Suite Sale

A case study of my latest web app

Lately, I've been in the mood to purge my place of possessions, so I built an online marketplace inspired by local yard sales for the residents of building I live in, where they can post items that they want to sell & then organize a time to meet in the lobby.

Noise Cancelling Headphones

Sony WH-1000XM4 Noise Cancelling Headphones

A bit of a late to the party life hack: blocking out the the sadistic sounds of the city (ex. lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and garbage trucks) makes living life worth while.

Alarm Clock Persistence

One handy little trick that I've used a few times to help myself get out of bed in the morning this month is to not turn off my alarm clock until after I've gotten up and fixed my bed.

Bonus alarm clock lifestyle hack: Considering the prevalence of main character syndrome today, it could be a fun idea to set up our alarm clocks to be what we'd want our theme song to be if our life were a show. What better way to start off a new episode of your life than with your theme song.

The Average Delusion

99% Invisible Podcast [22:20]: Todd Rose on how the world is designed for an average person and yet there is no such thing as an average person. "There's this idea that seems almost like a bumper sticker, but it has pretty deep scientific meaning, which is that there is literally no such thing as an average person, and yet we've build our whole society against this idea that there is and that we can reference ourselves against it. Ex, story about Norma, the average woman sculpted [29:51]

Education

Right now, it seems to me that the primary goal of a lot of education systems is to get individuals to achieve some sort of decent average across all subjects.

I wonder how it would look if schools were designed, not to achieve a semblance of sameness among students, but instead to figure out each of their individual strengths?

Urbanism

Apparently there are places that incorporate something called continuous sidewalks into their streets. The sidewalks that I've grown accustomed to tend to end where a road runs through. Continuous sidewalks reverse that, so that roads end where sidewalks are. Instead of a sidewalk lowering to the road's elevation, continuous sidewalks make roads raise to the elevation of the sidewalk and sidewalks maintain their distinct design from the road.

Hearing about this is the first time I internalized the concept of designing cities for people rather than cars.

Music Familiarity

I've noticed that sometimes, it takes me 2 or 3 times to get used to a song enough to finally really like it. I wonder if this could mean that I have a need to get past some level of familiarity before I can start enjoying a song. So for the songs that I have an immediate liking to, I wonder if that's because they remind me of a song I've already heard?

Comfort Zone Redefinition

New comfort zone definition: activities and behaviours that form a consistent routine. Being that I've identified comfort as one of the main values I hold, I've never been fully on board with the concept of "getting out of your comfort zone". I can rationalize the beneficial reasons for doing it, but I was never able to reconcile making myself uncomfortable just because people say it's a good thing to do.

For me, this new definition offers a nice mindset shift when it comes to the concept of getting out of your comfort zone:

Considering that novelty is another value I have, this mindset shift was a happy realization for me.

Sunk Cost Fallacy Solution

The sunk cost fallacy is where people demonstrate a greater tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made.

One clever strategy, that I learned about this month, for bypassing it is to ask yourself at any point in a project "how much would I invest to get into this project now?"

Non-Mainstream Sports

This month I was introduced to sport climbing via the Olympics. I think that it was perhaps the first time I experienced what I'm dubbing as the "sports spasm". It's that phenomenon we see in "sports people" where, as a result of some happening in a game, they feel compelled to jump out of their seat, raise a tightly clenched fist in mid-air, and shout something at the tv in either pure glee or disdain.

Of course, after experiencing what might have been my first sports spasm I fell into a mini-identity crisis. "Am I a sports person now?" "Have I been a sports person all along and all I needed to do was find my sports??" "What other non-mainstream sports are out there just waiting for me to spazz at them???"

As a result of my spiral, I consulted a list of every sport known to humankind and isolated the ones I felt a potential connection to. So far, I've discovered Olympic wrestling and rediscovered Ninja Warrior and I'm enlightened to say that I have exhibited many sports spasms.