On Cars, or: Here's a Pretty Sweet E-Bike I Made

I live in Houston, Texas. It is a good example of a sprawling region; practically everyone I know owns and operates a car or truck. It's more or less a necessity. The sidewalks are like afterthoughts and road planning seems nonexistent. Such is life, I'd normally say. It's time to pony up the money for a car, and since I'm not made of that kind of currency, then I should get a credit card and saddle up some debt... but I had a better idea. What if... okay, guys, hold on a second... What if... Guys? Seriously, I have a good idea, c'mon! Okay... Are you ready? Here goes... What if... What if I didn't drive a car?

... ... ... See those ellipses? That's the response I get whenever I mention this idea to people -- a blank stare, with a raised eyebrow if the weather's right. The first question is one of pity: Are you a poor person? Do you need money? And my response is, No, I'm not poor, I would just rather not drive a car. And then they ask, Well, why?

And then I break into a grin. You see, there are so many upsides to not driving a car it's ridiculous:

• Improved health
• Decreased expenses
• Less stress/anxiety
• Ecological responsibility
• Increased solidarity with nature
• I'll just stop now; the above mean a lot to me

And there are so many downsides that what started as a small thought grew into something much, much larger. See, I now ride a bike everywhere.

Well, almost everywhere. I also use public transit and hitch rides from friends who own cars when necessary. For example, there is no bus infrastructure in Spring. If, for some reason, I need to go far north, then I car share. Works out often enough to be sustainable.

But, anywhere else, I try to bike. Popping down to the shops doesn't require a car. I can make the fifteen miles to my campus on a bike. It's fun stuff. Feels good, man. Why would I give up the fresh air and sunshine for a nauseating ride in a box on wheels? (I get carsick. It's not fun.)

Nausea is only one downside to a life with cars. Let's look at more problems! :D

• Maintenance costs
• Inspection costs
• Petrol/gasoline
• Licensing cost (and exam)
• Insurance
• Peace with driving a potential weapon. Not kidding.

Let's say you're an average guy I know and use your car for pretty much everything -- picking up groceries, nabbing the kids, driving around to errands, and the like. Cool. Lot's of people require cars; nothing wrong with that. However, if you're an average guy in my neck of the woods, around my age (19), doing the things I do (e.g. college, groceries, errands), you're looking at the following running costs (in dollars):

• Insurance: 300 monthly (19, male. Sad.)
• Petrol: 125 monthly (people laugh and tell me this estimate is too low.)
• Lease/note: 250 monthly (I sincerely hope you didn't buy a new car)
• Maintenance: 20 monthly? (not quite sure, but kids I know often pick up parts here and there)
• Inspection: 40 annually

Assuming the above costs are more or less accurate, there's somewhere around 8000USD a year going into driving a car. That is, if I decided to get up and start driving tomorrow (or, after I take and pass a driving course and test), I'd be looking at spending 8 kilodollars over the course of a year. That's ridiculous. Even if I somehow found an insurance agent willing to knock my payment down to 200USD, that's a shaving of 1.2 kilodollar. Significant, yes, but still unnecessary.

I say unnecessary because, really, owning a car isn't a necessity for me. The upsides to owning a car aren't enough to make me willingly shell out 6 to 8 kilodollars a year. Speaking of upsides, here are some nice things about cars:

• Safety/security from adverse weather
• Expeditious, comfortable movement (well, not really...)
• Ability to transport others
• Ability to transport others' stuff (like moving homes and whatnot)

And then, when you throw a bike into the mix, the car gains some advantages:

• Arriving at your destination not covered in sweat
• Arriving at your destination comparatively quickly

However, those advantages can be matched. In my case, I leave earlier to arrive on time. And, I take a shower when I know I'll be around other people. I mean, if I'm taking a bike ride to get shots of wildlife on the White Oak Bayou, I don't care if I'm leaving footprints on the pavement. But, if I'll be in classrooms or cubicles with others, I'm definitely allotting time to clean up.

Now, weather is a bit of a different beast. Cold and warmth change with the days, it seems. In the winter, layer up! And in summer? Grab an extra bottle of water. It's not too much of a stretch, but at least it never hails, and sleet is pretty rare.

As far as transporting others? Hasn't been a problem so far... In a city where everyone drives a car, it's easy to find a ride. And, as far as objects go, I'm working a cargo bike in the future. For the present, I have a rear rack and a messenger bike. Again, there hasn't been a problem so far...

Anyway, I kind of touched about motion sickness and comfortable movement. I also mentioned some kinda peace, yeah? Well, I'd rather not drive a ton of metal around. It's scary. If I wanted, I could plow into an establishment, let alone a pedestrian, and cause some massive damage. I'd rather not have that ability; it's quite a bit harder to seriously injure someone on a bike. Not impossible, but not easy, either.

So, with that all out of the way, I had another idea: What if I had an electric bike? I mean, for those occasions where there's no showering available, or I'm incredibly pressed for time... For example, let's say I have a photo shoot to attend across town, and I'll be moving about for four hours, before biking back. Honestly, I'm pretty sure that I don't have the energy to move twenty miles, run around chasing animals (or brides), and then biking back home. That's where an electric bike would come in handy.

Here are my restrictions: no license, no gas, no recurring payments, and no insurance. It's kind of a tall order to find an electric car or motorcycle for less than 1 kilodollar. It's even harder to find something I can drive without a license or registration of insurance or the like.

So, what did I do? I built one.

GNG mid-drive motor, bicycle, laptop batteries, a million zip ties, a gooseload of hot glue, and one of my old road bikes. Most. Excellent.

I'm still working out a few bugs, but the first ride went pretty well. Except, I somehow caused a short and blew five batteries. :x However, I ended up rebuilding them and making the entire deal even better. The bike is now running on a total of 84 18650 cells (that's the model type), in a 12s7p configuration (12 groups in series, each comprised of 7 cells wired in parallel). Each cell has a capacity of 2200 mAh, and a charge of 3.6 volts. The C rate isn't ultra-amazing like some of the hobby LiPo packs on the market, but it's enough to keep me moving at 22mph. Plus, I saved 200USD by salvaging discarded laptop batteries instead of buying a manufactured kit. Heck yeah!

 Here's an image of the aforementioned battery blowouts... The internal battery management system was shot, but the cells are still good, thankfully. So, I ripped it all apart. :D

My initial configuration involved 6 cells in parallel. However, I realized I had enough cells to increase the capacity a tad.

I ended up with 6 packs of 7 cells. Each pack is 15.4 Ah (2.2x7). The total capacity is about 15 amps at 48v.

And finally, here is the end result. 12 packs of 7, yielding 84 cells. Beautiful. They're wired up in two sets of 6s7p (42t) for ease of charging, balancing and management.

I also added some bodywork/fairing and re-routed the wiring. The appearance is neater, and I have far less fear of ripping something loose while on the road. I went from this:

How messy!

To this:

Most. Excellent. I should probably remove my aero bars at this point. Maybe.

I'm never buying a car. :D

My next project involves a sidecar or trailer to haul more batteries for long trips. Like, say, from here to my hometown, which is about 150 miles or so. I'll need to carry about 100Ah at 48v.

Now, if I buy lithium polymer batteries outright, I'll be forking over way too much cash than I'd like. Instead, I'll continue to salvage old batteries, which are full of 18650 cells... meaning I'll need... 50X12... 600 cells! Each laptop battery yields about 6 cells, so I'll need to come up with 100 laptop batteries, then rebuild them.

100. Wow. Thankfully, people throw them out all the time (which is terrible for the environment) and so I can just collect them. So, basically, this is the part where I open up a laptop battery recycle outfit until I end up with, say, 150 batteries -- that leaves a margin of error for totally dead cells and unsafe packs.

Gotta catch 'em all!

Compositional Distillation

That's a fancy way to refer to taking out the excess when making something. Recently. I've been working on a song that is supposed to be the greatest thing I've ever written. At least, that's what I always call the stuff I'm working on. It's a progressive thing; aim for the best, and you'll get better. Eventually.

Anyway, it starts off kind of hard. The drums are in full force, the main melody is playing, and I'm establishing the basics so that I can destroy them later on. After a few bars, everything but the chords drops out, and the distant echos of drums fill the track. Slowly, brushed cymbals and shakers are introduced, and the drums grow louder. And then, the main percussion kicks back in, along with a strong bassline and harsh synths. Three sections of this follow, with stutter edits and percussion-driven change-ups slowly changing the track into something rather dynamic.

Another section, similar to the intro, with a stripping of previous embellishments and an adding of lighter sound effects and metallic percussion. I left the song here (the sun was starting to rise) and headed for bed. A few days later, I revisited the song, with a lot of ideas about how to make it even better.

And this is where it all turned to crap.

My drive to add a lot of things crowded out my drive to make the track seamless; that is, my desire to make sure that all the sections flow together in a typical fashion. Hence, the track became a mash-up of many elements that sounded terrible when placed one after another, even on top of each other. And I... I was heartbroken. I thought it was going great! I mean, it was, wasn't it?

Yeah, for a while. So I thought to strip out some things. Better said, distillate. Keep the essence of the song intact by evaporating all of the murk it sloshes about in. Concentrate the main elements and feel into juice that is poured into a pitcher, added to water, expanded every time it's played. Refreshing, yeah?

Distillation is a lesson learned, I suppose. I didn't think I'd learn it while making music.

So, here are the three iterations. First, the work in progress that I was so happy with. Then, the version in which everything, including the kitchen sink, was added until it fell apart. Last, the finished piece, cleaned up, edited, and marked with my seal of approval. Enjoy.

Essentialism, Not Minimalism

100 things isn't a lot, but it's a fairly arbitrary number. I prefer to think of things in term of value, even if that means having over a hundred items. After all, in my art, I work with markers fairly often (such as ShinHan Touch Twin and Chartpak AD). As of right now, I have north of 140 markers. As for colored pencils, something north of 50. Moreover, I have stacks and stacks of paper. There's also more art stuff I won't bother listing here. Yet, all of this stuff is essential because of its value, although it numbers over 100.

There is nothing wrong with having a goal to achieve. 100 items is quite a small number, and what one chooses to include in that number says a lot about them. Anyone can have a lot, but few can have a little (by choice, not circumstance). Lots of people pride themselves on how much they have, yeah? Big houses to hold big things and all. For many, it's a physical show of success and satisfaction. So, from a non-conformist standpoint, minimalism is quite attractive. There's even a challenge, there: Will I be happy with less? Even happier?

Of course one can. Happiness is relative. From a material viewpoint, stuff is just a collection of atoms in a pleasing arrangement. It usually only has as much value as we assign. From a more nihilist viewpoint, nothing matters anyway, so why bother with striving for a lot, when the lot is worth as much as the little? That is, of course, nothing. Personally, I view a lot of stuff as just that -- a lot of stuff. Some stuff doesn't serve any purpose, though, and so I have less stuff.

And that's why I'm a bit more comfortable with the label "essentialist" than "minimalist," but I use both labels. I value, well, value, over less. It just so happens that I don't value a lot, ergo I have few things. Hence, I call myself "minimalist." However, I won't get rid of stuff in an effort to have little. The stuff I have is essential! So I call myself "essentialist."

Why do I call myself these? Rather, why do I willingly plaster labels to my person? Because labels help with classification. Sounds obvious, but it helps when people need an explanation so that they can understand the world better. For example, a surprisingly common question is, "Why don't you have cable TV?" My answer: "I find the Internet to be more valuable, making cable TV rather redundant." In this case, it's redundancy makes it valueless; it makes it a nonessential. Not useful. Unnecessary. So, I don't have cable. But I do have video sites, such as Youtube, in case there's a show or clip that strikes my fancy.

Another question concerns furniture. A traditional desk requires a stool or chair. Two items that work together. However, my desk allows me to sit on the floor, which eliminates the need for dual furniture. Suddenly, something necessary (the chair) becomes nonessential. Less stuff. More minimal. Easy. See what I mean? I need a desk for ergonomic/work purposes, but with a certain kind of desk, I need less.

Some things don't work that way, though. And this is really where essentialism shines. Suppose you have 100 things. Suppose the 101st object is a fire extinguisher. You're weighing whether you need it at all. After all, you've never had a fire in your home; at least, it was more than ten years ago. Why keep what you'll probably never use? Because the future is uncertain. It is better to be prepared than have one less item, just to say you're that more minimal. It's a fire extinguisher. It isn't huge or unwieldy. I've never been in an apartment that didn't have one in its stock configuration. It's essential, after all.

To distill that entire paragraph: Certain kinds of minimalism will lead to dying off. Yes, that's dramatic. No, I can't imagine anyone not owning a fire extinguisher because it's too much. Then again, I wouldn't imagine a crowd of people (hipsters?) voluntarily sitting and watching a woman open a can of expired soup, rub it on her shirt while reciting a poem backwards, then cut open her jeans and discharging something from her vagina. And then they all applaud! But that's a performance titled Interior Semiotics (link NSFW). And that's a different can of worms. Or Spaghetti-Os.

Plus, I don't really feel that a warning about keeping fire extinguishers is needed. Still, stop signs should be built before crashes and all. Although, I'm not some sort of minimalist government responsible for public safety... I hope. If I were, I'd also tell you to wear a paracord bracelet and keep a first-aid kit and perhaps store everything in a bug-out bag. And now, we're overlapping with survivalism. And that's okay.

I mean, shouldn't stuff be integral to survival? Let me go ahead and split this tangent into two topics: survival and hoarding. On the survival side of view, your stuff won't weigh you down. It helps you live another day, or another month, or another year. Maybe it all needs to be carried at all times. Maybe it should be able to fit on a truck bed. Or maybe, it needs to be stuff that's easily disposable. Stuff that can be cut away quickly if necessary.

I'm of the mind that less stuff means less to worry about. If there's a fire and I have one minute to round up stuff I cannot live without, I do not want to have to decide between two laptops. True, I'm supposed to vacate immediately, right? And leave everything behind? Yeah, right. Laptop, camera, shoved into a prepared bug-out bag. Done.

Different scenario: I have one hour to get out of Houston because there is, I don't know, a tsunami/hurricane/ICBM headed my way. The last thing I want to think about is how my collection of fine China will be reduced to nothing. Relatedly, the last game I want to play is Tetris as I try to fit that collection into our small SUV. I don't have a collection of China for these very reasons. Or two laptops.

I feel secure when I have enough. Monetarily, when I can walk into a store and buy any food I want (because most of my life revolves around food, but that's a different post). Physically, when I can carry any of my friends on my back. Emotionally, when.... well, I don't. And spiritually, when I'm not swayed by various churches passing out pamphlets for a better life -- my religion is fine, thanks, fancy a magazine?

Better said, I'd feel less secure with more. Emergency planning aside, I really hate walking into a room and sighing because of all the stuff spilling out from everywhere. My desk is one thing; everything is within easy reach, so why use shelves and drawers? But the entire room, or, the entire house, needs some organization. If I can spend two hours organizing my files on my computer, I can spend at least one making sure the kitchen is in shape.

For some, though, it's different. They feel secure by having so much stuff, and from an armchair anthropologist standpoint, that's really interesting. There's this illusion of security, and it's always visible. After all, you can't help but turn around, if you have the space to turn around, and see the products of your hard work. Can't help but open the fridge and see seven chickens and feel some satisfaction that you won't run out. Can't help but drive the Jeep and not worry about breaking down because you've got another car at home and you'll just take that if you have to because isn't that why you have it anyway?

See the idea? Mind you, that's not to say every hoarder has this mindset. I know the ones in my family, myself a few years back included, do.

And no, I haven't completely shrugged off the habit. I finish role-playing games with a full inventory because I never know if I'll need a certain item. That's part of why I quit playing Runescape way back when; I couldn't hold everything I felt I needed. That's also why I currently have, in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, two jars with faeries, Fairy's Tears, and lantern oil. Why? Well, what if I run out of hearts? What if I run out of oil? Oh no! Say it isn't so!

...What if my toaster catches on fire?

Well, good thing I kept the fire extinguisher.

It's all about essentials. I have the faeries because I don't have the maximum achievable amount of hearts yet. Hence, sometimes I run out; I'm not the best player. Instead of starting a stage/level/dungeon from the beginning, I can keep going for a bit longer. It's essential. Similarly, when my sister accidentally started a grease fire, I got the fire extinguisher and put it out. Had I ever needed one before? No. Was I glad for having one? Yes.

One last thing: I value some things that aren't essential for most people, but are for me. For example, my copy of Twilight Princess. I don't need it, in the strictest sense. However, I do like relaxing every now and then (about once a week or so) and sitting down to play it. It's fun in a way that anything I do online isn't. That is, I enjoy reading Cracked or Wikipedia, and can lose the better part of the day doing that as well, but I don't get the same level of bliss. I'm not sure how to explain it. Just, whenever I need to really unwind, I play Zelda. And that's where the value comes from. That's what makes it essential. The game isn't necessary for life, but it does give me a certain something; enough to keep it, and the Gamecube and telly to make it work, around.

So that's it for now. Essentials over minimals, although they overlap. I'll continue this with a post on choices and how they affect us; it's all related, trust me.

Circle-Based Expectation, or, Social Pressure

I use the term "circle" because "social network" felt a bit too unwieldy and "community" seems a bit too broad. While either would fit, (most of) this post deals with family and friends. Specifically, how family and friends motivate people to do more.

Do more what? Anything, even if the more is less. Neither is inherently positive or negative; that is, sometimes, doing less is a good thing. Anecdote: personal story. I'll drive myself into the ground for the sake of proving a point; if I'm told that I can't survive on three hours of sleep, I'll do it for a month, just to show that it's possible. So, sure, the point is made, but at what cost to myself? Similarly, when people say that skipping meals leads to a starvation response that results in weight retention and overall retardation of weight loss, I'll skip meals days, to show that it's just not true.

So, while I think it's a great way to give firsthand experience, it isn't healthy. Neither of those two activities/habits. That's where friends and family come in, to encourage us to do less.

Conversely, doing more might entail striving for higher goals. Pushing one's self to achieve, well, anything. And that's something I really find interesting. Please, join me at my armchair anthropology.

See, social networks like Twitter or Facebook or Blogspot or Tumblr or any other site you can think of usually ask for a level of transparency. Not just from the company providing the service (Google Plus nymwars, anyone?), but from the users, as well. People police each other. And, if people have something to lose, that is, pride or reputation, they will stride ahead to keep either in the green. After all, your name can spread over the web at a very alarming rate.

Let's say something terrible happens to your name. Oh, I don't know, you tweet that Angelina Jolie looks like Ellen Page. (This is hypothetical, so let's have fun.) Someone with (invariably) way more followers than you retweets you and people notice. And they become upset. Like wildfire, the malcontent at your serious lack of facial recognition (I hope you have something like this disorder; people will "understand"). Offline, you could switch towns. States. Maybe countries, if the mob brought pitchforks. Online, however, your name is tainted. You're taunted. Hopefully, you used a handle with no significant attachment to you (xXrazorXgurl14Xx) and you never posted anything about your whereabouts. Maybe your friends don't know that xXrazorXgurl14Xx is you. Maybe you don't have friends. At least, not anymore.

So! If you're (in)famous, word gets around. And online, words are everything. Hence, people safeguard their name. Usually.

After all, it's just a name, right? Just a way to refer to one's self? I'll have to get into that in another post.

Another name I call this is social pressure. Basically, we're pressured by the people we interact with. Sometimes it's little things, like speaking in a different fashion to police officers as opposed to our best mates, who we always go wakeboarding with. Whether that fashion is positive or negative is left to your discretion. There is also large social pressure, in the form of the goals you set and the promises you make. On the negative side, peer pressure. Peers pressure you to, or, expect you to, commit certain acts. Well, to be fair, peer pressure isn't always negative, or, bad. But for the sake of clarity, I usually refer to positive peer pressure as social expectation.

Technically, positive can be a bad thing. Positive reinforcement refers to a given reward, such as increased rations. Positive punishment refers to a given consequence, such as reduced rations. But I'm digressing; back to topic.

Let's say it's Monday. If you happened to promise that you'd, I don't know, go wakeboarding on Saturday with your best mates, and Sunday morning you posted photos on Facebook of you slamming bowls of phở at the delicious Houstin restaurant Pho Saigon that I won't shamelessly plug here because they're soup is delicious and I like to hotlink now and again, guess what? Everyone knows that you don't keep your word (and that somehow you spilled tapioca all over the waiter). And those mates? Maybe they aren't your mates anymore. I know I'd feel terribly dug out.

So, you go wakeboarding. The alternative is delicious phở, but at what price? (5.75 for a large bowl, actually, plus a side of deception and grief.)

But that's kind of far-fetched. How about... goals? Perhaps you have a goal to bike from Houston to Austin, which is about 150 miles. So you put that as your status on Facebook. And look! You get a couple of  likes. That's pretty nifty! But later, you get cold feet. Maybe the ride will be hotter than you thought. Maybe there's snakes in the road halfway through. Maybe Shia LaBeouf is nearby.

Well, haha, there's no backing out now, buddy. You already said you're going to do it. In fact, you promised. And it's public. Sure, you could go back on your promise. Maybe. But what kind if upstanding citizen does that?

So you bike. Congratulations! You're now a victim of social expectation. You've done what was expected, even though you weren't sure if you would or could. Seeing as people usually rationalize actions after they're committed, you might even feel a bit happier from the ride. It wasn't so bad, right? And what nice friends you have. They cheered you on! They didn't let you fail! They didn't expect you to!

Then again, some things don't work that way. Armchair anthropology over.

In other news, the spring semester ended last week, and I have more time at home. I get to write articles and post to blogs now. Also, I'm here when my sister comes home from school, and that's really nice. We bond and stuff.

So, personal story. Because I wanted to be a good influence on her, I became more studious around her. Well, to put it more accurately, I used her as a crutch to get work done. I noticed that I'm less likely to futz about on the computer if someone's around -- same as how, when I was younger, I needed my mom to stand in the doorway so that I could clean my room. (Thank God that's changed.) In my personal time, I'm a bit more lenient as to what gets done, and when. But when she was around, I worked more expeditiously, because I want her to work expeditiously. Is that hypocritical? Probably. Good thing that we become the masks we wear; I've learned to prioritize in my own time, out of her eyesight. And that's for the best, isn't it? Wait! So really, I was training myself to work better by requiring myself to work at my best, right? Right, guys?

...Guys?

Really though, circle-based responsibility. Set a good example for those in my circle; become the mask. Don't slam bowls at Pho Saigon. Go wakeboarding. It's all connected. I'll write more about this in the future -- social pressure. Not the phở.

Flow. Also, Goal-Oriented Research

Judging by tweets, I worked on a new song for a couple of hours last night. Part of me is pretty happy because that's the shortest I've been able to work on a song at once. What? Let me explain.

Usually, if it's late at night and I feel the inspiration for now music, I fire up Renoise and start a new song. Over the next five or six hours, I quickly draft, compose, edit, and fine-tune about five minutes of audio. And I never notice the time passing until I hear roosters (because I live in that part of town) and see early rays of sunlight peeking from under my drawn curtains. And then I glance at the clock, affirming what I'm dreading. Another night's gone by, and the coming day will be heck on my nerves. You know, because of lack of sleep and all of that. So I'm more nervous about poor decisions. And... okay, I digress.

So, last night, I knew what to expect (the rush and thrill of fresh sounds plus the time sink they inevitably become) and limited myself accordingly. Instead of spending the night, I spent just a part of it. And possibly, that was a good thing, because I've been tired lately and I need to acclimate my internal clock. See, I've been trying to go to sleep at a decent hour and wake early. For eight hours or so, that means hitting the sack at ten, so that I can rise at six. However, long nights at the keyboard and headphones doesn't really help with that.

Anyway. I thought there was probably something wrong with me, in that I could spend so long at a single task. Or, maybe, this behavior meant that I really learned the software, and so using it was second nature and I was truly making music as fast as I could think of it. Maybe. But that sounded too good to be true, so I fired up my super advanced research tool: Gleaning Orders of Opulent, Gorgeous Learning Ephemera. Or, Google, for short. (I can't believe I just did that.) Within a few minutes, I had my answer: flow.

Yes, I like Wikipedia. More to the point, flow is that state of total involvement in an activity. When I'm drawing, the moment where my pencil is part of my hand, and not an unwieldy tool to get the job done. When playing guitar, I don't feel inhibited and I can noodle for hours. And when in front of the computer, composing music, the time can fly by and I don't even notice.

The nice thing about flow is that it's not restricted to one activity -- that is, flow follows from immersion in any activity. The current image on the Wikipedia article depicts a young Girl Scout braiding plastic. I don't find it hard to imagine her playing piano with the same level of concentration. Or modeling with Lego. Or, closer to home, surfing the Internet.

Better said, raiding the Internet, or, researching by making heavy use of it. Like any task with a goal and a method, information culling can be reduced to a familiar set of steps that can be adapted to suit the current sub-goal. For example, let's say that I'm trying to find information on my momentary insomnia. I might search for such for [musical insomnia] because I'm only awake for so long when I've got a bassline stuck in my head. Currently, the results mostly point to how to use music to overcome insomnia; not quite what I had in mind. So, I adapt the search to [need no sleep while composing] which is closer to my experience, although unwieldy. However, the focus is still on sleep -- not the music. Another adaptation to [time flies when composing] which still has that narrow "composing" as part of the query, but has the broad "time flies," which should gather more relevant hits, since it is a common phrase. And on the first page, someone mentions the "zone."

And that's the magic word which jogs my memory. The zone. Of course. And from there, we're quickly at the concept of flow, after subtracting "zone diet" and "twilight zone" from future queries and searching Wikipedia on a hunch. In fact, the Wiki article for "In the Zone" is about a Britney Spears article. Thankfully, there exists a link to Flow (Psychology). And that's where I began to understand.

Right. So, sub-goals. The overall goal is to learn about what's happening, but along the way, I had to continually adapt my search query; the sub-goal was to find the most relevant information using the most relevant query. Of course, because "the zone" is such a popular phrase, it would take a while to finally distill results until they centered on psychology/mental phenomena. That's where adapting to Wikipedia comes in -- using two large resources in concord to access data quickly.

Like flow, the approach can fit to other topics. Can't think of an old song? Search the lyrics, then plug titles that seem familiar into Wikipedia to check the date. If it's a song that you know you heard in 1994, there's no way it could be that big hit from 2002, right? but it might be, so you hop on Youtube to check, and then you realize that you might just bypass Wikipedia altogether because almost any song is on Youtube these days. And that's pretty cool. So, the goal is to find an old song, but sub-goals include developing an easier way to find that song (adapting to Youtube instead of Wikipedia) or eliminating obviously incorrect results.

Another example: a song I still love to this day is Old Feelings, by drum and bass artist Beckett. For a while, I was dying to know from what song he sampled. So, I searched the lyrics. Repeatedly. What's sad is that I couldn't understand what exactly was said. Hence, I had to enter many, many variations of a few phrases. So, the sub goal became "find the proper lyrics," while the goal remained, "find the source material." Eventually, I located an old jazz song from the 30s: Undecided, by Ella Fitzgerald (a woman who should need no Wiki link, but here you go in case you do).

I did not expect that.

At first listen, it didn't seem to fit quite right. But after a while, I heard more lyrics that sounded perfect -- at the very end. There it was. Perfect.

And so ends my short thoughts on flow and goal-oriented research. In a different post, I may talk about broad research -- scattershot research -- where the goal is just to know more, but not specifically about anything specifically specific.

Specifically.

Initial

Spanshot. Many targets. So little time. So let's talk a bit about this blog and its purpose.

See, I believe that if I do what I love, I'll love what I do and fulfillment -- both personal and monetary -- will follow. Therefore, I do many things, with the goal of working from home. Why? Because I have a lot of interests; enough to make me feel uncomfortable with pursuing just one in a single-purpose environment. Also, there exists this stigma that working from home isn't really working. I'm proving that wrong, too. Plus, I crave time. I'm thinking that I can save time by saving a commute. And there are loads of other reasons that will unfold as I post more. (Too many for this initial post.)

I'll document my progress in these things in this blog, with the intent of helping others with whom I share my ideals. In this blog, I'm writing about a different way to view life -- as something to be met and cultivated and tackled and subdued. But above all, to be enjoyed.

So, I'm aiming to prove that one can make a (suitably awesome) living by shooting at multiple targets. Obtaining revenue from multiple streams. Sowing seeds in many fields. And other associated metaphors.

Now, what are my targets? Currently, I'm interested in (and will blog about) the following areas:

• minimalism
• cycling
• writing
• photography
• music
• abstract art
• web design
• schooling
• and more!

So, I won't be only making a living, but showing my living, in all its minimal, musical, and frugal ol' glory... serial commas and all.

Being a student, I don't have the time to update consistently, or perhaps even often. However, I will update, with news of progress and other thoughts that flow this way. Thoughts from budget studio lighting to picking a Linux distribution. Search engine optimization to drum and bass. The idea is to shoot at several fields -- to perform a scattershot. Why? To make a living without being stuck in one spot. Because, what's the point of living when you aren't really living? More on that later.

Lastly, this blog will show my writing style; on a personal level, as is this introductory post, and on a wide level, such as some of the future articles I'll post. I try to straddle styles and have fun with language. I hope this is apparent. :3

So, all in all, my choice in life is a sort of scattershot, but without the connotation of haphazardness. I feel that a more fitting catchphrase would be spanshot. And that's how I titled this blog. Enjoy.