Duane Morin

My wife joined weight watchers recently. I vehemently refused. But I have access to all of her point-keeping scorecards now and could play the game the same way. 20ish points a day for me? No problem. Now it’s a personal challenge. I know that a handful of pretzels is 3 points. 5 handfuls of pretzels (or, worse, Dove mini chocolates….) is like a day’s points right there, shot to heck.

Sure I still cheat sometimes. I’m not doing the “weigh in every week” thing. But I’m down like 17 pounds and even though I still make my regular cafeteria trips at work it’s almost always just for diet coke or water. Sometimes pretzels or nuts. Almost never chocolate or Doritos.

Been biting my nails for 30 years now, easy. Ever since I can remember. Know what finally worked? The rubber band on the wrist trick. Don’t ask me why, but it’s been just about 2 weeks now and although I still stare longingly at my fingers and occasionally catch myself trying to just pick at little bits of cuticle, I can honestly say that I’m done. My hands look and feel like somebody else’s now. It’s very weird.

I think the rubber band thing worked, for me, for a couple of simple reasons. First and foremost it’s always there. Every other tool that you can think of, clippers and files and polishes and so on… you will eventually not have on you (driving? sleeping?) and there you go, an excuse to pick. But the elastic can stay on all the time, even in the shower.

Second, it’s not so much the negative reinforcement thing, snapping it is no big deal to me and I rarely do it. It’s just the reminder. Like, ok, I’m staring at my fingers. I have a couple of choices now. I can bite them. I can snap the elastic. Or I can just look and then go look at something else. Sometimes I snap it, sometimes I don’t.

Highly, highly, highly recommended.

Office in my house means “place for all the paperwork”, which means “place to dump all the paperwork that you plan to get to later.” Gotta work on staying on top of it.

This says ride, not “master the art of riding.” :) I love the philosophy behind the unicycle. Namely, “There is no coasting.” There’s something to that. You are NOT going to master the unicycle by thinking “Ok, first let me get up and get my balance on the thing” like you might with a regular bicycle. You have to constantly keep your feet moving. And once you get moving, if you find yourself saying “Hey, I’m doing it!” and you stop pedalling? Crash. A little bit like juggling.

I have one because work gave them to us last year. 20gig model. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than maybe 2-4 gig on it. And the interface leaves much to be desired, especially if you are into anything but ripping your music collection. How about bookmarking where you are in a large audio book MP3 so you can leave it and come back? How about deleting files, for that matter, when you are done with them? If you’re into podcasting at all you’re going to go through a dozen audio files a day and you don’t want to have to keep skimming through an ever growing list to find the next one you haven’t listened to.

Get an MP3 player. A good one. But look around at some of the ipod killers to see if one fits your taste a little better, and you’re not just paying big bucks to get the slickest one.

Don’t carry debt is not the same as don’t use your cards. Just pay them off every month. That way you can take advantage of whatever point system is currently all the rage. If you’re not in a position to pay them off every month, then absolutely don’t use them!

Two terms to learn, “index fund” (S&P, Nasdaq, etc..) and “automatic investment plan” (AIP). Head over to www.morningstar.com and pick an index fund you like (I used Vanguard Growth Index when I started), and then sign up for an account and tell them that you want $x automatically taking from your checking account every month.

Congratulations, you’re investing! Next, lookup “dollar cost averaging” to understand why what you’re doing is a good thing.
In short you pick a fixed dollar amount, NOT a fixed number of shares. That way when the price goes up, you are buying less, but when the price drops, you are actually buying more (so that when the price goes back up again, your profit goes back up at a higher rate).

This is the key bit. Do NOT just take a thousand bucks one time, buy some stock, and then watch it every day to see if it makes you rich. You will be a very sad individual. The AIP is your friend. You need to think about your investment over time.

Had a deal with an ebook publisher (does that really count?) and had the final copy all sent it, but the actual publishing bit never saw the light of day :(. Now I have to decide whether to shop the content around to some other publisher or to just consider it an opportunity missed.

(I wish there was a rating in between worth it and not worth it.)

Sure, I studied Esperanto. Had a penpal in the Netherlands, and read fairy tales from China. Neat for the uniqueness of it. But have I ever actually used it? Have I stood face to face with someone else who can speak Esperanto?

So if you want to learn it and then join an Esperanto Club on the net where you know that’s what people will be speaking, then go for it. But if you hope to go through life wondering if you’re ever going to get a chance to spontaneously use it (as you might use Spanish, French, or Sign) I think you’re going to be disappointed.

The man wrote what, 38 plays if you count Noble Kinsmen? And the Sonnets? It’s not all gold, people. Nobody is rushing out to turn Cymbeline or Pericles Prince of Tyre into blockbuster movies. Reading them all is really one of those things you’re gonna be doing just to say you did it. Trust me, I’ve done it. I’m always on the lookout to bring a little more Shakespeare into the conversation, and the good stuff always seems to come out of maybe half of his body of work.

Read some Shakespeare, absolutely. Read it often. Get into it. The man wrote some brilliant stuff. If you haven’t gotten started yet, I think Hamlet and Romeo&Juliet are probably two of the most accessible. Both have been made into movies countless times, and both have characters that people can easily relate to. Hamlet may seem daunting, since to most people it represents the cream of the crop of Shakespeare’s work, but look at it like this—Hamlet’s dad is out of the picture, and his mom marries somebody that Hamlet hates (and who doesn’t care for Hamlet much either). Not like that sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time in present day. At one level the play is entirely about Hamlet’s changing relationship to his parents and his growth from schoolboy into rightful heir to the throne.

If you prefer a comedy, I’ve always liked A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though Taming of the Shrew is probably easier to start with. Much Ado About Nothing was made into a good movie. After some of the big ones you may find yourself struggling to remember the difference between As You Like It, Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Just remember to ease yourself into it. People have been analyzing this stuff for almost 400 years, you’re not going to get it all into your head in one reading. See the movie as you read the play. Pay attention to plot and characters first, and then go back and look more carefully at the bits you find interesting. It took me many readings of Hamlet before it dawned on me that “thrift, Horatio, thrift! the thrice-baked funeral meats did coldly furnish forth the wedding tables” (or something like that) was Hamlet’s joke to Horatio that his mom had to get married quickly after his dad’s death so that they could use the leftover food and save money.

Can you tell I love talking about this stuff?

It’s not always easy to see teh value in taking half a year’s salary, sticking it in the bank and saying you’re not going to touch it. Try getting laid off. Suddenly your perspective changes a bit.

Best way to start is to get into an automatic investment plan (AIP) with the mutual fund of your choice, ideally something conservative like an index fund. Just tell them to take $x out of our bank account every month, and then promptly forget about it. Before you know it (depending on big $x is) you’ll have yourself a little nest egg.

Once you have some money built up (say, 3 months) switch it over to a money market fund or something that is no risk. I’m sure that the financial planners out there had heart failure when I said to keep your emergency money in mutual funds, but that’s only to build it up a little bit. After all if you’re doing this thing then you don’t have a fund right now anyway, so it’s not like you’re going to lose everything.

Tivo is destined to become the verb, like Xerox and Google before it (even though they’re trying to prevent that, just like the others did). Sure it has its problems. But Tivo really put the whole PVR/DVR concept on the map, and they’re only poised to get better. Instead of watching them chase red herrings, expect each decision they make to solidify them as the killer tv app.

If you have an MP3 player, what more can you hope for than a regular source of original content? Everybody gets bored with their music collection eventually. Watch for “micro station” to catch on. Everybody with an IP address can play radio station!

Somewhere after college I hit a depressed slump where I couldn’t think of good reasons to do anything (up to and including leave the house) without someone to do it with. In other words, I’d just gotten out of a long term relationship the hard way (unwillingly).

A friend’s wedding a few states away gave me the answer. I drove there, alone, and on the way back I decided to take an extra day and just drive somewhere randomly. I remember calling my parents and saying “I’m staying an extra night. I have no idea the name of the town I am in.” The first time was scary as heck, I was so afraid that my car would be stolen or something and I’d be trapped. But I survived.

I made that a habit for several years, now taking a week to go drive at will. From Massachusetts I drove to Canada accidentally (drive west across Vermont until you hit NY, turn around, take a left, drive until the radio stations are in French), and to Virginia by way of North Carolina (for another friends wedding ironically enough).

Not something you can really do with a spouse and children, so my days of random driving are over. But they are fond memories indeed.

When my first daughter was born I wrote a journal of every day of my wife’s pregnancy (as a surprise) and bound it up into a book that she can read when she’s older. I don’t know how she’s going to feel about lines like “My new alarm clock sounds exactly like my wife with her head in the toilet…” but it is what it is.

When my second daughter was born I didn’t want to do the same thing (mostly since I tried and every entry was “Oh, Katherine did the cutest thing today….”) so I came up with the idea of writing a children’s story/book for her. I have the idea, I even have characters and a plot, I just have to get moving and write the thing and not be afraid of the final product.

I want to communicate with people about my ideas on how to teach Shakespeare. I have a good 45 minutes a day commuting to work where I’m doing nothing. Why not just ramble into a recorder and publish it? I’ve discovered that several podcasters do exactly that (just babble into iPod while driving). What am I embarassed by?

When I was a kid living at home I would take breaks from programming marathons and wander the house…to the kitchen, of course. In college it actually got better because we never had food in the house, and the computer lab was not close enough to free food. Now I”m at a job that stocks the cafeteria with whatever we want, and inevitably there are bags and bags of mini chocolate bars. So my trips up from the computer (always a good thing to release repetitive stress) end me up in the cafeteria trying to decide between the Dove mini bars and the Doritos. Must stop.

I would normally have written “publish something”, but what does that mean anymore? I once wrote “publish a magazine article.” Did it. I’d love to write a novel, or even a text book, but let’s set realistic goals. I have a blog (points for finding it :)) so technically I can “publish” whatever I want now.

I also want to work more on the children’s story I owe to my daughter.