more like it was 100 years ago. And that's good for our health.

My low-budget EDC (Every Day Carry)

I'm not a survivalist or "prepper" by any means, but I've always been interested in stories of survival, and I believe in the Boy Scout motto, "Be prepared". When the whole "EDC" (every day carry) trend started, back in 2007 (see the Google Trends report), it resonated with me, and I created my own little kit.

The standard EDC, which tends towards fancy knives and expensive notepads, would work great for a zombie apocalypse. Mine is very basic, and mostly has the tried and true items that I actually need regularly. I have it in a separate see-through plastic container, so I can move it as needed (office bag, day pack, travel bag, etc.). Since everything is easily visible from the outside, I don't need to be so concerned about organizing it properly.

And here's what I have inside.

1. String - I used this just once, a few years ago. I got a farewell gift of two monstrously huge coffee table books when I left my job at the UN. I was biking to work, and my work bag wasn't large enough. I used some string to tie the books to my bike rack, and made it all the way home. An EDC triumph!
2. Large Binder Clip
3. Small plastic bags
4. Band Aids - always good if you have kids, even if it's more to just not see the blood anymore. You can make friends on the playground with them, too, when other kids get hurt.
5. Sun lotion - Always good to have a little container on hand.  The container itself is from Daiso, the Japanese dollar store, they have a huge selection of tiny containers.
6. Gum - My kids always like to have some. I sometimes have a little container of tic-tacs or Skittles, which I used to call "walking pills" when the kids were getting tired of walking around on our trips.
7. Cash, whistle, earplugs, needle/thread - The cash, I've used on numerous occasions where I only had my credit card on hand. The rest of it - not very much.
8. Hand sanitizer - useful on planes and while traveling
9. Flashlight - this little flashlight, the Pak-Lite 9V LED, lasts forever! I use it most frequently when traveling, and reading at night with my Kindle, which is not backlit.
10. Tissues
11. Hairband - keeps me cooler when walking
12. Twist Ties
13. Safety Pin 
14. Vaseline
15. Medium size plastic bags 
16. Small pocket knife - I wouldn't want to carry a large, heavy pocket knife around, but a small one is great
17. Spare tampons
18. Large size plastic bag -  This is just a folded up bag from Target. I love them, they're very durable. I end up using it a lot.
19. Mini lighter - If I'm ever in a situation where I'm stuck in the wilderness and need to make a fire, I'll be prepared! I haven't yet, though.  
20. Compass - Sometimes when traveling, a compass can be handy.
21. Roll of dental floss - I've used this for some spare string occasionally
22. Single-use eye drops - I tend to have dry eyes, so I like to have some of these around
23. Ibuprofin - no need to suffer from headache
24. Sheets of paper
25. Pencil stub

In addition to these items, I always carry my smartphone, wallet, and keys.

So in looking through these items with a critical eye - honestly, there's a lot I haven't used much, if at all. But they're mostly extremely light, so I'll keep on carrying them. And it gives me a big thrill when I can solve a problem with something that I have with me. 

5 tips for making children's clothing last

My kids are growing fast, and not particularly concerned about fashion. So, I've found a few strategies that keep them decently clothed, without me needing to spend a lot of time and money shopping. Since I have boys, these tips are focused on boy's clothing, but they could work as well for girl's clothing.

Here's what I do.

1. Put a cuff on jeans, if they're too long. This is commonly done, except that I go one step further and actually hand-sew the cuff in two spots, so that it doesn't come undone. I will also buy the jeans a little long, as opposed to exactly the right length. Then when my children grow, I just undo the cuff. Jeans with cuffs in them look fine, unlike "high-water" jeans - i.e. jeans that are too short, which look goofy.

2. If the sleeves on a knit shirt are too long, I put elastic in the cuff. I cut a tiny little hole on the inside of the cuff (on a knit shirt, it won't unravel), and thread a piece of thin elastic through, then tie it off at a length that fits snugly around the child's wrist. This looks great and prevents the sleeve from going over the wrist. Then when it's no longer needed, just snip the elastic and remove it.

Note the small hole where the elastic is threaded through

3. Don't get white clothing! Stains in non-white clothing usually disappear without any extra laundry work. In whites, you may have to do extra scrubbing and/or bleaching to remove stains, if you can remove them at all. I'm happy just not getting the kids white clothing.

4. Keep them in shorts and short sleeves as much as you can. The "acceptable length" of shorts is extremely broad - anywhere from mid-thigh to just above the knee. As long as it's an elastic waist, that covers at least a couple years. And t-shirts and polo shirts that fit quite large usually look just as good as t-shirts that fit exactly right. If your child wears the t-shirt both when it's large on him, and regular size, you can get additional years of wear out of it.

5. Patches - this is an area where I haven't had much luck. I've done the iron-on knee patches, and most of them seem to come off very easily. I'd suggest doing some research on which patches work best, and then following the instructions exactly. Of course, the knees are the first to go, especially if your kids still play on the floor a lot.

But - knee patches are never necessary on shorts - yet another reason to favor them!

Job satisfaction, and how to find it

How do you best arrange your life to get maximum job satisfaction? That’s a question that everyone will answer differently. And job satisfaction, the feeling that what you're doing makes a difference, is so important in life that it's worth a great deal of thought.

Here's a few of the situations where I've gotten the most job satisfaction:

- Starting my IT career, I was in tech support for Microsoft DOS and then Microsoft Access. I started without any computer background, but I learned a tremendous amount very quickly, and was constantly solving problems, especially with Microsoft Access, that were quite complex and required creativity and great troubleshooting skills. Overall, it was lots of fun. The part that got old was that although I was helping customers a lot, I wasn't building anything larger, and wasn't part of any longer-term project. Everything began and ended with a phone call or online interaction.

- More recently I had the opportunity to rework an internal product that was hobbling along, causing lots of support issues and costly time. I worked very closely with just a few people, rewrote the product from the ground up within about 5 months, and made a huge difference in the performance and features of the product. I got a lot of satisfaction from this, and people were very appreciative.

- I set up a site for my mother-in-law, an accomplished artist, to sell her artworks on Etsy. That was a new experience for me, involving substantial research and some graphics work. I still get a kick out of every order confirmation email from Etsy. And it's creating something where there was nothing before.

- I also set up a site for my mother (OldGermanLetters.com) to advertise her German translation services for old, handwritten letters, diaries, and journals. I hadn't done much front-end work previously, so it interesting to work on. I was very pleased when she recently got her first commissions. Again, I was creating something where there was nothing before, and learning some new skills.

Here's some situations I've been in that have given me the least job satisfaction:

- Jobs where I had no real work do to. It's hard to believe, but it's surprisingly common in IT. Especially when you do database work - good data people are so hard to find that once they find someone, they keep them around even if there's no immediate work. Sometimes, the organization is just overstaffed. In that case, you have to be careful when trying to find something useful to do. It's likely that you'll be stepping on somebody's toes, because the work that is available will be jealously guarded.

- A job where the work you're doing will never be implemented. Again, very common in IT. So many projects go nowhere. And frequently the writing is on the wall, for you to read, far before a project is officially declared dead or just fades away.

The title of this post is "Job satisfaction, and how to find it". But to be truthful, I don't know if I have any special insights on this, other than - it's damned important.

Here's a quote that I found very insightful, from the book Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

To do great work, you need to feel that you’re making a difference. That you’re putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you’re part of something important. 

This doesn't mean you need to find the cure for cancer. It’s just that your efforts need to feel valuable. You want your customers to say, “This makes my life better.” You want to feel that if you stopped doing what you do, people would notice. 

You should feel an urgency about this too. You don’t have forever. This is your life’s work

My first attempt at a time-lapse video

I've always been fascinated by time-lapse videos, so after watching one from my friend Jim England (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YbpQQY1pQg), taken on his iPhone, I decided to try it myself.

This is the sunset from our back deck, with the app Framelapse. Yes, it's quite flawed - next time I'll have it do a photo every few seconds instead of every second, and, of course, set it up horizontally!

Easily link to an address in Google Maps

EDIT: just in - an easier way is to click on the gear icon in the bottom left of Google Maps. That will give you a "share or embed map" option, which gives you the link.  Thanks, Roger!

I've had a hard time finding an easy way to email someone a link to a particular address, or location in the new Google Maps. I expected to be able to right-click on a location in Google Maps and have a "Copy Link Address" option pop up.  That doesn't work, though.

You can still do it, though. Here's how:

1. Go to Google Maps
2. Type your address in the search box at the top left
3. When you get the resulting Google Maps page, the URL at the top will look something like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/400+Mercer+St,+Seattle,+WA+98109/@47.6248623,-122.3486017,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x54901547316f078b:0xdfb80bac5a3df8a8

4. Copy only the left part of the URL, until the @. In this case, it's this:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/400+Mercer+St,+Seattle,+WA+98109

5. Now you have an easy street address link you can use anywhere: https://www.google.com/maps/place/400+Mercer+St,+Seattle,+WA+98109