January Monthly Bragging Thread

OK. I already mentioned that I'm preparing a longer post about it, but I didn't brag about it:

Despite being left by my wife for a younger guy after 15 years and 4 children I have acted sensible, rational you might say, and bought a house, negotiated a fair marriage contract (separation of property), completed a much overdue freelance project and cared for the children a lot. I didn't break. I didn't hate. I didn't run away. I think I succeeded in saving my sanity (salvaging instead of destroying emotions from the relationship), providing a dependable, caring and safe environment for the children now and in the future (the house is on the other side of the street). And get along well with my future ex-wife and her new partner and avoid alienation of her by family and friends.

Actually all of that didn't happen in December but it is effectively done now. The children moved into the new house on Jan, 1st and all paperwork and such is done.

I've practiced the virtue of silence. I can't say much more than that without breaking the virtue.

Some cool things I did this month. Lost 11 pounds in 15 days. Participated in invitees only party in Rio's new years eve, by invitation of a billionaire. Caught up to philosophizing about existence with my best friend who lives in Brasilia now. Finished subscribing to all those snazzy PHD programs that can provide me a Visa and income at the place I want to live. Learned to deal with the other side of polyamory by feeling all those stupid, pointless, ridiculous feelings one feels when one's partner finds happiness with someone else and our savannah minds take over - and did not give up, poly for the win! Finished a writing sample with commentary from Chalmers, Bostrom, Yetter-Chappel and others. Did more than 35 pomodoros in a row, twice. Had a good chat with Nick Beckstead and Nevin Freeman over skype, lovely decent smart gentleman working for the good of mankind, my favourite. Filled in more forms than ever before, and I'm as good at filling out forms as you are good at fishing with a spear. Oh, and I gave a friend advice he considered life saving, in the sense that he would have become a self he didn't wish to be, had he not stuck with me to the end of my explanation. Oh, and I got 114/120 in the TOEFL test, which is better than 96 out of 100 test takers aprox.

Helped setup .impact.

I have five of six chapters of my thesis done. It feels great to be able to finally apply for PhD positions. Choosing a future supervisor, I'll do a lot more checks to ensure my continued sanity. LaTeX & knitr saved the day with regards to document and layout management.

On to the conclusion chapter, then 3 weeks with a language editor, and hand in is so near I can taste it.

Just invited a former Member of Parliament to our local LessWrong meetup, she agreed.

I hope everyone appreciates how far I am willing to go to keep our meetups gender-balanced. :D

I've completed the first draft of a rather long piece of Chrono Trigger fanfiction -- with significant motivational help from the Less Wrong Study Hall and Beeminder. It still needs polishing, but it's generally excellent to see it done. [Edit: I didn't emphasize that enough. It is awesome to see it done. Like finishing a marathon and looking back down the trail.]

It has no particular rationalist bent. If anyone here is interested in seeing it anyway, you can find the HTML version here, and the PDF version here. It's about 35k words and would probably take a couple hours to read beginning to end. It may be intelligible even to non-players, I'm not sure. (but I would be interested to find out)

If you're interested in helping me get it ready for release, please flip a coin to choose the version (so I catch any version-specific problems) and send feedback to error@feymarch.net.

I was able to look at an unfamiliar problem outside of my expertise and spent a a few minutes really working to solve it ,instead of passing it off as outside my field. And those five minutes worked (followed by a month of review and mulling, followed by hours of number crunching, we created a viable solution), now I'm a more experienced, more valuable professional working for a firm with a larger market share.

Perhaps a month isn't the right time frame. A lot of awesome things entail doing not-so-awesome things on a regular basis for many months or even years.

Personally, I can say that in December I flossed my teeth every day; I went to the gym every day; I stayed roughly the same weight despite having a lot of holiday events; and I put a thousand dollars or so into my retirement account. None of these things is particularly awesome, but I think I have a pretty good chance of awesomeness if I can manage to keep this stuff up for 20 or 30 years.

I placed 34th(top 10%) in Kaggle facebook recruiting III competition: http://www.kaggle.com/users/45975/chester-grant

In November, when Bitcoin hit $900, sparking exciting Facebook discussion from rationalist friends, I wondered if I should buy some. Then I rehearsed the standard arguments against doing so and kept my money where it was. Because of this, I didn't lose any money when Bitcoin crashed in December, and finished the year about $1400 ahead on some very boring stock investments.

I've been running during my lunchbreak for two weeks now. I've decided to just walk for the rest of this workweek because I've been moving heavy crap while moving house but it seems an easy habit to keep up and a clear win.

In month of January every one brags about what they did in previous year. Some speculate about the market trends, other show how much profit they earn throughout the year. Then one thing leads to another eventually posting what is their next aim. To read about me see my blog. http://www.kevinbradleyrealtor.com/