guitar player's journal

[Slevin]

Yeah crap I’m gonna hit 500 posts and still not be fi.

If it makes you feel better my journal is 8.5 years old and I'm still not retired...

[7Wannabe5]

...and who knows WTF I'm doing.

[guitarplayer]

@slevin hah for you it is a matter of choice though. In truth however so is the case for me, maybe with a bit tighter margin.

Also, as to your reflecting of paying off the mortgage, I hesitated to write in your journal about myself because ‘everyone likes to talk about themselves’, but overall I follow the ‘small slow and simple problems’ approach so really looking forward to paying my loan off. Just waiting for the penalty period to fade next year. Our loan on the flat is though just £50,000 by now. But in terms of percentage of annual earnings we are probably less far apart as this would then be something like 80% of gross annual household income which is not that little.

Hehe @7w5 you know what you’re doing!

[dara]

Yeah crap I’m gonna hit 500 posts and still not be fi.

At least you can always blame it on others going off topic in your journal!

[guitarplayer]

@Seppia I appreciate the attitude.

Or do they just return as entitled consumers expecting a performing monkey up front.

Yes from my experience this is the majority, looking at the exchanges on fora to do with my Maths and Stats degree and the module I am doing now. That university where I did the degree is particularly targeting adult learners.

I will add to @Henry's post that 'necessity is the mother of invention'. If learning new tricks is necessary, it will happen so long there is capacity for it to happen. The trouble is when the capacity is not there as a result of atrophy.

Inevitably then, my mind makes me want to iterate this and put necessity in place of invention. '? is the mother of necessity'. But this is already sailing in wide waters, coincidentally this is largely what this forum is about in my view.

@mathiverse maybe we need to reach a critical mass of ereites looking for their freedom-to, then we will be the thread on teaching.

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Update:

London

We went to London for a long outing. DW had to sort out a new passport at her consulate which she needs to to a stint in Spain in Autumn this year. To give a hint on which consulate, I will say that I had some nice coffee whilst waiting.

London is something like 5 degrees warmer than Glasgow, which I know but to experience it is a different story. Otherwise, we had a good day, went to the National Gallery to check out Van Gogh's Sunflowers and plenty other pieces of art. Also went to the British Museum to check out Rosetta Stone and plenty other artifacts. Managed to get lots of free food. Lunch from a market research company that had leftover salads and mango chutney from a focus group. Supper from, I assume, an employee of one cafe who was giving away leftover vegan aubergine sandwiches and salads. We got a nice yogurt breakfast thing we never asked for, too. So bent our vegan inclination and had some of this because it looked tasty.

Cities are such reach environments nowadays. I like to sometimes focus on the money aspect just to get the kick out of 'how much I save', even though I am aware it does not work like this actually. That said, I would estimate we got something like £60 worth of free food whilst in London. Brought some limes and chutney, sandwiches and yogurt back with us.

Coding / job

Thinking what to do with job, coding etc. I am setting up a bit of an online presence. I really start from a nil level, so by 'setting up an online presence' I mean basic things like getting a good looking github profile, building a neat cv with Quarto and such. In the context of job, and the promotion I never got, I am looking at opportunities arising within my organisations, which there are many as it is a big organisation.

Otherwise, having undergone something of a reality check, I am reviewing professional life a bit. Sort of 'what can I actually offer' versus 'what do you actually need me to do'. Identifying where the flow is, and whether I can and want to partake in it, and to what extent. It is a good time for this, too. Trying to take an objective stance and discount wishful thinking, I am in a significantly different place now than just over a year ago.

Guitar

I have a lead cable to connect my guitar with a recording setup and experimented with testing out the setup and playing some music with overdrives, reverbs etc.

Health

I have been doing moon salutations in the evenings these past few weeks. My near injury aftermath after pushing it too hard trying to do a split last year is now gone thanks to those moon salutations. It will remain counterintuitive to me that in order to improve things, one has to engage with something that sort of 'hurts'. Then again, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And things are better now.

I also notice my routine of 201 burpees and recently also 5k run in a park got me fit to the point where I could walk around 25km in London with a day pack with no issue, not breaking a sweat even. In the past I could do it but I would break a sweat .

Stoics

Epictetus' Manual currently.

Maths and Stats

I am doing non-linear optimisation problems in Python now. It does not feel exactly great, I think I got too distracted with other stuff in life and lost sight of really basic things, like operations on vectors. So I am going to try to make it a point to revisit these basics (and historically I know when I write stuff like this here in the journal, I am more likely to do it).

[Ego]

Inevitably then, my mind makes me want to iterate this and put necessity in place of invention. '? is the mother of necessity'.

One interesting answer.
https://www.asomo.co/p/money-as-addiction

[ertyu]

My kitchen door exit (one of them) is to get a bursary to train as a Mathematics Teacher in a year and migrate to Outer Hebrides to get remote islands salary top up, swim in the ocean, play Scottish folk music and ponder the world.

There is a small army of A-Level maths teachers that teaches at various international schools around the globe. You meet many as an expat. Housing, transportation, and health insurance is typically provided for you + dependents. Different country every two years if you're child-free, or free education for your kids in whatever swanky high school you teach at if you've got children. Ability to travel during vacations. Not a bad coasting gig if you find the job itself agrees with you.

[guitarplayer]

Thanks @Ego, good stuff as always. It resulted in me ordering 'Debt, the first 5,000 years' from the library. I will get it tomorrow

Yes @ertyu I can imagine!

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Update:

Scottish Alps

We are going to explore the Scottish Alps this weekend.

Coding

I am busy with optimisation problems for a Maths course I am doing.

Job

Dear ERE council,

There are currently three opportunities I am looking at. The first one is heavy on using PowerBI and building dashboards, the second one is heavy on R with some python and building machine learning models and other models, the third one is to do with communicating stuff to do with coding and doing analysis - but not doing analysis itself. It looks easy and pays the same as the previous two. Which one to concentrate most on? I feel the second one I would have the biggest chance to excel at.

Otherwise, I have an understanding with my manager that inasmuch it is great working together, I am keeping an eye out for opportunities as the fortune was not on my side getting that step up I wrote about previously.

Guitar

The first recording is here, it only took 23 takes for the first track and a further 15 for the second. It is mostly an educational piece for me. I sent it across to my family though, let's see what they say. It's not my song. I will try to see how to best post stuff I record.

Health

I did a caffeine detox, think four of five days without coffee. I am back to coffee now.

[ertyu]

2. 3 will soon face a lot of competition as some of those in similar roles are replaced by generative ai. 1 sounds boring.

[Lemur]

Relate to the health section. That is a good run lol... I too can't quit caffeine. The brain just feels dull without it...But I do have a hard stop at 12pm so that sleep is not impacted.

First one can be lucrative. Dashboarding just seems like one of those things that most don't want to do so if you can get good at it, then you've a niche. Second one is another good long-term bet. Agree with ertyu on the third one.

[delay]

Thanks @Ego, good stuff as always. It resulted in me ordering 'Debt, the first 5,000 years' from the library. I will get it tomorrow

That was a fun read, full of interesting stories. Like how in medieval England, "So unimportant indeed was the coinage that sometimes Kings did not hesitate to call it all in for re-minting and re-issue and still commerce went on just the same". Commerce ran on credit and debt. Like it naturally develops in a group of people, even in a family.

There are currently three opportunities I am looking at. The first one is heavy on using PowerBI and building dashboards, the second one is heavy on R with some python and building machine learning models and other models, the third one is to do with communicating stuff to do with coding and doing analysis - but not doing analysis itself. It looks easy and pays the same as the previous two. Which one to concentrate most on? I feel the second one I would have the biggest chance to excel at.

To share my experience, PowerBI is Microsoft tooling. Easy to learn, visually impressive, but brittle with unpleasant bugs. Microsoft rewrites everything every few years, so PowerBI projects are short lived, as is the knowledge you build up. Python and R are harder to pick up, simpler visuals, but far more pleasant to run. They are never rewritten and the knowledge you build remains useful.

Thanks for your journal update and good luck with the job opportunities!

[guitarplayer]

Thanks all!

@ertyu, @Lemur - would be good to learn how to work with generative AI if it if out of scope to learn how to work on generative AI.

@Lemur, yes I can see how people are not keen on dashboards, I am working on some now and there are so many dependencies on both data end and user end, you being the hub. Coffee, yeah nothing much to add.

@delay, yes that is my thinking is that PowerBI is just so much a ticking box exercise. I learned DAX and M but this is just code snippets and generally going against the grain as the whole system is designed to tick boxes. Then there is the question of what people are attracted to PowerBI, what people are attracted to Python and R. And how transferable this is, you are right.

After the recent reality check, I might apply for them all, if not for anything else than for interviewing experience.

I also recall that I am almost four years into my maths and stats life since starting the BSc degree in 2020. Something to ponder is the next adventure to springboard to.

[zbigi]

To share my experience, PowerBI is Microsoft tooling. Easy to learn, visually impressive, but brittle with unpleasant bugs. Microsoft rewrites everything every few years, so PowerBI projects are short lived, as is the knowledge you build up. Python and R are harder to pick up, simpler visuals, but far more pleasant to run. They are never rewritten and the knowledge you build remains useful.

In my experience, there is depth to PowerBI, but not the pleasant kind of depth. It's harder than it looks because, as you said, you run into bugs, and have to come up with workarounds. Also, in my limited experience when dealing with PowerBI, the most difficult thing was getting it to connect to the company systems that it was supposed to be getting data from. In a well-organized company it shouldn't be that of a problem, but how many companies are actually well-organized.

@guitarplayer
Otherwise, it sounds like a boring job with a low skill ceiling and thus limited future prospects. Isn't there some data science/analysis component to it? Or will you literally be expected to be a "PowerBI monkey" for people who do analysis/data science?

Regarding the 3rd job. I'd consider it if the communication is to the stakeholders (management and the like). They would never make business decisions based on BS "analysis" generated with LLMs. If, on the other hand, the communication will go to general public (so actual quality is less important than perception of quality in the eyes of the layman - something LLMs excel at), then I agree with @ertyu.

EDIT: typos, my 11 yo laptop keyboard is slowly giving up the ghost.

[loutfard]

Definitely avoid the Power BI job. Bad for your stomach and mine just hearing about it! Bad for your hair too. If it doesn't go grey or fall out, it will make you pull your hair out!

The comms job... Managing Aspergers - which is what you would be doing in practice- can be interesting if that is what you are into. Like other said, it does make you more easily replacable.

Don't hesitate. Get the python/R/ai job. Chances are you might like or even love it!

[7Wannabe5]

I kind of like PowerBi. It's like the big box Playdough Fun Factory. I wouldn't want to make a 30 year career out of it, but it might be a good skill/tool with which to rent oneself out on smaller contracts.

[guitarplayer]

Thanks @zbigi, @loutfard, @7w5!

@zbigi, I think there rarely is a 'xyz monkey' job anymore. Even if a job boils down to it, there seems to me to always be an element of empty talking about more stuff which takes time and is a job in and of itself - that could and probably is already overtaken by LLMs. The communicating would be in theory mostly to technical people about heads up what's going on in the organisation, upskilling opportunities etc. But potentially also with your average person. I think it would in principle be a lot of herding cats which @loutfard alludes to.

Yeah I echo the troubles with linking the dashboards to data, this is a flying circus.

@loutfard, like mentioned I spent quite a deal of time learning DAX and M to tweak some of the dashboards I deal with. But actually there's nothing inherent to do with these two, if find myself flowing through work looking at code. So in this sense that job you recommend would fill this, and more. Also, it is to do with optimisation which we ereites like very much in some shape or form, either in the strict sense or systemically

@7w5, agree and there are many options to plug into that. This is like returning to cave full on. Insofar people who work with R of Python (I can say more for R) tend to be either random people or a rather particular demographic which I like, people who work with PowerBI tend to be either random people or very corporate folk. That said, I think @frugalchicos once mentioned working a lot with PowerBI. One thing for sure, is that R and Python are open source and this makes things much different in terms of wider transferability. For example, pulling a jacob and enrolling into a PhD in the US to some other country where I otherwise couldn't have emigrated

[guitarplayer]

2024 update 13/52

Dangerous ideas

I am four chapters in reading Greager's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". Reading anthropologists can be a dangerous exercise for me, can get too interesting. He's a good writer, some good frameworks in there.

I am not sure I will manage to read the 'Bullshit jobs' and still hold onto my job! But will attempt I think.

I also see he'd written a book 'The Dawn of Everything' - anyone read this?

Music

I am happy playing music with my multi-effect and recording this. Cakewalk is a DAW I am using, has got a built in metronome so I am training my foot too. These are very basic things for anyone having something to do with music. Gives me joy.

I want to learn to sing better, hunting for a microphone. When I have a microphone I can plug it into my multi-effect and use Sennheiser headphones as a monitor to listen to my singing from the outside (of my skull). I aim is to get to this feedback loop, then self-correction will kick in quicker I hope, will also be able to record.

I know Shure SM58 is a good mic on the cheap, new one is £100. I would prefer to get one for free or a cheap second hand, so am on the lookout.

Health

I was talking to my potential future boss of a boss. They were impressed with one data point in my GitHub profile which is that I do 201 burpees everyday. So we chatted more about it and long story short, now I experiment with adding a pull up in between the burpees. So the routine is

- when I do burpees, I do them with no break and
-- there are 16 sets of 12 reps (and one short set of 9 reps) where
--- each set of 12 reps is divided into 4 sets of 3 reps where
---- the sets differ in that my palms point (1) backward, (2) outward, (3) forward, (4) inward and
---- in each set of 3, I project my feet (1) backward, (2) back to the left, (3) back to the right
- in addition, every 30 burpees, instead of a jump I do a pull-up.

I tried adding a pull up on Tuesday and Wednesday but try not to overdo it so am not doing it now and see how it goes.

Otherwise, I am still doing moon salutations in the evenings. If one cycle is two sets (left-to-right and right-to-left) then
- when I go out in the evening to collect free food walking, running or cycling, I do three cycles of moon salutations
- when I don't go out in the evening to collect free food walking, running or cycling, I do five cycles of moon salutations

Coffee

After my coffee detox some week and a bit ago, I am now down to one coffee a day.

Hike and outdoors

Hike in the remote hills of Scottish West Coast last weekend was a blast. I am thinking or returning to Loch Lomond this weekend, running there on Monday, it is meant to be sunny. From my place to the shore of Loch Lomond there is a cycling path all along and the distance is just over 20 miles / 35 km I think. My idea would be to run there and catch a train back. The trains are every 30 min and cost £6.5, I can fork that much for the trip back.

DW and I neglected going outdoors together for quality time the last few months.

Raised bed and tools and bikes

I got in touch with a local charity and applied for adopting a raised bed in a 'croft' they had set up on derelict ground next to the park where I run everyday. I will hear in the next week.

The same charity organises a tool library where standard membership is £30 / year. After over a year of living in Glasgow and about half a year in our (and bank's until next year) flat, I am going to subscribe to this as it still seems like the best way to get tools on demand. Lifestyle inflation? No, I think investment.

There is a community bike shop around here, ran past it finally recently. On my incubator list whether to get engaged with this.

Job

I have been talking recently about sorrow of not getting promotion and looking for different opportunities. Now I am in touch with the head of department dealing with that job I mentioned earlier that is done in R or Python. They are trying to get me more money on a temporary basis arguing that I will be doing more complex tasks. I think even if that extra money does not come through, I will still try to move there for experience of building prediction models and maybe machine learning models. There is all the hype about Machine learning now, but when I read about it, this is often to do with principal component analysis for dimension reduction and clustering in some way, like k-means. Then applying the outcomes to a new set. I have done both for my MA thesis in Psychology over a decade back.

I should try to learn how to sell my skills. It is hard when things look real obvious to try to explain them excitedly to someone. It is a marketable skill these days to see it as obvious to be excited about things one is unable to explain - I think this is good for job interviews.

Studying / Maths

I am deciding what case study to conclude studying my applied computational mathematics module with. I can choose between

- Integer programming

Has many applications in management science and related areas, for example planning the best order in which to visit a number of locations, or scheduling the use of resources. I think this could be useful for that job I might take on

- Signal analysis and the fast Fourier transform

This case study considers the fast Fourier transform, which is a powerful and widely used method for the analysis of discrete signals, such as digital music. The fast Fourier transform is related to Fourier series which you will have seen in earlier studies for the analysis of continuous signals. I think this could be theoretically interesting as I studied sound engineering once

- Simulations of the Ising model

This case study considers the Ising model, which is widely used in theoretical physics to study situations in which some macroscopic behaviour results from interacting microscopic events. I think this has been mentioned on the forum. Also thinking micro / macro economics.

Let me know if you have any good ideas to feed into choosing between these!

DW has sorted out a study plan for her. In a few months she will wrap up two courses she is doing now, then have a break to February 2025 when she will learn about PEN testing. Then from October 2025 to Sep 2026 she wants to do the last two courses and get a BSc in Cybersecurity.
- I have a feeling that notwithstanding ERE, DW is going to stick to this job. She is much less difficult a person (agreeableness) than I am and gets a lot from this work as well. It is more likely I will take times off work to do something else.

Citizenship(s) / International

After our trip to London a while back, DW received her renewed passport. HR people form DW's company are sorting out visa to go to Madrid. DW has learned that some people in her roles but in a different department go to NY or thereabout for 3 months. I see an avenue for DW to make her way to the US East Coast with this company, especially if she get the above mentioned Cybersecurity credential, will have 3-4 years experience doing what she is doing and still enjoys / wants to do it.

But I wouldn't mind moving to Spain either

Separately, next week the plan is to go to get certificates of citizenship of where we are at now, next will come passports.

[delay]

I am four chapters in reading Greager's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". Reading anthropologists can be a dangerous exercise for me, can get too interesting. He's a good writer, some good frameworks in there.

I am not sure I will manage to read the 'Bullshit jobs' and still hold onto my job! But will attempt I think.

I also see he'd written a book 'The Dawn of Everything' - anyone read this?

Thanks for your journal update! "Bullshit jobs" explains functions people have. For example, if you are a manager, you want to manage as many people as possible. So you hire people to browse social media all day. You'd rather not have them mess up real things. Knowing this makes you a better, not a worse, employee. I no longer get upset when I see people browse Instagram all day, because i know that's what they get paid for. How would knowing that endanger your job?

Haven't read the "Dawn of Everything".

I tried adding a pull up on Tuesday and Wednesday but try not to overdo it so am not doing it now and see how it goes.

I'm training to get to my first pull up So far I can start half way, raise my chin above the bar, and lower myself slowly. Surprisingly hard!

[guitarplayer]

Hmm, @delay so maybe Bullshit jobs goes along the lines of ribbonfarm. I think it could endanger my job in that I would get inclined to ditch it. I have some currently latent views that are along the lines of @7w5 approach to jobs and they could resurface in the ‘epigenetic environment’ of ideas from the book.

For example, when I got my first corporate job in Poland at about $880 / month which was a money stream I had never seen before, it took me only six months to save up some money, quit and go to travel around Asia for 3 months and then go volunteer in Scotland for a year in a ‘PeaceCorps’ style.

Re pull-ups, I was not always fit (and in addition had many bad habits in my early twenties). Particularly for the pull ups, I couldn’t do a single one until when I had a free gym as an exchange student in Ankara, Turkey. I would go there and about 4 days a week do inverted pull ups only - what you describe with lowering down. Would do this with a chair and standing to be all the way up having chin above the bar, then lower down x reps with y seconds breaks in z series. I was in Ankara for about 4.5 months I think and leaving I could do maybe 2-3 pull-ups.

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From the "Debt: the first 5,000 years" so far I take away the distinction the author makes between 'hierarchy', 'exchange' and 'communism' governing social life and how in this day and age 'exchange' is inflated against the other two. The terms are potentially contentious, same as in some other frameworks such as 'geeks mops and sociopaths'. I think Greaber's framework is a good shorthand for looking at social life where 'hierarchy' maps onto blue or traditional society, or relationship of imbalance of power such as children and parents. 'Exchange' maps onto orange or mercantile society, society of strangers that are bound by debt. 'Communism' maps onto green or society of equals, such as between partners in a relationship (ideally), or in tribes (maybe also ere2 tribe). pros and cons to all, and to see where is the place of each of them and how to switch between them is the system thinking level. Those examples above, these are archetypes but in fact you would have all three modes in every social situation.

This way of thinking is helpful enough to hold the distinction I think (using whatever vernacular). I mean, I could go on and attempt to explain everything with economics, and I have heard some people aiming to do it with with some success. But I think it is more mentally expensive to have one framework and a very complex model than a few frameworks and much simpler models.

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I am excited waiting for an answer to my request for a free 16 kg kettlebell someone in town is giving away! That would be fun to have it!!

[zbigi]

Thanks for your journal update! "Bullshit jobs" explains functions people have. For example, if you are a manager, you want to manage as many people as possible. So you hire people to browse social media all day. You'd rather not have them mess up real things. Knowing this makes you a better, not a worse, employee. I no longer get upset when I see people browse Instagram all day, because i know that's what they get paid for. How would knowing that endanger your job?

The worst kind of bullshit jobs are in places which are heavily regulated. The regulations madate some work to be done, which in reality often does not make sense or cannot be done well - but has to be done anyway. I once worked as a part of a 5-person 4-month project (so, considerable amount of mandays went into this excercise) whose purpuse was auditing an implementation and rollout of a large system bought by Polish fiscal administration. The system was bought with EU's money, so EU laws demanded the post-mortem audit. We've done the audit in good faith and rather honestly, pointing out the many flaws of the system (it was so bad that many users preferred to send each other Excel files, instead of entering data into the system). However, at the end, our CEO (we were a small IT consulting company) went into a room with a high government official who was paying for the audit, and came out with largely modified conclusions of it - the ones they were willing to pay for (because, if we said the truth, they'd probably refuse to pay and we'd have to take them to court). Of course, it's those fake conclusions that made it into the final audit report, largely obliterating our work - which was probably as close to pure bullshit work as I ever was. The system where the auditee is paying for the audit is obviously going to lead to a ton of bullshit work - but those were the regulations, and they had to be followed.

EDIT: usual grammar snafu.