Don’t know how happened but now I prefer to wake up early and in general to synchronize my active time with the bright daylight time. I definitely get better sleep at night when it’s dark and quiet. And then I feel fresher and more focused when it’s bright and sunny outside. It’s not bright and sunny during the winter but it’s still better. Moreover when I wake up early enough I don’t have to rush for work and my entire day is much less stressful. I do my breakfast, quickly scan the news headlines, go through the bathroom and dress up at a what I’d consider fairly relaxed speed. By the way most of the year I commute to work on a bicycle. This is not only far less stressful than driving but also saves me some time cause I have to go less often to the gym. Actually my situation is a little bit more complicated cause I work in shifts. I’m also on-call some of the nights. And I do my workouts in home without going to the gym… but you get the idea

I think that one of the main reasons the early rising has so positive effect on me is that it gives me enough time to tune up to the coming day and to calibrate my internal clock as well. You know how time flies when we’re busy, but really drags when we’re waiting? By having some free and calm time in the morning, as opposed to rushing through the door ’cause you are late for work, makes a difference to your perception of time for the whole day.

I really find it useful to step back and just look through the window for few minutes every now and then, just to slow down my time perception. It has the added benefit of relaxing my eyes and gives me some rest in general. And if you think that’s too wasteful - think about the time lost in inefficient or ineffective work, useless conversations, procrastination…

In order not to return to my sleep-till-late habit I use alarm even on the days I don’t need to wake up early. On these days I put it a little bit later to allow for 08:30-09:00 hours of sleep. It serves two purposes: on one hand I don’t oversleep and on the other hand if I wake up earlier I don’t have to get out of the bed because it looks like it’s late. I could just lounge till the alarm goes off.

P.S.: There’s a very interesting wikipedia article on the role of melatonin in humans.

We’ve been to the marvellous Spain. Three weeks was enough time to completely forget my “ordinary” life and all the incomplete things fighting for my attention. While in Spain I’ve deliberately chosen to stay away from computers and then when we returned I still kept away from computers for a while driven by the inertia. I mean Internet connected PCs - you can’t easily avoid computers cause they are everywhere these days - in the camera, in the GPS, in the car, in the phone…

We travelled around Andalusia and some of Madrid and Valencia regions. We’ve been to Valencia, Mojacar, Granada, Tarifa, Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, Segovia, Avila, Toledo to name few. Overall we traveled about 4000 kilometres. It sounds like great distance but that’s only 10% of the Earth’s circumference. And still it’s quite a lot for three weeks

Spain is a big and diverse country. It meant lots of broken stereotypes for me. It’s organized into several autonomous communities and some of them even have their own local languages. For example at the Valencia’s airport there were signs in English, Castellano and Valenciano. Different landscapes, different cultures… We’ve seen wild flamingos, deer, wild boars, great sand dunes, countless beautiful beaches, white villages, castles, the big and modern Madrid. And I can’t find words to describe how delicious the food was.

From the local news - the 6th annual OpenFest conference - was held on 1st and 2nd of November. I liked only three of the lectures: “Wordpress.com - 40 million pages a day” by Nikolay Bachiyski, “28 Months Scalability” by Slavi Nikolov and “Free Hardware” by Radoslav Kolev. In my opinion the main problem was the weak presentational skills of the other lecturers. I know it’s easy to sit aside and criticise, so I’d be better take part and make a presentation for the next year’s OpenFest.

We used the opportunity to exchange PGP keys on the key signing party kindly organised by Peter Pentchev. There was a pleasant “unofficial after-party” as well, so overall I’d call this OpenFest a success.

At work I’m currently having fun with things like DRBD, Hearbeat, OpenVZ… My impressions from DRBD so far are that it’s a very complete product. Decent documentation, predictable behaviour. I wonder whether it has something to do with it’s commercial backing? OpenVZ looks quite complete as well.

I started to use my Facebook account a little bit more because some of my friends use it and it’s rather convenient way to show your pictures And Niki invited people to his birthday party via Facebook. Niiice party

I spend some time learning the Kohana framework + jquery + CSS. I don’t use it for something specific at the moment - just trying to figure out what is it like to create websites with modern tools like these. Most of the time I’m quite busy with system administration and I started to feel too far behind the web technologies So far it looks very powerful - nothing to do with the way things were done 5-6 years ago. I’ve tried to make a collapsed tree (ul/li) in which branches are dynamically populated on expansion by ajax - it fit in less than 10 lines of Kohana/Jquery. And it work’s on each browser I’ve tried so far. Impressive!

И те така те.

Maybe I’ll write in more details on the aforementioned topics. Or maybe won’t - only time will tell :-P. If you happen to know Bulgarian you can read more about our journey through Spain at Antonia’s blog:

• Испания, началото
• Испания, край морето
• ‘спански снимки
• Испания, дни 3 и 4, дивите плажове

By the way I’m looking for a book called Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management by Edwin Bliss but I’m left with the impression that this book is out of print. Any ideas where to find it? Especially if there’s PDF or other open format version because I hate to wait for the dead-tree books to arrive. Moreover they are bulky and inconvenient to carry around.

Not anymore, thanks to the people at Percona for their microslow patch and Google for the UserTableMonitoring patch.

Latest version of the patches can be found here but at the time of this writing they are against MySQL 5.0.62 and the current MySQL version is 5.0.67. So I tweaked the patches to apply cleanly to MySQL 5.0.67 and placed them for download: microslow, userstats, microslow+userstats.

We are proud owners of a Canon Powershot A95 compact digital camera for about 3 years and are generally very satisfied with it. Some of the main advantages of the compact digital cameras include:

• Lightweight - A95 is not the lightest one at about 330 g but still only a half of the 2005’s lightest DSLRs.
• Compact - you can carry it in your pocket.
• Automatic shooting modes and various scene modes for point-and-shoot simplicity.
• Live preview on a tilt LCD - none of the 2005’s DSLRs provided live preview and even though the current models do provide live preview it’s not nearly as useful as A95’s is.
• Much cheaper than DSLR.

In November 2007 we were on a business trip to the USA and a friend of ours asked us if we could buy a Nikon 40D for her. You know - electronics are much cheaper in the US than in Europe. So we bought it and used it for few weeks while we were staying in Boston. It turned out DSLRs got cheaper, lighter and even my wife, who don’t want to know too much technical details about photography and prefers point-and-click interfaces, liked it. And the main selling points for us were:

• Excellent low light/high ISO performance. This one is quite annoying with A95 and we have lots of blurry and noisy low light pictures.
• No shutter lag. It’s instant. No more “oh, could you please stand still one more second please” or shots that include only the cat’s tail.

There are more SLR advantages that come as a bonus to the two above:

• High degree of manual control.
• Wide range of interchangeable lenses. Some are very expensive though.
• Lenses are often high quality and produce images that are sharp and have a wide dynamic range.
• Precise focus.
• Higher frame rate.
• More control over depth of field.

And some of the biggest disadvantages that were there in 2005 have improved significantly. For example Canon EOS 450D, aka Digital Rebel XSi, weights only 475 g (body only). A DSLR with comparable specifications weighted at least 700 g back in 2005.

So we decided to buy a Canon EOS 450D aka Digital Rebel XSi. It’s the latest incarnation of the Canon’s Digital Rebel line and some of the more notable improvements in comparison to 400D are:

• Larger 3.0″ LCD monitor.
• Live View.
• Spot metering
• Improved auto-focus.
• 3.5 fps continuous shooting.
• Larger viewfinder.
• Display of the ISO sensitivity on the viewfinder status line.

We are waiting for our shiny new Digital Rebel to arrive from the US. Without any lenses so far because we are going to test first what kind of lenses will suit us best. Thanks to my brother Dave who has a rather extensive collection of Canon compatible lenses and is willing to borrow us some of them for test ride.

I’m 185 cm tall and up to my twentieth year I’ve never weighed more than 86 kg. Then in the last six months of my compulsory military service, which were very boring, I started to gain weight. My unit was carrying out a sentry service and there weren’t much things to do except taking charge of the posts or resting. After my discharge from the army I went up by another 2-3 kg. That’s when I decided I should take countermeasures. I restricted my food intake and also bought myself a bicycle. I was thinking about using it for transportation for some time anyway. This turned out to be enough and I was again at 86 kg in just few months. I enjoyed my bike through the summer and part of the autumn but when the temperatures fell bellow zero grades centigrade I left it at home.

There’s little room for outdoor physical activity in the big city during the winter and there are a lot of holidays as well. Quite often the days from 24 Dec to 1 Jan are non-working and we just stay at home and eat these delicious dishes prepared around the Christmas and New Year celebrations. That’s how I woke up at 103 kg on the 1st of January 2003. It was time for more drastic measures.

At first I severely restricted my food intake. I didn’t change what I was eating at all - just the quantities. I replaced the big pizza with a small one, 3 slices of bread with 1 slice and so on. Strangely (at least it was strange for me back then) these measures almost didn’t help so I included some physical activities. Mostly cardio like jogging, biking and only occasional push-ups or pull-ups… With a lot of effort I managed to go down to about 91 kg but the mirror wasn’t happy. Having the knowledge I acquired since then I think that’s because I lost too much muscle mass together with the fat by not eating enough and doing mainly cardio exercises. And the worst thing - after the summer was gone and I lifted the food restriction and abandoned exercises I regained my weight up to 100 kg in just few months.

At the beginning of 2006 as I was at my 99 kg mark again I finally realized that I don’t really know what I’m doing. It was about time to sit and do some serious research about how does the human metabolism work. I had spent years studying computer systems and at the same time I knew very little about how does my body work. Okay, perhaps nobody knows exactly all the aspects of how does the human body work. It’s a stunningly complex system and there’s a lot of controversy about what’s good for your health and what’s not. But anyway I had to look at the available knowledge and try to take some educated decisions about what to do next.

After about a month of research I decided to stick with Low Carb, High Fat diet (LCHF) and Resistance Training. This turned out to be an excellent choice so far. Two years and a half have passed - I eat mostly LCHF, most of the time I don’t watch my calories, unfortunately I don’t exercise very regularly - and I weigh 87 kg and my body fat is about 15% on average. I got a cholesterol profile about a year ago and the results were excellent. So I highly recommend this way of eating and training to everyone.

In later posts I’ll get into more details, and show you what I did to lose weight and what were the exact results.

The fact that I have 10 years of experience working as a (unix) systems and network administrator is very handy when it comes to installing, configuring and troubleshooting the software I use on my VPS. Unfortunately it doesn’t help that much with the selections process so I had to sit down and filter the myriad of VPS providers out there.

I dug through blogs & forums, asked friends. Web Hosting Talk forums were particularly useful. Finally I have chosen Future Hosting. It turned out to be a good choice indeed. I’m with them for almost a year already and there weren’t any major issues. I asked for PTR RRs (that’s reverse resolving from IP to hostname) and their support staff quickly added these for me.

However good a hosting provider is you must keep a backup of your own. I was rather passively looking for second VPS provider for some time. One day I saw (can’t remember where) a Comfy Host’s ad. It looked suspiciously cheap at $10/mo to me and I haven’t heard anything about them before. But this was supposed to be a backup VPS so I decided to give it a try. I placed my order with Comfy Host using my PayPal account and started waiting for a welcome email. One day later I received an email saying that due to the surplus of orders my VPS setup will be delayed a little bit. Ok it happens. Few days later I had to submit a support ticket to ask what’s going on with my account. After some more back and forth support tickets I got my VPS up and running.

I used it for three months and it was pretty stable. I used it only for my automated daily backup and monitored it with nagios. Then one day suddenly the monitoring lost connection with the VPS. Since it is a backup server and I was busy with other things I let it stay this way for a week. Finally I logged into the control panel and guess what… I was paying on a monthly basis after receiving an invoice from Comfy Host. Last month I didn’t receive an invoice. And I couldn’t pay either because according to the control panel I didn’t owe money despite being late with the payment. Hm… I submitted a ticket to ask why is that. I had to wait several days for a reply that read:

“Sorry about the late reply. The ticket seems to have been overlooked without a response. We received no payment and therefore your VPS was shut off.”

Enough. I went looking for another backup VPS. I remembered that Leo from Zen Habits once said he is satisfied with his current provider - namely slicehost.com. So I’m with slicehost.com as my backup VPS for about a month now. So far so good.

So the biggest journey we are planning for this year is three weeks in Spain. We still haven’t decided whether it will be a pure cultural and sightseeing tour of the big cities or maybe smaller cities plus rural Spain plus south coast… Probably something in between.

One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to practice it. And the best opportunity for this is while you are visiting a country in which the language in question is spoken. I’ve considered the idea of learning at least some basic Greek or other language and to practice it during our vacations. But eventually I was abandoning it every time because it was important to improve my English first. Now when I feel that my English is on a quite acceptable level* it’s about time to try another language. Yep, Spanish. My aims aren’t too high though. I’m not even considering proper grammar for now. My immediate intentions are to learn 200 words till 15 September and to be able to get the general (be it very broad) meaning from Spanish news, maps, signs, restaurant menus.

Some facts about Spanish that I find particularly interesting:

• Everything has gender in Spanish. Some of the gender information is kept even in plural.
• There are two different “to be” verbs: ser y estar. Although they can often be translated the same way, ser and estar are distinct verbs with distinct meanings and are seldom synonymous.
• Spanish verb conjugation is much trickier than that of English verb conjugation because endings change for virtually each pronoun for each tense.

As a matter of fact Bulgarian verb conjugation is quite complex as well. But it’s my native language so I didn’t have any particular difficulties learning it

—
*Although I don’t have the slightest idea where to put commas in English texts. Except probably in non-defining clauses.

It’s clear that people are unique. The way we think, our paradigms about the world we live in, our environment, the temperament, the work we do for living - it’s all different. There’s no single method for planning and action management that will work best for everyone. The methods that I’m going to describe are so far the best ones for me and my situation. For example I work as a System and Network Administrator - that means that 90% of my job is being done while sitting in front of the computer terminal. I don’t meet with clients, only occasionally communicate with business partners and do weekly meetings with colleagues. Another aspect of my job is that a large part of the tasks I have to do are not planned - these are software security upgrades, overloaded systems, hardware failures, power or connectivity outages and so on. Of course I have some limited control - if I put more effort in the design of the systems I work with, or regularly audit and use multiple layers of security measures then some part of the unplanned work will move to the planned & preventive work quadrant. But in general there’s a lot of ad hoc work triggered by external forces in my job.

I’m sure most of us have more work to do than it is possible to be done. At least within sensible time frame and having limited resources. If I record every single idea I’d like to see done and never ever throw away anything it’d be an ever growing list of wishes. But the worse thing is that many of these ideas are just “stuff”. Just raw thoughts that are yet to go through planning stage before they become something doable. That’s the thing that makes you feel overwhelmed more than anything else. You don’t know from where to start because you know you can’t do all these things and more are on the way. It all seems hopeless and in the end it is counterproductive. I know people who avoid planning and project management in general because of these precise reasons.

Is your world taken over by “stuff” as you are running from one crisis to another trying to fix things and hoping that you haven’t forgot something?

Enters GTD. One of the main strengths of GTD system (at least for me) is that if you stick to it you are forced to convert “thoughts” or “wishes” or “stuff” into actionable tasks or so called “next actions”. One of the major problems I had with more complex projects was that I was hesitant to start them because of their complexity and the constant flow of distractions, which is typical for my job. By having all of my work chewed down to specific next steps, contexts, estimated times, energy levels and so on it’s much easier for me to just pick some work and do it. It makes all the difference to have “Outline the requirements for the new server”, “Get a price quotation” etc. in your task list instead of the fat “Upgrade 10 servers” task. I often have only small blocks of time like 30 minutes or an hour and prior to implementing GTD these small blocks of time were often used or rather misused in a suboptimal way. You see - “Upgrade 10 servers” isn’t something that could be done in 30 minutes and hence I was delaying it too much while waiting for that never coming large block of time. On the other hand “Get a price quotation” definitely fits in the 30 minutes block.

Another important thing is that I have a trusted system and I know nothing would just disappear or get delayed because it’s hidden in the ever growing pile of “stuff”. Now when a new task enters my perimeter if it’s not really really very urgent I try not to interrupt my current activity. I just write it down and continue working. By having this trusted system to keep my “stuff” for later processing I don’t have to think about it (and get distracted) until its time comes. Then when I’m done with the task at hand I check the accumulated new “stuff” and pre-process it. If it’s something I could do in less than 3 minutes and there are no other tasks that are more urgent I do it right away. Otherwise I write it down as one or more specific “next actions” with appropriate priorities. Sometimes if this is going to end up as a more complex project I enter it as “P&O: Project name” - i.e. I create task in which to plan and organize the project.

For a very long time I had some problems with setting right priorities until I finally realized that I should evaluate importance and urgency separately and only then merge these two parameters in a single priority parameter. I wrote about urgency vs importance some time ago.

Another aspect I like about GTD is the additional criteria used to choose what task to do next. When I enter a new task into the system I set various properties which I use later for filtering and sorting. Some of these criteria are priority (combined importance and urgency), context, ETA, energy, start and due dates. For examle sometimes I feel tired and have only 20 minutes left till the end of the work day but since I have energy and time criteria in my system I may choose a task that has highest priority and still fits within my current energy level and time available. Otherwise I’d probably just stare for few minutes at some high priority, high energy task that requires too much time and would eventually go procrastinte.

If you have difficulties broking the “stuff” down to a list of specific next actions try this: I find it extremely helpful to start thinking backwards - to begin with the end in mind. In the “Upgrade 10 servers” example the last task would be “Decommission the old servers”. But then I must already have copied the data to the new server so lets “Copy data from old server #1 to new server #1″. Obviously I have to have a new server in order to do that. But I can’t just call the supplier and say “Please send me 10 new servers”. I should “Decide on specifications” of these new servers and “Get price quotation” first. I found it important to try and further break down tasks which look like they would take more than two hours. I mean if some task is going to take you two hours there’s a good chance it is still “stuffy”, it’s probably not really well thought and is more of a project than specific action.

I usually start my day by reading my email, notes left by colleagues, tickets, bugs and checking other communications channels, from which something important may come. I check my calendar as well. I try to do all of this as quickly as possible and I usually finish in about 45 minutes. If there’s something that’s going to take more than 3 minutes I flag it and enter it in my task inbox. If it can be done very fast I’ll do it on the spot. When I’m done with this collecting phase I go over my task inbox and process what’s there by sticking priority, context, time etc. to the tasks and move them into the pile with other already pre-processed tasks. Or if it’s something that has to be done on a specific date I put it in my calendar. Finally I sort the big pile that’s full with next actions and choose some to be done today. Knowing that there are many unplanned tasks to come during the workday I choose tasks with summary ETA equaling about 4 hours. I try to pick 1 to 3 bigger tasks and then some smaller ones to be done in a batch.

There’s one very important aspect of the GTD system that shouldn’t be overlooked no matter how tempting it might look - that’s the weekly review. It’s purpose is to make sure all outstanding actions, projects and ‘waiting for’ items are reviewed, and that everything is up to date. If you don’t do your weekly review regularly the system will start to fall apart and more importantly - your trust in it will decrease, you’ll feel more stressed and will tend to use it less… and so on in a downward spiral. Please, if you decide to evaluate GTD do your best not to skip the weekly review.

GTD is the best tactical action management system I know to date. You will probably still have difficulties choosing the “real” importance of actions without good strategic system. I mean without clearly identified goals and long term plans how and to what would you align your short term projects and tasks? But at least you are moving and stress starts to lessen it’s grip. This system will help you to get on track and will allow for some thinking time in which to think out your life goals and visions.

If you are not familiar with GTD there’s a good overview on wikipedia. But my recommendation is to read the book because there are some important aspects that are not exactly obvious or may look strange at first glance but are well explained and supported by examples in the book.

Anyway I was very impressed with the idea of hyperlinking and I consider it the best way to write documents ever since. Correspondingly the wiki systems are the best collaborative knowledge management tools.