Can I just say this though?… If I had 10 million air miles, you wouldn’t see me for dust, I’d be traveling the globe and not looking back.

Well worth your reading time. Well written and extremely lucid in its explanations of how Scion Capital has made such exceptional returns over and above Micheal’s value investing.

Waterboarding for dummies – Torture – Salon.com

… what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding ’session.’ Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to ‘dam the runoff’ and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second ‘applications’ of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

The most frightening thing is the doctors who would revive people only to have them tortured again. Why does this always deeply remind me of those Skinner experiments where someone in a white lab coat calmly tells someone to shock a subject past an obviously marked dangerous level?

I still can’t believe no war crimes have ever been leveled against the US for this. Such an incredibly dark time for a nation that was supposed to be a beacon of human rights even in a time of crisis.

(via BoingBoing.)

It does kick ass if you’re getting stuff up fast, but if you’re moving into more serious production environments with multiple devs and you also need a staging environment, the simple git heroku push master gets to be too simple. You really need something capistrano-esque for managing deployment even to heroku.

So loved George’s article and complementary rake tasks : Managing Heroku Deployments

Hong Kong Space Saving apartment

Kinda reminds me of some of the nifty things I had on the boat, which had to cram a lot of livability into a small amount of space.

(via Gabriela S.)

So, how’d I do in Feb ?

1. More mensch – Join a Board and Give Back
   I’ve got a lot of feelers out on this one, but so far it’s turning up pretty much butkis. Do you ever get the feeling, you’re not part of the old boy network? How have other people become Board members with interesting organizations? Anyhow, did have a very nice Board member for my present organization point me at an opportunity, but the organization in question appears to be too closely tied to a political party which would be problematic for my current real job, so I’m going to have to take a pass. I am giving this till my BDay at which point, as I mentioned in my initial post I’ll just do some senior volunteering for a locally focused charity. In the meantime though, if anyone hears of anything or know anyone looking for a Board member that has experience in strategy, operations and well, information technology and internet, please give me a holler rightaway.
2. Travel somewhere every third month
   I’m already nervous about this one but have decided to take a number of days around Easter to do something interesting and stick to my guns on this one after my boss killed my Thailand/Bali over XMas and Chinese New Year in HK. Fiji looks cheap and semi-promising at the moment and just have it on the todo list tonight to check out what sort of cheapies the discount carriers might have that Easter-ish week.
3. Learn to Surf
   Surprisingly, despite the rather rocky start and miserable weekends we’ve had, I’m actually getting a lot happier with where this is getting to. Have managed to get my kip up onto the board into good stead and just need to be a bit better paddler and stop straightening my damn legs when I stand up. Also enjoying it much much more now that I’m in a tiny bit better shape than when I first started.
4. Languages – Learn Mandarin
   I was actually a little worried about reporting on this one until the class on Saturday. Characters seemed to really be kicking my butt, but for some reason a lot of things clicked this last Saturday and a number of characters seem to have remained in my head to the point where I’m actually able to read and form simple sentences from the stuff we did in pinyin last class. I still cheat usually by writing the pinyin under the characters in my book during class, but it’s getting there. Also, I have to recommend the excellent and free Pleco iPhone Chinese-English dictionary which has been great and just downloaded Chinese Flashcard software to help me out a bit for lunchtime drills.
5. Health – Get back into shape and back to a martial art
   If I can point to anything in February and say it’s massively improved, it would have to be the health front. Managed to stick to both surfing and capoeira, have been eating much better and cooking or fixing (or eating out and having) healthier meals, I feel trimmer and a lot more sporty and also have started an 8 week couch to 5k plan which I just passed the first week on. So… yay me! Trying to be good about bed by 1am (though slid once or twice), have miraculously managed to stick to 2 coffees a day, and then only drinking unsweetened tea, cut out red meat and have been walking to work whenever I am not late for a meeting or something. Energy levels are up but really noticing that I’ve been quite tired by the end of the day. Passing out and sleeping soon as the head hits the pillow so will be glad as I start to get more fit. it’s still humbling feeling like I’ve slid into sloth while in London, getting my running back up to Vancouver levels and re-learning all I’ve lost in capoeira. Still, great progress this month. Now I just need to make it a habit and work around things like evening events. Just in case you were wondering though, Mon, Wed Fri is running, Tues, Thurs is capoeira and Sunday is for surfing. Saturday is my off and cheat day for food.

   I am getting a little worried about injuries as I’m pushing myself pretty hard. My shoulder feels a bit wracked and my right knee threw conniptions running on Sunday, so if anyone has some very good injury prevention advice, I’m all ears.

6. Get back into cooking and add to my repertoire
   Much better and keeping the fridge stocked and making meals at home. Lots of salads though this month I did stretch myself a bit and try to cook a calamari from the “get it at the market”, clean it (not as tricky as I thought), cut it and marinade it and served it with my high school friend Robyn’s amazing mango salsa recipe. Overall, need to cook more but kinda happy with where this is. Will be posting recipes of what’s been done in Jan and feb shortly. Might try another fish dish without the squid (which I overcooked sadly) as the salsa was aces. Do want to perfect squid though. Still can do a mean chicken dish though.

   March I think I want to work on a cooked vegetarian super yummy dish, so if anyone has a contender, please throw it over the wall for consideration. As always, must be easy and quick to make, use sustainable produce (preferably local to 150 kms), be nutritious (think protein on this one) and super nummy.

7. Financial Sustainability – be smarter with money
   Have held to 80/20 so far but it’s slipping. B minus for me on this one, though the expenses had more to do with layouts for a lot of the new things I was doing (running shoes, starting lessons on things) than on-going expenses. Still, money I owe myself I need to pay back shortly. Still working on second source of income besides reading up about startups a lot though I am attending the Eric Ries’ presentation in Sydney on Monday evening so sliding int he right direction on that one.
8. Start an online company around one of my applications
   Have started programming a little on this, but internal work projects at work kept pulling me off of it where I was foolishly using my personal time to get it done (mostly a vacation and TOIL tracking app). Definitely did a lot more programming in Feb which felt very zen like and good actually. Still need to look at setting up the whole thing completely offshore and have it integrated with payment services (so it doesn’t matter if I move countries). Could use advice if anyone has done this before.
9. Reduce and completely offset my current carbon and environmental footprint by 200%
   Shockingly, this has been the hardest thing at all. A lot of it seems to revolve around the rather seminal problem of people not being able to agree on how an ewnvironmental footprint should be measured. I would have thought this would have been figured out by now, but nope. So, had a rather interesting if random conversation in a swimming pool with a friend who is an environmental engineer over the issue. Apparently, there are four basic issues people argue. Is sustainability measured via carbon emissions, resource load (ie. how many hectares to support my person), lifecycle analysis (how much gunk went into getting me that carrot?) and toxicity (how poisonous is what I do to the envirnoment longer term). As near as I can tell, no one seems to have a proper answer, so this is going to require more research. No, I”m not copping out, but surely someone has combined these things into some sort of synthesized footprint calculations I can figure out before/after and what I need to do to make it neutral. I am quite worried that I just don’t earn enough cash to offset my current lifestyle even after I reduce it. Guess we’ll see. Still managing to stick to local produce as much as possible and eliminating some big issues out.
10. Keep up the good habits of 2009 – Don’t Lose My Gains
    Doing pretty well on previous gains as well. Can’t say that I’ve done too badly. Just for review, the ones applicable to this month and on-going are :
    • Blogging, journalling and GTDing once a week
      Check-a-roonie. Big fan of Taskpaper now and have switched from EverNote to the lighter, faster and vastly simpler Notational Velocity. Both sync over the internet with respective iPhone apps which keep me focused on the go. Both are superfast, efficient and keep it simple. Both are keeping me on track though do need to put aside time at the start of each week for planning.
    • A cultural outing every month
      Oh crap. I’ve got King Lear planned in March but had originally meant to go to Hong Kong to fill in this one and see New YEar’s there. Fallbacks obviously didn’t happen for whatever weak-ass reason. Sydney’s New Year’s parade (missed due to late ferry), Mardi Gras (was exhausted and super woozy from eye testing so slept through till after parade started) and the Dragon Boat Races (clashed with surfing). Hmmmm… could forgive myself since I did so much in January but think I’d better double up in March. Bad precedent even if it is averages. Well, need something to work on next month. Those do sound like a sad collection of excuses though, don’t they?
    • Polishing development skills
      Definitely been working on these though need to practice TDD and BDD much more before the fact than after.
    • Read – at least a book a month
      Actually, knocked this one out of the park, even on a short month and got through four (count ‘em – 4) books this month including a Nobel prize winner and the very diverting Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. WOuld have probably done even better except this retreat for work sucked up a lot of evening time I’d normally use reading.

Best quote: “Life does not reward you with free time, you need to create it.”

Breaking his advice down into themes, it basically covers these 9 (I think):

1. Time = Wealth
2. Be Where You Are
3. Slow Down
4. Keep It Simple
5. Don’t Set Limits
6. Quality over Quantity
7. The journey is more important than the destination
8. Seek people
9. Life is a journey

PS> If you havent’ read his book, Vagabonding, you owe it to yourself to do so.

(via Tim Ferriss’ blog.)