Everybody Needs a Fishbowl

Water Leaks, Part 2

2021-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve detailed in a previous post my relationship with water in the basement. During every rainstorm, I have a surge of worry flare up. I fear every dollar sunk into that level of the house will go up in smoke.

We’ve done our best to be proactive: we’ve replaced 3 of the 4 low window wells, installed underground downspout tubes, and keep those filters clear.

And I’m really well prepared to be reactive: strategically placed leak detectors all over the house, and a kit with a water-powered pump and long hose (i.e. no power required).

Hurricane Else rolled through the northeast several days back, and put all of my planning to the test. Rain began in earnest around 5AM, my normal waking time, and an preliminary check of the basement showed no leaks. I peaked out the window of the last short window well to see a small pool, but it wasn’t rising. We had never had an issue at this entry point before.

The rain began to pick up at a steady clip. I checked the basement again about 20 minutes later, and heard the sound of falling water before I could even turn on the lightswitch.

My adrenaline spiked as I ran back upstairs, screamed to my wife that there was a leak, and tore open the closet for my flood kit. A poncho happened to catch my eye, which turned out to be a great addition for being outside during a tropical storm. I bolted outside in flip flops (the only shoes I was able to find in my scurry) and quickly hoooked up the 25ft hose to the outdoor faucet and dropped the pump in the well. I turned the valve and… nothing.

Shit. I had never turned it on from this past winter.

To my luck, there is a nearby sprinkler valve with the same faucet connection that was turned on, so a quick hookup there and the pump spurred to life.

The well drained in less than 60 seconds, but I kept it running for long after the rain had slowed.

Our “borrowed” wet-dry vac from my father-in-law slurped up as much of the standing water as I could find. Probably 10-15 gallons or so, but enough to soak the corner of the carpet and the carpet pad underneith, and show some signs of water along the baseboards.

All in all, this experience taught me a few things:

1.) The worry is sometimes worse than the actual event. I’ve dreaded heavy rain – I think not because of the actual damage or inconvenience, but the uncertainty of whether or not something has happened without me knowing about it.

2.) My backup plans worked well. I had everything I needed together. In one spot. Ready to go. When I needed it. Just as I planned. Because of this, only 15 gallons got in instead of 50.

As well as a few improvements for (ugh) next time:

1.) Passive leak detectors weren’t enough. Not only in quantity, but they don’t quell my underlying fear. I bought several new detectors that connect to my WiFi and alert me actively when something is up. More on this later.

2.) Shoes and ponchos are part of the kit. Rain boots have long been on my list but they went straight to top after this.

3.) Need to raise the last window well. The landscaper is currently working to get that last window well raised and parts of the yard regraded to keep water flowing downhill and away from the house.

4.) What if a second well had been compromised at this time? Ok, now I’m starting to get paranoid - but if one could be breached, it’s far more likely that a second one would go, too.

Moving Forward

I’ve introspected a bit why I’m so afraid of this. I think part of it is related to the very adrenaline spike I felt when I flipped on the basement lights - I didn’t know that was happening and I got lucky discovering it when I did. If that surge had happened at 11pm at night, even with a detector in that window well, I likely would’ve discovered a ruined basement in the morning.

Active Detectors

A rather pricy upgrade from the passive variety, these Zircon Leak Alert WiFi detectors send out an email whenever they go off.

Coupled with a personal (free) plan for PagerDuty, I now have 6 detectors that will blow up my phone with alarms, texts, and phone calls if ever a drop of water comes in.

Even this past week, where we’ve continued to have thunderstorm cells pop up, I wake up and think “did my phone go off?” When I realize it didn’t, I feel much more confident that I still have a dry basement.

The Morgan Housel Archive

2020-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Back in 2010, I expanded my interest in personal finance out into investments. My grandfather had recently passed away, and left me with a small chunk of change that my grandmother insisted I keep invested in the stock market. I didn’t know the first thing about investing.

I stumbled onto the Motley Fool – a news and commentary site about all things stock market. Their homepage frequently featured a writer I looked forward to reading named Morgan Housel.

Morgan’s focus was not so much on the day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter stuff. Instead, he focused on timeless areas where investing meets psychology, behavior, rationality, and expectations.

In 2016, he moved on to the Collaborate Fund, a venture capital firm focused on funding companies at the intersection of “better for me” and “better for the world.” I continued to follow Morgan’s writing here, where he’s been cranking out home run articles ever since.

To thank Morgan for 10 years of influential, thought provoking, and impactful pieces, I’d like to introduce a way to archive Morgan’s writing (all of it) for yourself. I should have been bookmarking his “best of” throughout the years, but like investing, the second-best time to start is now.

Here are the URL lists of all of his work from the Motley Fool and Collaborative Fund. Details on how I scraped these together and what you can do with them are below.

All articles
- (2016-present) Collaborative Fund (up through 2020-05-22)
  - Long form PDFs
- (2008-2016) The Motley Fool
  - /investing/general - where most of the “timeless” stuff is.

Generating the URL lists

Luckily, both MF and CF have pages devoted to all things written by specific authors:

Fool.com

Fool.com structures their author pages as a pseudo-infinite scroll. Watching the URL bar shows a variation of https://www.fool.com/author/1611/?page=2 as new pages are loaded.

After some trial and error, the entire archive goes up to 134 pages. A simple script can be used to fetch them all:

$ for i in {1..134}; do
  wget https://fool.com/author/1611/?page=$i && sleep 1;
done

Inspecting the pages reveals:

<a href="/investing/general/2016/03/30/things-im-pretty-sure-about.aspx" title="Things I'm Pretty Sure About " data-id="article-list">
  <article>
    <div class="text">
      <h4>Things I'm Pretty Sure About </h4>
      <div class="story-date-author">Morgan Housel | Mar 30, 2016</div>
      <p class="article-promo">We're all in the same boat.</p>
    </div>
  </article>
</a>

The data-id="article-list" is a nice indicator pull out the line that has all of the links. Here, we’ll grab all of lines from the raw HTML, then remove the cruft before and after the href link:

$ grep 'data-id\=\"article-list\"' --no-filename index.html\?page\=* > raw-links
$ sed 's/^.*href\=\"/https\:\/\/www.fool.com/' raw-links | sed 's/\.aspx".*$/\.aspx/' | sort > mf-all.txt

Sample Output:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/24/how-to-fail-well.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/24/how-to-make-better-investment-decisions.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/26/why-everyone-disagrees-about-the-economy.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/02/pithy-wisdom-that-changed-how-i-think-about-invest.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/07/explaining-investing-in-ways-that-make-sense.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/09/investing-the-market-and-beyond-a-day-with-foolish.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/13/two-trends-were-not-excited-enough-about.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/14/sherlock-holmes-on-how-to-be-a-better-investor.aspx
https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/16/what-i-learned-buying-a-house.aspx
...

Collaborativefund.com

Collaborativefund.com makes things a bit easier (no fancy paging), but it also appears the data is loaded asynchronously. So this simple wget doesn’t have any of the links:

$ wget https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/authors/morgan/

A simple workaround is to just right-click anywhere on the page in a browser and “Save as…” –> “Website, Complete” –> Save.

Inspecting the page, one can find repeated elements like this:

<li class="post-item"><h4><a href="https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-shock-cycle/">The Shock Cycle</a></h4>
  <small class="post__meta"><time class="faded">Apr 2, 2020</time>
    <span class="faded">by</span>
    <span class="js-author" data-author="Morgan Housel">
      <a class="faded faded--60 js-author__title js-related__author" href="https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/authors/morgan/">Morgan Housel</a>
    </span>
  </small>
</li>

From here, we can grep for the links in the same way, looking this time for <li class='post-item'> elements:

$ grep 'post-item' Morgan\ Housel\ ·\ Collaborative\ Fund.html > raw-links
$ sed 's/^.*href\=\"//' raw-links | sed 's/">.*$//' | sort > cf-all.txt

Sample output:

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/100-little-ideas/
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/2020-what-a-time-to-be-alive/
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/23-books-that-changed-my-life/
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/acceptable-flaws/
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/a-chat-with-daniel-kahneman/
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/a-decade-watching-the-craziest-game/
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/a-few-thoughts-on-public-speaking/
...

Archiving The Pages

It took me several iterations, but I think the following command should work for each of the text files full of links you just created:

$ INPUT_FILE=cf-all.txt
$ wget \
  --input-file $INPUT_FILE \
  --page-requisites \
  --span-hosts \
  --domains www.collaborativefund.com,www.fool.com,g.foolcdn.com \
  --convert-links \
  --wait=1.5 \
  --random-wait \
  --adjust-extension \
  --output-file=wget.log \
  --background

Lets go through each of these options, because each one is kind of important:

--input-file allows us to specify a file with the list of URLs to fetch
--page-requisites fetches the CSS, JavaScript, and images that make the page look nice and work well. Technically, we’d really only like the CSS and images, but I didn’t find a way to get just those. By default, it only fetches them from the same host domain, so we use:
- --span-hosts gets required resources from other host domains, and
- --domains specifies to only fetch resources from these whitelisted domains. It appears MF uses g.foolcdn.com as their host for images, JS, and CSS.
--convert-links changes all reference to images/CSS/JS to use the locally fetched ones (thanks --page-requisites!)
--wait puts some time between requests so we don’t hammer the site
--random-wait randomizes the wait between 0.5x and 1.5x of the --wait time
--adjust-extension renames .aspx files to .html
--output-file to capture the logs of each request
--background to put it in the background. It’ll take a while.

In the end you’ll have something like this:

$ tree www.collaborativefund.com/
www.collaborativefund.com/
├── assets
│   ├── css
│   │   └── all.css
│   ├── fonts
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-circle.eot
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-circle.eot?
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-circle.svg
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-circle.ttf
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-circle.woff
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-regular.eot
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-regular.eot?
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-regular.svg
│   │   ├── ss-collaborative-fund-social-regular.ttf
│   │   └── ss-collaborative-fund-social-regular.woff
│   ├── images
│   │   ├── home--cities--overhang.svg
│   │   ├── home--cities.svg
│   │   ├── home--consumer--small.svg
│   │   ├── home--consumer.svg
│   │   ├── home--consumer--text.svg
│   │   ├── home--health--overhang.svg
│   │   ├── home--health--small.svg
│   │   ├── home--health.svg
│   │   ├── home--kids--small.svg
│   │   ├── home--kids.svg
│   │   ├── home--kids--text.svg
│   │   ├── home--money--overhang.svg
│   │   ├── home--money.svg
│   │   └── home--money--text.svg
│   └── js
│       └── all.js
├── blog
│   ├── 100-little-ideas
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 2020-what-a-time-to-be-alive
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 23-books-that-changed-my-life
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── acceptable-flaws
│   │   └── index.html
    ... snip ...
│   ├── you-can-see-where-this-is-going
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── you-have-to-live-it-to-believe-it
│   │   └── index.html
│   └── you-played-yourself
│       └── index.html
└── uploads
    ├── 0labr_spnd0-brad-fickeisen.jpg
    ├── 10-5591a8.png
    ├── 11-5dd870.png
    ... snip ...
    ├── vladimir-chuchadeev-86192.jpg
    ├── vqpqjitnqvw-anton-belashov.jpg
    ├── wesley-tingey-mvLyHPRGLCs-unsplash.jpg
    ├── wim-arys-523715-unsplash.jpg
    ├── yb0qs65azmc-anders-jilden-2b4e51.jpg
    └── yuriy-kleymenov-1102408-unsplash.jpg

227 directories, 596 files

Long Form PDFs

Morgan has published numerous long form PDFs, which I’d also like to archive. Now that we have all of his posts, we can search for .pdf references and grab those too:

$ grep --no-filename "collaborativefund.com/uploads/.*\.pdf" -r www.collaborativefund.com/blog/ > raw-pdf-links
$ sed 's/^.*href\=\"//' raw-pdf-links | sed 's/pdf">.*$/pdf/' | grep "pdf" | sort | uniq > cf-all-pdfs.txt

From here, you can use a simple wget --input-file cf-all-pdfs.txt --wait=2 to pull all of the PDFs and put them in the uploads folder.

Viewing the Files

Launch any of these pages with your browser:

$ google-chrome google-chrome ./www.collaborativefund.com/blog/true-at-once/index.html

You should notice that this is served from your local machine.

Thank you, Morgan!

Coronavirus: To Test or Not To Test?

2020-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

To test or not to test - that is the question. I explore each potential result here, and I conclude that blissful, asymptomatic ignorance is likely the best choice of them all.

As of this writing, I have no idea how one goes about trying to get tested for the coronavirus. I’ll assume they go to their doctor (or ER) with symptoms, a prescription is written, and some poor nurse gives them a test. The test itself looks pretty unpleasant, to boot.

This is how far back we have to put the swab to test you for #COVID19.

You might want to follow medical recommendations and #StayHome. pic.twitter.com/gCMqUdpsEk
— Jessica Peck, DNP APRN CPNP-PC (@DrPeckPNP) March 29, 2020

Lets assume at some point we’ll be able to get tested voluntarily. The optimist in me thinks this won’t be too far off; the pessimist thinks it will never happen - cases will drop off without the majority knowing if they ever had it.

I started mulling over whether I and my family would get tested. What would happen, and how would it change our behavior going forward? To be clear, nobody in the family is experiencing any symptoms - no fevers, no dry coughs. So, if positive, we might be in the most dangerous asymptomatic group.

I think there are rumblings of a test with results in under 15 minutes, but I think the more common case in the US is one that takes about two weeks. I predict that we’d be more irritable from test time until test result. Objectively, nothing has changed, but at the same time, the anxiety increases because it becomes more real. Ask anybody waiting for a biopsy result.

OK, so the time elapses, and we’ve got a result - what happens next?

All family members negative
- Feeling: Slightly relieved.
- Behavior: Two possible outcomes:
  1. Clam up even more - we’ve dodged the bullet so far, so lets take extra, extra measures to ensure we don’t have to keep ducking bullets.
  2. Begin seeing friends and family who have also tested negative recently. At large, I can see society starting to loosen up a bit on our protective measures (going out more, no gloves/mask, etc), even though it’s likely those protective measures were the reason we’re not sick in the first place.
All family members positive
- Feeling: Oh shit. It’s real - we have it. Anxiety and fear up 10x. Every little cough or sneeze would bring back a flood of fear. Is it getting worse? Where did we get it? Why aren’t we showing symptoms? How will this effect the baby?!? An endless set of question resembling the stages of grief.
  
  (I’m getting stressed just predicting how we’d feel)
- Behavior: Clorox everything. Only go outside in the backyard. Alert any neighbors we’ve had even passing contact with. Request family members do our supply shopping. Start logging all data points. I would probably dive head first into some of the things I’ve been trying to avoid, namely researching what is happening inside me from first- and second-hand accounts. Pack hospital go bags. Emergency prepare estate plans - we may be asymptomatic now, but that may not last forever.
Mixed results - A strict subset test positive. All cases bring about questions of how that’s even possible - my son has sneezed in my face at least thrice in the past 24 hours, so this is probably the most unlikely scenario.
- Son only: Likely would mean my wife would go to her parents. I’d bite the bullet to take care of him without risking exposure to the fetus.
- Wife only: A whole bunch of unknown here. Our son would probably still go his grandparents’ house, and I’d stay here with here, but in separate parts of the house.
- Me only: Likely a similar scenario to just my wife being positive, but I’d probably quarantined to the basement.
- Son and wife: Tidal waves of survivors guilt-like feelings here. I likely would stay around and risk exposure here as well. In no circumstances do I think leaving a sick child and pregnant wife to be good for anybody.
- Son and me: Wife would go stay with her parents to protect her and the baby. Little man and I get lots of time together.
- Wife and me: Probably the worst case scenario - all of the fears from the All Family Members Positive option above. On top of that, we’d have to separate from our little man for an unknown length of time. As if that wasn’t hard enough, we’d constantly be in fear of “what if the test was wrong, and he was in fact positive, and now he’s with grandparents that are vulnerable?”.

Analyzing all of these scenarios demonstrates that there’s a huge asymmetry here: the best case scenario from taking this test is “slightly relieved.” Whereas the downside is an unending pit of fear, anxiety, and stress.

What would you do?

A Guide to the Good Life

2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve recently been rereading William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life. It introduces the teachingings of Stoicism, but updated for a modern audience.

One of the big lessons discussed at length is periodic “negative visualization”, or imaging bad things happening to the people or things that you love. At first glance, it sounds like a morbid concept, but in practice, it makes you stop, think, and feel in the moment. It makes you grateful, because life and everything in it is all temporary.

One example I think about every now and then is with my cat. Blueberry is the sweetest feline to ever walk this earth. Each evening, he curls up on my chest and doses off while my wife and I watch a bit of TV before bed. I absolutely love these snuggles.

Occasionally, I employ this negative visualization technique and imagine when I won’t have him around anymore. I feel terribly sad to think this, but at the same time, I am far more grateful that evening when I get him back. I enjoy his company more after I practice this, and helps me not take this time for granted.

How many times have you beaten yourself with “If onlys”?

“If only I had spent more time with …”
“If only I had paid more attention to …”
“If only I didn’t take … for granted.”

There are so many other good examples. When you have your first child, every wise parent friend tells you to “Enjoy Every Moment. It goes by so fast.” This technique is the most practical way to take that advice.

I’ve used this to astounding effect recently with the stock market crash. I’ve practiced negative visualization on my portfolio about once a quarter, asking myself “How would I feel if tomorrow, this number was 50% of what it was?” and exploring that line of feeling.

In truth, I’m trying to anchor high when I do that, because in the Great Financial Crisis, a 100% stock portfolio in the S&P was down ~55%. I don’t take that much risk, so my account has some room dedicated to bonds and cash. So I ask a more realistic scenario, and run the calculations on if I lost ~30%.

If you’ve been following any market news lately, you’d know that as it turns out, the stock market crashed about 30% in record time. Several of these days were within the top 10 largest single day drops since and including the Great Depression.

Did I panic? No, not one little bit. And I think it’s all because I pictures and pre-felt what that moment was going to feel like. So when it actually did arrive I was prepared.

WFH-a-thon Thoughts (Part 1)

2020-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

All anybody can talk about these days is coronavirus - just as contagious as the flu, but 10x deadlier, at least to the elderly. I’m personally not afraid of the virus, but of the knock-on effects it has had on society.

Namely, panic - runs on toilet paper, Purell, bread, whatever. My family had some supplies stocked up, and were a bit short on others. We’ve stocked up on water, gas, baby and cat food, and some shelf-stable foods. I think the only thing we’re missing are various weapons & ammunition, but don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind. Panic makes people, well, panicky.

Last week, my employer said all employees could “optionally work-from-home.” Two days later, it was upgraded to “recommended work-from-home for the next 4 weeks.”

I didn’t need the escalation to take up the chance to experiment with 100% remote work. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I would join a smaller company with a 100% remote workforce - this gives me the best of both worlds.

Thus far, it’s been a net good change. Getting back 2+ hours of my day gives me the headspace to do things I wouldn’t otherwise have time to do - like write up this post. All without having to sacrifice the precious time with my wife and son.

I’ve largely tried to stick to a similar schedule as work-from-office days. Same workout in the morning, same taking my son to daycare. One big benefit has been walking to pick up him up from daycare with my wife in the warming weather - I’ve greatly enjoyed that part.

I’ve had some difficulty getting into a “work headspace” in the morning, despite only really using my office for work. It’s the same kind of mental transition needed to get into “gym headspace.” It’s not a lightswitch, but a process, and a process that needs a set of triggers to really get going. Those triggers aren’t there yet, but it’s something I’ll think about over the next week.

The house clutter has been significantly reduced. Traversing through the house, being reminded “need to put this away, need to put that away”, adds to the procrastination. A clutter-free space is a clutter-free mind.

The stock market is getting crushed - down 25% from all time highs just a few weeks ago. I’m not so worried about my retirement accounts - this can and should happen to those from time to time.

I worry a bit because part of my compensation is through stock, which obviously has taken a similar 25% drop, and with little hope of recovery before the next vesting.

I think my feelings are best summed up by Ben Carlson here:

The problem with market crashes is it always feels like it’s too late to sell but too early to buy.

I purposefully kept some cash on the sidelines as “dry powder” for just this kind of scenario. In fact, I deployed some after the first 10% drop. Anymore, though, and I’m thinking further down the line, since this cash is also there for my mortgage and property tax payments. Maybe it’s time to rethink that plan - to have a proper separation of “essential expenses cash” and “market implosion cash”.

I think the good result from this whole thing is that I’m not (yet?) sleeping poorly because of my allocation. I deliberately chose my stock/bond split with this in mind (in particular a 50% stock drop, like from the Great Financial Crisis).

Phone Addiction

2020-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

I “discovered” the best productivity hack of my generation 3 years ago.

My phone buzzed in my pocket when I was meeting for a one-on-one. Hating it when others look at their phone when engaged in conversation, I ignored it.

But the mystery gnawed at me. Was it important? What was I missing?

I didn’t hear anything else the other person said for the rest of the meeting. I was too engrossed in the possibilities of what my mystery notification could be.

We stood up and my hand instinctively reached into my pocket.

A new email! Oh boy - it was from… L.L. Bean?! Psht. Delete.

At that moment, I realized my phone’s notification system controlled my attention. Transitively, every app that pushed alerts to me had my attention within seconds. Resistance was futile, as proven in the meeting with my colleague.

Since then, I aggressively turn off notifications. Here is the short list of apps I allow to take my attention:

Google Voice (text messages)
Work chat & Slack
GMail (only “important” personal emails, no work emails)
Starbucks (love those Buy One-Get One specials)

Real-time apps are the theme, but the message must be addressed particularly to me. Also, caffeine is addicting.

These days, my son requests to hold our phones more and more. He sees my wife and I staring blankly into these magical gadgets that can produce “Elmo’s World” and “On Top of Spaghetti” videos out of thin air.

Following Atomic Habit’s advice, I’m using the inverse of the 3rd rule to break this habit: make it difficult. In theory, I won’t get distracted my phone if I don’t have it.

To implement, I’ve dedicated “phone drop-zone” space near the front door. When I arrive home, my phone goes here and I don’t pick it up until my boy goes to bed.

Focusing on my family is important to me. Proving it with action is important to them.

Home Gym: Part 3

2020-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

In the previous parts 1 and 2, I detailed the design and equipment of my home gym when my basement was unfinished.

There were a few flaws in my choices:

I used pressure-treated lumber as the base. This wood is injected with chemicals to prevent rot when placed directly on the groud. It is significantly heavier than standard plywood, which at the time I thought was a good thing. After a while, the chemicals started to seep through the non-pressure-treated top-layer, causing ugly stains.
I screwed and glued it all together. At no point did I think I would ever need to unscrew and unglue it. If you read my water leaks post, you saw how a nearby window leaked after a heavy rain. I needed two neighbors to help me lift the platform off the ground dry out the water underneith.

My wife and I decided to finish the basement this winter, which meant I needed to get everything out of the space. I spent an hour disassembling the rack, and another two hours dissecting the platform into manageable pieces. It did not go down without a fight.

Platform removal via circular saw. Notice the dark spots in the middle? That’s the pressure-treated lumber chemicals soaking through.

The new space is a chance for a fresh start.

Ceiling height was a concern from the beginning, and became even more so after seeing the thick furring strips attached to the joists.

Furring strips attach to the bottom of the ceiling joists

To compensate, I removed all supporting pieces from under the main platform. So instead of 5 total pieces of plywood, there was only 1.

Staining the platform

Despite my attempt to save the ceiling, we ended up poking holes into it during rack reassembly. These holes were necessary to get the main support beams in place, and would be needed in case it was ever moved. Luckily, my contractor came up with a nice way to cover up the new openings.

Here’s everything nearly finished:

I plan to put a small border around the permiter to give it a slightly nicer finish. Photos of that later, though.

2010s

2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

My 2010s (in rough order):

📚 Finished Masters degree
🗽 Moved to NYC
😸 Adopted two cats
🏋️ Competed in two weightlifting competitions
💍 Got married
🔍 Hired at Le Goog
🏠 Bought house
👶 Had a baby
✈️ 10 countries, 🇺🇸 26 states
🖥️ 2704 Github contributions

Water Leaks

2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been a homeowner for just over 3 years now, and in that time, there’s been no greater threat to my peace of mind than a slow, persistent water leak.

I recall growing up feeling like my mom also feared water leaks, but as I’m writing this, I can’t really remember any time in which we had any major (or even minor) flooding.

Leading up to buying the house, my wife and I watched gobs of HGTV. “Flip or Flop,” “Love it or List it,” and “Fixer Uppers” were among our favorite shows. Each one focused on fixing distressed properties, many of which had plumbing issues behind walls and under sinks - areas not frequently checked - and it routinely cost thousands of dollars to fix.

The internet, for all the good it does, is generally not great as calming nerves of one day having this happen:

Not long after we moved in, we had our first heavy rain. Worried about the basement, I headed downstairs right before bedtime. Big mistake:

This leak from the sill plate (as I soon came to learn its formal name) plagued us for more than a year. Each time our builder kept saying “this should surely fix it,” and lo and behold, the next heavy rainstorm it would be wet again. I stopped calling him after a while because he was proving worthless in fixing the issue, and was taking longer and longer to reply.

The next major incident occurred right in our family room. One day my wife looked up and said “What is that?”

It’s kind of hard to see in the photo, but there is a ~5 ft. long water stain. In trying to find the root cause, I cut a hole in the ceiling and got a good look at shower trap.

Turns out this one was from the master shower, where the builder’s plumber/tile installer didn’t put grout all the way to the edge of the shower drain.

We lived with that hole in the ceiling for over a year.

Back onto the theme of “infrequently checked spaces”, I happened to one day peek into our guest room closet - a room within a room we hardly go into. That feared rush of cortisol hit me again:

We had a 1-month old baby to take care of, so this was the last thing I wanted on my plate. We hired not once but twice to fix this - the first a roofer, the second a contractor to fix the drywall. Turns out the roofer’s solution didn’t fix the problem, and the contractor found out the hard way:

Everything was quiet for a while after that. That is, up until July of 2018, when we had a patio installed in the backyard.

All of the water would run off towards the right side of the patio, which happened to be a low point in the backyard. A severe thunderstorm a few weeks later in late September caused enough water to collect at that low point to eclipse the window well of the basement, turning it into a small aquarium, and my basement into a shallow pool:

All of this brings me up to date, and to the the impetus of this post. We’re finishing the basement this year, and have seen not 1, not 2, but 3 water events in the past two weeks.

The first was pretty small, and I thought was related to our original basement water issue, as it was right at the same point as the leak in the first picture above.

The second was major. Our new egress window, like its predecessor, became a small aquarium during a heavy rainstorm. I estimate it dumped in between 20 and 30 gallons of water, all at approximately 2:00 A.M. when I discovered it. Here’s the beginning of it - I didn’t get any more photos because I was too busy scrambling around with the wet-dry vac.

We had to pull up all of the new flooring, dry it off, and run the dehumidifier for three straight days. We thought we fixed the issue (the downspout drainage) when we reburied it, only to discover two days later that it was not fixed:

Le sigh…

After so many back-to-back incidents, we went above and beyond to prevent this from happening ever again.

First was replacing the buried downspout corrugated tubing (with holes!?) with solid PVC pipe.

Second was to tar the outside of the window well, and put 40 mil shower liner on the outside. This is a second layer of protection where the egress unit meets the foundation.

Third, there is a float-activated pump buried at the base of the egress window well. Should water get past the first few defense layers, it should be pumped right up and out before it can turn into Aquarium Horror Stories part 3.

All of these incidents have sucked. I experienced great levels of stress upon initial discovery and subsequent fixing. All in all, though, I can be thankful of a few things. First, nothing priceless or irreplaceable has been destroyed, and I’ve been able to afford the fixes without financial strain. Second, my colleague Matt has helped me through each incident - brainstorming and sound-boarding how to fix the issue. Third, my wife has weathered it all without reflecting too much of her own stress back to me, as she knows I’m the one who worries constantly about this stuff. I suppose lastly that this has been a huge lesson on construction and building material science. Tip to future homeowners: have a Lowes, Home Depot, or other hardware store close by, and learn the store layout. You’ll need it.

Atomic Habits Book Review

2019-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

James Clear has fast become one of my favorite writers. I signed up for his newsletter a few weeks before Atomic Habits came out after hearing about it on Twitter.

Atomic Habits in the book I wished “The Power of Habits” by Charles Duhigg would have been. Instead, I got a lot out of Duhigg’s first section on personal habits, but got lost as it scaled up to organizational habits (not something I could directly control).

Instead, Atomic Habits laid out a simple mental model for how to view any habit. Expanding from Duhigg’s model, Clear says the basic habit loop looks like:

Cue
Craving
Response
Reward

Knowing this, we can use each of these steps to form the backbone of the book, known as the “Four Laws of Behavior Change”:

Make it Obvious (Cue)
Make it Attractive (Craving)
Make it Easy (Response)
Make it Satisfying (Reward)

I tried coming up with a mnemonic for this - OAES - “One Atom, Every Situation”, “Once Atomic, Eventually Successful”? I have yet to come up with one that I like.

Make it Obvious

(Is this where some of those Gen Z’ers want a “trigger warning”)

The first part of the habit loop kicks off the whole process: the cue. It may seem silly at first, but purposefully putting things at the forefront of your attention can and will alter your behavior.

I have a bad habit of picking at my cuticles. Like really bad - to the point they start to bleed. I’ve been embarrassed and ashamed of this for a long time, but I can’t seem to stop. Recently, I noticed that if I keep my fingernails trimmed, I’m less likely to pick and tear at my poor fingertips.

Using Law #1, I moved my nail clipper and file out of my vanity drawer and next to my toothbrush. A small, simple change that has had dramatic effects: Every time I reach for my toothbrush, I see my nail clippers. It’s purposefully in my line of sight and not hidden away.

The other thing at play here is a technique Clear calls “habit stacking”: linking one habit with another. In my example, by putting the clippers next to my toothbrush, I’m associating one already established habit with one I’m trying to cultivate: brushing my teeth –> trimming my nails.

The other side of the coin is how to stop a behavior you don’t like. Using the inverse of the first law means you’d want to “make it invisible”.

I’ve used this to great effect in my kitchen. I take any sweets we have in the house and put them in a bucket on the top shelf of one of my cabinets. This has multiple layers of defense: it’s not visible from any point in the kitchen (behind the cabinet), and it’s not visible when I open the cabinet for something else (top shelf, and in another opaque container).

Of course I know those sweets are still there, but by adding these minor roadblocks, I prevent a craving from happening unintentionally when I’m just passing by or doing something else.

Environment Design Because of the great effect that things you see have on your behavior, your surroundings can have a massive effect on you. If you are deliberate with how you structure you room (Clear calls this “environment design”), you can entice yourself toward good or bad habits.

For example, if you put a TV in your office, you’re much more likely to turn it on during the work day and get distracted by whatever is on. Remove the TV and that option isn’t even on the table.

One more example is what I did when I knew I wanted to write this book review: I know that I procrastinate and get distracted easily, so I took a Chromebook with me to Starbucks to get started on this post. The new environment doesn’t contain any of my normal cues, and thus I can write distraction-free.

Make it Attractive

The second law is associated with craving. The author deftly describes this as the “desire to change your internal state.”

This part of the habit loop is driven by our lowest, most basic, emotional part of the brain.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), we’ve developed a fantastic understanding of how to push our own emotional buttons. Scientists call these “supernormal stimuli” - and you see it everywhere these days: junk food, social media notifications, porn, etc. All of these are supercharged versions of things we’re emotionally drawn to: tasty food, status, sex, etc.

“We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.”

One of the main brain chemicals at play here is dopamine (the subject of another book I hope to cover at a later date). Studies show that during the first few iterations of a new habit, dopamine is released at the end of the process: it’s your reward. Eventually, though, dopamine gets released as you anticipate getting that reward.

The inverse of the second law states that to break a bad habit, you need to make it unattractive.

Reframing your associations with your habits is one way to tackle this. I’d estimate this is one of the harder things to implement from this book.

One example Clear states is when trying to stop smoking. Rather than stating to yourself “I’m going to try to stop smoking,” you reframe your assertion to “I am not a smoker.” This reframing puts the emphasis more at the core of our identity [https://jamesclear.com/identity-based-habits].

Make it Easy

The third law of behavior change is make it easy.

Why do you think so many people sign up for a gym membership in January, go for a week or two, then never visit again?

I’d wager that they do too much, too fast.

I know I’ve done that many times before. I get so excited to try something new that I end up overdoing it and getting sore. And being sore is not a good feeling (nor a good reward), so I’m discouraged from doing that same behavior again.

BJ Fogg is a big proponent of starting small. Very small. Like “floss only one tooth [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKUJxjn-R8]” small.

One of the main things I got from these chapters is that you must master the art of showing up. Even if what you’re doing is really easy at first, you’re showing up. Only once a habit has been established can it be optimized.

After an hour of writing, maybe I should follow my own advice here - If I’m trying to establish a writing habit, I should start by writing short, small posts. Only then should I work on longer pieces, like this one, where I have lots of things to say, but don’t quite know how to say them succinctly.

The opposite side of the third law is to “make it difficult.” Lets say you want to stop watching so much TV. One way to “make it difficult” is to simply unplug the TV after each use. A minor roadblock like that may discourage you from mindlessly turning on the TV when you’re bored, and remind you that you’re trying to break a habit. You could even go as far as to put the TV in a closet and only when you really want to watch something do you pull it out and hook it up.

Make it Satisfying

Finally, the part of the habit loop that probably started the habit in the first place is the eventual reward.

Clear clarifies in the first part of this section that our brains overvalue rewards that come sooner rather than later, so he states that this law really should be called “Make it immediately satisfying.”

The evidence for this isn’t hard to find: We eat a chocolate, we get a sugar rush. Drink some coffee, and get a caffeine high. It’s easy to get hooked on these because you’re rewarded shortly after a behavior.

So to establish a new, good habit, you need to design it such that you’re rewarded shortly afterwards, even if it’s a small reward.

One example stated in the book is the Paper Clip Strategy: Start with two containers - one filled with paper clips, and one empty - and move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar each time the desired behavior is done. (This probably works best with something that is done repeatedly throughout the day, for example, making sales calls.)

“The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.”

Another simple way to implement this strategy is with a dedicated calendar for your habit. Each day you complete your workout/chores/desired behavior, you get to mark it in the calendar. Eventually, you see a streak forming, and (ideally) you’d like to continue that streak unbroken. It’s a small reward, but it builds and builds until the behavior becomes part of your core identity.

Lastly, the inverse of the 4th law is to “make it unsatisfying.” As with the clarification above, we can modify this to be “make it immediately unsatisfying.”

In general, “good” habits have immediate consequences, but longer term rewards. “Bad” habits, on the other hand have a immediate reward, but longer term consequences. This makes bad habits really hard to abandon.

“The best way I know to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of punishment associated with this behavior. There can’t be a gap between actions and consequences.”

Final words

This synopsis only scratched the surface of the wisdom in this book. James Clear is an excellent writer, and this work is no exception. I’ve found the four laws of behavior change to be an excellent model for understanding my own behaviors. More so, I’ve successfully used these lessons to influence other people’s behavior.