raamdev

I've been using Ledger for years now and with thousands of entries a year. I track investments, income, expenses, and budgeting. For mobile entry, I keep my ledger file on Dropbox and use the Drafts app and TextExpander on my iPhone to quickly append properly formatted ledger entries to the file from my phone, the moment the expense occurs. Every two to four weeks, I spend 10 minutes and use ledger-mode in Emacs to reconcile accounts with online bank / credit card transactions. It works really well and I love the flexibility and long-term portability of keeping my ledger in plain-text.

In the mid-ninties, around the time I had just become a teenager, I remember walking down the back corridor of a mall where my parents were leasing a space for their business and hearing a song playing overhead on the mall speakers that really caught my attention. I had no idea what the song was called or who made it, but I really liked it. I remember wishing I had some way to quickly find out, before the song ended, the name of the song and the artist. I remember thinking, "wouldn't it be great if this cell phone in my pocket could somehow tell me the name of this song?"

A decade later I discovered Shazam, and even today, more than a decade after that, Shazam still has a place on my home screen, quickly within reach, helping me discover hundreds of great artists and songs overheard from as many different places. The magic of the experience, and the appreciation for the technology, stem from the memory of that moment in the mid-nineties when I stood under a speaker listening to a song that I might never hear again.

Given the irregular distance between holes and the different angles of the holes, I'd guess something organic. There's still a lot we don't know about even well known fish like sharks, what to talk of fish or marine life that we have yet to discover. Seeing the raised ridge along the entire set of holes makes me wonder if they're from some kind of eggs that hatched after being embedded in the seabed.

It's amazing that there are still so many mysteries like this on Earth.

Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina, because it made me a better father; Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, because it taught me of the importance of something that I’d occasionally dismiss as a nuisance; Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC by Pete Egoscue, because it completely changed the way I understood posture, pain, and how repetition influences my body; and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, because it taught me how despite big changes in technology and society and way of living, very little changes when it comes to our personal struggles and concerns; Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, because it helped me realize that in any situation, my attitude is what I always have control over; and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey because it greatly contributed to my mental framework for how to be productive and for this quote, which is probably my favorite of the past decade:

“In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.”

I have done a lot of both worlds and find an incredibly noticeable difference in my private life.

Manual labor that has my body feeling ‘used’ at the end of the day makes me feel that I’ve somehow accomplished so much more than if I’ve only used my mind all day and I find myself generally happier on a day-to-day basis when I’ve been doing primarily manual labor all day. But I can’t seem to justify doing manual labor over the long term when I can make so much more money as a programmer using my mind.

Since becoming a father, it also seems to have become harder to be willing to make less money for more general happiness, knowing that I can work remotely, have more free time for my kid, and make a lot more money in the long-run making money with my mind. It’s also hard to find manual labor jobs that don’t expose your body to something that is usually bad for your health over the long term.

I try to find a balance by taking on, and volunteering to help with, major home projects whenever the opportunity arises, and exercising outdoors as much as practical, but I constantly feel like there’s a huge imbalance (I spend ~40 hours a week at my computer).