When to Give Up

Caught up with a friend of mine who was in a similar life-situation, but a little more motivated.

The life situation of "how the fuck do you live life".

He provided me the following thought experiment about when to give up on something you believe is right:

If you were teaching your child how to walk, and at first he doesn't get it, do you give up?

Startups aren't exactly the same, but it was a good analogy.

First time to Europe - Cheap but cool, poor but sexy

I went to Europe for the first time a few weeks ago.

• Total trip duration was 15 days, with 13 full days in Europe.
• 6 countries (6 cities: London, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Coppenhagen, Stockholm)
• Total expenditure was around $2800 (including everything - e.g. airfare, food, hostel, trains, cash withdrawals, bars, strip clubs, concerts, getting scammed/conned by street artist for 75 euros, etc.)
• During this time (May 2015), the Euro was about 1.12 to 1 USD (close to record low)
• May's the best time because it's not too hot, not too cold, not too touristy, and still has super long days (sunrise at 5am and sunset at 920pm)
• Purchases prior to flying out to Europe:
• Flights to Europe and back - bought about 1 month before trip
• Eurostar train ticket fm London to Paris - bought about 1 week before train ride
• Flight from Paris to Prague - bought about 2 wks before the flight
• First night's hostel stay - bought 2 days before trip
• Trip planning: I used Trip Advisor heavily. It's nice because each city from Trip Advisor has its own offline map and reviews. So no need for internet. For the week before my trip, every day's poop-break was spent on that app starring places I wanted to see. (Basically I'd try to hit up the top 5 rated attractions in each city). Also, I tried to take as many over night trains as possible. I traveled with a good friend that had similar traveling qualities: laid back, frugal but down to spend money and have fun, willing to split up to see our own stuff

The itinerary looked like this (with description of that day's main activity or expenditure):

• May 7th, day 1, Thursday - Leave Los Angeles at 7pm
• May 8th, day 2, Friday - Land at London Gatwick at 1pm
• Pie and mash meal
• National Gallery (free!)
• May 9th, day 3, Saturday - London, then 2.5 hr Eurostar ride to Paris (get to Paris around 930pm)
• Walking tour of all the touristy stuff
• British museum (free!) - saw the mummies and left
• Got to Paris, checked into Hostel, then immediately went to Moulin Rouge area for strip clubs for some reason. (About $120 gone in the span of 10minutes. Paris strippers are ruthless). First time I went to a strip club :( 
• May 10th, day 4, Sunday - Paris
• Versailles tickets (about $15)
• Walk up the Eiffel tower so we didn't have to wait in line
• May 11th, day 5, Monday - Paris
• Llouve tickets (about $15)
• Bike around the huge ass traffic circle around Arc De Triomphe 3 times
• Underground jazz club in a cave (this was amazing, made me want to practice guitar more)
• May 12th, day 6, Tuesday - Paris, then flight to Prague
• Sacre de Coeur (my favorite momnument in Paris. Free to enter)
• Got text-book conned by street artist for 75 euros via shell game, right outside the amazing church because I'm a dumbass (Literally text-book with Foundation work, approach, build up, etc)
• Picnic at Eiffel tower
• Got to Prague at night. National hockey going on. We went to a bar that turned out to be a free strip-club.
• May 13th, day 8, Wednesday - Prague
• Great walking tour
• Then strip club.
• May 14th, day 9, Thursday - Prague
• Lunch at a Michilin Restaurant
• Rent bikes to bike up a hill to see the Europe's largest bronze equestrian statue
• Parnas ensemble concert (5 strings) at the Rudolfinum (Great concert, but kind of a way to get money out of tourists.) 
• Regular clubbing till 5am, no sleep, no hostel (wasted too much money on strippers)
• May 15th, day 10, Friday - Leave Prague for Berlin
• Train to Dresden at sunrise, rent a car, then drive past Berlin to Sauchsenhasen concentration camp
• Drive back to Berlin and get ramen and curry wurst (in the rented car, of course)
• May 16th, day 10, Saturday - Berlin
• Holocaust museum
• May 17th, day 11, Sunday - Berlin, then night train to Malmo Sweden (train went to the north edge of Germany, then was put on ship, and went to Sweden)
• Walking tour
• May 18th, day 12, Monday - Wake up in Malmo, Sweden, take train to Copenhagen, do Copenhagen for 8hrs, then go back to Malmo and take overnight train to Stockholm
• May 19th, day 13, Tuesday - Stockholm (arrived at 7am)
• Walking tour of Sodermalm neighborhood
• Nobel Laureate's museum cuz it was free after a certain hour (and totally worthless to go to)
• Jazz club (this one sucked ass)
• May 20th, day 14, Wednesday - Stockholm
• Vasameet ship museum
• Took a ferry to the archipelagos (checked out Grinda island)
• Clubbing till 5am (shouldn't have gotten a hostel)
• May 21st, day 15, Thursday - Fly home at 10am

Details Below:

• May 7th, day 1, Thursday - Leave Los Angeles at 7pm after full day of work
• Fly Norwegian air to get in/out of Europe. They're the cheapest airline i found. Cheapest flights that I could find that fit my dates was: 
• LAX to London Gatwick direct for $180 (including all taxes/fees). 
• Stockholm Arlanda back to LAX for $323.77. I specifically wanted to leave on a Thursday.
• I didn't care about what cities I went into or left from, because it was my first time in Europe (I'll take it!)
• Those prices did not include meals nor check-in baggage (but why tf would you have check-in baggage for a 2 week vacation...)
• This day was kinda ridic cuz I woke up at 2am on Thursday morning to do laundry (cuz I had none to pack). Then packed and went to work for 11hrs because I was super behind on work. But I like it that way because being on a plane being fully rested and NOT sleep deprived is stupid. I couldn't sleep on the plane much though cuz of the movies.
  
  
  

• May 8th, day 2, Friday - Land at London Gatwick around 1pm
• I went to my Hostel (London Generator). I'm super tired, hungry, and out of willpower (This made me sad because I had about 7hrs of daylight left, but not enough energy, so maybe I should've slept more. After I check in, I get food because I hadn't eaten in 36hrs due to being so cheap. (But I actually like fasting and not being mastered by my hunger, and I don't get to do it enough.) So my first meal is classic english food - pie and mash (I thought the pie was like a Marie Callendar's chicken pot pie, except it had meat inside, and mash was just mash potatoes).
• The food gave me enough willpower to go to the National Gallery. I was lucky because it was Friday and the place closed at 9pm instead of 6pm. It's also at Trafalgar square, which is kind of like London's downtown. 

• Distances from London to other cities are often calculated from Trafalgar square. (I know, who tf's Trafalgar right?)
• Being a "gallery", everything at the National Gallery was paintings. But a lot of them. 
• I walk around for 2 hrs and realize that I don't have a good appreciation of art. I don't understand why some paintings I thought looked like crap were famous, and others I liked were not.
• On a side note, a lot of people were taking pics of like every other painting with their phones/cameras, which I thought was weird because if you wanted to see the painting in detail, you'd go home and google it. But then I started doing it too.
• In order to increase my appreciation of art, I join a free guided tour. The first stop of the tour was on some painting of Jesus. There's a bench near-by and I sit down and proceed to knock out. When I wake up, the group had moved on, and therefore I move on and discover the following:
• The National Gallery had 2 Leonardo Da Vinci pieces. One of which was in its own small room (I.e. this room had nothing except for this cartoon drawing: The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist)

• Inside the room there was a man sitting there looking at this drawing. I asked the man if he was a worker there. He said no, but that he just likes to come on Friday nights he doesn't have work, and enter this room, and stare at this painting and meditate about it for a few hours (holy shit!). We have a very nice conversation and he teaches me a lot about Leonardo. 
• The other Leonardo piece was this one (Virgin on the Rocks, of which there's another one by Leonardo in the Llouve in Paris, which I went to go see a few days later)

• After the National Gallery, I walk to the edge of the river, check it out, and go back to the Hostel and knock out.

By a thread

How do you not give up when you're just hanging by a thread?

I once asked an MMA fighter why he enjoyed MMA.
He said because it's the essence of life. Fighting.
You're literally fighting for your life. It's that feeling of when someone is on top of you, sitting on your chest and bashing your face into the ground. Fist after fist. And you're coughing, can't breath, bleeding from your nose, eyes, mouth. Blood mixed with sweat, and you're just hanging on by a thread, and you're dazed, and thinking about just giving up, just closing your eyes, just going to sleep. But instead, you clench your teeth, yell, and pull, draw up, suck out, and claw into existence whatever little willpower and energy you had into an unshakable determination to not give up or back down.
And you clench your fingers into a fist and launch it into the face your enemy and push his ass off your chest.
And you spring back to life, to light, to fight, to fight, to FIIIIIIIIGHT!!!

My understanding of how beer is made

Alcohol comes from yeast.

1. you create sugar water.
this involves making lots of hot water (but not quite boiling hot), and then cooking grains (malted barely) in it. This gets the carbohydrate out of the grain and into the water.
2. you put in hops for flavoring (that shitty bitter taste)
3. you put yeast into the sugar water
The yeast poops out alcohol and farts out carbon dioxide. Too much yeast results in too much alcohol too quickly and then the yeast can't make more alcohol cuz they're swimming in their own poop. When the yeast is done making alcohol, they clump together and fall to the bottom, leaving the rest of the liquid clear. That clumping thing is called flocculation.

http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/homebrew/beginners-attenuation-and-flocculation-definitions


If you create the sugar water from grapes, and let the yeast do its work in an OPEN container (so that no carbonation occurs) you get wine. If you distill wine (boil it so that the alcohol evaporates first, and you collect all the alcohol) you get brandy.





The carbonation comes in two ways:

All beer leaves the brewer carbonated. This is accomplished in one of two ways - natural and forced carbonation. In both cases beer and carbon dioxide are sealed in a container under pressure. The beer absorbs the CO2 giving the beer its fizz. 

Natural carbonation results from the fermentation process. Fermentation produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as yeast digests the sugar in the wort. Although most of the carbon dioxide is allowed to escape during fermentation the brewer will seal the beer in a container when it is almost complete. This is how natural carbonation is used to carbonate beer in holding vessels at the brewery and in casks. 

Anther way to use natural carbonation is in the bottle. In this case the beer is allowed to ferment completely. It is left unfiltered which leaves active yeast suspended in it. Then a small amount of sugar is added at bottling time. Once the bottles are sealed and the yeast begins to act on the sugar, CO2 is released and absorbed by the beer. 

When beer is force carbonated it is allowed to fully ferment. Then CO2 to pumped into a sealed container with the beer and absorbed into the liquid.

http://beer.about.com/od/commercialbeers/f/fizz.htm

good links about learning angular

A lot of tutorials are too intelligent for me to fathom. They dive way down into the leaves when I don't even know the continent/forest i'm in.
These ones below seem to tell it in a "tell'em what you're gonna tell'em, tell'em, tell'em what you told'em" manner

About angular js directives:
http://www.sitepoint.com/practical-guide-angularjs-directives-part-two/
http://amitgharat.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-directive/

So much

There's so much to read. So much to learn.
So much life to live.

Opportunity Costs, First Principles, State of my life

I wrote this in my journal a few days ago.
July 13, 2014

State of my life at this point.

I did really badly in hanabi game yesterday (card game that involves a lot of logic, memory, quick thinking). I made a lot of illogical moves where i didn't think every path through.

I'm worried that that's a sign that I am not very logical, and a further sign that I suck at programming, and maybe being an engineer.

This makes me go back to being worried that I'm not leveraging my forte/strong-points. (Where my current major goal in life is to become an entrepreneur, first through programming and making apps, and programming requires logic.)

After the game night, I then came home, browsed youtube, and saw this super sad romantic anime called 5cm per Second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o6sZ8K3Vy0. All that got me thinking about life, failure, and what to do about it. I thought about the following.

Tombstone - Going to First Principles

I remember Elon Musk talking about first principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3sBlRgzTI . And I want to boil things down to fundamental truths of my life and life's desires.

What do I want it to say on my tombstone? What do I really want to do in life? My desires. Not necessarily having anything to do with my career.

Do I want it to say Entrepreneur? or more like Father, Husband, Son? But maybe even deeper than that, what is it that I really want? about being an entrepreneur, or father, husband, son?

Entrepreneur:

-Fame?

-Glory?

-Recognition

-the feeling of worth

-money  (money for what? -to experience more experiences)

-helping others? (does that lead to the feeling or worth?)

Father, husband, son, friend:

-Ultimately, I want to love and be loved and be cherished. I think that is what we all want. 

(Do i mainly just want to be loved? and I know that the best way to "get loved", is by loving others?)

So maybe I just want to feel valued, loved, cherished, and relevant. Is that my deepest desire? How do I know if something is my deepest desire? Is the the thing that's motivating everything I do?
Isn't that what all human beings want?
Ok maybe this is too first-principled, and we gotta go back up a level. Because even though all humans might be able to agree that they want to feel valuable, an engineer might define "valuable" as being able create a low-cost, low-energy water-desalination device that solves California's drought, while a father might define "valuable" as being able to take his kids to get ice cream. So maybe having it say "Valuable" on my tombstone is a little to vague and not sufficient. TBD on this trail of thought.

Opportunity costs

Also what i am doing today that i would be doing differently, had i not had ambitions of being an entrepreneur? and not spending a bunch of hours trying to make a website.

-partying more

-not being as stressed out about time

-spending more time with friends

-going to the beach

-getting a masters

-going to bars more

-spending more time on getting a girlfriend and having more sex?

-learning how to cook

-learning how to fix my car?

-investing money in stocks

-creating some e-commerce website?

Even if i don't become an entrepreneur, will i regret the current time spent doing what I'm doing? Not too much... maybe only second to getting a masters, because i still do spend a lot of time with people, and i still don't care as much about learning now to cook.

Love and Romance

This anime called 5cm a Second was amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o6sZ8K3Vy0 

The guy kept looking and waiting, for something of the past, for something better than the present, and refusing other girls. Yet the girl moved on and lived her life.

What about me?

After watching this anime, it made me want a relationship, a family, and not those things typically found in bars and clubs. What I gathered from some of the comments I saw from youtube video was that I need to learn how to be happy in the present rather than in the past, or the future. Neither of those are real. Only the present is real.

More on first principles

http://studioblog.envato.com/elon-musks-greatest-weapon-laymans-guide-first-principles/ 

"Meaning: rather than taking what already exists as the basis of our thinking, we break the problem down to its most fundamental truths and examine each piece. Even though a problem has already been solved, we start from the problem’s most basic elements to reexamine whether a better solution might be possible."

"Most major revolutions that have occurred build on this basic premise. Cars examined the fundamental principles of transportation instead of iterating horse-drawn carriages and smartphones looked at the principles of communication instead of improving dumbphones. "