Goal Setting
I think people who set goals for themselves are fools. The clever people know this. This is because it is very hard, perhaps even impossible, to achieve a goal that you truly don't desire. The goals you set need to be important to you. You need to be super enthusiastic about it to achieve a goal, like a toddler begging his parents to buy him an ice candy. The problem though is that if you're so enthusiastic about something, you would probably already have achieved it. You wouldn't need a goal. This is the fundamental paradox of goal setting.
I guess that makes me a fool too. I set goals all the time. The thing though is that I don't wait for any special milestone like my birthday or new year's to set a goal. I just make them when I feel like it. And I start working toward them from that moment onward. I only really set 1-2 goals every 2-3 months. Most of these are personal. Some of them professional. But because I set goals the second I'm inspired by how cool it would be if I achieved them, I safely bypass the fundamental paradox.
Goals need to be quantitative. Mostly because progress towards a goal needs to be analyzable, graphable, and reportable. All my non-quantitative (i.e. qualitative) goals have failed miserably. I think seeing progress provides the extra boost needed to complete the goal.
People always confuse goals with vision and ambition. You might only have one vision, a couple ambitions, but a handful of goals which have been set with your vision clear in your mind. A goal needs to be concrete, like "I'm going to wake up at 7 o'clock each morning", not "I'm going to try and wake up earlier if I can everyday."
Waterloo's Plaza
I eat out a lot when I'm on campus. So I was interested in knowing which places I spend the most on average per month. I exported my monthly bank statements as CSV which I imported into Excel. I then used the "Subtotals" feature under the "Data" context menu to figure out totals for each eatery. I then divided each total by 18 to figure out the average per month. My bank, TD Canada Trust, keeps statements for up to 18 months. With a bit of help from my dad, I figured out how to gather all these subtotals in a separate sheet which I plotted using a column chart.
Some things to note about the data:
- I might have gotten a cashback after eating at some restaurants. This skews the data point.
- I might have paid by cash at some restaurants at certain times. This would be a missing data point.
- I might have had someone treat me. This would also count as missing data.
- I might have paid for someone else because they forgot their wallet, and have them pay me back by cash later.
- Mr. Sushi is not on the list since they only accept cash. I don't eat there very frequently anyway, so it should be okay.
- Golden Mango accepted only cash for the longest time until this term when they finally managed to fix their debit/credit machine. This definitely screws up the numbers for Golden Mango.
- I eat on campus as well (SLC, DC, and SCH). I use my watcard at these places, so the data does not take into account these places.
And here I present the top 13 (click on image for larger version):
Conclusions:
- So it looks like my favorite places in the UW Plaza are Subway, Phat Cat, Kismet, Pita Factory, and Al-Madina.
- I spend 8.5% of all my food money at Subway.
- Just Subway, Kismet and Al Madina's account for about 20% of my total food expenses.
- The fact that I spend almost $40 bucks a month at Subway (and not Harvey's) is reassuring — at least I'm eating healthy!
On Wikipedia
Almost 1.5 years ago, I pleaded people to stop linking to Wikipedia mostly because your readers already knew how to get there. Thankfully that isn't happening as much these days, although that probably didn't have much to do with my plea.
This morning I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of Wikipedia pages I had been looking at over the last little while. So I wrote a script to parse my Firefox history file and generate this alphabetized list.
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When I was in Grade 10, I had this crazy idea for a short story. In it, the librarian of a really old and really large library would gain illegal access to the library's database and use that info to reconstruct the personalities of people by looking at all the books a person liked and disliked over their membership's duration.
I think the same kind of idea is possible if you had access to a person's browser's history: I believe you can tell a lot about a person by looking at the kinds of Wikipedia articles he/she reads everyday.
I think Wikipedia has dramatically changed the way I look at facts and information. I have quit trying to remember all the little pieces of info in my head because all these factoids are only a quick "wiki" search away. I remember the good old days of trying to look up stuff in our personal copy of the World Book encyclopedia. This almost always used to be a half-an-hour ordeal. Now I can tell you the currency of Ethiopia in less than a few seconds assuming I'm at my computer with Firefox or Chrome already open. This is some significant impact.
Some of the articles on Wikipedia are actually of very high quality, if I say so myself. Especially the economics ones. Take the article on Deadweight Loss for instance (deliberately linking to wikipedia). It tells you everything you need to know, complete with a great example and a detailed illustration. You no longer have to worry about not understanding terminology; almost all arcane field-specific terminology is, as I said before, only a "wiki" search away.
Once, I had a dream that I had spent all of Grade 5 through to university reading two Wikipedia articles a day instead of going to school. That's almost 10,000 articles in total over 13 years. Somehow I suspect I would've understood more about the world that way.
Going Paperless
I think that one of the most wonderful things about owning a laptop is the amount of paper one can cut down on. I have never had a need to print lecture notes, assignments, tutorials, lab manuals, or project specs. I estimate all this saves me approximately a 1000 sheets of printing paper each term. And e-school at Waterloo is eight terms. I'm sure you can do the math.
Since I don't have a printer of my own, anything that needs printing needs to be printed using university printing facilities which unfortunately cost me 8 cents a sheet. Not to mention the inconvenience and the wasted time waiting for those slow lab computers to log me in. So it not only saves paper to not print, but also saves time and is more convenient.
And if I want something photocopied, I scan it instead. Not only does this save me paper, but I can also import the scanned document into a service like Evernote and search for text in it at a later time, handwritten or not. Very powerful.
Currently, I use a paper-based agenda to keep track of all my academic deadlines and assignments. But as I complete my migration to Google Calendar (view my calendar here), even that is going to go away.
At the start of each term, I find this one particular white-coloured recycling box near the university library where reams of printing paper are dumped each term. I'm guessing these are from profs and graduate students who dump copies of their research papers at the end of each term. All these sheets have something printed on them on one side; I just use the other empty side for scrap. And also, before I forget, to do my assignments.
I find three significant advantages, beyond the obvious environmental fourth, to doing assignments on about-to-be-recycled scrap paper that you didn't pay for rather than on loose-leaf paper that you did pay for:
- When marked assignments are passed around in class, it becomes really easy to spot your needle from a haystack of about 300 sheets.
- I generally get the assignment done faster when doing it on scrap paper. I don't really know why. I wish I did.
- I generally make fewer errors when doing assignments on scrap paper. This probably explains, even if not entirely, why I get them done faster in the first place.
I think it's important that we all strive to go paperless during our university careers. Just imagine the amount of paper we'd save over the 4 or 5 years of our program's duration. I still end up printing a whole lot more than I'd like, but that's just because I'm forced to by profs and TAs who find it hard to read off a screen. But hey, at least I'm making a conscious effort to cut-down. I think you should too.
The "paperless" idea isn't quite revolutionary. It is at least 30 years old, but only today do I feel that we have the necessary tools and technology to perform virtually everything on a laptop with simply an internet connection.
My university, the University of Waterloo, is making an effort to go paperless. The challenges were explained at a recent in-house conference. Take a look and let me know what you think.
