Jetroid's Blog

Getting into your head

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 14:55:03 +0000

Today, whilst trying to concentrate on an online lesson, I caught myself distracted. I was thinking about someone that I had disagreed with yesterday; and I wasn’t focussing because of it.

I always have troubles with focussing. So much so, that whilst writing the few lines up to this one, I have already been distracted by scrolling on my phone, fiddling with my tweezers, and playing with a set of nail clippers. Perhaps I have some kind of undiagnosed problem, I don’t know.

Anyway, I have trouble focussing. If there’s something particular that is bothering me - some kind of lingering thought or doubt - then that can really throw me off and disrupt me.

In these circumstances, I find it useful to stop what I am doing and address the problem. That might be to send a quick message and complete a quick task, or to just pause and let the thought run it’s course, or to actively dismiss the thought.

Of those, dismissing the thought is probably the least disruptive but also the hardest to achieve. I’m not very good at it, but I think that it is something that could be improved by meditating; when I meditate - and thus am trying to blank my mind - I often find myself chasing, catching, and playing with stray thoughts.

Today’s thought - the one that I mentioned at the top of this post - was about somebody that I had disagreed with online. When I caught myself thinking about her, I realised that she was living rent free in my mind, and thought back to this post by my friend Pat.

It didn’t matter about who had the stronger argument; she was winning! She was taking my brain away from my own thought and self improvement because I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Once I realised that, it was easy to stop my brain from thinking about her, and I went on to complete my online lesson.

Twitter

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 14:36:22 +0000

I often hear people say things like “I’m glad that I’m not on Twitter”.

A lot of people see Twitter as just endless drama, political debate, trolling, and perhaps even memes too. I’ve certainly seen it used that way and it might even be the most dominant use cases.

It’s strange behaviour; people are letting them get upset by something they can’t change, and typing messages that don’t do anything other than make other people angry.

That’s not what my twitter timeline looks like; my timeline is filled with art, people working to improve themselves, start businesses, learning & educating. There are a few really wholesome niches that you exist on the fringes. Seek those, and you will see the value of Twitter.

Unfortunately, the more negative use cases are built into the platform; anger-fueled engagement is still engagement after all. When I looked at the #explore section whilst writing this yesterday, I saw outrage about things said by Twenty One Pilots, by Alan Sugar, and a whole host of other things, including, of course, something Trump said. I also saw various announcement about different people catching coronavirus.

There was just a whole lot of things there that will bring you down if you think about them too much. The utility of that information and social discussion to me is not useful; I can’t do anything about any of it, and it just makes me feel bad.

So yeah, I don’t care about any of those trending things. I’ll never go to #explore, and I installed a plugin to hide the “What’s Happening” box (You can do this in uBlock Origin, for example.) If you can’t install a plugin, you can also set your content preferences to a small country like Antigua & Barbuda, which usually has nothing much trending.

Mute Words

Next, if you choose to, you can mute specific keywords so that you never have to see them again. Pieter aggregated a list of words that you might like to mute. But you can also hide other annoying ‘suggested’ content too. I’m not sure if the latter still works, but I have most of those muted just in case.

Careful curation

After that, I’m very careful about who I follow. I only follow people if I find the tweets that they post valuable, or inspiring. For some, I like the content they post themselves, but they retweet a lot of things that I don’t care about. In these cases, I can simply turn off retweets for them using the drop-down on their profile.

Other people share a selection of content that I care about along with content that I don’t, and unfortunately I just have to unfollow these people.

A Metaphor

I treat my social media timeline a beautiful garden; in a garden, you have many beautiful plants trying to grow and flourish for you to appreciate. Some of your beautiful plants get some kind of mold that stunts them and makes them ugly, and you have to trim them back. Then you also have some ugly weeds and some invasive plants that manage to get in from your neighbours, and you have to be ruthless and vigilant in culling them before they overtake things and spoil the whole garden.

It’s kind of a weird metaphor, but that’s how I visualise my social media timelines.

Crazy People

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 20:03:50 +0000

I have a mild interest in missing persons, unexplained deaths, and mysterious phenomena, etc. I always have done; one of my favourite books as a kid was “The Complete Book of the Unexplained: A Thrilling Exploration of the Earth’s Most Baffling Mysteries”. These days I mostly get my ‘fix’ through YouTube channels like ‘Dark5’ and ‘Bedtime Stories’.

Often, clearly suspicious deaths or disappearances are written off with because the victim had mental issues of some kind. Even in cases where (with the story as presented) it seems impossible for the victim to have committed suicide given the cause of death, it sometimes gets ruled that way anyway. The same happens for disappearances where no body is found; often someone with depression is assumed to have committed suicide just because they went missing.

This really bothers me. I hate the stigma against mental health; if these people hadn’t talked about what they were going through, the cases might have been ruled in a different way. Their memory is sullied just because they had a problem and chose to try to address it publicly.

This scenario makes me think about myself. I periodically deal with depression, and in fact I am dealing with it right now. I wonder what people would think if I mysteriously went missing. Would my blog posts be used to make a case that I had went out intending to kill myself? How about my journal, or my chat messages?

It wouldn’t be an accurate portrayal of who I am and what I’m going through to boil down things down like that just because I experience depression. As things stand, if I disappeared today, it’d have been because something happened to me outside of my control. But no, the first conclusion that many people would jump to after finding out that I have had depression is that I had committed suicide. Authorities might not devote much effort into trying to find out what happened to me, and I would be remembered differently by my friends, family, and others.

Society views people with mental health issues as ‘Crazy People’, or ‘Sad People’, or ‘Angry People’. We think that they are violent, or dangerous, or that they are a danger to themselves. If a person with mental health issues breaks down, it ‘makes sense’, and we attribute it to their illness rather than looking at the specific circumstances which pushed them to it. If a depressed person commits disappears or commits suicide, that ‘makes sense’ too and we don’t try to look into the reasons why.

We should instead be viewing these ‘Crazy People’ as people that need our help, compassion, and understanding. Crazy or not, they are People after all.

Don't you like anything else?

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 21:52:19 +0000

A number of times over the past year, I have received emails, comments, or seen blog posts that praise me for my work. When I dig deeper, it usually turns out that they know me for one specific project.

It’s nice to receive the praise - very nice! - but it makes you feel a bit unappreciated for your other works. I long to be complimented about some minor project that I have all but forgotten about, or something like that. I’m more than just the one work!

I’d previously heard that some musicians don’t like playing their most famous songs. Being complimented on just the one project makes me sympathise with how an musician or artist may feel when they are known for a specific few hits or pieces.

I realise that I’m being completely ungrateful here, and that I should feel good about the fact that my works are appreciated at all, but I can’t help how I feel.

I actually like the piece of work that I get complimented on, unlike some of those musicians (and other artists in the same boat), so I guess there’s that. My instinct is to ‘double-down’ on my successes, but that isn’t really possible here (or at least, there’s no real benefit to doing so).

I should probably just keep working on my other things to try to get recognised for those too. :)

The Lens

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 21:28:58 +0000

There’s a blogger that I follow who often refers to something that a particular (very famous) musician did or said, or uses them as an example. The musician is clearly an inspiration (and perhaps an idol) for the blogger, and influences their thinking.

It can be quite jarring to me, because I never think about this musician; I never listen to their music. I never read their tweets. I never watch their videos. There’s no malice or anything, they’re just not a part of my life!

At first, I’d often find these references or examples to be unusual or strange, and I’d struggle to understand the significance of why they chose that person to reference. The blogger often refers to the musician in ways that are completely unrelated to music, which can throw me.

But then I realised; he blogger sees the world through a lens influenced by that musician; I don’t.

There are a myriad of different things that influence my thinking but that don’t influence yours; some you haven’t even heard of, others that you’re simply not interested in.

The interesting thing is how our influences change over time. Since I visited Asia, I often find myself relating new input (including films, books, and articles) and perhaps even new experiences to things that I have seen. It wasn’t possible for me to do that before I had travelled.

I think that this is one of the main benefits to learning - other than learning a new skill, anyway. Some ‘social’ topics like History, Religions, or Cultures have a low perceived value (and there might even be a stigma to learning them!), but I argue that the non-skill topics provide a peripheral value that sculpts the unique tapestry of your thought patterns. This serves to turn you into a more unique individual in the long term, with unique ideas that grow out of your unique experiences.

In the era of homogeneous brands dominating the world, we need your original expression now more than anything.

Bubble

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 22:27:18 +0000

In yesterday’s post, I talked about how I often occupy my mind by watching ‘low effort’ YouTube shows whilst I cook, or clean, or eat, or even try to get to sleep.

There are a lot of other ways that I have occupied my mind whilst doing day to day tasks; like listening to music whilst walking somewhere, or listening to music whilst working out or running, or even listening to a podcast whilst sitting on a bus, flight, or train.

I once had a friend tell me that he was disappointing with how many people listen to music whilst they wander around. We were sitting together on my university’s campus, and a majority of people that you could see were wearing headphones or earbuds.

I didn’t understand what his problem was at the time; it seemed fine to me. I felt like he was just buying into that trope of ‘our kids are turning into zombies because of mobile phones!’ …but I’m starting to understand what he meant.

Unless you start ignoring whatever it is that you are ‘listening to’, you’re not going notice the things going on around you. You’ve put yourself in this little bubble that not even your thoughts can penetrate.

I’m sure that there is value in letting my mind be on it’s own for once, without constantly trying to pump stimulation into it. Letting your mind be on it’s own with your thoughts is basically meditation.

And there are a ton of benefits of meditation. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that; you’re sick of hearing about it by now.

Whilst talking to Naval, Joe Rogan mentions that during a 20 minute wait for the doctor, he used his time the meditate. There’s an implication that he fills a lot of his ‘dead time’ with short bursts of meditation like that, too.

There isn’t any reason that you couldn’t apply that to doing chores, or whilst walking from place to place. In fact, I know there isn’t; people go on walks specifically to think about things, and to discover how they really feel.

I’m probably not making the best use of my time by occupying my mind in every little moment of down-time.

Something to think about.

Disposable Media

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 22:18:49 +0000

I realised recently that I do not enjoy one of webcomic that I’ve been habitually consuming for the better part of the last decade. The webcomic didn’t change or drop off in quality or anything, my interests just changed.

These days, I read the strip, say ‘meh’, and go on with my day. It’d be roughly equivalent for me not to read it.

Then I realised that this comic strip was a microcosm of a lot of media online, particularly YouTube. I frequently half-watch a lot of low effort content that people are pumping out daily for money. I just put something on whilst washing dishes, or whilst I’m eating, or even just to fall asleep listening to. I just put this stuff on to occupy my mind.

Meh!

It doesn’t really “matter” if I miss a big chunk of it whilst my concentration is elsewhere, because it doesn’t matter in the first place. If it mattered, it’d have more than a partial fragment of my attention.

I’m not watching/listening to it to enjoy it, or think about it for any longer than the duration that it’s playing; I’m watching it because it’s easy.

I suppose this kind of ‘disposable media’ is like junk food; it’s easy to consume, has an in-your-face ‘flavour’ that lacks subtlty and depth, but is low in nutrition. It doesn’t substitute for an actual meal (in this analogy, an actual meal would be a lovingly crafted film), it’s just something… ‘extra’… that you have that you could happily skip.

And this kind of media is skippable. As I said - it’s disposable media.

(NB: There are other people online using ‘disposable media’ to refer to media that is only relevant at the time of production, like topical discussions. I’m not using this term in that context.)

Nobody is having revelations from the kind of comic or YouTube videos that I’m talking about. I doubt it actually adds much to anybody’s lives at all. Perhaps with the notable exceptions of the creator and the advertisers.

(NB: I’m not saying there isn’t ‘enlightening’ content on YouTube or that there aren’t interesting webcomics - just that there is a lot of ‘low-effort’ content.)

So I don’t think that it matters if I enjoy that webcomic, or the plethora of pointless YouTube videos. That isn’t why I’m watching them.

Regrets

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 21:52:48 +0000

We all have regrets in life.

“I wish I hadn’t said that to him.”

“I could have studied harder in college.”

“I should have experimented more when I was younger.”

“I ought to have been more careful when I signed off on that.”

Consider these feelings.

Some of them will help you to make sense of the world, avoid negative behaviours in the future, or make more positive choices. If so, they were useful; take their lesson to heart and stop dwelling on them.

Other times, regrets simply hinder us. Regrets can become self-blame and fruitless introspection. They cause us to avoid taking risks. We hesitate because we’d prefer to avoid making the same bad decisions that we made in the past.

By dwelling on our mistakes, we’re raising our stress levels and making ourselves less likely to take a chance in the future.

Forgive yourself, and move forward. You might end up regretting it if you don’t.

Creating a dynamic summary in Excel

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 22:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, my girlfriend Ni sent me an Excel spreadsheet that she had received, and asked me to explain to her how it was made and how it works. She’s trying to learn more about Excel to help her automate routine tasks and be more efficient with her spreadsheets.

I’m not an expert at Excel - I often just write code to do calculations for me - but I thought I’d give it a go.

The main feature that she wanted to replicate from the document was a sheet with a dropdown box allowing the user to pick a month. The sheet acted like a ‘summary’ or ‘view’ page, pulling in data from other sheets for display. It pulled from specific sheets based on the selected month.

I’ve recorded a demonstration video of the spreadsheet that Ni received. For legal reasons, I have replaced the data from that spreadsheet with junk data.

I did some searching online and managed to figure out a solution on my own, without reverse engineering the spreadsheet that Ni has sent me. Because I was curious, I reverse engineered that spreadsheet too, which I’ll write some notes about at the end of this post.

You can download a demo of what I will be creating here.

Drop Down List

The Drop Down List is a key aspect of this spreadsheet.

It’s actually remarkably simple to implement. Spreadsheet Software have a feature called ‘Data Validation’, which you can use to create a list of values that a cell can take.

In Excel

Data Validation in Excel.

In Excel, you can find it by going to Data > Data Tools > Data Validation > Settings > Allow: (List), and then entering a list of allowable text, like this:

January,February,March,

If you’re inputting something that has a month and a year, Excel may try to automatically convert it from Text to a Date, which we don’t want. Either use a different text format that it won’t convert (eg 20-Jan rather than Jan-20), or explicitly set it to text (such as by typing ="Jan-20").

In LibreOffice

Data Validation in LibreOffice.

In LibreOffice, the same feature can be found under Data > Validity > Criteria > Allow: (List). The format is much the same, but you can write the values on multiple lines rather than seperating them with semi-colons.

January
February
March

For the purposes of this guide, make sure that they match the names of the sheets that you want to pull values from.

If you’re inputting something that has a month and a year, LibreOffice may try to automatically convert it from Text to a Date, which we don’t want. Either use a different text format that it won’t convert (eg 20-Jan rather than Jan-20), or explicitly set it to text (such as by typing ="Jan-20").

The Formula

The second thing to implement this feature is a simple formula.

In my case, I have the drop down list on Cell A2, and wanted to get data from Cell B5 from each sheet.

Therefore, we want to create a formula that uses the contents of cell A2 as the name of the sheet, and references cell B5 in every sheet. We can do this using the INDIRECT() and CELL() functions, and &, the string concatenation operator.

The formula looks like this:

=INDIRECT("'" & $A$2 & "'!" & CELL("address",B5))

The Formula in Excel.

INDIRECT() converts any entered text to a cell reference. For example, =INDIRECT("'Sheet1'!A1"), is equivalent to just having ='Sheet1'!A1.

CELL("address", <CELLREFERENCE>) converts a cell reference to a text form of it (aka it converts B5 into "B5"). I’m using this to allow us to AutoFill our formula; without it, we would write "B5" as text and it wouldn’t increment the index as we AutoFilled the formula into new cells.

The string concatenation operator (&) joins two pieces of text together. We use it to build up a cell reference (like 'January'!B5) by joining ' with the cell A2 (January), the text '!, and the address of cell B5 (B5). This cell reference comes out as text, which INDIRECT converts to a valid cell reference. Hopefully you can see us doing that in the formula!

…and you’re done!

What follows from here is just a short analysis of the spreadsheet that Ni sent me because I thought it was interesting.

The Wrong Way

When I first opened Ni’s spreadsheet, I was stumped because I couldn’t figure out how the cells were pulling in the data. When I clicked on any of the cells, there wasn’t a formula in the formula box at all. I’d never seen anything like that at all. What’s more, every sheet was ‘protected’, preventing me from editing and interfering.

Not one to be deterred, I used a Excel VBA script (that someone had shared online) to brute force the password. The script I found just unlocked the active sheet, but I modified it to return the password so that I could unlock the rest much quicker.

It turned out there were formulas in all of the cells, but that they were just hidden with formatting.

I was quite surprised and a little horrified by the formulas that I found. Initially, the whole document has seemed quite polished. It was nicely formatted, and there were even little textboxes everywhere that acted as tutorials on how to interpret the data, etc.

The actual formulas were not polished at all. They were overengineered and clunky, and it showed; when I tried to save the document, it took several seconds (on my SSD!). The document even crashed a few times as I edited the data, which I’m thinking might be something to do with the formulas (or maybe there’s something else in that document that LibreOffice didn’t like.

In short, the formula for one of the cells on the ‘summary’ sheet looks like this:

=IF($A$6="JANUARI",
    jan!A11!,
    IF($A$6="FEBRUARI",
        Feb!A11,
        IF($A$6="MARET",
            Mar!A11,
            IF($A$6="APRIL",
                Apr!A11,
                IF($A$6="MEI",
                    Mei!A11,
                    IF($A$6="JUNI",
                        Jun!A11,
                        IF($A$6="JULI",
                            Jul!A11,
                            EO12
                        )))))))

Formatting my own.

If you understand Excel Formulas enough to be able to interpret that, you’ll see that they ran out of space or something, and had to create a second hidden table all the way over at cell EO12.

Second Partial Table hidden at EO12.

The cells there contain formulas like this:

=IF($A$6="AGUSTUS",
    Agt!A11,
    IF($A$6="SEPTEMBER",
        Sep!A11,
        IF($A$6="OKTOBER",
            Okt!A11,
            IF($A$6="NOPEMBER",
                Nop!A11,
                Des!A11
            ))))

Formatting my own.

So putting that all together, they check if the contents of $A$6 is each specific month, and then reference a fixed cell on a fixed sheet.

Whilst that works, it’s quite a clumsy formula, and has flaws:

It’s time-consuming to change for formula. For example, if they wanted to create a version of the spreadsheet for the English language (rather than Indonesian), they have to redo all of the formulas in addition to renaming the sheets and updating the data validation text-box.
It’s hard to change the formula. For instance, if we want to change our referenced cell from A11 to B11, we have to change it in 12 places. The same problem occurs if we want to change where the month reference ($A$6) is.
It’s easy to make a mistake in the formula. For example, it would be have been very easy to accidentally type Sep!A12 rather than Sep!A11 and not notice. The formula would work for every case except September, so might go unnoticed for a long time.
When you have a lot of cells with long formulas like this, the spreadsheet becomes very large. It takes several seconds for me to save the document, and it crashed LibreOffice multiple times whilst I was editing data. I have never had LibreOffice crash before now.

The only advantage I can see for this kind of formula is that it is very easy to understand for a beginner.

The Problem With Publishing Daily

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 22:50:36 +0000

As an addendum to yesterday’s post, there’s one other problem I have with publishing something every day:

It’s much harder to go into depth on a topic.

Ordinarily, if I had something that I wanted to go into depth on, I’d spend a few days writing it.

But if I’m trying to publish every day, I can’t really justify doing that, because I won’t have anything to publish on the days when I’m writing it. Readers will just see this as me ‘not writing’, not knowing that I’m working on something that will take longer to create.

This either incentivises me to just focus on shallow topics, rather than doing an in-depth deep dive, or makes the (more valuable?) deep dive take longer to publish, because I’m distracted from it whilst I find something to publish for that day.

Obviously, this is ‘all in my mind’, because nobody is actually holding me over a fire. It’s just a conundrum that I’m facing with my writing.