Many of us have the habit of filling little voids of downtime with streams of trivialities on our cellphones.  Usually they're of little consequence ( Read more... )

 I've been spending the last couple of weeks working out of our new office in Mountain View.  Despite the fact that a couple of friends are generously offering me places to sleep in the south bay, the commute from SF is driving me crazy.  I'm going to need to move down to Mountain View soon.

It's taken me two weeks to realize that this has broken a ( Read more... )

I've been on fire these past few weeks.  I'm so engaged with my new startup efforts that it's taken center stage in my life, and everything else seems like a distraction.  Making progress on the project is both an endorphin rush and a ( Read more... )

At this point there are volumes of studies showing the beneficial effects of meditation in terms of reducing various causes of malaise and mortality.  However, I still have not been able to get myself to do even a minimal amount of meditation, like 8 minutes per day.  Generally I get around 30 seconds in before the brain starts spinning up and ( Read more... )

#1 ( Read more... )

Despite attempts to get myself to use Things and OmniFocus, I've always gone back to a hand-maintained Excel document plus writing down physical to-do lists if I'm out running errands.  Maybe it's just inertia, or perhaps the simplicity of just typing tasks into cells made everything else feel cumbersome ( Read more... )

 It's interesting to reflect how much my day-to-day life has changed in the last two months ( Read more... )

There are already implantable glucose monitors.  Why not create one that causes harmless pain if blood glucose rises beyond a certain level, with the amount of pain increasing commensurate with the level?  People modify their behaviors quickly to avoid pain if there's a clear and rapid connection between the pain and a pain-causing stimulus ( Read more... )

On the ski lift today:

Me:  The fall wasn't bad. I had knee pads.
Woman: You have knee pads?
Me: Yeah.  I also have a tailbone pad and body armor -- that's wrist, elbow, shoulder, back, and chest pads -- and a helmet.
Woman: Wow... you must have been in a terrible accident.
Me:  (laughs)  No.  I want to avoid being in a terrible accident.  That's why I ( Read more... )

 I posted earlier about my experimentation with blue-blocking glasses to help improve my sleep.  I ended up not enjoying the experience of wearing the glasses, but I realized that I could achieve similar results by setting up red and orange colored night lights in my house.  This was especially nice to add to my bathroom, as it now allows me to use ( Read more... )