Anthony Panozzo's Blog

I have followed Cosma Shalizi’s blog / site for a long time, and there is a wealth of information on various technical fields such as statistics, computer science, economics, psychology, and much more. Really, his notebooks are a good index of interesting things. Every time I look through it I see new references to dense readings. Cosma also publishes blog posts, and these are often centered around books (he likely reads more hard books in a year than most people do in a lifetime) and classes that he is teaching.

One of the things I like about his blog is that the articles are long but often have an Attention Conservation Notice at the top. This is a longer version of tl;dr (too long; didn’t read), a summary or editor’s note on what is important. Some of my favorites are “I have no taste” (when he is talking about “books to read while algae grow in your fur”) or “7800 words about the intricacies of [some specific controversy in a subset of some specific field]”.

People generally think that I am a pretty calm person, someone not prone to get angry. I have heard some people say that they have never seen me be angry. But I have also had my share of mistakes. This post covers some of the tips that I try to use to avoid losing my cool and to avoid encouraging negative emotions. I will go from practical strategies to more abstract thoughts about how negative thoughts work.

Many of these ideas accord with what Stoic philosophers and practitioners thought and wrote about. Similarly, there is a lot of overlap with Buddhism, and there are probably some Christian influences in there as well.

Taking The Long View

A mentality that I find helpful is to consider whether my actions or the events that happen to me will matter an arbitrarily long time from now. For example, will this experience matter later today? Tomorrow? In a month? In a year? In five years? In twenty years? In a century?

Most “bad” things don’t really matter that much on a long enough time scale. There are very few one-off events that have a level of significance of even one week, let alone one year. This is probably most the case when it is something that affects me personally. People hundreds of years from now will not care whether I was a little cold or felt a bit tired on one day unless it results in something extremely significant. Just taking a breath and looking at my situation more broadly puts things in a better perspective.

In fact, it helps modulate positive emotions as well. Will this thing that I think is so fantastic really appear so ten years from now?

Today’s post is about a little mantra that I created that helps me deal with meetings that start late or not at all. It probably increases my work ability by half an hour a week.

The mantra developed when scheduled remote meetings kept getting forgotten by the other party and severely delayed or postponed. I would typically be ready five minutes ahead of time, and then fritter away twenty minutes or so, not wanting to get deep into any work. Then I would be a little demotivated for another few minutes when I realized the meeting wasn’t going to happen and that I wasted a lot of time.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was interested in moving from Octopress to Jekyll because it seemed more supported. I ended up doing it and it took less time than I thought it would. Here’s a quick recap summary.

Basics

I created a new Jekyll 2.0 project and then:

• copied over the existing posts
• copied over the debug blog posts
• copied RSS
• copied existing styles and javascripts
• generally made sure everything worked as before
• got comments working with Disqus

New publishing strategy

To get publish my blog, I previously used a hand-rolled script to copy files to S3. I thought “there has to be a better way”, and some basic research revealed s3_website. This gem rocks. I would recommend it for any Jekyll site deployed to S3. It reduces code that I have to maintain. But wait, there’s more. It checks what is currently on S3 and uploads only the diff. When it figures out what to upload, it can upload gzipped versions in parallel to speed it up. Deploys can go from a minute to about ten seconds. Plus, it has great support for redirects, which I used to give some existing posts and other resources some better names.

“What’s for dinner?” is the refrain heard around the world at around 5 PM. What if you knew the answer to that and had a healthy meal halfway cooked every night of the week?

Overview

There are clear benefits to coming up with a system for dinner. You can decrease the time, money, and effort you spend on fulfilling basic food needs. You can also consider what kind of meals you would like to eat and make sure they are healthy.

To accomplish systematizing dinner, we ended up going with a subscription meal planning service. I’ll give the overview that they have on their website, as it does a good job of explaining what the service is:

The Fresh 20 is a meal planning service, created for busy families and singles who want to eat fresh, healthy meals, and save time and money. Our meal plans rely on simple, healthy, homemade lunches and dinners using just 20 fresh, seasonal ingredients per week. No more grocery lists with 80 items that will eventually go to waste. Our meal plans are carefully created to utilize everything on the list so you can stop throwing money down the drain. The Fresh 20 mixes and matches a small list of ingredients to create 5 balanced meals that play off each other. We include detailed guides to meal prep, original recipes everyone will enjoy (even picky eaters) and motivation to help you stay the course on busy weeknights. Because we are committed to our customers, and to health and happiness for all, we now offer Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Kosher, Meals for One and Lunch, in addition to our Classic Meal Plan.

How It Works In Practice

Getting stuff and prep

We go to the store one day on the weekend, and don’t need to run to the store during the week since we have a complete list. We can grab milk and eggs and such as well. Making this a habit on the weekends helps us make better choices during the week. So this takes an hour or two after you consider driving and parking and such.