Hakiri

This is a Saturday morning post so bear with me. I mean to talk about this topic for some time now and today I felt inspired to sit down and actually blog about it.

Anyway, personal automation… I truly believe that human beings are the bottlenecks of their lives. The most self-distractive and time consuming tasks are the repetitive decision making process for unimportant problems, procrastination and the inability to plan thoroughly in advance. It is not that we are incapable to do all that. It is more about the fact that these things are the everyday norm because humans are lazy beings in general.

However, these problems can be solved by removing yourself as the bottleneck. You don’t want to be the driver of the car but you want to give orders where you would like to go, i.e. you want to be the passenger. The only way to do that in a sensible way is by introducing a degree of automation in your lives.

If you find yourself doing something over and over again perhaps it is the time too look for a solution that will automate the problem. If there isn’t a solution, you are probably on verge of a breakthrough idea that could make you significantly richer. Both ways you win but the most importantly, you solve yet another problem in your live which you shouldn’t really worry about and can be completely outsourced and automated.

Here are a few ideas of what can be automated:

• Holidays, bookings, general entertainment – planning all of these things suck! they all require a lot of time, worries and thinking. Instead of doing all of this yourself, get a VA (virtual assistant) to sort all of this out for you.
• Personal finances – paying all the bills yourself is definitely not good for your health. It could be stressful to say at least. The best way to deal with it is to put everything on autopilot. All the money you owe should be taken out automatically on the first day you receive your salary. If the bill comes out every 3-4 months, than just do your average contribution every month. That will save you hustle at the end. Think about it, 30-40% of your salary go to the government anyway but you rarely think about it because because you don’t see all of these money coming in and going out of your bank account
• Food – food can get boring too, especially if you plan it. Most stores in UK have websites where you can purchase all the food that you need. Often, you can purchase the same ingredients you did last time. You don’t even need to do that. You can just a VA on autopilot to do it for you. On the geek side of things, you can write a script to calculate the basic possible way to use all the ingredients.

Once you do all of these you will see that automation is actually great. It almost feels like you’ve been taken care by your parents again but this time you are in charge of how things should happen. I personally haven’t fully reached such reaches but I am planning to improve in the near future.

The following video reminds me of SecondLife, although I am not a big SL fan. Apart from the fact that the video is very futuristic, I do believe that one day we will be able to build virtual worlds like that and perhaps even live in them. I most certainly I will opt out from such an option.

A technology of that magnitude will change everything.

DoubleEdge Films, the guys who did the SPIN video footage, which by the way was the opening post of this blog, have another one coming titled INK

Obviously, this is something I am quite looking forward to see.

Simply put New is a very relative word. New to whom? And how do you prove that something new is new indeed? You cannot. Perhaps you can suggest that something is new as nothing like it has been documented before, but again this is very subjective.

You often see rants about what is new and what is old in the security scene: underground and aboveground. Some people will complain that nothing new has been discovered when a presumably new type of vulnerability/research is released. Others will simply take it as new without even questioning it and essentially start a hype.

Perhaps new should be changed with fashionable. Like in the fashion business new things are often well forgotten old things, i.e. ideas always circulate. And new things are simply not possible without the help of old things because we require access to technology, whether it comes in terms of knowledge or tools, to build them. In that respect nothing new is actually new.

The best way to learn is by teaching. It seams that when we teach others we actually learn because teaching is way of transmitting information in the most optimal way and in order to do that, our brains engage with the task to simplify the information and to find the most important bits that are necessary to unfold the rest of it that follows, as such, we learn.

As an experiment, do the following: Pick a topic you know nothing about and study it for a short period of time. Make sure that you pick something that is pretty hard for you to comprehend at first. Now, try to teach your wife/colleges/kids of what you have learned. There is a good chance that by the time you finish your first lesson, you will have a better idea of the topic than you had before.

Is it coincidence that most of the best minds of the past century were also teachers and they were constantly involved with public speaking engagements, seminars, etc? I think not! Of course, most of them were related to the world of academia that also contributed to developing their intellect.

Although teaching is a way of learning, not everybody is good at teaching. This is another skill of its own.

I’ve got so many projects that it will take me a great deal of time to list them all. It is always exciting to start something new if you know what I mean. However, how do you find time to work on all of your projects and still enjoying plenty of other activities? This question has been occupying my thoughts for some time now but I think I pinned a solution.

So how do you find time? It is simple:

1. Make sure that you have clear goals! You may have pretty big goals. This is good! If they are pretty big, split them up to smaller ones. It is easier to work in smaller steps and it helps you keeping focus.
2. Dedicate specific day and time for your project. Make sure that you are not overdoing it. By overdoing a project either will get sick of it or you will loose interest. Also, overdoing something does not necessarily means that you are actually productive in any way. In fact, most of the time, you are not. Just find a day of the week in which you can work on a specific project and stick with it.
3. Rest well. If you book yourself to work on a particular project on Tuesday for example but you are unable to do it, don’t stress. Find time to rest and use your brain instead. The truth is that you can develop the entire project in your head. Once the model is ready, you can dump the whole thing on paper.

Finally, what you really need to answer yourself is whether spending more time on a project is actually worthed. If you think about it, the amount of time spent is totally irrelevant. On the other hand, the amount of focused/productive time spend on a project is quite important. The problem is that the more irrelevant time you spend on a project the further you go from your goal. The more focused time you put into a project the closer you get.

Multitasking or running several projects at once is all about good time management, cutting through the abstract work, resting well and having clear goals.

One of the beautiful things about virtualization is that we can pretty much stop writing software and start writing glues. We no longer need to care about whether software is cross-platformed. We can choose the platform for which we want to develop our products.

I guess all of this sounds too futuristic but I truly believe that one day we will download and install appliances the way we download and install software. Products such as VMWare, VirtualBox and QEMU will be treated no different than Java, .NET, Flash, Adobe AIR and other development platforms. Effectively, we will start thinking in terms of how many CPUs we can handle rather than how many processes although in reality virtual appliances are processes running in the host system. It will all merge and the permutations will become deep and complicated but at the same time this approach may allow us to build self-sustainable systems.

And this is what it is referred to as Software as an Appliance.

Via XKCD, this is what Information Security is all about.

Welcome to the real world!

Pure classic!

The one bit I love the most is where she says that it takes 2 hours to download an electronic version of a news paper. Well, some of us remember the days of analog modems.

From 1000 ideas one should definitely work. So although some say that stubbornness is the key to getting something good out of your work, I believe that it is mostly the combination of chance, timing and well planned execution. Keep in mind though that not all ideas click with people even when they are successfully executed.

My approach to this problem is very simple. I try to get out as many ideas as possible. I know that the majority of them will fail but some of them will work. This way I not only practice my creative thinking all the time but I also get a good exposure on quite diverse topics and problems.

So, do not waste time thinking whether your idea is any good. Just do it and see how it goes. You will see its real colors once you start executing it and you can always give up if it is too much for you.