better living through python

This trip was fantastic. Robey and I returned, none too worse for wear, with friends in tow and smiles on our faces. Beginning our trip we headed out and and camped with some dear friends of ours, friends of mine from my college years in Eugene.

While the Willamette Valley was sweltering in almost 100 degree heat we were enjoying low 90’s at our private mountain lake (which was very swimmable by Oregon standards) with newts and crawdads for company. We also were especially lucky that we were able to make arrangements with a friend of ours from Germany last minute, so that he and boyfriend could join us.

We spent much of the week exploring, swimming, catching up on our reading, visiting with good friends, and swatting at the occasional mosquito or horsefly. I finished rereading Alas, Babylon, a novel I read during high school by Pat Frank. I also finished my book reviewing the Native Americans of the Pacific Coast.

I started reading a book I picked up on my tour through Eastern Oregon this past April, called Bleed, Blister and Purge; A history of Medicine on the American Frontier. It was initially a gift for Robey, but upon receiving it I informed him that it was a partial self-gift as well. Ah well, serves me right that I only got through the first 20 or so pages before putting it down for something a little less…gruesome. There was a reason I chose not to follow the family tradition of going into nursing…it’s funny how easy it is for me to forget when I see a good lookin’ history book.

This book lead to me look up the symptoms of diptheria on Wikipedia, which is subsequently NOT a good idea. There is a quote from the book which almost promptly made me shut the thing as I grossed out (aka don’t read further if you have a easily queasy stomach). It detailed a Native American shaman using some barbs stuck to a string covered in hot buffalo fat that he stuffed down the throat of an infected. Once the fat melts he rips the barbed portion out in order to rip out the infected membrane in the throat. The infected person he was quoted having done this to survived, but despite the amazing doctoring done here it did not encourage me to keep reading.

The trip ended fantastically as more friends joined us at the lake for the last weekend, and we all basically caravanned back on Sunday afternoon. On the way we stopped at an A&W fast food restaurant. We went inside to eat, where I had to use one of the telephones located at each booth to order our meal. It was hilarious watching the faces of our european friends react to this modern convenience as well as exciting sharing the much loved root beer float American experience. Later that evening Robey and I were safely home snuggled in our bed and cuddling with our cats, with still smokey hair from a week over a campfire to lull us to sleep.

Many of you have probably heard of Pay what you want (PWYW). Many of the Indie Bundles use this payment scheme, the Humble Bundle being the most famous of the group. Basically it’s an opportunity for you to purchase something for the value you think it’s worth.

Some places will require a minimum starting amount in order to purchase, but many do not. Other places promise to donate a portion of your money to a charity. There is a lot to making this particular payment method work for you. It’s something that we at FlamingLunchbox are considering heavily as an option for our business model.

So we did a little research. We checked out the Humble Bundle Statistics page to see how PWYW was working for them. The lowest average purchase was $4.09 and the highest $9.18 per purchase. Not too bad really considering their total purchases range from 81,583 up to 599,004.

However, FlamingLunchbox is not supported by such communities like the Humble Bundle is. So I looked into some other articles from individuals enacting this payment method to find something more comparable. One particular article was referenced on Techdirt. The independent programmer recommended it overall, however did mention one thing that stuck with me.

I think the main reason why so few people chose to pay for Proun(his game) is this: the free version did not require a Credit Card transaction and was thus way easier to download.

So for most PWYW options, especially for independent developers, it would be important to require a minimum payment.

But requiring a minimum payment still might not make this work for everyone. Many people might just simply pay the minimum payment and then feel good enough that they’re helping in that small way to assist a small business. Some other incentive might be necessary to make something like PWYW work even better. I found that answer here on one of the Discover magazine’s Blogs. They mention one particular aspect, which the Humble Bundle also uses, in order to provide even more incentive to the average customer.

But when customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, salesand* profits went through the roof. Around 4.5% of the customers asked for a photo (up 9 times from the standard price plan), and on average, each one paid $5.33 for the privilege. Even after taking away the charitable donations, that still left Gneezy with a decent profit.*

After our review it seems that PWYW can work well, especially for independent developers. That is, as long as you require a minimum payment and donate a certain percentage of your profits. But then the question remains, whom would FlamingLunchbox donate to?

Robey thinks that a suggested payment along with strong differentation between free and paid versions would work instead of requiring a minimum. What do you think?

More than ever we are surrounded by the need to showcase ourselves online. Whether it’s by having our resume always accessible via basic sites such as LinkedIn, or pushing to make sure we’re always on the newest and more intriguing sites out there. Lately I’ve been doing a fair amount of review by trying out a some of the myriad of sites out there. There are new ones every day, some more versatile and others leaning toward artistic.

Obviously there are the basic sites we all know about. You’ve got Twitter, and Facebook, and I mentioned LinkedIn already. But now there are more and more options out there. One of the sites I appreciate, as it provides an easy way to manage your online presence, is about.me. This provides you with a basic page you can create for yourself, that allows you to give a brief biography as well as provide many basic links to where you interact online. You can find my about.me page at about.me/rbergstad.

The most prevalent increases seem to be for those in programming/web and software development or graphic design. There have already been sites online such as DeviantArt, which allow graphic designers a way to showcase their goods. There are also tons of options out there for programmers, when it comes to showing off their skills. They can answer questions on forums, such as posts to stackoverflow or provide opensource code on sites such as github.

Recently there were two new options blogged about on Silicon Florist: Vizify and Path.to. I checked them out and created profiles. You can check me out on my Vizify profile and my Path.to Profile. They both offer unique ways of presenting yourself to your professional community.

I enjoy them both; I think Vizify adds a little more to the experience. If you were looking at tons of different applicant overviews using it, it might get to be a bit much. It’s a great way to present yourself at a glance though. Path.to is nicer because it allows for you to see what jobs match not only your skill set but also your prefered work environment. I do wonder, however, with all these new alternatives to LinkedIn how things will play out?

This past weekend was amazing. We took off after I returned from work on Thursday and drove to Rock Creek Reservoir. We stayed there two nights, went rafting on Friday, and then took off Saturday.

On Saturday we split off from my mother and nephew and went south towards Redmond. Stopping randomly on the side of the road we checked out various places and sites. Once it started to get later we kept an eye out for campsites. We attempted to stay at Riverside Campground, one of the walk-in tent campsites near Camp Sherman. It follows alongside the Metolius River, which is absolutely gorgeous. We unfortunately didn’t take pictures or stay, as the river is fly fishing only.

We weren’t disappointed though. We continued along the highway towards Hoodoo and finally turned off a couple of miles prior to the Hoodoo turnoff. We found a snowpark that turns into Mountain Lakes during the summer. We drove around and found a campsite just on the side of Island Lake. We had no idea what it’s name was at the time, but it was definitely worth the exploration it took to find it.

Also, as promised, some pictures from jamming. We picked tons of berries and thus made tons of jam. In this final picture you’ll see our half flat of boysenberries, flat of blueberries and marion berries, two half pints of raspberries from the backyard and the last of some nectarines we had gotten at a local farm stand that were starting to go. That was a long weekend of jam makin’.

For more pictures just check out my Picasa folder Rafting and Jamming.

This past weekend Robey and I spent a fair amount of time creating a bunch of jams and some sandwich pickles. I wanted to share some pictures from our amazing experience over the hot oven and the delicious berries we started with. Unfortunately getting all of the camping gear packed last night didn’t allow either of us any time for much else.

So now you’ll get a serious collection of photos from jam making and rafting/camping this upcoming week. That’s right, I said rafting/camping. Robey and I are going rafting and camping with my mother (Gwen) and nephew (Alex) this upcoming weekend. We’re leaving Thursday after I get off work and driving up to Rock Creek Reservoir.

Friday all of us will go rafting for the first time, hopefully not drown or get too sunburned, and then go fishing and hiking around the rest of the weekend. All in all, I think it’s going to be tons of fun.

On a side note, I wanted to link everyone to this article about Why Over-Apologizing is a Bad thing. This article talks about why saying you’re sorry too much in the workplace can make you look weak. I think the turn of phrase that struck me the most was the quote at the end, ”It can give a certain kind of person permission to treat you poorly, or even abuse you,”.

Does this mean that being too willing to admit that you might be wrong might encourage those who might abuse you in the first place to start doing so? It definitely made my mind buzz. Robey put it this way, ”You can admit to being at fault for something without apologizing for it. Apologizing emphasizes the guilt you feel, and can sometimes allow others to feel more willing to point the finger in your direction. At least, for those who want to lay blame elsewhere, for anything.”

During my lunch break today I checked out this neat site called Codecademy. I had heard about it previously on a blog I read called AVC musings of a VC in NYC . Today he posted about an update to their site, as it now includes python as one of the programming languages.

Naturally I was rather interested while reading his post Codecademy Update, being a novice python programmer myself. So I finally decided to check out this codecademy myself.

As I’m still working on my first javascript (js) game, I decided to brush up on my javascript knowledge and go through their fundamentals overview. The site is free for those who either want to learn or teach programming. By teach, it means the site’s content is user curated. This creates a for free and possibly very awesome resource for self-starters.

The major impetus they use to influence people to curate, is the phrase “Build your reputation as an expert in your field.” Which as far as I can tell, those who choose to create lessons on this site are taking it seriously. They are well thought out and put together. This provides an excellent opportunity for those who not only want to be known as code creators (aka using github and open source to show off their skill) and code educators. However one thing the site doesn’t do, is provide for an easy feedback system from the student to the code educator.

They do currently provide a Q&A forum on each section of the various lesson plans. These sections, as best as I can tell, are meant to be used akin to a professor’s office hours. The feedback I mean is if there is a noticeable error in the logic in their coding examples (which some may state that office hours is when you go and tell the professor he was doing it wrong in class).

Going through the javascript fundamentals lesson I noticed a section where completing the section didn’t require the correct answer, just an answer. Here is where I feel that being able to provide the curator with direct feedback (in my case a screenshot of the occurrence), would be most useful.

There are a couple of other things I noticed, but they were mainly things that weren’t explained to the student in places where I personally felt it was appropriate to do so. All in all this is an excellent place where you can provide yourself with a code education. I’m sad I didn’t include this link to my post from last week, but I’m glad I’ve finally gotten around to checking it out.

Another neat aspect of the site? It allows you to use social sharing as a way to promote your educational experience. This is quite awesome for me, because as someone who blogs about their learning process, this provides me an easy way to communicate my progress. I also think it has the ability to connect with today’s youth, because it allows them an easy way to show their friends that they’re learning to program. I think I’ll show this to my nieces and nephews…

I was reading an article on arstechnica recently, titled Measuring the boss from hell. It struck a chord for me, naturally, so I read the article. I was rather intrigued to see what a tech site would have to say about workplace bullying, as I assumed that’s what the article was about. However the article is mostly about a new scale developed called WARS (Workplace Arrogance Scale).

Arrogance? I was confused at first as to why they used arrogance instead of bullying when they referenced a boss from hell. When I read the article many of the quotes it uses are blatant descriptions of workplace bullies. Quotes such as the following, ”According to the authors, ‘Cassano had penchants for yelling, cursing, bad-mouthing others, and belittling colleagues, as well as little tolerance for opposing viewpoints.’ .” Or, ”the authors note, is typically arrogant behavior: disparaging others as a way to exaggerate your own self-importance, possibly as a way of covering over personal insecurities, all wrapped up in the inability to incorporate feedback from the people you disparage.”

Then finishing off with quotes such as, ”The authors found that arrogance not only created a poisonous atmosphere at the workplace, but it actively hindered the ability to get projects done: “These results highlight an interesting paradox: Employees who act superior in actuality have inferior performance.” This quote in particular reminded me of something I read in the bullying study I took part in, that most of the women who are bullied in the workplace by other women are more highly educated than their superiors. Why not with men as well?

The last quote, ”judging by the AIG example given earlier, there are probably some workplace environments where arrogance may not be considered a negative personality trait.”, is exactly how many bullies are portrayed in the workplace. They are considered perhaps a problem, but never addressed.

After posting a question to the Ars Technica Forum of what the difference between workplace arrogance and workplace bullying was I received this reply:

”Yes. Workplace arrogance is workplace bullying that you can’t do anything about. If there was an even higher authority to report it to, such as, I dunno, the legal system or something, that, you know, gave a shit, well, they’d just call it bullying and celebrities would speak out against it and groups would take video game makers to court to stop portrayals of it and there would be a lot less of it going around altogether.” (courtesy of SockPuppetGovernment on the ArsTechnica forums)

This may be a harsh way of putting it, but basically this study that created WARS, in their attempts to address workplace arrogance are also, by default, assisting with the management and identification of workplace bullies. If you score too high on their scale your a workplace bully…but we’re not going to call you that. I personally think it’s because the word ‘bully’ is too politicized, but that’s another discussion altogether.

We’re so lucky today, in that if we have access to the internet (in the US) we have access to an enormous amount of learning materials. But it’s not just even learning materials, it’s also access to learning communities that makes the difference. Forums, Organizations that provide learning resources and communities, and even simply Wikipedia, there is such a large variety of options at our disposal.

I know I’ve talked about some now and again, but I thought I would mention the best resources I’ve found out there.

There are tons of forums out there for those interested in learning to program. So many of them are specified by programming language as well. Due to this I’m only going to be linking you to the ones I’m aware of, which are python and javascript oriented. I’m only listing a few, because these are the ones where I feel I can find information that I understand. They are also the ones I feel that I can post to without feeling totally ridiculous.

• /r/python
• /r/learningprogramming
• /r/javascript
• stackoverflow - Typically for intermediate programmers

There are also tons of educational sites and reference resources. OCW (Open Courseware) via MIT is one of the best, however there are tons of other Open Courseware offerings out there from other universities, simply google OCW.

• MIT OCW
• W3Schools
• Mozilla Developer Network
• jQuery

One resource that I’ve seen be rather helpful, but I think is under utilized by me, is Youtube. I’ve seen some howto videos, and I know for graphic artists there are tons of resources online there. People will walk you through using various (from what I’ve seen) open source and closed source graphics programs to create a variety of graphics and styles.

As always these resources, as awesome as they are, require you to be dedicated to your studies in order for learning to occur. Just like all things, you must do the work to reap the benefits (mostly).

I’ll be finishing up the Betwixt Icon creation this week, and afterwards I should be getting back to programming and other such projects. Also lots of camping coming up in my near future. A nice long weekend with my nephew, mom and Robey out Rafting and Camping up near Maupin, OR. Then a week after that Robey and I take off for our (starting to be) annual week long trip to Gordon Lake. No cell service, no people, just nature and us. If only we were better at fishing :)

After I graduated in 2006, for years I dreaded waking up and going to work. There were some jobs where getting up, preparing myself for work and getting there was hard. Making it through the shower and dressing myself and moving my way to work. It was all about getting home. Even then I was sad and stressed most evenings. I was drained and unhappy.

Now I’m happy. Yesterday I was trying to figure out why it’s so much different now than it was before. I think it’s because I’ve learned to leave work at work. It’s amazing how much of a difference that makes. Not stressing about work or your relationships from work when you’re at home.

Something about going through something so stressful and so horrid has taught me that no job is worth that. Even if I start my own business and I love what I’m doing for a while, if it ever got that bad again, I would walk away. I can walk away whenever I want to. I know that now.

I ask myself, why do so many people think they can’t quit a job they hate? Why don’t people leave jobs that make their life hell? So many think they couldn’t make ends meet. People can survive on such much less than they think they can. You just have to be willing to endure change and some difficulty for a short while, before things get so much better.

I used to think I hated getting up early, but now I get up and get to work at 7:30 in the morning and I still have energy at the end of the day to do other things. I have energy to make dinner instead of just making do. I have energy to work on FlamingLunchbox things. If you think you’re unhappy with where you are professionally, be willing to scrutinize yourself and your job. Is it you or the job? Is it worth it? If no, make a change.

On a side note I’m ran the Dirty Dash at Mt. Pisgah in Eugene with a very good friend of mine this past Saturday. Here are some pictures so you can see how very, very dirty we got. As a side note, I tweaked my bad left ankle the night before, so the fact that I ran the race is something I’m rather proud of. The fields were rather knobbly. For those who enjoy running events for fun, I highly recommend this.

As many others probably have experienced, working a full time job and doing other things is rather complicated. I am honestly hesitant to say anything at all about how this stresses me out, because a good friend is attempting to work full time and go to grad school full time and somehow she is making it through. I know how stressful it all can be, and how much you have to sacrifice to do more. There are only so many sacrifices I will make.

As I slowly start to get my life back together (after the past year of fluctuation and changes, family troubles, and personal self doubt), I’m able to tackle all of the many personal hurdles I have wanted to cross. I am finally able to take more control of my diet and better physical care of my body. I can actually admit when I’m wrong. Not always at the beginning of an argument per say, but I am getting closer. I am also becoming much better at accepting certain aspects of life; aspects that can be difficult to accept, aspects that would have been much easier to change when I was in school and had more time.

Working full time at one job and attempting to work additional hours for FlamingLunchbox is consistently reminding me that 50 or 60 hour a week jobs may not be something I can ever get used to. Such intense jobs may never be something that makes me happy.

I’m not lifehacker. I’m not all about filling up my time with every waking minute busy with friends or fun. I need evenings to just sit and eat dinner, evenings to enjoy the sunshine. Evenings when I feel relaxed enough to chat with Robey about the news and play the piano in the wee hours before I hit the sack. I need days where I can waste 5 or 6 hours on a hike in the woods. Does this make me less capable? No, but perhaps to some I don’t sound as devoted.

Do you ever feel like the internet is trying to help you find better ways to organize your life, and more things to enjoy, when all it does is make you stressed out about the things you can’t fit in your schedule? What is one of the best things I did to make my life happier? I choose to be selfish and do things I want to do, things that relax and make me happy. I choose to do those things and I don’t feel as guilty about doing them.

Doing this means that sometimes I don’t see friends or family as much as I think I need to. Sometimes the house isn’t as clean. Sometimes I’m very tired all day at work. Sometimes I do or say stupid things. Sometimes I stress eat. But I forgive myself, because I trust that I am attempting to do my best by my friends, family and me. Self-forgiveness is a requirement. A good portion of that is trusting yourself and those you love to love you even when life is hard.