Personal

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 2nd, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) Nothing really exciting this month. I had lots of work and could not quite focus on reading hard books or non fiction. I needed to escape from the humdrum of life So, I read a lot of Jack Reacher. I decided to read all of the Lee Child novels featuring the character. And all of that, started because I read a book, that followed Lee Child around for a year, describing his writing process and the work that goes into a Reacher novel. It’s been fun, reading. Like meeting an old friend. Considering that he writes about one a year, I find it slightly alarming that I have now read seventeen years of Child’s work in a month. ...

Update, 2020/11/13: This has been working beautifully! I love the poems as they show up in my feed. This is a tiny little niche thing, I built all for my ownsome. It all started, when I got hooked on reading the daily poem, on the Poetry Foundation page. Learning Python as I am, I wondered if there was a way to have it come to my RSS reader. And so Poemfeed is a tiny little utility that does just that for me. ...

Ok, one more time. I know there have been lots of one more times before, but I am going to keep at this until I get proficient enough at this to land a job :) And while I may not be brainy enough, the one thing I can do is be persistent enough to show up. This time, I will focus on building tiny projects. I realise my life is too chaotic for #100DaysofCode. But I can do this, one tiny thing at a time. ...

I want to keep reading books and stories about how folks pick themselves up. It helps me deal with the storms in my life better. It assures me I am not alone. And people often have it worse. Neil Pasricha shares his story in You are Awesome. Most of which are relates with everything we face in our lives. And I was meh. But he also shares his parents stories. And those are really, really inspiring. ...

Now we are here at home, in the little nation of our marriage, swearing allegiance to the table we set for lunch or the windchime on the porch, its easy dissonance. Even in our shared country, the afternoon allots its golden lines so that we’re seated, both in shadow, on opposite ends of a couch and two gray dogs between us. There are acres of opinions in this house. I make two cups of tea, two bowls of soup, ...

It’s a Michael Lewis book. That alone, is enough for me to tell you to go read it. Kahneman and Tversky’s work has probably been the biggest influence on my life in recent years, since Taleb.1 We cannot think in probabilities in our daily lives. We keep fooling ourselves, with various biases. And the intuition we have, is because we are really amazing biological machines. And even that is subject to error. Unless the intuition is backed by extensive experience. And even then we can easily be fooled. That basically is the gist of their work (to me, so far). I flunked nearly every experiment in Danny Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.2 We need to think slowly, through every implication, when it comes to the few big decisions in life. ...