Book Review: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett and one minor resolution completed!

Done! Finished my twelfth book for the year!

Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett

Image Credit: Amazon

Guards! Guards! centres around Anhk-Morpork's Night Watchmen, or the Watch. Schemes are afoot as a secret society plans to summon a dragon to overthrow the city's Patrician. When a number of people and shops are destroyed by a precise fire, the Watch is tasked with the job of getting to the bottom of it.

This has been one of the most entertaining books I've read in the Discworld series so far. I thought it would do really well as a graphic novel - and I've just had a look into it, and they have. I might have to buy that at some stage.

Resolutions update

Major resolutions

1. Go to the gym three times a week - was going well, then not so well leading up to the move. I've started riding my bike to work in Newcastle, but it has been raining a lot lately, so it hasn't really been an option.

2. Drink less alcohol - Was going pretty well, then not so well leading up to the move. Now a little better.

3. Pay back the wedding by 30 June - Was going pretty well, then not so well leading up to the move. Should be on track to easily finish before the end of the year.

4. Complete the 26 Fortnight (52 week) saving challenge - A little behind on this one; see above.

5. Practice mindfulness - Tracking very well, I've started using Headspace and have completed Take 10, Take 15, Take 20 and the Discovery series. I'm now onto the Mind series.

6. Be a better friend - remember birthdays, think of good gifts, enjoy your social life - Generally going pretty well; Jess always helps me to remember people's birthdays (I'm crap with dates), I've been keeping a list of potential presents for others, and I've been trying to be less grumpy about social activity.

7. Get recording studio going, learn to use ProTools, keep up the good work with the band! - Well, the recording studio set up hasn't got far. I've dabbled in ProTools, but haven't got my head around it quite yet. But the band is going well; we've scored a few support slots this year for international acts, including Coroner, Carcass, and Sinister, and we're in the process of recording a new EP.

Minor resolutions

Music Tuesday and rudiments practice - Was going pretty well, then kind of dropped off. I've been starting to get back into it since the move back to Newcastle.

Mind expansion Sunday - Lasted a little while, but I haven't really picked it back up again.

Writing this blog - Overall, not going too badly. This will be my 32nd post for this year, and Excel informs me that this is the 35th week of the year, so I'm not overly far behind where I need to be.

Spring cleaning the house - Yeah, this one didn't last long. Moving house compressed a lot of this, we threw out or donated loads of stuff that we don't use or need any more.

Read 12 books this year - Done!

Data on my day off: A printer-friendly Pocketbook report

Update: I have now refined some of the features of this report - you can download the new version of the template here.

It's no secret that I love Pocketbook. Hell, I even wrote a blog post way back in February about it. I love how it syncs with my bank accounts so that I don't have to manually enter every single thing I spend money on. I love how it automatically categorises transactions for me. And I love that it gives you the ability to analyse your transactions using the web app.

One thing that had bothered me though was the lack of a 'printer-friendly' option for the Analysis reports. I've even emailed Pocketbook to ask them to put such a feature in - they did get back to me and said they would look into it, but as of yet this functionality hasn't been added. So I've made one myself in Excel. It uses the fact that you can export your transaction history from Pocketbook, and then uses a Macro-enabled Excel workbook to populate a printable report. I'll step you through how it works and how to use it, and if you want to download it - I've made a template version that you can customise yourself. With more than 50,000 people using Pocketbook now, there must be others in the same boat as me. You can click on any of the images below to enlarge them.

1.   Get your transaction history from Pocketbook by logging in to getpocketbook.com, going to Transactions, selecting 'All time' from the Date Range drop down and clicking Export (CSV).

2.   Open the Pocketbook Report Template Excel Workbook. Click 'Enable Content', this enables the macros that are embedded in this workbook to be able to run. These macros are purely to refresh the PivotTables later on, and are completely safe - promise!

Copy and paste all your transactions data into the Excel worksheet named 'Source Table'.

Note: Unfortunately, the 'Source Table' does not automatically update. You will need to do this manually each time you want to run a new set of reports with the latest data included. This is not an issue for me, as I do these once per month, so it's not a big task to do manually.

3.   Go to the 'Source Data' worksheet tab. Here I have listed all of the default categories as set by Pocketbook. If you have any custom categories that you've created, you will need to add these to this list manually. It's probably easiest to add rows in the middle of this, so that the formulas fill automatically afterwards. Just make sure you spell your category names correctly!

This tab is probably the most important, as it puts the data in a format that can be used more easily for the report. It splits up the 'Amount' column from the Source Table (which lists expenses as negative and income as positive) into two columns and turns expenses into a positive number by taking its absolute value. It simultaneously collects all of the transactions listed under each category, within the particular date range that you'll specify later.

Note: For this to work correctly, all of your transactions need to be categorised. Missing categories in the 'Source Table' show a blank, and blanks aren't picked up by the formulas used in this sheet.

4.   The Date Ranges tab is another lookup table which the report uses to determine which transactions you are interested in from your Source Table. You don't need to change anything on this tab - all of the dates are data driven; they use the =today() and other built-in Excel functions to update automatically.

5.   The 'Report' tab is sort of like the dashboard. It's the basic overview of your finances, listing your Total Income and Expenses by Category and your Net Income for the period. The 'Report 2' tab is a bar chart of the Expense categories for the period you select.

But first, go back to the 'Report' tab and select a time period by clicking on the cell H1. A small drop-down arrow appears to the right - click this and you can select any of the periods, just the same as the Pocketbook web app allows. Selecting this tells the 'Source Data' tab the date range you are interested in. If you want a custom date range, firstly enter the 'date from' and 'date to' (inclusive) in the Custom Date Range box in K9 and K10. After this, go to the drop-down and select 'Custom Date Range' at the bottom of the list.

Now for the piece de resistance - click the 'Refresh PivotTable Data'. This runs the macro we talked about earlier. Essentially it refreshes the data source that the PivotTables are based on, giving the PivotTables the most up-to-date data based on your date range selection. It then unfilters the PivotTable (allowing everything to be populated) and then filters out any categories that have a zero total value.

All of the graphs are PivotCharts based on the PivotTables, and automatically populate after you click the 'Refresh PivotTable Data' button.

From there, you can easily print your report. I hope other Pocketbook users find this useful.

 Feedback? Questions? Got an improvement you'd like to suggest? Let me know in the comments!

Results from Media Blackout May

How time flies. I said that I'd make an update in June on how Media Blackout May went - and it's now halfway through August... Oh well, better late than never I suppose. To be fair though, I didn't jump straight back into consuming news and social media as soon as June rolled around, I have actually maintained the media blackout for the intervening months. And really, that was sort of the point of this experiment - to change behaviour and habits. So how did it go?

Initially, it was difficult. If your go-to habit when there's not much happening is to whip out your phone and check Facebook, then suddenly you're left with nothing. If you watch or read the news over breakfast, as I did for a while, then that's no longer an option. It was interesting to see just how many times you would find yourself in that situation each day - just kind of staring blankly, asking yourself, 'what can I do instead?'. But after a while, probably a couple of weeks or so, these moments became an opportunity to find some clarity and focus. To think about what I was doing beforehand and what I was going to do next, or noticing that I needed a break from whatever I was doing.

Have I felt out of the loop? Not really. In fact, I feel like I've side-stepped a number of things that might have made me angry or upset. Also, because I haven't read everyone else's analysis of an event, I'm free to do my own. In a world inundated with information, it's very easy to get bogged down and very easy to rely on others to form your opinion for you. The 'low information diet' helps with this; your brain has less stuff to sort through and process, and once it has, it can spend more time connecting and creating. The more you spend time away from these sorts of time sinks, the more you realise how unnecessary they are to your day-to-day life and the more time you can spend doing things you enjoy. In the last couple of months, I've spent a lot more time reading, doing band stuff and writing. It's been nice.

Again, I want to stress that I don't think that news and social media are useless, I just think that I needed to reprioritise their importance in my daily routine. More often than not, they'd just become a  habit - something to occupy a few minutes of time between other things. Which I think is a comment on a wider trend, namely our compulsion to always be entertained and always be doing things.

Short Story: Pensioner Zero

Hey all, this post is a quick revisit back to a short story I wrote a while ago. For a little background, I wrote this while I was working for Aldi while I was looking for a professional job in Canberra. I may or may not have been bitter and cynical at the time of writing. Enjoy!

Pensioner Zero

Like zombies they gather, in the early morning - haunting carparks with Zimmer frames and canes. Crowding around the clinical tempered glass of the protective electronic double sliding doors that separate us. Waiting for the signal to be given, waiting for the mechanism to unlock, waiting to seep through the crystalline barriers to shuffle idly, mindlessly back and forth through the aisles.

From behind the cage they exertedly push, like Sisyphus rolling the stone, they peruse this week's specials at a lurching amble.

"My gosh, that's cheap." they remark regarding some low-quality, built-to-a-price-by-the-lowest-bidder, piece of consumer electronics, before registering a complaint about the lacklustre workmanship.

"They just don't make 'em like they used to," they croak to each other in raspy tones, "everything is made in bloody China now". They express their myopic perspective; vision which cannot be improved in clarity with the best of lenses, served with a side of borderline racist undertones.

Shovelling canned goods and other flotsam and jetsam into their metallic nets, they march inevitably toward the counter. They unload their items onto the belt at a painfully slow pace; a speed that makes human evolution look as though it happened overnight. The red second hand clicks loudly. Much to the annoyance of the cashier, it runs a full revolution. Then another. And another. 

Their backs are weak, their knees stiff, their bones brittle. They just don't make 'em like they used to. They exhaustedly jostle the wheeled basket into the receiving position, an elegant manoeuvre in the supermarket leagues. They nod, as if in slow motion, toward the cashier indicating their readiness to make the play.

Without hesitation, the cashier proceeds to fire items past the scanner, only breaking to demonstrate a level of dexterity unseen by their generation. Groceries pile up faster than a freeway in a blizzard with zero visibility. The scanner sounds in a chorus of rapid-fire bleeps. The elderly couple cannot abate the onslaught.

As if the experience was over before it began, the total amount gleans toward the couple in a dull green, dot-matrix font, the likes of which haven't been seen since the early nineties.

"Cheaper than I thought" they crow at each other. 

Turning their beaks toward the cashier, they proceed to dig through knitted cardigan pockets searching for their pension money. The second hand completes another lap. Like archaeologists they manage to unearth a wrinkled fifty dollar note, buried beneath a layer of glasses cases, used tissues and other debris. Instantaneously the cashier makes their change, and offers a polite but trite farewell, and turns to the growing line of other grumpy old bitties.

"Where are our bags? Aren't you going to pack these?"

Remnants of a dying epoch, fossilised by the inevitable march forward of productivity.

Book Review: Pyramids by Terry Pratchett and The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan

Hey all! Snow was a little better than yesterday, but not much new to report. Another day of skiing/snowboarding, spa'ing and sauna'ing - you know, the usual... Today was our last day of our ski pass; tomorrow we'll be hitting Rotorua. Jess and Claire are booked in for massages at the hot springs, Dean will probably go swimming in the thermal pools and I'm going to go recover our passports (Jess left them on the Hobbiton bus) and then (hopefully) go Zorbing! Anyhow, because today has been a pretty slow news day, I give you a book review update.

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Given I've been doing a fair bit of travelling lately - a gig in Sydney and Canberra each weekend before flying over to New Zealand - I've had a bit more time to get stuck into the books I had started. I've just about tied up my new year's resolution to read a book each month; these two make it 11 so far this year.

Admittedly, I find Terry Pratchett novels to be easy reads - they're usually all around the same length and they flow along well, stuck together by clever witticisms - which usually means I can knock one over fairly quickly. On the other hand though, Robert Jordan's novels are the definition of epics; this one I've been working my way through was well over 30 hours in audiobook format.

Anyway, onto the quasi-review/plot synopsis.

Pyramids - Terry Pratchett

Image Credit: Amazon, available in a number of formats.

Young Prince Teppic of the Old Kingdom - a civilisation obsessed with pyramids, rituals and multitudes of animal-headed deities - is sent away to Anhk-Morpork to be trained by the Assassins Guild. On the death of his father, King Teppycimon XXVII, he is compelled to return to his kingdom - with some new ideas in his head on running the place, of course. This is not taken well by Dios, the king's first adviser and high priest. Contains camels with doctorate level mathematics prowess, assassins, Death, beliefs coming to life, the walking dead and axiom destruction testing.

The Shadow Rising - Robert Jordan

Image Credit: Amazon

Beginning after taking The Stone of Tear, Rand Al'Thor - the Dragon Reborn - must travel into The Waste to prove himself as He Who Comes With The Dawn to the People of the Dragon. Egwene, Nyaneve and Elaine continue to hunt the thirteen sisters of the black adja, and scratch the surface of The Dream World. Perrin and Loyal return to Emond's Field to find it overrun with Children of the Light and Trollocs, and unite the Two Rivers folk to fight back. Meanwhile, Min is caught up in an uprising in the White Tower of Tar Valon.

New Zealand update #2 - Shredding Mt Ruhapehu

Greetings all! Today and yesterday were spent skiing and snowboarding Mount Ruapehu. Yesterday, the weather was beautiful and clear - a perfect day for it. Today, not so much.

While Jess and Claire were getting a ski lesson, Dean and I made our way progressively further up the mountain with each run. Most of the runs on the Turoa side are Blue/Intermediate level, which were pretty enjoyable. That is, until Dean had a massive stack, half-tumbling and half-flying off the edge of a run - barely skimming a rock with his back on the way down. He's not too badly hurt, but he twisted his ankle coming out of the skis and his left shin is a bit swollen. He got himself checked out at the medical clinic straight after and they've given him a clean bill of health, but it's too painful to ski on with the swelling. So that's pretty much finished Dean's hopes of skiing while we're here.

After Dean's incident, Jess and I tackled the whole mountain as the last run of the day. We took the High Noon Express chairlift to the top (2,322m elevation) and made our way down. The view from the top was amazing:

We finished up yesterday in the spa, relaxing our very sore muscles, preparing to hit the slopes again today.

Today's weather was not great for it. Visibility was poor and gusty winds made it near impossible to get a nice, clean run. On the bright side though, the weather had deterred a lot of people, so the snow was in pretty good condition. Fingers crossed tomorrow is clear again!

New Zealand update #1 - Hobbiton

This post comes from beautiful, but not very sunny, New Zealand. We spent this morning hoping to ski but weren't lucky today; hopefully tomorrow's weather will be more conducive to skiing/snowboarding. Not to be discouraged, we made the drive from Whakapapa ski fields to the quaint town of Matamata - the home of Hobbiton.

The tour took us around a number of hobbit holes including Bag End of course, the Party Field and the homely Green Dragon Inn. Excuse my fat finger in the photo below.

The oak tree atop the home of the Bagginses is completely fake, it is made of plastics and had leaves imported and wired to it. Jess found a couple that had fallen off, which we were encouraged to keep as souvenirs.

The tour ended with a complimentary drink at the Green Dragon Inn, which offered a number of themed beverages including a Sackville Cider, an Ale, a Ginger Beer and a Stout. The stout was only available from the Green Dragon; there is nowhere else in the world where you can get one. Can you guess what I ordered?

Despite the disappointing start, I think we made the most of the day. As I write this, we're all heading back to base at Ohakune - some more spa'ing and saunaing is in order!

Mindfulness Meditation with Headspace

One of my resolutions this year was to practice mindfulness. The main reason being that I often find it difficult to take time out from doing things and give myself time to unwind. Being busy for prolonged periods of time or stressful situations would often cause me to melt down and lose it, and I'd feel completely demotivated and unhappy for days or weeks afterwards. Jess suggested that I should find something to 'do' that would involve me doing nothing at all - sort of like a brain hack. She suggested something like sitting and listening to music or meditating. 

I felt like I wouldn't be able to sit still and concentrate on listening to music each day with my mind constantly reminding me about how much other stuff I could be doing in the time, so I opted to try to get a better understanding of my mind through meditation. I also felt like I would need to be guided in the practice of meditation, so I started searching for something that would fit my needs and lifestyle. I found a great app called Headspace, which I've been using now for a number of months.

Headspace is a guided mindfulness meditation app designed to suit modern life. We can't all be monks, living in a secluded monastery and becoming one with the universe - but we can set aside some time each day to observe how our minds work. The app was recently updated, however I haven't tried out many of the new features yet. The original version has a number of programs that you work through sequentially. It starts with Take 10, which takes you through the basics of meditation practice for 10 minutes each day for 10 days. As you move through the programs, new techniques are introduced and the duration is increased. I'm currently on the 'Discovery' series, which has so far been about being more aware and present in your body, noticing physical sensations, as well as underlying moods and your reactions to them.

The app works particularly well for me and motivates me to continue my practice. It's got a number of stats that track your progress and you can see how far you've come. With the update, they also recently added a 'buddies' system.

If you're interested, download the app to try out the Take 10 program. After that it's a small price for a subscription to get access to the rest of the content. I would link to it, however the app I'm typing this up on doesn't have that feature; just Google it if you're interested.

Note: I didn't get paid to write any of this, just thought I'd share something that's been working for me.