guys like dolls

(I don’t remember filming this..)
Thanks to Scott for keeping this video around!

So the whole OKR thing really didn’t work for me last year. I’ve realized that I actually like vague goals that I can satisfy in many ways; in 12 months many things seem to come up that change the playing field.

Overall, I had a great last year. Joey and I lived in Switzerland for 3 months, which was something we had wanted to do for a while. We also visited Seattle for the first time in January. I took a month off of work in October and then talked myself into a job that more closely fits my skills while Joey passed his quals and is now officially in the phd program. He also got his first, first-author paper accepted into a major journal and I took an art class at our local community college.

Joey and I both became vegetarians, and are eating organically grown vegetables from spud.com (and almost our backyard!). We cook 99% of our meals at home and make most things from scratch – ridding ourselves of processed foods.

Lola has become much more mellow and was fantastic on our road trip to South Dakota. More importantly though, the cats didn’t have any major surgeries this year!

We also made great strides on finishing our back yard although that project is still far from complete.

So all in all things have been good.
Here are our specific resolutions from last year:

• become bilingual – totally ditched this one. Joey and I both realized that this just isn’t that important to us. We got by just fine in Switzerland with English, gestures, and simple words. We did well enough that it seems better to spend our time on more worthwhile things.
• run 1000 miles this year – soo.. the thought behind the idea was sound, but the actual objective wasn’t completed. I am now in much better shape than I was at the beginning of the year, and Joey and I are also eating much better than we were. (becoming vegetarians who focus on natural food made the latter very easy). I am going to count this as completed because the spirit of the goal was achieved.
• have the dog and cats get along – we made a big change this year and Lola now stays inside the house while we are at work. This has made life with all of the animals infinitely better. She no longer tears up the yard, and instead sleeps and guards all day. The cats and dog are inside together, an no one has been eaten yet, so I would say they are doing much better at getting along. Lola also goes to doggie daycare twice a week to help get rid of her excess energy.
• be able to walk the dog off leash around the block – i am abandoning this goal. Lola is a good dog, but I don’t think she will ever not run after a tempting squirrel – at least not until she is so old she can’t run anymore (ie never)
• be able to take the dog to school for a whole day – i tried taking Lola to work with me again, and it was a complete bust. Joey had better luck though and is able to take Lola with him when he isn’t working in the lab. Unfortunately, he has been doing a lot of lab work lately, and dogs just don’t fit there. Having consistent doggie daycare times and keeping Lola inside makes this goal less important though.
• finish all major housework - we made great progress here, but it all moves slowly. During my month off of work I made a lot of improvements to the organization of the house and Joey and I have put a lot of work into the backyard. However, there is still a lot to be done.

This year, I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish, but I am only going to highlight a few:

• explore more 3d art projects – I really want to keep pursuing art. I hope to take a sculpture or welding class and make some great pieces this year.
• get a six pack – It is going to be awesome. Wish me luck.
• volunteer and donate – More things in my life are now under control, so now is the time to start really giving back.
• keep working on the house – We really need to get things more organized and under control so that we can go on a…
• camping/backpacking frenzy – I really want to do more camping, hiking, and backpacking this year. (I’ve never done the latter) Going out with Lola is fun, great exercise, peaceful, and beautiful. I don’t think we will stray far from home this year as Joey already has conferences in Quebec, and Denver and so far I have to go to Boston. However, there are a ton of great areas in northern California, so I don’t think we will be lacking in any way.

That sums up the gist of everything.
I think this is going to be a great year (and it better be as I will be turning 25!)

After our Krakow trip I came into work today and found a letter waiting for me. With some Google translate help I now have physical evidence that the Swiss do in fact live up to their crazy reputation. Life in Switzerland is just a little different than home…

In summary, garbage is handled in a very careful manner here. You need to purchase special bags from the market (where they are stored with the hard liquor and cigarettes) called Zurisacks which is essentially a per-bag tax on garbage, which is a great idea. If you don’t use the proper bag or put it out at the wrong time (like we did), the authorities will dig through it looking for personally identifying information. Once they’ve figured out who you are, they send you a letter to let you know that they’re on to you and if you do it again they will be knocking at your door. Did you catch the part about how we are part of the fox/weasel/cat axis of evil? We had heard stories of the garbage police but had never believed them, until now.

I am finally free from both lotion and chapstick.

The chapstick story starts a long while ago. Ever since middle school or so I can remember using chapstick every day. I would always carry a tube around with me and frequently reapplied it. This continued on through high school and college until the point where forgetting my chapstick was a horrible occasion. If I realized I wouldn’t have chapstick for more than an hour or two I would have to borrow or buy a new one. (Thankfully I was usually with Joey who was a user too).

Finally, while working at Google, I was fed up. I decided that it was time to get rid of my addiction and of course starting searching the internet for advice. I ran into a bunch of articles about whether or not lib balm is actually addictive (it definitely is) but finally made it to one that described the process of withdrawal… Without that article I am sure I would have given up because it was hard. Because chapstick prevents your lips from exfoliating properly when you stop using it you have a lot of dead skin to get rid of. This results in a really gross set of lips for a while that are constantly shedding. Thankfully, vaseline was there to help. Vaseline is sorta like a midway drug. It is worse than not using anything, but a lot better than chapstick. Vaseline was able to slow down the exfoliation to the point where I didn’t feel disgusted about going to work, and after a couple of months I was able to stop using it too and I am now lip product free.

That all happened a couple of years back. More recently, I also ran into lotion issues. About 2 weeks or so into our Switzerland trip I was completely out of the lotion I use back in CA and the weather was ridiculously cold and dry. I made several trips to the grocery store to buy Swiss lotion and unfortunately none of it was strong enough. My face started to look cracked and was hurting. It then dawned on me that this was exactly like what happened with my chapstick. I was addicted to lotion (and really strong lotion at that). I decided to take a long weekend, forgo the lotion altogether and see what happened. It was fortunate that I had learned what it would be like from the chapstick withdrawal because it turned out exactly the same… and this time I couldn’t use vaseline. Thankfully, after much scrubbing and hiding from work I was finally presentable enough to talk to people in person. 1 month later and my face is still slowly getting better at coping without lotion. However, at this point, I can definitely declare myself free from the addiction.

So, if you have to use lotion and chapstick every day now you know that you have the ability to free yourself. To me, it was worth it, but of course everybody has their own addiction preferences.

This year I wanted to post my new year’s resolutions here and try to review them periodically. I’m thinking I’ll make it work like the OKRs we have at work. Review them every quarter, grade them at the end of the year, and shoot for a score of 0.7:

So the short version is: improve our brain, improve our health, improve our dog, improve our house. Sounds like fun.

And to convince you that I just won’t forget about these here are the ones I had from last year:

1. lose 10 pounds
2. get ready for bed at 11pm every night
3. get happier at work

I didn’t post them or review them during the year, but I didn’t do half bad. I lost the 10 pounds and have moved to a better team at work. I did not get to bed at 11 every night (not even close) but a 0.67 is pretty good.

I hope I do as well this time… it is going to be quite a year!

We have been meaning to invest in some index funds for a long time. They provide a nice return inbetween individual stocks and a regular savings account and are a really smart idea for our setup. However, I’ve put off buying them for so long just because I just didn’t know the stock symbols for any good index funds. Thankfully along came an article from the simple dollar in my google reader that laid some vanguard links out very clearly for me. After that it was a piece of cake to just go and buy a handful. This was so helpful that I thought I would spread the information along:

Vanguard 500 (VFINX; large-cap domestic)
Vanguard Emerging Markets Index Fund (VEIEX; international)
Vanguard Mid-Cap Growth Index Fund (VMGIX; mid-cap domestic)
Vanguard Small-Cap Growth Index Fund (VISGX; small-cap domestic)
Vanguard Total International Index Fund (VGTSX; international)
Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund (NAESX; small-cap domestic)
Vanguard Mid-Cap Index Fund (VIMSX; mid-cap domestic)
Vanguard Large-Cap Index Fund (VLACX; large-cap domestic)
Vanguard European Stock Index Fund (VEURX; international)
Vanguard Total Bond Market Index (VBMFX; bond)

Happy investing in index funds!

Not really… but I did get to write a Google blog post. Can you tell which parts were rewritten by legal and pr?

After being inspired by an article on homemade bread from the Simple Dollar I decided to get out a wedding present of ours that we hadn’t touched yet… the bread maker. Now when we first got this as a present I just thought it was amusing, I mean, who needs one? We either buy bread from the grocery store or occasionally make some pizza dough or something ourselves.

This weekend though I discovered just how wrong I was. All you have to do is dump all the ingredients into the thing and like magic you have some incredible bread. So for about 5 minutes of work you get bread that tastes like you have been working for 3 hours (which is how long it takes the little machine) It also claims to make pizza dough and supports any sort of mix-ins you want, nuts, raisins, etc. We haven’t tried those yet but I’m sure they will be good.

The moral of the story: bread makers are actually pretty cool.
(Thank you for the gift)

While searching for a place to record all of my todos (a la Getting Things Done) I have been through various online and offline systems.

First Joey setup Tracks for me. This followed GTD pretty well, but the UI wasn’t really appealing. You also couldn’t add repeating events and it took a lot of clicks to manage your todos. You have to install the app yourself and that means maintenance and no new features without work.

Next came Gubb. It had a lot of pretty colors and instant UI appeal but it lacked features. And after awhile the UI that looked flashy at first got pretty clunky. Very slow feature iteration.

Along comes Todoist into the market and finally something sticks. It has extremely quick development, can be used almost entirely by keyboard, looks clean with a very nice UI. Has subprojects, repeating events, very nice search functionality, mobile UI, an api, igoogle gadget and much more. If you want something to help manage all of your tasks this is definitely the one I recommend.

So I guess I’m going to start developing my own online profile now. The whole facebook, social network thing is getting bigger all the time and if all info everywhere in going to be online and public well the right view of me needs to exist. Especially if one day someone actually wants to read about me.

Time to start posting real things.