Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: happiness

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Thank goodness for swimming!

I have always loved swimming, and since I have started to suffer with AOSD, it has become all the more important to me.  Right now I am not able to swim at all, but hopefully within a few days I will be swimming ten lengths, within couple of weeks I may get up...

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Luck

Just recently I have been reading about luck and whether there is such a thing a lucky person.  It’s a big subject, but two ideas stuck with me:

 

  1. People interact with so many people and things in so many different way these days that statistically “miracles” happen.  If you define miracles as events that have less than a 1 in a million chance of occurring then I read somewhere that most people will hear of one about once a month.  That means that people are going to come across someone being very lucky/unlucky , (perhaps 1 in 10,000 chance events),  pretty much every day just based on chance.

  2. The second idea is much more interesting.  It seems that people who describe themselves as lucky seem to know more people than those that describe themselves as unlucky.  Not surprisingly the more people you know the better the chance that one of those people will be able to help you out in some way, or will know someone who knows someone ….This networking theory although obvious once it’s explained is pretty powerful.

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Happiness and the Olympics

It seems that in an analysis of the expressions on Olympic medal winners faces on the podium the happiest people won gold, then bronze then silver. It seems that the people who won bronze were thinking “I nearly didn’t get a medal at all”, whereas the silver winners were thinking “if only I had tried that bit harder I would have got gold”.  I then got to thinking about how I think in these terms and it goes something like this:

 

  1. I always think about the worst that could happen.  I think through the worst scenario but while I am doing so I look for something good that could come out of it.

  2. I don’t dwell on this worst scenario though, I am quite a positive person so I quickly accept it as a possibility, and then assure myself that its fairly unlikely and move on.

  3. If it’s a repeat of some event that happened in the past I try and remember something good about that event as well.  

  4. Any outcome from that point onwards is then better than the worst scenario that I have already accepted as a possibility, but then set aside and not …

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Perfection – or good enough.

Every month or so someone tells me my work is too detailed, or that I am a perfectionist.  Ironically every week or so someone also tells me that I have not covered some topic or other in sufficient detail.  However the, “its too detailed”, or “too complex”, audience tends to be the one that pays the bills so they are more important to listen to.  I came across this nice little post on the subject, and I have extracted a snip from it here:

One important lesson I’ve learned about designing software is that sometimes it pays to smother one’s perfectionist engineer instincts and be less ambitious about the problems one is trying to solve. Put more succintly, a technology doesn’t have to solve every problem just enough problems to be useful. Two examples come to mind which hammered this home to me; Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and collaborative filtering which sites like Amazon use.

However I am not a person who likes to compromise so I am gradually working towards a way of solving this problem, and its pretty simple and obvious.  Stop writing documents and start writing web sites.  This post is an example, (although not a …

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Utopia

Just started this little book so I am not really sure where its taking me.  This version has a lot of preample putting the book in its historical context and talks a lot about the approach taken to the translation, and compares this approach with other translations, ie its a...

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The Tyranny of too much choice.

An article in Scientific American, titled The Tyranny of Choice has sparked a considerable debate on the web about the problems faced by western societies as a result of too much choice.  In fact the idea is a very old one, I came cross it years ago but it is not mentioned very often by your every day Happiness literature which tends to talk more about internal changes that people can make to the way they think rather than factors from their external environment.

 

You can sum up the material prior to this article as follows:

 

  • The intent of advertising is to make us dissatisfied with what we have

  • If we meet people who have more than we have, or have different spending priorities or saving priorities then we tend to be dissatisfied with what we have

 

These two factors are the main environmental factors that effect happiness.  In my experience they are even more powerful than having somewhere warm and dry to live and enough food to eat, which I soon got used to.  However some people disagree with this and consider these to be essential, (Hygiene factors in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs…

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Choosing a PDA – can it really be so difficult!

I used to have an IPAQ years ago and despite using it a lot in the beginning I gradually stopped using it mainly for the following reasons:

 

  1. I did not like having to sync it

  2. It was too big to carry around everywhere

  3. I did not have a case that gave me instant access to it when carrying it around, so it tended to be in a bag

  4. The battery life deteriorated to the point where it could not be relied upon

  5. It did not have enough storage space without a great big expansion jacket add-on

 

Then along came a Blackberry which I instantly fell in love with, I have talked about my love affair with my Blackberry before in my gadget blog.  However I recently started working from home and the subscription costs to the Blackberry service no longer seemed worthwhile so I decided that I would take that money and invest it in something that was a higher priority, I decided I would try a traditional Palm or Pocket PC PDA again.

 

The process of choosing is a classic example of the tyranny of too much choice.

 

My experience went something …

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10 Secrets of Abundant Happiness

I have just finished reading this book, it’s a cute little book in an easy to read format.  I carried a copy in my combat trouser’s pocket while I was reading it and it made it very easy to dip into it whenever I had a spare minute.  In fact I...

All Posts / Chronic Illness

Why home working?

I called this blog, ‘adventures in home working’.  Why did I choose this title?  Well it sort of sums up a lot of things for me:

 

1.     I have this disease, AOSD,  and home working is more suited to people with this condition

2.     I am an IT guy, and for a while I have wanted to see how viable it is to work from home

3.     I have 4 children, and I wanted to spend more time with them, and be able to arrange my work life more flexibly

4.     I have always been a person who works better with people I know and interacts with them face to face.  I wanted to get beyond these limitations and extend my circle of friends and contacts