“If he was not the laziest, he would have became the greatest” – Sergey Lukanenko, False MIrrors

There is a quote that often gets thrown around about mediocrity being the enemy of greatness but it is not mediocrity itself but the laziness and complacency that it causes. When we settle for mediocre and regular in our lives, we lose our inherent drive towards personal greatness.

Interestingly enough David Allen of the Getting Things Done (GTD) fame, has a similar concept in his book. He discusses how your brain tries to remember all the various things you need to do and that causes stress. If you have a system that captures those reminders, then you can “dump” them out into that system like paper or a PDA/smartphone/webapp, and they do not stress you out anymore.

I was reminded of this concept recently when a relative asked me why I have so many keys on my keychain making it weigh close to a half of pound. I have never actually thought about that, and I did recently take the time to go through my keychain and get rid of keys I don’t need. There were plenty of keys I no longer needed, and in at least one case a key that I have been carrying around for over 15 years which opened a door I no longer had access to as an employee. Once I cleaned up the keychain, it weighed very little reminding me of importance of simplicity every time I pick it up.

I must also say that the Square Foot Gardening method that I tried out this year has worked phenomenally well and much better than all of our previous years. When I get enough time, I plan to post detailed notes and pictures from the garden.

UPDATE: I ended up digging out the rest of them which may not have been wise. A picture appears below. I did learn two things:

1. They need to be planted much deeper so they don’t stick out of the soil.

2. I need to wait to harvest them a little longer.

And here is the picture of the turnip:

Here is a picture of all of them:

P.S. And of course they are all available on the Kindle.

In more recent times, the same phrase has expanded to any sort of trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increase productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. Or, in other words, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.

In my previous post about our garden, I pointed out several of the problems I constantly ran into when gardening including bad soil, weeds, pests, etc. What I have found in the last year or so can be best called hacks for gardening – all kinds of ways to think out of the box and save time/effort/labor when gardening. Some examples are:

• Lasagna gardening – gardening in layers without weeding or tilling
• Growing potatoes in old tires
• Vertical gardening using plastic pockets on a wall
• Growing veggies upside down using old soda bottles

My favorite so far has been Square Foot Gardening – growing plants in a raised bed with a special soil mix divided into 1 foot squares (I will be posting more on that in the future).

All of these “hacks” share a common theme – they assume that the way we garden has been carried over from commercial farming and lot of the approaches and techniques used in commercial farms do not apply in gardens. It remains to be seen whether this in fact is true – all I could so far is anecdotal evidence, not something rigorously checked by a scientist.

A quick tip that I once saw somewhere – in order to get yourself used to eating veggies and fruit, is to make sure you have some of that at every meal. It maybe something small like a fresh apple or some baby carrots, or for the really lazy among us, some canned peas, but getting to like veggies and fruit as part of your daily meals, will make it easier to eat healthier down the road.

And no, french fries do not count as veggies

However, reading the legal paperwork yields several more nuggets that are pretty interesting:

• The Maryland SLAPP law is being invoked to expedite the lawsuit and dismiss it early. It goes without saying that First Amendment rights are involved as well.
• While the lawsuit was filed on April 11th, 2011, Adam Meister was not served until 3 weeks later on May 1st. His co-defendants have still not been served.
• One cannot claim defamation against something based on their own words. In this case, the councilwoman signed an affidavit in conjunction with a real estate transaction, which is the same as her own words.
• There have been other cases where defamation claims have been dismissed based on third party information, but here it is even better since this is her own words.
• Someone cannot say something and than retract it later and sue for defamation based on the original statement.

The entire set of legal records makes a fascinating read, and I would encourage everyone to go through it.

On a related note, a local whisteblower site, BaltiLeaks, has been posting copies of all kids of real estate documents where Ms. Conaway, the councilwoman, has signed that she is a resident of Baltimore County, not the city. See here, here, here, here and here.

While the councilwoman claims it was a mistake signing those documents, BaltiLeaks summarize it the best: “If Conaway committed an ‘oversight’ in signing these documents, they did it four different times.”. This is besides the fact that someone who makes her living writing and passing laws, signs legal documents without reading them?

I ended up getting rid of my Samsung Intercept and getting a new LG Optimus V. The difference is striking – everything I have thrown at the Optimus, it had no problems running, even at the same time as other apps. On the Intercept, by contrast, even syncing with Google Reader would lock the phone down. I am very happy with the Optimus V and would highly recommend that phone as a good Android option for Virgin Mobile.

Once again, I do not recommend the Intercept, especially since it is more expensive. The Intercept retails for around $179 by Virgin Mobile, while the Optimus V is $149.99. I was able to snag one on Amazon for $129.00 from a third party seller. Another tell tale sign was when I ran through several buyback sites such as Gazelle to see what I can get back for our two old Intercepts. With exception of Best Buy, no one offered more than $25 for the phone, while the Optimus V fetches around $50.

(followup to part I and part II)

Well it has been over three months since I switched from Sprint as my cellphone carrier of over 10 years to their prepaid subsidiary, Virgin Mobile USA. Overall, I am satisfied with the service itself and payment, especially with reduced taxes and ability to buy refill cards as a discount from online stores. The phones however turned out to be somewhat of a disaster.

I originally bought two Samsung Intercept phones running Android 2.1. While I have seen people complain about them being slow and unresponsive, I was hoping that it was merely because power users were expecting something more, and also waiting to see if the 2.2 upgrade in April 2011 would fix things.

Sadly, things have not gotten better. While I do not have widgets, or use a lot of applications, even basic things like Gmail sync would lock up the phone. My wife has been constantly complaining about the touch screen not responding, and I had to reboot both phones at least once a week. So we finally swapped one phone out for a new LG Optimus V (which does not have a keyboard), and boy what a difference! The Optimus V is faster and more responsive, and while it does not have a built in keyboard, the larger screen with the online keyboard make up for it. Even installed some additional apps did not slow it down. So for now, my wife is going with the Optimus V, while I am waiting to see if the new Motorola Triumph is coming out soon (which supposed to match the HTC models).

I am still highly recommending prepaid over conventional service because of the cheaper pricing, but for Virgin Mobile, I would recommend the Optimus V over the Samsung Intercept. Don’t bother with the slower, junkier and more expensive phone.

Here are some reasons why I like Amazon:

• Free 2-day shipping and cheap overnight shipping – I have an Amazon Prime membership and take advantage of it. For a busy family, it is often easier to order something online than to actually visit a store. A new trend has been is third party merchants qualifying for Amazon Prime shipping when they use Amazon’s warehouse services.
• Reviews are a great resource – many of the reviews, especially the negative ones are unabashedly straight forward and strong. I have found, time and time again, that user reviews steer me in the right direction.
• Great returns policy - for most items, they can be returned hassle free without paying shipping if something does not work. Even when I no longer want the item, it only costs the shipping itself to return something, and I often able to get cheaper shipping myself.
• Guarantee for Third Party merchants – one of the great things about Amazon (unlike Ebay) is that they guarantee most of their third party transactions, so even when things are not being bought from Amazon itself, there is still protection there.

WHY PLANT?

I find gardening an interesting hobby and it is useful for the kids as well. Additionally, being that we plant vegetables and fruit, we are hoping to eventually save some money on what we grow.

So far we have not broken even financially, primarily because the cost of transplants is high, and we buy new soil every year as well.

WHERE TO PLANT: LAND / SOIL / GROUND

In my back yard there is a section of ground right next to the neighbor’s fence, already surrounded with concrete and even has a small groove for water. That small strip is about 5″ wide and 45″ long, for a total of about 225 square feet. This is where we usually plant our garden. The problem is that the soil is extremely heavy clay, so heavy in fact that I can probably make pottery from it! I have looked into various possible solutions ranging from clay conditioners and just plain compost, but there is nothing that does not take a few years.

What we have done in the past, is weed whack the entire row, and than make burrows for the plants we are planting. We would then supplement those areas with freshly bought garden soil and hope for the best. The problem is that weeds tend to continue sprouting like crazy and a lot of work goes towards weeding. Another problem is that a lot of grass tends to grow in that area which makes things harder to plant. And to make things even crazier, there is a whole colony of kudzu in the end of the strip which spreads like wild fire. Because almost everything we plant is edible vegetables and fruits, I am afraid to use any sort of chemicals to kill the weeds.

Last year we have tried a new thing by using newspapers to block out the weeds and planting in soil on top of that. While that worked relatively well, the corn we planted did not make it in the end. There was a lot of work involved in stapling the newspapers to the ground, putting new soil on top, etc.

Earlier this year, we tried something new – putting out black plastic garbage bags to cover the ground and kills the weeds underneath. This worked somewhat well, but the weeds starting coming back after we took the cover off. The biggest problem however started once I begun preparing the ground – it is just way to hard to plow. Our neighbor spends several days with a pick ax doing just said, but don’t have that luxury. I did end up trying an electric cultivator but it did not work as well as I thought.

HOW TO PLANT: SEEDS / TRANSPLANTS / FERTILIZER

What we have done in the past is buy seeds from reputable companies like Burpee and Ferry Morse Co (Amazon actually sells a lot of Ferry Morse seeds). While we haven’t specifically focused on buying non-hybrids, starting this year we may begin to because non-hybrid plants produce seed that can be used year after year, forgoing the yearly purchase of seeds.

For certain types of plants like tomatoes and peppers, we buy transplants from Bonnie Plants, usually in Home Depot. We have never tried growing transplants in doors yet, but may try in the future.

I haven’t not used any sort of fertilizer in the past because we eat what the plants product. This may explain why some of our plants did not make it. Instead, we usually buy soil with fertilizer already in it and supplement our existing soil in the burrows where planting is done. It does not look like this is really working.

WHAT TO PLANT: Vegetables and Fruits

Majority of what we have planted over the years have been sweet bell peppers. One year there were only banana peppers left and we tried those, but they were not quite as good as the regular sweet peppers. The sweet peppers we used were various Bonnie hybrids. We have had great success with peas and green beans, in particular, Wando peas and Blue Lake green beans.

Cantaloupe, cucumbers, corn and watermelon were tried but all either got some infection or did not produce good fruit. We also tried sun flowers but couldn’t figure out how to dry the seeds properly.

NEXT

In the next few posts I am hoping to cover some of the experiments we are doing this year.

UPDATE: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe.

I have been using Virgin Mobile USA’s Samsung Intercept for about 2 months now. Good things I have found:

• Cheap pricing – paying a little less than $80/mo for two phones, with 1,200 minutes each, and unlimited texting/web
• Android 2.1 with access to Android Market
• Pretty much the same coverage as Sprint PCS
• Works great with WiFi

Some bad things:

• No roaming
• No three way calling
• Takes a long time to boot
• The phone is pretty slow and locks up when too many things are running. However, for my purposes, which does not use a lot of running services, it works great.
• Does not run Android 2.2 (yet, although an update is coming on March 25th) – speed should get better with 2.2
• The default browser is sort of sluggish, but alternatives like Opera Mobile work great

Overall I would have to say that it is a great deal for the price I am paying, however, it is not for someone who is looking for playing Android games, but for basic usage it seems to be fine.

Palm:
I have stayed with Palm devices all the way to the new WebOS launch. I waited about 6 months after launch to see what would happen before getting a Palm Pre. A year later, I would still use it but I got really sick of it. The main reason – the browser sucks and there are no alternatives. On Android, iPhone, Symbian even the low level J2ME phones all have alternatives. Not so WebOS. Then I started looking at some innovative mobile services out there such as RedLaser barcoding scanning, Square payments, etc. None of these were planning to support WebOS any time soon. Then I switched to Android – and you know – it was liked coming out of a dark place into the light. While I have never being a big fan of apps and concept of apps, on Android the app concept actually makes sense. I have apps like Google Reader, Mint, and Gmail all syncing in the background and ready to go when I am, instead of the browser. Any task I need to do has an app for that. I purposely did not want the iPhone due to its closed nature and expensive plans.

Why do apps make sense? Because even on a fast mobile device, browser access is still clunky. Applications that can store assets locally and sync in the background alleviate that to a very large degree.

Sprint:
As I mentioned above, I have been a SprintPCS customer for over 10 years. I have been paying $150 for a shared family plan of 1,500 minutes. Yes, I like mobile to mobile to any company, not just Sprint; and their network isn’t so bad. But the same exact plans I could get on Boost or Virgin Mobile for half the price (while ironically they are owned by Sprint). Why should I pay through the nose for the same exact network while getting nothing in return? The real clincher was the new $10 premium data fee imposed on all smartphones even though I use WiFi most of the time with my Palm Pre. It is not enough to gauge me on the plan, they want an extra $20 per months for nothing? So I said goodbye and got a Virgin Mobile Intercept instead for me and my wife.

More to come on Virgin Mobile experience…

For those of you not local to Baltimore, the Environmental Control Board informally known as “trash court” is an agency of the city government that does administrative hearings on trash, health, safety and related violations. My experience with them about 2 years ago reminded me of Kafka’s Trial more than American democracy. I have been to an administrative hearing once before in NYC, before the NYC’s traffic court and it was a very different experience. Here in Baltimore, they basically rubber stamp the citations, occasionally reducing some.

In any case, below is a letter that I have been working on for quite some time which I recently sent to the city government. You can download it here as a PDF file or read below:

The application is located at http://frano.carelessmusings.com and is a transaction based portfolio tracker similar to yahoo/google/morningstar portfolios. If you have an investment portfolio and you want to be able to take a quick look at how you are doing day to day this is for you. If you’re not investing or have a 401k that is fire-and-forget then thanks for reading

It is open source with the source on github..

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

You really need to read the entire thing.

(Hat tip: Ben Casnocha)

A better plan for transparency

Instead of televising city meetings on cable, publish all relevant information online

By Yakov Shafranovich; 5:35 p.m. EST, November 17, 2010

Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young recently proposed new legislation to achieve greater transparency in the operations of city government. His proposal would broadcast the meetings of several of most powerful city boards over cable television. City officials balked at the cost of the proposal, and rightfully so. The Internet can achieve even greater transparency, while being much cheaper and easier to use.

It should be noted that two existing state laws impose several important transparency requirements on city government: the Maryland Open Meetings Act and the Maryland Public Information Act. The Open Meetings Act requires that all governmental and quasi-governmental bodies falling under the law hold open meetings which all citizens can attend freely. It also requires that notice be given prior to each meeting, letting citizens know that it will take place, and that minutes of each meeting be recorded in a timely fashion. The second law, the Public Information Act allows citizens to request access to any government records. A key component of this law is that government cannot charge excessive fees for access to or photocopies of materials available under this law.

This means that every board and agency in the city that holds meetings must let us, the citizens, know about it in advance, and that written minutes must be created after each meeting. Additionally, anything ranging from the minutes and agenda of the powerful Board of Estimates down to how much the City Council spends on bottled water and its lunch menu, must be easily accessible to citizens. These two laws do not cover just the several boards mentioned in Mr. Young’s proposal but extend to most city boards and agencies, and are already on the books today.

Mr. Young’s proposes that meetings of several key city boards be televised on cable TV is well-intentioned, but it would be far more transparent, cheaper and broader to publish meeting notices and minutes of all city boards and agencies on the Internet. In addition, written records can be searched and perused much easier than video, whether live or recorded, and posting written records in lieu of video will not require the city to spend funds on new recording equipment as proposed by Mr. Young. Existing city law already mandates that the Department of Legislative Reference should collect the meeting notices and minutes of various boards and commissions. The City Council should require that this information, most of which is already in electronic form, be posted on the Internet for ease of access by all citizens.

Furthermore, an existing city law requires that fees for photocopies of public records shall be set at 15 cents per page citywide. Multiple city agencies, including the Board of Estimates, are possibly out of compliance with this law, and by extension the state law as well by charging excessive fees for photocopies. For example, the Board of Estimates currently charges $1 per page for copies of any of its records, when the state agency average is about 25 cents per page.

The mayor and city government should make sure that all city agencies comply with the Maryland Public Information Act in a uniform fashion and make sure that fees and procedures of access are uniform across the entire government. Furthermore, certain important city records, such as financial and ethics disclosure forms, can be published on the Internet as well. They are accessible under the existing law anyway; why not take a step further and make them public to all?

We have already seen great strides toward transparency by the city in many key areas. For example, the Board of Zoning Appeals publishes an online docket with appeals documents attached. The Department of Housing has an online database of code violations with actual photographs. The Department of Finance publishes a database listing payments from the city to various contractors, a property tax database, and a parking ticket database. The City Council itself has a very good online system for its agenda, minutes and proposed legislation.

It is a shame when it is easier to find out information about meetings of community associations and corporations than important city boards such as the Ethics Board. Mr. Young’s proposal seems like a step backward. Instead, Mr. Young and the rest of the City Council should examine alternatives that would utilize the Internet and achieve compliance with existing laws.

Yakov Shafranovich is a software developer living in Northwest Baltimore.