Spring is beginning. It's the time of year that we get to clean out and start anew. This is not only just a cleaning sense, but it's also a a time for renewing time management, personal hobbies, and goals. Since summer of 2012, I have begun numerous attempts to revolutionize my health, my mental acuity, my goals, and my fitness.
Thereover lies a moment when I can perform a brain dump. I want to start cleaning out the baggage, the failed attempts, and all the other mental clutter that may otherwise act as a cloud to prevent me from taking steps backward in my attempts to improving myself.
My refuge for this is my site. It serves as the place for me to put my personal projects, interests, and hobbies; which is why I am writing this particular post tonight to mark progress.
Inspired from recent releases of some ideas, such as Addy Osmani's basket.js, I decided to extend the features of jqLocalStorage. jqLocalStorage's only dependency is jQuery 1.5+, which introduced jQuery Promises, allowing a more idiomatic approach to connecting asynchronous code. Finally, jqLocalStorage has been updated with a better ability to access CORS hosted files.
jqLocalStorage started off being able to:
And several enhancements have been made to Loader in the past week:
Find out more after the break, or you can get it here: Github
This program is based on the book “Body By Science” from Doug McGuff and John Little. The program is like a mutual fund of exercises, this means basically you need nothing more than these exercises. It is the best starting point and a ideal fundament to stimulate all of the metabolic benefits necessary to optimize human health and fitness. It is very simple and it’s done in less than 13 minutes a week.
See Dr. Doug McGuff do it here: Dr. Doug McGuff himself performs the Big 5 Workout.
Also, I will be writing another post on the benefits and effects of Whole Body Vibration, but the moral of the story is that you can spend 40 minutes a week (twice a week, 20 minutes each) on a Vibatrion Plate. I recommend The Mini Crazy Shaker, which will:
Giunta M, Cardinale M, Agosti F, Patrizi A, Compri E, Rigamonti AE, Sartorio A. Growth Hormone-Releasing Effects of Whole Body Vibration Alone or Combined with Squatting plus External Load in Severely Obese Female Subjects. Obes Facts. 2012 Aug 24;5(4):567-574. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 22922806.
Bosco C, Iacovelli M, Tsarpela O, Cardinale M, Bonifazi M, Tihanyi J, Viru M, De Lorenzo A, Viru A.: Hormonal responses to whole-body vibration in men. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2000 Apr; 81(6):449-54.
You can do the workout with machines or as a free weight option. However given that it is basically a resistance training, which means that the goal of your training is a point where you can no longer produce enough force to lift the resistance, the machine option is the better choice.
For a true understanding of how to be in tip-top shape with minimal need for exercise, head on over to Amazon for Body by Science by Dr. Doug McGuff.
Javascript is increasingly a larger and larger piece of logic and application building on both front-end and back-end technologies. To help maintain and iterate pre logic and modularity, some MVC patterns have crept into popularity over the past few years. One such popular MVC framework is Backbone.js.
If you didn’t already know, Javascript functions double as object constructors. For example, to simulate a class in object-oriented programming, you would write
function Person(name){
this.name = name
}
I wanted to cover a couple (ok, a lot) of neat things about javascript, and look at proper coding techniques for this adaptable environment. What better way than to share? To teach is to show mastery, hopefully!
There’s a famous story of a young woman who dined with William Gladstone one evening, and with Benjamin Disraeli the next. (Gladstone and Disraeli were prominent British statesmen of the nineteenth century. They were bitter rivals.)
Asked her impression of these two powerful men, the young woman replied, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.”
In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for the cards.
So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented “sandwich”, the name for 2 slices of bread with meat in between, became one of the most popular meal inventions in the western world.
What’s interesting about this, is that you are very likely to never forget the story of who invented the sandwich ever again. Or at least, much less likely to do so, if it would have been presented to us in bullet points or other purely information based form.
For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods.
Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day.
Tim Ferriss gives another great presentation on Market Validation, Product Testing, A/B Testing, Market Availability Evaluation, and Capturing users' on your site through psychology.
As a precursor, check out How to Make a Million Dollar business
Which category does your organization’s Web presence fall into? Over- or under-managed? When it comes to the Web, few organizations have found the Goldilocks zone. Their online activities are either under-managed with minimal policies and procedures, or dogged by bureaucracy and internal politics.
Those that fall into the former category are vulnerable to legal threats, internal disputes and knee-jerk management where the website lurches from one crisis to the next. Those in the latter are crippled by indecision and fail to respond to the fast-changing nature of the Web.
One of the absolute best style guides I have seen in some time, AirBnB released a javascript guide and hosted it on Github.
This document covers AirBnB's typical javascript syntax rules, some general performance enhancements, and other coding paradigms in the browser environments.
A Commonsense Guide to Your 401(k) is a really awesome primer to investing, setting up a portfolio, and planning for your retirement
I recently started reading a personal financial planning guide from the Bloomberg personal bookshelf: "A Commensense Guide to Your 401(k)" by Mary Rowland. This book has really helped me understand the fine print, learn to make better financial choices, keep what I save, reap what I sow, and find the best avenue for investing for gains with risk.
Hacking is a method. From lifestyle design and habit development, to hacking one's own brain and body, to entrepreneurship, to financial success and scrappy and fruitful personal adventures, to finally hacking code, network security, algorithms, and other neat tidbits. Being metaphysically wrinklefree is the embodiment of applied practice to reach measurable results in all corners of thought.
This new site of mine is powered by the ever-so-wonderful Wheat, a git based blogging engine written in node.JS.
These are the ramblings and anecdotes of Matthew Keas.
You can learn more about me around this site, and of course from a few other well-known online sources: