Coalition Basketball Narrow Loss
Once again we lost by 2 points! Argh, so close.
Blog
Archive for the ‘Joel’ Category
Joel Hang Gliding Video
Video of me hang gliding:
And a video of the overall environment by the hang gliding instructor Fred:
Dishonesty
If there is anything a team member can do to make me hate them, it’s being dishonest with me. People need to be open and honest and trustworthy in order for a business to function well and when people lie it creates huge problems. Dishonest people lose out in the end to karma and my hatred for their dishonesty will greatly hasten that process. I would rather have an employee who makes five big mistakes and talks to me about it then a person who makes one little mistake and hides it or lies about it.
Caring for Team Members
As the owner of my company, it has become increasingly clear to me that I absolutely must put caring for my team members over any other business objectives and goals. I have to rely on my team and trust them to do what is right for Coalition and the only way I can possibly be able to do that is to absolutely do the same for them. I offer a lot of benefits for our team here and I have been increasingly trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in every situation and treat people as well as I can. I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I am working hard at it!
Coalition Basketball Team Wins in Double Overtime
In one of the lowest scoring games of the year, Coalition’s basketball team won in double overtime. The first quarter ended at 2-2, there was no scoring in the first overtime and we scored the only basket in second overtime to win it. I think the game was 26-24 at the end.
Real Life as an MMORPG
Around 3 years ago, I wrote a blog post about World of Warcraft vs Real Life. I have been thinking about this topic of real life as an mmorpg (massively multiplayer online role playing game for those of you non-nerds) more recently.
It’s been roughly 6 years now since I played serious computer games and got started with “Real Life”.
I think a lot of great lessons carried over from computer games to real life for me:
- Track all of your statistics that are important to you even if you are not specifically working on improving them! Just the mere act of writing down things that are important to you will help you naturally focus on those things more. For example, I have a spreadsheet in which I track if I worked out or not (I just put an X in a spreadsheet cell), if I took a nap or not (again just an X), my productivity for the day (1-10 scale), how healthy I ate (1-10 scale), my bedtime, and a few other stats.
- If you are afraid of something or can’t figure something out, just dive in and keep trying new things till you figure it out!
- Reading the manual REALLY helps. I study constantly and actually have set aside an hour very early every morning for training in something new. Recently I have been working on adding Python to my programming skill set!
- Exploring new territories can pay big dividends. I have had an incredible time working with and visiting people from other nations and other walks of life.
What Are Your Friends Professions?
A very important question to ask yourself is what are the professions of your friends? Study after study has shown that who your friends are, what they do for a living, and what their habits are will have an enormous influence over you and your behaviors.
Here is a list of some of my friends professions:
- Law firm owner
- High end design firm owner
- Tutoring firm owner
- Google account executive
- Finance professional
- Hippy semi-pro skier
- Struggling Actor
- Waitress
- Maid service owner
- International business consultant
- Iranian pastry shop owners son
- CFO / accountant
- COO / recruiter
- Sales Director
- Drunk oil rigger worker
- Aerospace engineer
- F-16 Fighter pilot
- Dentist
- Affiliate website entrepreneur
- Financial marketing exec
- Nursing services firm owners son
Who are your friends and what are their professions?
Recursive Functions in Python
I spent the weekend learning more about Python on Udacity.com. I went through Unit 6 which was all about recursive procedures in Python.
A recursive function is basically a function that calls itself. An example of this would be:
def factorial(n):
if n == 0:
return 1
else:
return n * factorial(n - 1)
Recursion is great because it allows you to write code that is much simpler and cleaner than if you had to write the same code using if/while procedures.
Frattastic
My brother is pledging a frat and apparently they kidnapped one of the brothers. Read on for his version (this is his email to the brothers of the house):
Friends, Comrades and Dear Brothers,
I expect over the course of the day there will be quite a bit of rumors going around regarding the events of Ted’s recent homecoming. So, the freshmen pledge class has decided to disseminate the accurate version of events before things get out of hand.
Lady Fortune showed favor to the captors when the mark called us, requesting a ride to pick him up from Bushwood and to take him to Old House. The first issue was to make sure he was situated in the back middle seat with one captor on each side blocking the doors. There was one captor in the front passenger seat pretending to have an asthma attack in order to make Ted quickly enter the vehicle without realizing he was in a car with four soon-to-be kidnappers.
Once he was in the car and we were driving, the code phrase was asked, “Where’s Dougie?” which initiated the subsequent duct-taping and hooding of Mr. Ted. At first, his reaction was of total shock, and then complete compliance. He must have realized the hopelessness of the situation and decided to just give in to the inevitable. He said that it was “pussy-shit” that we waited until he was alone, but his anger only amused the captors. Obviously, the captors would prefer to get a Brother alone as opposed to fighting of the drunken masses during the process. He then exclaimed that he had some sort of interview the next morning at nine and handed over his cellphone (and its password) in order to verify this via text messages. But, even this revelation garnered no mercy from the captors.
He was initially relaxed about the whole ordeal but when the kidnappers put a pillowcase over his head and duct taped it, he began to experience the effects of anxiety and paranoia. The captors had decided to be completely silent and only listen to music and ignore Ted’s remarks to maximize his feeling of isolation.
After an hour of driving, Ted stated something to the effect of “I hope you aren’t stupid enough to take me over state lines, because that is a federal offense. What if you guys get pulled over? I hope you do, cause my parents will sue you.” One of the captors smoothly replied, “We don’t care.” And the drive continued…
At this point, one of the captors saw a mechanical pencil in the vehicle and had an epiphany: “wouldn’t it be great if we (the captors) convinced Ted that we were injecting him with some sort of hallucinogenic drug?” Thus, the captors asked Ted if he was hot and told him they would roll up his sleeves. They then grabbed his arms and held them still while one of the captors poked him in the forearm (after flicking the mechanical pencil like one would a syringe prior to injection).
He quickly asked what had been given to him and was answered with the cold silence of the dark night…leaving him to his own paranoid thoughts. However, he did have some rather interesting speculations about the nature of what had supposedly been given to him. His first guess was that the “drug” consisted of medication for women in menopause to handle heat flashes. The captors really didn’t know where that one came from, but figured, “Well, it is Ted.” His second hypothesis was that the captors had given him a laxative.
The kidnapper who had first imagined the mechanical pencil scheme then chose to turn all the heat up in the vehicle to make Ted uncomfortable. Once he began complaining of the heat, the captors told him that the air conditioning was going full-blast and that his high temperature was a side effect of the drug. The captors then changed the temperature from one extreme to the next throughout the ride (as well as routinely changing the volume low and high for a constant period of time to further aid the placebo effect).
Mr. Ted began questioning what the captors had given him and one of them obliged to look up the side effects of the drug on the Internet and read the symptoms. The kidnapper went to the Wikipedia for LSD (without revealing that it was LSD that had supposedly been given to him) and read the symptoms which progressive became more and more intense in nature (the captor added temperature variation and sound wave changes to the list). At the end of the synopsis, Wikipedia revealed that LSD should not be used in stressful environments where the user is not comfortable and Mark began expressing concern for his psychological and physical health at this new bit of information.
He then pretended to pass out and was resting his head on one of the captor’s laps for awhile before suddenly jerking upwards and striking a glancing blow on the chin of that kidnapper which resulted in further restraint. After some time had passed, the kidnappers decided to give him another fake injection. When they grabbed his arms, Ted pleaded, “Don’t do this. I am okay with the kidnapping, but please don’t drug me.”, but the captors proceeded and gave him another “shot”. Once the deed was done, Ted cried out, “This fraternity is going to shit, you are all crazy like Baker and Watson” before laying his head on his seat; resigning himself to the perceived effects of a mysterious psychedelic drug.
This silence lasted for a short-while though because he wanted to know if the drug could show up on a NCAA drug screening and the captors said that they really had no idea.
Yet, all good things must come to an end. The captors had reached their destination which last over a total of three hours (imagine having a hood over your head for such a period while being under the perceived influence of a powerful chemical agent): the home of Mr. Ted in Greensboro, NC. The kidnappers quickly dragged him out onto the side of the grassy hill directly in front of his parents front door, and after a few pictures, left The One with Rage.
With the utmost sincerity and respect,
Dimitri