February 2012
2 posts
3 tags
3 Things Metro Could Do (for free) To Make it Less...
The Washington DC area metrorail system is probably the cleanest public transportation system in the US. That’s about as far as I can go on complimenting it.
Metro is horribly run. Trains don’t run on a schedule, the staff is rude and sometimes threaten passengers with violence, there is no way to report incidents that occur on the trains, and the metro police don’t seem to...
2 tags
Principal Components Analysis Just Blew My Mind
I like to think of myself as a pretty data-savvy individual. I’m a 3-star black belt in spreadsheet jujitsu and I’m becoming more and more of a SAS-hole, but it turns out that there was a huge hole in my game.
Principal Components
I had heard the term “principal components” before, probably while reading a paper about some super-sexy analysis that someone else did, but...
January 2012
1 post
2 tags
The $1 Billion Challenge
In a recent article for The Economist, Ron Conway outlines fields where he expects to see the next billion dollar companies emerge. While I generally agree with his prognostications, one line in the article struck me more as a challenge than a prediction.
“Perhaps 2012 will see a company develop a $1 billion business inside 12 months.”
That line got me thinking about a new paradigm...
June 2011
15 posts
4 tags
Race Report: Ironman 70.3 Eagleman
Yesterday I ran the Ironman 70.3 Eagleman in Cambridge Maryland. I finished in 6 and a half hours, a shade above my goal of 6 hours, but not horrible. Here’s how it all went down.
The river was a warm 82 degrees which made wetsuits illegal for the swim. My tri-gear is not exactly swim friendly, which caused me to have some extra drag on the swim. The buoys were really far apart at this...
1 tag
Five Years Ago
Five years ago I was finishing my junior year of college, going to work as a swim coach for the second summer in a row, and generally missing the point of being 21 years old. It turns out that drinking beer and playing FIFA soccer on playstation 2 every night by yourself isn’t the most meaningful existence… who knew?
I’d love to go back and tell myself that I was going to NCAAs...
2 tags
My Personal Message
I have a favorite personal mantra:
Everything in the world is perfect, including my desire to change it.
Obviously not everything is perfect - dictators lash out violently against their citizens who ask for freedom, politicians cheat on their wives and post it all on twitter, and the Phillies sometimes lose - but the point is that these imperfections create meaningfulness for our lives. If no...
2 tags
The Difference Between Vectors and Pixels for...
I’m not an adobe user, except for acrobat, and even that I try to keep to a minimum. It’s not that I’m opposed to adobe products, it’s just that they are insanely complicated and make my little brain hurt.
That said, both this site and my new Team Disruption website (coming soon) need logos, and adobe is the industry standard, offering 30 day trial periods to beginners...
2 tags
To Fly
The setting couldn’t be better: 5am in an apartment in Brooklyn, and wind-up fish toy hanging from Jay’s lapel, because why not?
Late night discussions tend to turn to philosophy, at least for me. Maybe that says something insightful and not altogether flattering about me, or maybe it doesn’t say anything at all. That night, I decided I could fly.
Not that I could fly in a...
1 tag
Waiting to Live
For those of you who haven’t heard, Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Workweek is a must read. It turns out, though, that the main idea isn’t so original after all.
Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Huzzah!
No matter who is telling you to live now, instead of waiting, it seems that almost everyone chooses, what Ferriss calls, “the...
2 tags
What the Jibberish After the ? in URLs Means
I never really gave it much thought, but when I see a URL pop up with a ? and then a bunch of jibberish behind it, I usually just assume it’s something totally arbitrary. Turns out I’m wrong (who knew). Not only does that jibberish contain valuable information, but now I can actually use it too. This probably shouldn’t be exciting.
Let’s talk about a fictitious...
2 tags
One Place to Visit
There is one place that I absolutely must visit before I die: New Zealand.
I don’t really know why, but there’s something alluring about New Zealand. The landscape looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before (at least in Lord of the Rings), and the people sound great, too. I once heard that they consume more ice cream there per capita than any other country in the world (a fact...
2 tags
A Fun Fact About Prime Numbers
Take a random integer: let’s say 17783. Is it a prime number? (yes)
If you had to go about checking whether or not that was a prime number, how many numbers would you have to divide it by before you could be sure it was prime? That’s a more fun question.
The first instinct is to say, 17782, since you need to be sure that every number lower than 17783 doesn’t divide it.
Of...
3 tags
Project Euler is Awesome
Learning to program is hard damn work. Luckily, today I found an awesome site that helps make it more enjoyable. While I’ve been using lynda.com and w3schools to pick up the basics, today I stumbled upon projecteuler.net, a site that offers hundreds of problems that can be solved with programs that take less than one minute to run.
The first problem (and the easiest problem) is this: find...
4 tags
Don't Forget Your Curly Braces
PHP functions don’t like it when you forget curly braces.
function love($lover, $object){
if $lover = “I” {
echo “{$lover} love {$object}”;
} else {
echo “{$lover} loves {$object}”;
}
}
love(“I”,”curly braces”);
<br />
love(“Everyone”,”curly braces”);
3 tags
How My Search Box Works
You may not realize this, but there’s a search box hidden under the title of this page. You can’t see it, because the CSS for the search box has a “display: none;” tag on it.
There’s also a bit of javascript that makes the search box appear if you click on the “search” link in the navlinks bar.
Try it out…
The tumblr theme that I have on this...
4 tags
One Strong Belief
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Security is a kind of death, and perhaps the worst kind there is.
I do not mean physical security. As someone living in Washington DC, a city...
2 tags
Using Negative Margins in CSS
My first wedding anniversary is coming up in just a couple weeks. Last year I made a website for the wedding that looked great, but had one tragic flaw. In some browsers, the content would end up all the way at the bottom of the page, under the sidebar. I had no idea why this was happening, and ultimately just let those with that browser suffer.
Today I found out the problem. In CSS, when two...
2 tags
Today
Time is a difficult concept to deal with. As humans, our life flows at varying speeds. At times, we reach a state of flow where events happen in quick succession, while at other times events are sparse and we stagnate. Yet time moves on with cool consistency. Every second comes, and then is gone. Without fail.
Today is a day like any other. It begins and ends and it is up to us, individually...
May 2011
22 posts
4 tags
An Excel Workaround for Conditional Formatting...
Dear Microsoft,
I use the conditional formatting function in Excel for pretty much only two reasons. To flag invalid data entry and to identify outliers. Why is that so damn hard?
I’d like to be able to tell you “if the first digit of the military time is above 2 or the 3rd digit is above 5, flag it as invalid,” but I cannot. Maybe this is possible, but it’s really...
3 tags
Fifteen Minutes to Live
Muscles burning, lungs straining, stomach cramping. My head feels loose and heavy as it slumps to the side. I am unable to hold my body rigid and my military-esque posture fades to a puddle of slop.
Each step I take is painful and seems, on its own, pointless. The line will never come, and I have already broken down.
But the line always comes. No matter how painful, how hopeless it feels to...
3 tags
How to Make a Reservation at the Red Porch in...
As of this blog post, there will be exactly 2 places on the internet where you can find out how to make a reservation at the Red Porch Restaurant in Nationals Park.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Red Porch is a restaurant in center field at Nationals Park where you can sit outside with a pretty good view of the game, and have a waiter bring you your food and drinks, for free, rather than...
2 tags
Just Build the Damn Form on the Sheet
Since Excel userforms are such a pain in the ass, I just build the damn form on worksheet.
The biggest issue that this causes, and the reason I wanted to use the userform in the first place, is that it’s difficult to specify the tab order, meaning when a user is filling out the form and hits the TAB key, the selection should jump to the next cell they would logically fill out.
The...
3 tags
Excel Userforms are a Pain in Ass
Excel is a spreadsheet program. It can do some awesome stuff with spreadsheets. But there are some other features that can be used to turn it into something beyond just a spreadsheet program. One of those features is the ability to add userforms, which can prompt a user to enter information.
Unfortunately, unlike web forms or even Infopath, Excel userforms don’t work very well. The UI...
2 tags
How to Find Out What Your SAS Macros Resolve To
OPTIONS SYMBOLGEN
That option will cause SAS to write messages to the log regarding what Macros resolve to when they are invoked. Pretty handy for debugging SAS code that isn’t yours.
Short and sweet today.
2 tags
Using Arrays in PHP
PHP is similar to a lot of other languages I’ve seen in terms of creating and using arrays. One interesting feature I saw today was the ability to nest arrays within arrays, rather than creating a 2D (or 3D or 4D…) array. I’m not sure where this functionality might be advantageous, but I can certainly imagine that it might be.
Additionally, there are a number of array...
3 tags
Fun with Strings in PHP
Today I learned a number of string functions using PHP.
Among the more interesting functions were strstr(), which finds a string within a string. This find function is unique compared to other languages I’ve seen because it doesn’t just return the position of the string (the function strpos() does that), it returns the remainder of the string beginning with that substring. ...
1 tag
Hills and Valleys - The Columbia Triathlon
Today, I ran the Columbia Triathlon. A friend of mine told me it was “really hilly”, and as it turns out, that was the biggest understatement of 2011.
On one of the downhills on the bike course, I broke the 40 mph barrier, which is a new personal record by about 4 mph. On the run course, I passed someone on an uphill only to realize that they were walking, and I was running, and I...
2 tags
Intro to PHP
<?php echo “Hello World!”; ?>
That’s how it starts.
The basic syntax for calling PHP. Today I learned how to call PHP as well as how to declare and use variables: $Variable (case sensitive)
<?php
$var1 = 3;
$var2 = 2;
echo $var1+var2;
?>
That code spits out the number 5 on a webpage (riveting, I know).
Soon, I’ll move on to PHP...
2 tags
The Difference Between INDEX() and INDEXC() in SAS
Today, I was teaching the Intermediate SAS course that I developed over the last 9 months and an interesting question came up. What is the difference between the INDEX() and INDEXC() functions. Well it turns out to be pretty useful.
In SAS, the INDEX() function will scan a string and return the location of a substring. So for example INDEX(“Alabama”,”bam”) would return...
2 tags
A Man in Progress
I’ve been searching for a long time for a “brand” for this blog. What began as a 30 day challenge blog focused on improved well-being flamed out because the goal was too nebulous. My recent attempts to reignite the blog have been without direction.
What I’ve needed is a unifying idea: a concept that inspires me. Unfortunately, as it is, I’ve been looking for that...
5 tags
Finishing the AMP Stack
Yesterday, I learned what it meant to set up a server and an application server in order to start doing some web development. Today, I learned how to do it.
An “AMP Stack” is a group of three, free software components that make it possible to do web development.
The A stands for Apache, the server software I set up yesterday.
The M stands for mySQL, a database program from Oracle...
6 tags
The Difference Between a Server and a Web...
Another thing I should probably have known…
When your browser goes out on the Interwebs to find the webpage www.davidcroushore.com, it sends out a request to a server and that server finds the page and sends back some HTML, which the browser then renders as a beautifully simple white page with a lot of text on it.
Sometimes, though, you go to a site that’s a little more involved than...
How to Make Jury Duty Suck Less
Today was my first experience with jury duty. I’ve always heard that it isn’t hard to get out of jury duty, and today I learned some things about the proper way to approach a jury summons. Unfortunately, since I’m leaving DC before I’ll have the chance to get called again, this will probably be worthless, but maybe it will help someone else.
The summons says to report at...
Intro to CSS and XHTML
I’ve played with CSS and XHTML before. Mostly by using a WYSIWYG editor like Adobe Dreamweaver and playing around with the CSS to see what the effects were. That’s a great way to get acquainted, but if I’m going to take on a web development project, like redesigning this blog for instance, I’m going to need a more structured understanding of CSS and XHTML.
So today I...
WatchToday…. I learned to Dougie
4 tags
How to Calculate the Gini Coefficient
So week one of this challenge is turning into a “Dave shamefully admits that he doesn’t know things he should definitely know already” party, and today (yesterday) is no different.
(Quick note: Tumblr was down last night, thus this post had to be pushed back to the morning)
For those of you who are unaware, and among readers of my blog that is probably not many of you, the...
4 tags
The MS Excel Blitz Continues!
Today I picked up a lot of mini-Excel-skills, mostly concerning formatting.
For example, if you do a bunch of formatting in one place and then want to do it somewhere else, F4 does it for you (whoa! I know right?). Similarly, while I fell in love with the format painter last year, I just learned that you can double-click it and apply the format to more than one place. That would have saved me...
2 tags
Find & Select in MS Excel
There’s a button in MS Excel that is so important, the people at Microsoft decided it deserved to go on the “Home” tab. Yet, until today, I never really paid any attention at all to it. It sits way off on the right rather inconspicuously, but today I realized that this button is a powerful tool that makes it much easier to navigate, update, and search any Excel worksheet. ...
4 tags
Day 1: Using Group By and Order By in SQL
To satisfy my 30 day skill development mission for day 1, I learned how to use the Group By and Order By clauses in SQL, specifically, when calling PROC SQL in SAS.
Order By was fairly straightforward and probably shouldn’t count, but Group By presented a unique challenge that did take some effort to figure out.
My problem with Group By
The first time I tried playing with the Group By...
4 tags
30 Skills in 30 Days
Today is May 11th and for the next 30 days I am going to do one thing every day.
Every day, I am going to acquire a new skill.
It might be learning how to use javascript to enhance a website (this blog will likely be the testing ground). It might be learning how to use a new feature in Microsoft Excel or Powerpoint. It might even be learning how to cook a new type of food. There are only 2...
April 2011
1 post
5 tags
On Capital
I just finished reading Hugh McLeod’s book Evil Plans: Having fun on the Road to World Domination. In on chapter, Hugh discusses the evolution of capital throughout the course of human history. This chapter was one of the most insightful comments on the course of human social history that I’ve ever seen, and one that I feel compelled to share (in paraphrased form) here.
The...
February 2011
2 posts
1 tag
The Atmo Launch!
As of 5pm Friday, February 25th, Atmo is officially alive. As the CEO of Atmo, this event makes me extremely excited.
Atmo is a new music system that allows users to vote for their favorite songs and dynamically influence the music they hear at their favorite bar, coffee shop, community center, etc. Votes are cast through a smartphone (currently through the web, native apps coming soon) and...
1 tag
Review: The Honest Rainmaker
It’s been a while since I’ve read anything that wasn’t pop psych, econ, or self-development related, so I decided it was time to crack open something more akin to a novel.
The Honest Rainmaker is a non-fictional work, but it’s as close to fiction as one can get. I’d say about 75% of the story is fictional, but since it comes in the form of quotations from the...
January 2011
6 posts
2 tags
An Economics Comment on Fitness
When it comes to fitness, we each have a monopoly over ourselves. That is, we control the decisions we make that affect our fitness. There may be certain externalities imposed by others, like someone taking 45 minutes in the squat rack, but ultimately we have the power to determine our level of production.
Every little bit of effort you have to expend in exercise is a cost. Therefore, the act...
3 tags
Law 2: Friends and Enemies
This chapter is the one I’ve been looking forward to since I first heard about this book. I once saw a simple word document that paraphrased the 48 Laws and law 2 is the only one I remember. That document simply said, “If you have no enemies, make some.”
Law 2: Never Put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn to Use Enemies
The full law is a bit more involved than simply...
4 tags
The 48 Laws of Power: Law 1
Last semester, I took a course called “Leadership and Managing Human Capital.” One section of the course focused on power and influence, and renewed my interest in the topics.
I’ve decided to read Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power as a follow up to that unit. As I go through the 48 laws, I will detail them here, along with (hopefully) experiences in my life where the...
2 tags
Correcting False Assumptions
I ride capital bikeshare to and from work. Metro stresses me out.
Today, when I was walking to the bikeshare station, a metrobus pulled up in front of me that I knew would take me straight home faster than I could bike there. I paused for a moment, but ultimately decided to take the bike.
It was a slower-than-normal ride home today. The hint of snow has all the DC drivers in a tizzy, so I...
Something I've Needed to do for a Long Time
Kudos to Ramit Sethi for getting me to do something I’ve been putting off for a long, long time.
On Wednesday, Ramit posted on his blog about the need to examine the assumptions that we make and test them to keep them from holding us back. One assumption of mine was that a well-known author, though not a household name, would be too busy to answer an email from me. I’ve been...
My Current Projects
Hello all!
The last year saw some incredible things happen in my life, and now it’s time for me to take it to another level. Here are my current projects (more coming soon):
1. Work (gotta eat)
2. MBA - I’m on my second semester of the University of Maryland’s part time MBA program. Semester #1 was interesting, but this semester looks much more challenging, and I will be...
March 2010
6 posts
2 tags
Pressing the Reset Button
No matter how much discipline you have, there will come a time when motivation just isn’t there for you.
Of course, these times are one reason we like to build good habits. It doesn’t take much motivation to just keep doing what you do.
Still, at some point, we all face one of those ruts that sucks up all of our energy. So what do you do?
Hit Reset.
Take a week to relax. Eat...