Month: July 2018

A Regular

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I achieved a major milestone today. I officially became a regular at the Canary Wharf Starbucks I goto when going to the office in Canary Wharf. The lady taking orders remembered my name. You could see her struggle a bit trying to guess my order but then she knew my name. Another lady taking orders has been almost remembering for a week or two. You could tell by her facial expressions that she is trying and then is like a ha when i tell her what i want to order.

I guess we have been here long enough that I earned this nonsensical milestone. I am still proud.

Underground vs Subway Showdown Part 3: Crowds

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This is part 3 of my super scientific comparison and contrasting of the NYC Subway and the London Underground. In this part I tak about crowds and why I do not love them so much.

Rush hour in New York can be interesting. When I lived on the upper East side I would have to wait pretty often for five trains before I could even get on one. I lived at the 96th St stop on the Lexington Ave line. at 96th. As Upper East side goes that is pretty north and it was still horrible at rush hour. When I lived in Long Island city if there was any problem with the 7 train I would have to wait. You paid the price for being at the last stop in Queens. One time had to wait about seven trains to get on. Typically 2-3 would be a regular occurrence.

In more recent years when I lived in Forest Hills the crowds in the morning haven’t been as bad since I was at a stop that had 2 Locals & 2 Express trains and I could take any of them to work. Getting home however I would have to pick what line to goto and it could get pretty interesting if it got backed up at all.

In London depending on the time of day there are crowds. Going to work even at the night of rush hour in the 5 months I have been here I only once couldn’t get on a train and had to wait for another one. It can get pretty crowded in some stations though. I had to go to bank during rush hour a few nights. There was a line from getting into the station through until you got onto the platform. Unlike New York the line moved so was a crowd of people actually moving together. Once on the platform I had to wait several trains to get onto one. It seems like that’s normal at rush-hour for that station.

Luckily for me my daily commute is crowded however not ridiculously so. My biggest challenge is the last transfer on the way home. It’s at a major station in the line I take to go home. The line splits before I get off the train. That means I cannot just get on any train for that line. Side story i have only once got on the wrong train and had to turn around and go back. To make matters worse the other side of the line that I do not take has more trains than the one I do take. On the plus side I have gotten into a good commute rhythm and I haven’t had much of a crowd issue in a while.

The winter here is a tough one. It’s probably New York, however I am calling it a draw. My day-to-day experience in London has been pretty good so far. I see how the crowds could be consistently worse here in busy stations. I have heard they have had to close stations to new passingers when it gets really bad. I haven’t experienced it however I cannot recall that every happening in NY.

In the 4th and final segment I will cover etiquette. That one is more a commentary on the people rather than the system. That being said there are a few nifty things that systematically are done here that help etiquette.

It Is Late July And Summer Vacation Starts Now

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Today is the first day of the girls summer vacation/holiday. They get seven weeks off until school starts again in September.

This is one of those little things that are just a bit off in my universe and need adjustment. It’s late July and my kids were still in school until last Friday. Growing up for me school ended in June. The girls spent the Fourth of July at school. My memories of the Fourth of July is visions of watching fireworks at camp when i was old enough to goto sleep away canp or when i was working at one.

There’s arguments to be made for either system. I do not feel one is better or worse than the other. It’s just different enough that it takes getting use to. So here I am on 23rd of July and it’s the first day of my girls summer vacation.

My “Real” News Cleanse

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Recently I have started to look at things that I spend time on that don’t make me happy.  The first thing I gravitated towards was social media. I recently wrote about that in my detox plan for it. The next thing that ended up on my very short list was the news.

Over the years I have written several times about my love hate relationship with the news.  These two entries from August & September 2005 one from 2005.  Another one from 2012. As a young kid I used to watch it and be fascinated by it. By my late 20s I was jaded by the 24-hour news cycle. I spent the better part of the last 20 years avoiding and then binging on the news. The only exception is tech news. I’ve been pretty consistently reading that. Tech news usually doesn’t depress me and it helps me stay current in my profession.

With all that’s going on in the world today I’m not getting very much positive out of reading the news every day. I have kept doing it because I want to stay informed. When I read several different sources talking about how I statistically would be happier not reading it I thought about ignorance is bliss. It is. In this case there’s really not much I can do when I read headlines.  So what do I get out of it? I want to be informed however is being informed worth being miserable? I’ve tried being miserably informed for a while and it does not feel like working so I will try ignorant happiness.

Practically speaking when I have a coffee or eat lunch or commute I browse headlines via RSS feeds. I also read a few key websites.  Even after curating down what sources I look at each day I am still depressed by what I read on general news sites.

The habit I plan to change is to stop looking at news sites altogether. As a start I will also cut out the vast majority of the RSS feeds I read. I will still look at some technology, productivity, mindfulness, and entertainment (Sci-Fi) sites. It’s hard to go cold turkey so I will keep looking at those since I find them interesting. The technology sites also help in staying current with the industry or so I keep telling myself.

I know that simply browsing articles even if they’re not stress inducing news articles is not good for me. I figure that what I proposed to do is a good transition. With the time I free up white like to spend it reading more books. I have a queue of them lined up. All I have to do is start reading them. The hardest part I think is building that new routine that doesn’t include looking at new sites & feeds. I almost by muscle memory will type in theguardian.co.uk when I have a spare minute. It is hard to stop myself. Instead I want to start taking spare time I have and use it to update my journal in Day One. Or something else more productive than reading news.  Once I get started I hope to cut down on the other things I plan to keep reading at first.  Over time I hope to transition those interests into books of the same topic instead of 2-5 minute articles.

As with my attempt to cut out social media or drastically reduce it only time will tell how successful I am. By the time this is posted I should hopefully have a routine down. Successful or not I hope to touch back on this topic in a few months to see how I did.

Boobytrapped

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I should either feel that i have failed as a parent that my kids are boobytrapping the house, or i should be proud of their skills at home security. Who am I kidding I am so proud.

Going Sort of Cold Turkey on Social Media

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For a while now I’ve been focused on personal productivity. I consider myself pretty organized already.  I use personal kanban, organizing my thoughts in a database to track information.  I have been trying to journal.  Even with all that  I have also been serious about how to continue to improve on my productivity.  My dad always said work smarter not harder.

More recently over the past few months I have been reading a lot about mindfulness and ways to improve day-to-day happiness. It’s a fascinating topic.  It is surprising that I have noticed several general themes overlapping between what I’ve read about improving personal productivity and mindfulness.

The first thing universally accepted as a big time suck is reading and participating in social media. It also shockingly turns out to be something that generally doesn’t make people happy. Yet many of us still do it. In early 2017 I cut out my social media consumption almost completely. That of course coincided with my not logging into Facebook for months. When I started posting pictures on Facebook again I inevitably logged in to see if there were comments. That coincided with my return to blogging so I would login to also check on comments to those posts as well. I am at a point now where I know I shouldn’t be logging in and I feel like I’m about ready to just stop cold. I’ll keep writing and posting on my blog but reading Facebook feeds needs to go.

I use Twitter as well. Presently I’ve been using it keep tabs on some financial technology companies I am interested in. As much is that is using social media I find that I’m giving myself an exception by continuing to read that. It helps me stay on top of technical trends and that in turn helps me stay ahead in my career.

When I think about it I really do not get much out of looking at social media. There is a conversation here there with friends near and far that I cherish. Those are few and far between compared to all of the nonsense and polarizing news articles littering the cesspool of my newsfeed. The idea of Facebook and Twitter is great.  The in practice isn’t so much.  Besides not being productive I really am not much happier by engaging in it all. It is hard to understand why I keep doing it then.

I have been thinking about this all for a while now.  I am finally ready to action for myself.  What I’m going to  is simply stop. I am going to remove Facebook from my phone. I am not going to check my newsfeed. What I will keep doing is periodically checking some specific groups that are useful and that I contribute to. If I want to do that though I will need to do it from a computer.  I will also continue to review a few specific Twitter lists I’ve curated for keeping up on technology. I plan on keeping Twitter on my phone for now.  That’s it though. No trolling to see what others are doing. No commenting or replying to comments. And definitely no glancing at news articles or news headlines others garbage posts that litter my newsfeed.

What I hope to do instead is message friends more. I want to have direct conversations virtual or otherwise. At the time of this writing I hope to start this immediately.. By the time this gets published on my blog however it should be several weeks.  Hopefully by then I will have been successful.  I sure hope so.

In addition or along with this I have to address my news consumption. That’s the next habit I will write about Stay tuned, or not.

Finally Cooling Down

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Sidecar

It was hot (hot for England) at like 27 Celsius today. That is like 80 something in that Fahrenheit system that I used in the US. After the kids were in bed M and i decided to go out to our garden and relax. It was nice i whipped up some cocktails and we read. It was a nice relaxing end to the week.As we were sipping our drinks it started to get windy and cool. We both looked at each other and said it might be time to go inside. Then i looked at my watch and realised it was 9:40 PM. It wasn’t daylight but it isn’t dark. I am still fascinated at how different enough the weather and day/night times are here than NY. By 9:40 PM in NY during any day of the year it would be dark and cold. Here it is light enough that you can still read and it is still cool but not cold outside.