Anthony Panozzo's Blog

Basically the tip is: find some way of playing a sound every fifteen minutes or so, and when this happens, check my posture. I have found this useful for better ergonomics and posture while using my computer.

I'm using the Mindful Mynah app on Mac, and have it set to chime every fifteen minutes or so. When I hear the chime, I quickly check my posture and often find that I can improve it. I think this increases my mindfulness of how I type and sit, as the bell reminds me to check it more often. Even without the bell, I realize that I have incorrect posture more often. The nice thing about automating this process is that I just need to have the intention to have better posture once, and then I can automatically lock in that benefit over time without needing to expend much effort.

Today I want to talk about something I read about in GTD-creator David Allen's book Ready For Anything.

A key quote for me from his book is: "Nobody will even try to absorb and manage two hundred percent of what they can do. But they will take on enough to let themselves get ten percent behind their curve. And when you are ten percent behind, you feel like crap. But on the other hand, if you can manage to get ten percent ahead, you're transformed and on top of your world."

The idea he presented was that there is only a twenty percent difference between being ten percent ahead and ten percent behind, but the difference is huge*. Allen suggests that this 20% difference leads to feeling a general sense of ease and also the ability to think more strategically. Fighting fires does not lead to giving time to think more holistically.

I spent a little time during the last week figuring out ways to debug HTTPS issues locally, and wanted to share. My end goal was to run HTTPS with valid wildcard SSL certificate on a Rails server locally (most of this is not Rails-specific.)

Why this is useful

I wanted to do this so that I could see which pages had partially insecure content or looked incorrect when using HTTPS. If your "secure" page loads a stylesheet or image or JavaScript file in an insecure manner, you could leak private user information, etc. You can see whether you are really secure by looking in the URL bars of modern browsers.

However, we only had a valid SSL certificate in production for a client project that I was working on. If I tried to look at the staging server or a local server with HTTPS, I would get a pretty ugly error and the browser would just tell me that the certificate was not accepted. Plus, I wanted to be able to make changes and see the effects locally without needing to push to staging (increasing the feedback loop speed is always high on my list of priorities.)

Setting up the SSL certificate

I followed the instructions at Heroku's Self-Signed SSL Certificate post. I created a script which looks like this (to automate):

I found a hack recently that allows me to provide value to people following me on social media without actually interacting with them. I call it "Asocial Media."

The tip

I may sound like Buffer's number one fan after this post, as today's tip basically boils down into: buffer your social media posts in times of great productivity, so that you don't get sucked in and waste a lot of time looking at cat pictures.

This tip is for when you don't want to get out of the flow of what you are doing but feel a burning need to share something. Basically, if you find a cool link, instead of tweeting it out right away, I put this in my Buffer queue and then it automatically gets tweeted out. If I'm churning through email or blog post reading and I find something noteworthy, same deal. Basically it allows me to continue with what I am doing and not accidentally lose twenty minutes by looking through status updates.

I used to work somewhere where there was a very active and visible gaming culture. Some of the games were virtual, but a large portion of them were physical or based on physical games. Monthly game nights featured strategic board games which took several hours to play. Think Risk, but more complicated. At lunch every day, there was usually at least one table playing card or board games of some sort. Spades, hearts, and games most people have never heard of were standard fare. The players at lunch were all quite analytical. Card counting was common. If you weren't aware that your six of diamonds was going to win the trick when it was played, the other three people in the game probably knew and could recall the last three tricks played. The games were quite competitive.

My game of choice was spades. I liked that it was a very strategic game. You could play the same hand several different ways depending on what other people had and bid, and what the progression of the hand turned out to be. In this environment, I probably won more games than I lost, so I fancied myself a good spades player.