Jordan's Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Jiu jitsu

    I’ve started training/playing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu!  I took the plunge on 5 July and have been going 3-6 times per week since then, excluding when I am out of town.  My primary class has been 0515 MWF, which really serves as a better wake-up than coffee.  Recently I earned my second stripe on my white belt, and am starting to slow down, breathe and plan my moves during rolls.

    Here’s a few thoughts of what I’ve learned so far:

    1. Plan your next move.  Most of the time I still react rather than have a series of moves planned out, but I am making progress on this.
    2. Maneuver.  A strong, frontal assault will likely fail.  I am one of the strongest in the class, but this strength is often my weakness as other more experienced students spin around me, crank my neck, and/or lock my ankle.
    3. Breathe.  It is easy to tire yourself out when holding your breath.
    4. Engage multiple attacks.  Four points of control are more secure than one.
    5. Momentum.  Using your opponent’s energy, velocity vector, or attack for your own purposes is better than trying to fight them directly.

    All of the above five points can apply to life in general, arguments with a spouse, or work negotiations.  I know I will keep learning and continue to be grateful to my training partners for their knowledge.  BJJ is a fascinating sport in which your partner guides you through how to choke them best.

  • Whiskers

    For those of you that use Xubuntu, apparently the “start button” (Thank you, Windows 95…” is called the Whisker menu. Somehow I lost mine and couldn’t figure how to get it back.

    The answer.

  • Unshakeable

    I just finished reading Tony Robbins’ book Unshakeable and found it to be useful, but not for its intended purpose. Much of the monetary advice given is very philosophical or strategic, without tactical steps to implement. I have a hardcover of Money: Master the Game, so I will have to read this to get a better feel if Mr. Robbins has more actionable advice. I found JL Collins and William Bernstein to have better tactical advice with regard to investing…unless you want to leave your financial planning up to Creative Planning.

    The final chapter did have checklists which focused more on being grateful and having a positive, beautiful outlook on life and how this is more crucial than financial wealth. I’m still going to save and invest, but some of these passages remind me to think of other people and their struggles when I get upset.

    Each day we are blessed to get up in the morning and get after it.

  • Hair

    I get my hair cut every two weeks. Not like clockwork, since that would be every second. Or orange.

    So I got my haircut today at great clips because they have a police/firefighter/military discount through the end of the year: $13 cuts. Plus they normally have the style you got last time in their records and the stylists normally know to trim my bushy eyebrows. After the cut today, the stylists put some tea tree oil conditioner in my hair. So today I finally found a tea tree oil recipe one can make at home. I do not have any vitamin e oil so extra olive oil it is!

    Update: I like this recipe better (1 of 5). No baking soda and I could put it all in a pump bottle. I substituted the coconut milk for MCT oil and I think it is working well.

  • Podcasts

    Partially for your own investigation and partly for my own record keeping, here’s the list of podcasts I’ve been listening to recently.

    1. Joe Rogan Experience
    2. Jocko Podcast
    3. Financial Freedom
    4. The Minimalists
    5. Mad Fientist
    6. Afford Anything
    7. Tim Ferriss
    8. Waking Up (or I guess now it is Making Sense)
    9. Simple Families Podcast

    One annoyance I found is that some sites won’t allow direct downloads but only streaming through apps. I mostly download mp3s to a flash drive and listen to podcasts through the dashboard in my car (2005 Prius with all the fixin’s). So eventually I may be forced to listen to everything through Stitcher or Google Play.

  • Hell yes Deadlift

    So today I (mostly) completed the workout I started Sunday, which was a heavy round of squat, bench, press and deadlift. I omitted the squat sets due to my wimpy squat rack and dis the deadlift portion today. I was going for 5 reps of 450lbs deadlift, but could not get the third rep. My brother encouraged me to realize, “hey, I did two reps of the highest weight I ever pulled” rather than “set incomplete.”

    Here is the graph of my press, bench, squat, and deadlift since November 2018.

    Thanks goes to Mick at Strength Club for the app.

  • Cost per Unit

    If you are tracking your spending (and you really should…there are many choices for OSS finance software out there…), it is easy to pull a report and say, “I’ve spent $4,554.96 on groceries so far this year. Holy crap that is a lot!”

    Another way to look at it is the opportunity cost or what you would have spent on an equivalent product, say if you had outsourced the product. In this case the product is groceries (whether from a grocery store, 7-11, local bodega, or from your local dairy. So with the above amount, I spent roughly $4,555 over 105 days, which equates to $43 a day and just under $9 per person in my family. All for mostly organic, whole foods (don’t look on the top shelf).

    Hope you did your taxes.

  • Powerful Habits

    I just read…skimmed J.D. Roth’s post about turning 50 wherein he riffed on his 50 nuggets of wisdom for the year. His paragraph about habits reminded me about reading The Power of Habit last summer, combined with my habit tracker in my Bullet Journal. I’ve been bullet journaling (bulleting?) for my fourth year now and find it an excellent tool to quickly write down notes, but more importantly serve as a a brain dump. Each month has a calendar, random list of tasks to do, and a habit tracker. I try to use it to see how much water I drink throughout the day (moderately useful) and how many days I go without alcohol (interesting). I’ve also tracked getting 8 hours of sleep a night and how days in a row I’ve gone with staying calm with my sons.

    Duhigg talks about how we can’t change a habit, but rather change the reward or the cue. I’ve found that if I am feeling the need for something sweet, I will recognize this and eat a spoonful of coconut oil or almond butter, rather than to to chocolate. Or if I am upset at my family, I will recognize this and force myself to hug them or snuggle on the couch. This releases oxytocin (I hope it does…I’ve never measured…or maybe it’s serotonin?) and the anger lessens. See Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last for more about our world of hormones and when they visit. Also, go read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens for his discussion of how things or events don’t make us happy, but serotonin does.

  • Sunday morning baking

    My favorite meal for years has been breakfast casserole in a 9″x13″ glass dish. My go-to recipe is eggs, sausage, cheese and whatever leftovers are in the fridge.

    Today I relied on this recipe. Unfortunately I didn’t have granny smith apples, so I fried the ones I did have in bacon grease prior to putting them in the dish. I really enjoy the kitchn and the spruce recipes.

  • Track your Net Worth

    If you are like me, my dopamine levels love seeing my net worth go up! My wife and I have been tracking our net worth for about seven years now. We migrated from a spreadsheet on our laptop to using Google Sheets. I know, I know: this can open a can of worms regarding the privacy/security of Google “knowing” how much I have in certain funds (I’m sure Sergei Brin keeps hitting F5 on his laptop when I type…).

    This workbook has grown over time and today it houses seven sheets. I have tabs for Analysis, Net Worth over Time, Assets, Liabilities, LES template (aka what my paycheck breakdown looks like), Investment Template, and an estimated Retirement Income. The Investment Template came as a free download from one early retirement couple’s book, but I can’t recall who they are or what their book is.

    The key functions in Google Sheets are importxml() and GOOGLEFINANCE(“TICKER SYMBOL”). Basically if you put the number of shares you have in one column and use the formula above to pull the price, you can multiply these columns to get the value of your holdings.

    For those of you federal workers that have TSP shares (G, F, C, S, I or the lifecycle funds), the ability to track your holdings has changed slightly due to the TSP website’s changing of its share price history. To wit.

    Here is the sheet for you to copy. Let me know if you have questions on how to use.