Eating-wise, I’m currently on a every-other-day “restricted” diet, which just means I have to be more sneaky snacking while LiShya’s in the house. On days where I’m not on an official “diet” I am free to eat just about whatever I want. Occasionally I do find that on days where I’m “dieting” I tend to eat more than on days I am not. The “diet” has become less of a “diet” for me, and more of a “lifestyle”. This much is good.

I’ve come up with a theory about exercise, and in particular push-ups. Some people do push-ups everyday and say it’s perfectly okay, while others oppose such a move, saying that the muscles need time to recover to grow. I agree somewhat with both viewpoints: you can do it if it doesn’t strain you too much; in other words, it depends on your fitness level. Personally, I could probably do 200 push-ups everyday without too much strain, though I’d definitely have a day or two of rest per week.

I don’t currently do 200 push-ups. I currently do 100 - 125 per day of resistance push-ups, using resistance bands. My theory is that if I can acclimatise my body to thinking that push-ups with the resistance bands is my “natural” weight, my muscles should grow to accommodate that thinking. I still incorporate a couple of rest days per week, especially when on the previous day(s) I feel sluggish.

So far so good, and I’m starting to see results; definition on the arms has gone up a notch, while I could probably increase the number of reps if I wanted to without over-training. I’ve also included about three days a week of resistance squats (using my 15L bottle of water), doing 50 throughout the day. That I think may lead to over-training, especially coupled with runs that I occasionally go for, so I may lower the number of those.

Well, I’ve got another 18 days to go!

An article on the MSNBC website regarding the bailout revealed the thoughts of one man who voted against it:

Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said he had three insurmountable problems with the bill: It was too expensive, it rewarded Wall Street firms by guaranteeing private profits with public funds and it did not address an antiquated regulatory system.

“This throws a life jacket to Wall Street, but it doesn’t teach them to swim and prevent this from happening again,” Kingston said.

Sure, the bailout is no panacea. But the problem with the economy right now is that it’s reeling from the events (the bankruptcies and close bankruptcies of so many major financial instutitions) of the past few weeks. The economy is not thinking of jumping into the water: it is in the water. What it needs now is not a lesson on how to swim; it needs a life jacket. It needs to be rescued, put on dry land, and only after that be taught to swim.

As much as I agree prevention is better than cure, when prevention’s too late, it’s too late.

Lately, I’ve been going around sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay looking for torrents on “success” and “self-improvement”. I like the success genre, and I enjoy reading about how happy I could potentially be. In fact, just thinking about this potential happiness makes me happy.

The success genre of books, once you read enough, is very repetitive:

1. “We use little of our full potential.” (Open up our possibilities.)
2. “You are special, too.” (Build our self-esteem.)
3. “Find your purpose/values.” (Discover what really matters to you.)
4. “Set your goals.” (Set financial, physical, spiritual, relationship and personal goals.)
5. “Every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” (Break up your goals into smaller goals.)
6. “Review your goals.” (Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.)
7. “Reward yourself for the achievement of goals.” (Positive reinforcement will make your goal-achievement become a habit.)

Of course, there are variants of this theme, but basically this would be it. I’ve always had trouble with the step where we define what our values are, and specifically what our purpose in life is.

When thinking about “what really matters”, I find that I hardly ever am able to comfortably say “this is what really matters to me”. I’ve always felt that these things (our values, life-purpose), though supposedly never-changing, do; they may not change in terms of “yes, I value this” and “no, I do not value this”, but rather in terms of how strongly I value it.

So integrity may in some (most) circumstances be important to me, but in certain circumstances other values can be more important.

Likewise with that strange concept called “purpose” — how does one even find out such a thing? Most authors say everybody’s purpose is different, and that the only way to find out what your purpose is is to think through it, deliberate, and sometimes look to the past or future to find clues to what it may be. That’s easy for them to say. As much as I have tried, that single purpose eludes me. I’ve had short-term “purposes”, but never a long-standing, single “purpose” I could base the rest of my life on.

I think that’s my main problem with “success” — I simply don’t know what it means to me. All my definitions of success, on further introspection, feel derived from what others have wrote or thought about. Sure, as a general abstract notion of success, I seek it; I want it; I covet it.

Give me all the success ‘ya got and I’d think I’d happy! Ha. Bollocks!

Success is devoid of meaning if you don’t know what success means to you.

The idea of the Intersection goes against the grain of much traditional thinking where “focus” has been the preferred way of “success” in a chosen field. It is not the author’s intent to dismiss the importance of focus and expertise in a field. Rather, he argues that innovation can come from in-depth knowledge and expertise in a given discipline, but it is easier and more common to have innovative breakthroughs mixing disciplines.

Instead of focusing yourself into expertise in a given field, you take ideas from different fields and disciplines to create new fields; to create new areas of expertise. On a very superficial level, it can be said to be a short-cut to “expert” status, by virtue of the fact that you invented the field in the first place.

Another very interesting finding Johansson had about innovation was how good and breakthrough ideas often happened by chance. Most successful innovators, he says, go for a large quantity of innovations as opposed to a few high quality ones. The reason for this? The probabilistic nature of innovation.

Breakthrough innovation is often preceded and followed by considerably less important innovation; in fact, he gives several examples of how great innovation is often followed by dismal innovative failures. Successful innovators have always had a huge quantity of ideas; of these ideas, most did nothing, while the others were breakthroughs. Given the nature of breakthrough innovation, the author recommends going for quantity rather than quality.

Another suggestion that Johansson gives with regards to increasing the chances of such Intersection-based innovation includes working in different fields. The exposure to different ways of thinking and doing things leads to insights that would be difficult to get otherwise.

[V]irtually all industrialised countries face a population shortfall, endangering the social security systems in those countries. The rapidly aging population and dwindling birth rates can arguably be compensated only through increased levels of immigration.

[...]

Just between 1994 and 1999, the foreign-born population grew between 5 and 17 percent in countries such as Korea, Denmark, Spain, Australia, Italy, and Canada. According to management guru Peter Drucker, “The mass migrations of the nineteenth century were either into empty, unsettled spaces (such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil), or from farm to city in the same country. By contrast, immigration in the twenty-first century is by foreigners — in nationality, language, culture and religion — who move into settled countries.”

I’ve recently been reading one of de Bono’s books called Parallel Thinking. In it, he writes how sometimes systems grow sub-optimally through evolution: a system starts off small and doing what it was designed to do, and then grows through increasing user input (and a changing context).

Take for example one day, in order to get the top item on a bookshelf, you buy a three-foot stepping stool. With it, you manage to get to the top item easily. One day, the bulb for the ceiling light in your room blows. You think of changing it yourself, but even on tip-toes on the stool you got for your bookshelf you’re unable to reach it.

You decide to put a chair (also three-feet tall) on top of that stepping stool, making the stool-chair combination a total of six-feet. With this new contraption, you reach the ceiling with ease. It is, however, very unstable, and you fall before you manage to take out the blown bulb.

A little flustered, and definitely deterred, you decide to head down to the hardware store and get a six-foot ladder instead. With it, you reach the bulb with ease.

In a very rough sense, you can say that the chair-stool contraption you created was made by evolution. One item follows the next, each designed for a separate purpose — one’s for you to extend your reach three-feet higher, the other’s for you to sit. By mixing these two items together, you get a “satisfactory” but sub-par item, one that allows you to extend your reach six-feet higher but with great instability.

The ladder is made by design. It is designed to provide you six-feet of height, and with great stability. Unlike evolution where the end product is more or less improvised, with incremental improvement, design allows you to create an optimal end-product. To make this analogy a little more accurate, you could say that the wood used for the stepping stool and the chair combined is equivalent to the wood used to make the ladder.

eDonn.com has evolved. It started as a nice little site for me to write about philosophy, of which I was immensely interested in back in 2002. I didn’t care much for readership back then, since there were close to none and I was reluctant to encourage friends to read it.

As the years wore on, I gained a little audience; this gave me tremendous satisfaction as a writer: I loved how people appreciated what I wrote; it validated my ideas; it validated me.

But after a while, I started getting a little tired of writing for its own sake. I had a journal for that, and eDonn.com felt redundant. I was no longer writing for myself as much as I was writing for the invisible audience I had. And as the number of comments I received died down, it became harder for me to continue. Frankly, at times I wished eDonn.com never existed.

But by then, like being stuck in a bad relationship, I felt too attached to eDonn.com to let it go. I think it’s high time some sweeping changes happened. It’s time for me to rediscover my purpose, and the purpose of this website.

The new eDonn.com, if it does come around will be for me to share my ideas — ideas I think other people will benefit from, be it in the form of entertainment, or self-improvement.

I’ll have a separate section of a “blog” — personal space where I will write about my life. I think each section of that site should have more definition. Right now, eDonn.com is, honestly, simply a hodgepodge of ideas each screaming for its own space.

But, I think, overall this semester has been fun. I’ve had lots of time for other things, most of which has been devoted to writing code. I’m attempting to write the back-end to eDonn.com, giving it an internal and external makeover, if you will. But when it’d be done is debatable — as much as I’d like to finally implement it after all the effort I put into it, the perfectionist in me won’t let me implement something I feel isn’t “ready”. As a side note, LiShya tries to balance me out by constantly pushing for me to use the things I create — I just think she’s envious of the fact that I spend so much time with my computer and needs some justification!

A Love for Coding

I fell in love with coding (more specifically PHP coding) again after, ironically, helping out LiShya with her business computing unit. I just love the coming up with the logic behind applications; I love seeing my creations being implemented in the real world; and I love the oohs and aahs that come with some of these creations.

I hope I’ll be able to bring out some of my applications soon. I just can’t wait!

It’s been a while, 15 days, since I last updated on this six-pack thing. I’m at this point halfway through my goal attempt at a six-pack in 90 days; though I can see some improvement, it seems like there’s still a way to go before it’d show. I was hoping that I’d do it within 60 days, but I’ll settle for 90.

I haven’t changed the foods I eat much, though I’ve started cutting down on the amount of oil and sugar I consume this past week. I think this stems from the fact that I’ve finally started running again, and I’m feeling closer to the six-pack goal than ever before.