From Self-Improvement to Optimisation

Dom Mazetti has a good line about “The day you want to get big is the day you will be forever small”. Because no matter how big you get, something will always need working on, some bro will always have a bigger set of that muscle than you do.

I wonder. Is the day we go into self-improvement the day we will be forever unworthy? That we will have the nagging sense that we need to improve something else about us that is simply not good enough. Since we cannot be perfect, we can always improve. So how much improvement is enough?

Self-improvement has two purposes: first, to get rid of damaging or grossly sub-optimal habits and replace them with good habits; second, to take on new habits that will make us more informed, interesting, resilient, employable, healthier, better company and so on and on.

‘Lift weights’ contains within in the injunction ‘stop being a lazy slouch’. ‘Quit eating junk’ forces us to look for better food to eat. ‘Read books’ tears us away from the TV and the Internet. And so on.

Self-improvement stops when we’ve dumped the bad habits and replaced them with better, though possibly not optimal, ones.

Keep that up, and it’s maintenance mode. After that, it’s about optimising.

Getting your body fat down from 30%+ to around 20% is self-improvement. Getting down to 15% is optimising, and for looks at that. (Google it: Special ops have around 18% because any lower and you don’t have the reserves to wait for the submarine to come back the next night after the first pick-up has to be abandoned.)

Trying out for the local soccer or basketball team is more than exercising, it’s an interest. The work you will have to do to be good enough for a reasonable team will require some performance improvements and specific skills: this sounds like optimisation.

Reading some books on the history of food is maintenance. Reading a book on knife skills and using them is optimisation.

Throwing out garish branded clothes and getting some low-key trousers and shirts where the brand is tucked away inside, this is self-improvement. Custom suits are optimisation. https://twitter.com/michaelporfirio

I suspect I’ve been in maintenance mode for a while now, and need to get a little optimisation going on somewhere. I’ll tell you this: it’s not going to involve the gym. As I’ve said before and will say again, call my nephew when you’re doing what I’m doing at my age. I feel the need for some optimisation in some new direction and that may feel gratuitous.

I Have A Cold...

... but not one that involves runny noses. I can get up and go to work, but by the time I get home, I'm just waiting for sunset so I can go to bed. Plus it's messing up my tummy so if I do too much diary I get reflux. Also I over-did my hamstrings and had that lower back stiffness which turns me into an old man who can't get up once he's sat down. I went to my sports masseuse for that today. I just want to sleep. Or rather, not to be terribly active.

Pathetic excuses, but what can I tell you?

March 2018 Review

God that was a long month. On the first Thursday I must have absorbed something alcoholic around lunchtime, because I went slightly wobbly for twenty-four hours. I didn’t do anything stupid and even made it to the gym, but accidental alcohol makes me feel shaken. At the end of the month I took the four days before Easter off, and naturally, the weather was cold, wet and not worth getting out of bed for. Equally naturally, I slept badly and kept waking up early. That may have had something to do with the clocks going forward and me only finding out when I looked at my watch on leaving the house Sunday morning - Wait 06:25? What? My phone said it was 06:25 an hour ago, oh, that must have happened.

I continued the Food Experiment. One week I tried salads and other potato-based lunches from Masters on Throgmorton Street: result were satiety, no sharp appetite in the evening, and an extra pound of weight that fell off by Saturday morning because I work from home then. The next week I tried bagels from Bagel Mania on London Wall: results, less dozy in the afternoon, no extra weight, but a tendency to light-headedness by the end of the afternoon. I lost three kilos but no more. This will continue for a while.

I re-gained some of my Python chops, using PyCharm, writing a file-copying utility with a simple UI. Hence the post about the rotten documentation of os.walk(). Python is a nice language to use, but I sometimes wonder if some of the people who write documentation and help posts actually follow their own advice. I may write a post on how to write instructions as well. It’s nowhere near as easy as you think.

I read Ben Yandell’s Honors Class, a series of biographies of the mathematicians who solved Hilbert’s Problems; Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the British Isles, which got me interested in Anglo-Saxon England, about which I now have a book to read; Nicolas Naseem Taleb’s Skin In The Game, which makes a lot of good points and is prime NNT; and started on Per Olov Enquist’s The Wandering Pine.

I succumbed to Calibre. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, this is to e-books what the iTunes is to music. It’s a terrific program and I had my small e-book collection consolidated, organised and with updated metadata after a couple of hours. I will probably write a post about using it in the future.

I finished S3 of House. Five more to go. I had a break and started watching S2 of Follow The Money. I saw some movies in my holiday week: You Were Never Really Here and Isle of Dogs at the Curzon Bloomsbury; Red Sparrow and Unsane at the Cineworld Leicester Square; and The Square at the Curzon Soho.

I had supper with Sis for her birthday at Picture on Great Portland St, and with my mate at the Argentine Steak House in Richmond.

I had a lot of early nights. If I’m tired, I’m in bed at 20:30 and if I’m not, at 21:15 at the latest.

Upgrading the Windows Computer

Every now and then I think about upgrading my Windows laptop. At the moment I have a Samsung that may be seven or eight years old. It has a 17.5 inch screen, a 2GHz Pentium, a 500GB HDD, 4GB of RAM and a basic video card. The body is plastic and the keyboard is only for light use, and I mean maybe ten minutes at a time. It does the job I want it to do, and I suspect the video card is a part of that.

So I’ve been looking at laptops and mini-PC’s.

At the bottom end of the price range, say about £300 or so, are Celerons and Pentium with 2GB of RAM. At the other end are 4k video editing machines for photographers. These have GeForce 1040 or above video cards, 8GB+ of RAM, an i7 HQ, some SSD and a 1TB drive or a lot more SSD, and USB 3. / 3.1 to connect external HDD’s with decent transfer rates. MacBook Pros and Dell XPS 15’s are get a lot of mentions. (High-end gaming laptops are way over what I need.) These machines have good keyboards and aluminium unibodies (the Dell is almost an aluminium unibody).

In between is a mass of i5 / i7 U-series machines, with or without graphics cards, random amounts of SSD, rarely an HDD, random combinations of USB / HDMI / VGA ports and build quality that ranges from awful to okay-I-guess. These can vary in price between about £600 - £1,000. The only way to make sense of these component salads is to assume that Wintel manufacturers design a high-end model, a low-end model and a mid-range model, and all the others are put together from excess parts and left-overs.

The decisions are much simpler than all those fancy specs and combinations make it look.

Want to browse the net, do text-based work, basic photographic editing and adjustment, and send e-mails? But don’t do 1080p and upwards video-editing or scientific computing? Take a serious look at an iPad and an external keyboard.

Get a Macbook Pro if you want to do iOS, Mac or UNIX / Linux development.

Get the high-end £1,100+ video-editing capable machines if you want: the aluminium body, high-quality keyboard and sharp screen; a large HDD; to use Adobe Creative Cloud or the equivalents on 1080p and 4k movies.

Want to do lots of calculations but not much graphics? (Very rare). Then you can get one of the component-salads with an i7-HQ, 256GB of SSD and integrated graphics.

Sustained daily typing and use - because you’re an author, or journalist or other content-producer? Consider a Mac Air or one of the top-end machines. (The price difference is not that large, especially if it’s how you make your money.)

Anything else? Get the mid-range Wintel.

It’s the build quality. Once you’ve had Mac, you can’t go back. At work, they hand out POS HP’s with Win 7, VGA adapters, and a keyboard with the Page Up / Down / End / Home keys in the wrong place. But that’s institutional companies for you. Cheap. The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite user in the family does so on an MSI gaming machine with an i7 HQ and 16GB of RAM with a 17-inch screen. It’s wicked fast but it’s got that corporate cheap build feel. And he doesn’t work for a big company.

I don’t want to come home and use something similar to the junk they give us at work. It’s my home, not an office. Computers are one of the things I’m willing to Pay Good Money for. (Not Silly Money, but Good Money.) As a tool to do a job. And the video-editing performance laptop is a tool for a job I’m not going to do.

The outsider for my needs is an Asus mini-PC, which has the 1TB drive, an i5-7U series, a mid-range graphics card, some SSD, Wireless-AC, and ports out the wazoo. It can drive two external screens, which is a nice-to-have I’ve wanted for a while. It will be an ace media centre, but would need hi-fi to make nice sound, but then, so does a laptop. It costs £650 and already I have an external screen (the TV), a mouse and keyboard. At a pinch I could get a 21-inch monitor for about £150 and work on a table if I wanted to use it as a computer. Back to the future.

PS: I didn’t do any of this. I did something else instead that didn’t involve spending money. I’ll talk about that later.

How Strong Do You Really Want To Have To Be?

The title is a line in an episode from S3 of House. He’s trying to persuade the dwarf mother of a normal girl they had all thought had dwarfism to take the growth hormone that will let her grow into a normal girl. At first the mother is against it. Then House lets loose.

“You and I know that being Normal sucks, because we’re freaks, and the good thing about being a freak is that it makes you strong. Now how strong do you really want her to have to be?”

The mother thinks for a moment, then approves the treatment.

Was that moment was some moment of writer’s luck, when the words seem to produce themselves? Or was it from someone’s experience? It was from mine.

Being strong in the manner House means is a non-stop effort. Not exhausting, but tiring. Giving up for a moment means sinking into debilitating self-pity, and the only person who can pull yourself back up by your own hair is you. Nobody else can help you with it, because it’s like holding your stomach in all the time: the only person who can do it is you.

People only live like that because they have to, and they know there’s nothing noble or dignified about it. Being strong-like-a-freak isn’t a virtue, it’s tiring, a continual drain of energy, leaving less for relationships or interests. Nobody who had experienced it would want that for someone they loved. Which is why the mother relents.

The best thing about being a Normie, it seems to me, is that they don’t have any reason to try. Take one look at them. The people staying in shape in the gym, the people doing professional qualifications to get ahead, the competitors, the people with absorbing interests, the Suffering and Recovering Anonymouses, let alone the people with non-standard desires... none of these are Normies. Every now and then a Normie will suprise me by having done something I thought was a Non-Normie Thing, but then I can tell the Normie Didn’t Connect with whatever it was.

When I was a suffering drunk I wanted to be a Normie: smug, self-satisfied, lacking any self-consciousness and doubt. Now I’m a recovering alcoholic and much older, I am so glad I’m not a Normie. Because if I had been a Normie, I would have got married, and then maybe divorced, or would now be living with an old woman. Eeeuugh.

I’ll take the continual drain of being strong if that’s the alternative. The occasional dip into self-pity isn’t pleasant, but it doesn’t last long. Do I think you should do it? If you don’t have a reason, no, you should not. It’s so much easier being a Normie.

Toy Examples: How os.walk Works

One of the many things a programmer needs to do is walk a directory tree and do stuff to the files and folders in it, even if it’s just list them. This is a recursive exercise and those can be mind-bending to code, and if done badly can mess up all sorts of low-level things. It’s best left to the kind of people who have actually read Knuth. Fortunately someone on the Python project did, and they gave us os.walk. (It’s in the os module, and is called walk().)

Unfortunately, the almost identical explanations of how to use os.walk mostly miss the point. All of them - that I’ve found - print out a directory and file listing. Which is not what I wanted to do with it.

When you execute os.walk(starting_point), for a directory called ‘starting_point’, it returns a triple consisting of: the path for starting_point a list of the subdirectories of starting_point a list of the files in starting_point.

os.walk works in a loop. Outside a loop, it doesn’t do much. Here’s how to use it in Python:

for current_directory, subdirectories, files in os.walk(starting_point): (do stuff)

What happens? The first time execution hits os.walk, it returns a triple like this:

current_directory = starting_point
subdirectories .... of starting_point
files ... in starting point

If you want to do something to all the files in the starting_point directory, you loop like this

for file in files: do stuff to file

If you want to do something to the subdirectories, unless it’s to list them, don’t. Wait for a moment, because...

The second time execution hits os.walk, it steps one directory down the tree, like this:

current_directory = first_subdirectory_in_starting_point
subdirectories .... of first_subdirectory_in_starting_point
files ... in first_subdirectory_in_starting_point

Now you can ‘do stuff to file’ for the files in first_subdirectory_in_starting_point.

What happens if there’s a subdirectory in first_subdirectory? The next time os.walk is executed it will return

current_directory = first_subdirectory_of_first_subdirectory_in_starting_point
subdirectories .... of first_subdirectory_of_first_subdirectory_in_starting_point
files ... in first_subdirectory_of_first_subdirectory_in_starting_point

Why don’t you do anything to the directories? Because os.walk is using that list to walk through them, so if you change names or permissions or something, before you have walked to the directory, os.walk (probably) won’t work.

If you want to mess with the subdirectories themselves, the chances are you need to run os_walk in the reverse direction (look that up).

The toy example of a directory listing just doesn’t expose the inner workings clearly enough. It can leave you thinking you have to do stuff with the directories as well as the files, but you don’t, of course.

Someone who has worked a lot with recursive Python functions will, should they have got all that experience before needing os.walk, grok os.walk fairly quickly. They will read the description and look at the examples and match that against the way they know Python array-returning programs have worked in the past, and say after a moment ‘Oh, sure, it does this and that, and you always have to use it in a loop’.

Catch is, walking a directory tree is one of the first things a programmer wants to do. And grokking recursive-return functions like os.walk is not simple. Being able to picture a recursive process is one of those big-jump differences between code-bashers and actual programmers. A toy example isn’t going to cut it.

February 2018 Review

February is dance month. I saw Pina Bausch’s Viktor, Maria Pages’ Yo Carmen, and Jesus Carmona’s Impetus. Mother loved Carmona, Sis liked Pages, and I thought Viktor was wonderfully and sometimes disturbingly surreal. Each time I had lunch at Santore. My judgement: go for the pizzas.

February is also MoT month. I have used the same local garage, Mullen Speed Test, for a long long time. This time I needed new front tyres.

Mostly I went to work, went to the gym or went home, crawled into bed by 20:45 at the latest and slept.

I finished reading the first volume of Hegel’s Aesthetics, read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Nick Garlick’s Storm Horse. Gaiman has sold enough, so I’m going to commend Storm Horse to you. Don’t be put off by it looking like a children’s novel. It isn’t: it’s a sparely told story about a young boy, and that spareness gives it a bracing, adult feel. I was so absorbed I did not notice the commute on the train.

Towards the end of the month, I quit treating myself after the gym to make up for the crappy Christmas I’d had. No more breakfast deals at Paul, and no more sandwich and tea from Pret at elevenses. That was all costing a lot of money. And it was keeping my weight a little heavier than I would like. The real progress got made in March, so you’ll have to wait for that bit.

I finished series two of House and started on series 3. No movies. Too damn cold.