Graeme's Musings

Why I’m Not Upgrading My iPhone

September 22, 2012 by Graeme Blake Leave a Comment

Until two days ago, I was set to buy the iPhone 5. I have the iPhone 4. My phone had started to feel big, and it was slowing down.

It’s been two generations. Why not upgrade? It made sense as a business case. I use my phone often enough that I would save much time from getting a faster phone.

Then two things happened:

1. I watched Jimmy Kimmel fool people into thinking the iPhone 4S was the iPhone 5.

2. I had to upgrade to iOS 5.1.1 to secure my jailbreak.

I’ve realized that the people in that video weren’t so silly after all, and that I’ve been using my phone wrong for years. I’m no longer using a case, and I’ve made it 50% faster (subjective) by restoring it, and turning it off occasionally.

Thanks, Jimmy

I had a good laugh watching people gush over the iPhone 4s. “It’s so much faster than my iPhone 4S!”.

Comments on Hacker News pointed out that most of the people impressed by the “new” iPhone had big cases on their phones. Hmm…I did too. I had an Otterbox case, because I can be a klutz. I’ve gotten in the habit of throwing my phone around, because the case is so tough.

It occurred to me that I probably could be more careful with my phone, if there was no case on it. And Apple replaced it when my screen cracked (even though there was a case on the phone). I could probably get them to do it again, if something went wrong.

The resale value of the phone is only ~$300, so why not use it with no case. The very worst case scenario is a one-off $300 loss.

I’ve really come to appreciate the beauty of the iPhone. Yes, I sound like a fanboy…but it’s a really nice phone. It feels light and smooth in my hand. I can understand why those people thought the iPhone 4S was the new iPhone….they’ve been holding rubber in their hand, rather than sleek glass and metal.

Restoring My Phone To Proper Functionality

As iOS 6 was coming out, the window to upgrade to 5.1.1, jailbroken, was closing. So I restored my phone, and upgraded.

I was blown away at the speed increase. Clearly it had been too long since I restored. Or possibly, too long since I turned the damn thing off.

In any case, my phone is 50% faster. It feels like a new iPhone. If the people in Jimmy Kimmel’s video were used to a bogged down 4S, it makes sense that a shiny new 4S felt like an improved product.

I’m now going to restore periodically, and make an effort to turn my phone on and off every now and again.

I don’t Need an iPhone 5

My phone now feels new. Everything I use it for (calendar, internet, omnifocus, evernote, photos, dropbox) feels instant. I can no longer make the case for upgrading, at least not for efficiency reasons.

And physically, it’s a joy to use. The pleasant feeling of using it is worth the risk of dropping it. From anecdotes, the phone is actually quite durable. I know from experience that the screen doesn’t scratch, at the least.

I will likely get the 5S, or whatever it will be, but for now I’m thrilled to have discovered how good my phone actually is.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m Graeme. I’m a self-employed LSAT instructor in Montreal, moderator of /r/LSAT.

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Minimal Wallet (Stuff I like)

September 21, 2012 by Graeme Blake Leave a Comment

If you’re like most guys, you probably have a lot of stuff in your pockets. And unfortunately, it’s not wads of cash.

It’s plastic, and coins. Modern wallets are huge. You’ve got coins, bills, credit cards, debit cards, membership cards, etc.

Following my brother’s lead, I got rid of the coins, and never looked back. I bought a wallet that only carried cards and money.

It was good, for a while. But then my brother showed me a neoprene card holder from Mec.

It’s the greatest “wallet” I’ve ever used. I don’t carry cash anymore. Instead, I have:

Business credit card
Personal Credit Card
Business Debit Card
Personal Debit Card
Metro Card (Subway)
Health Card (Photo ID in Quebec)

That’s it. I hardly notice that I have it. It’s incredibly easy to take out of my pocket, and fast to find the cards.

It’s been discontinued, but you can place a bulk order on Alibaba if you truly want one….

Chains.cc (Stuff I Like)

September 20, 2012 by Graeme Blake Leave a Comment

Jerry Seinfeld had some productivity advice. To keep writing jokes, he put a big calendar up on the wall. Every day he met his writing goal, he put an X on that day. After a while, the X’s formed a chain. It looked nice.

Your job is not to break that chain.

It’s great advice, I’ve used it to help build several new habits. I found a great, lightweight webapp to help you do that: https://chains.cc/

Chains.cc is really simple. You add a chain, and click if you met that goal each day. It forms a nice, satisfying chain. I added it to my bookmarks bar, and check off my goals at the end of each day.

It sounds silly, but it works. Whenever I’ve broken a habit, I’ve noticed that I’ve gone a few days without marking off my chains. I didn’t break the habit in the first few days, but not marking down my progress “allowed” me to break the habit later.

My one piece of advice: Don’t build too many chains. I find one positive goal (doing something) and one negative goal (not doing something) is as much as I can handle.

Once a goal is in “maintenance”, then you can add more.

Go make some chains!

Moving Towards The Mountain

June 2, 2012 by Graeme Blake 1 Comment

You may have seen Neil Gaimen’s commencement speech last week. If not, ignore the rest of this post and watch the video now.

The entire speech is great. But I was struck by Gaimen’s “moving towards the mountain” metaphor. He gave me words to describe what I’ve been doing for the past year and a half.

I left law school in December 2010. I had no plan. I just had a goal: make my own way in the world. I would do no work that I did not want to do.

To my great surprise, things have worked out. Whenever I faced a choice, I just asked myself: will this take me closer to my goal, or move me away?

Over the past 15 months, I have:

Set up a private LSAT tutoring business
Helped a niche test prep company move into Montreal
Written LSAT explanations that provide me steadyroyalties each month
Begun learning to program

I didn’t plan to do any of these things. But when I noticed an opportunity, and saw that it brought me closer to my goal, I tried it. There were other things I tried that didn’t work out, but it’s not hard to try an experiment, and swiftly abandon it if it fails.

Just recently, I took over the LSAT subreddit, /r/LSAT. I’ve spent the past week getting it going.

Do I know how this will help me? Not at all. It might lead to nothing, or it might be the best thing I’ve done since leaving law school. I’ve never been a subreddit mod before, I have no clue what will happen.

But it feels like a step towards the mountain. How can it be anything but good to create an active forum that covers my niche? The worst case scenario is that I provide something useful to people for a while, nothing much comes from it and I hand it off to someone else. It’s worth an experiment, considering the potential upside.

Thanks to my past work, I’m free to spend two weeks getting something like this going, even if it doesn’t work.

Likewise, I’m learning Ruby on Rails with Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. Do I know exactly where this will lead? Do I have a well defined plan for how to benefit from this knowledge? Hell no.

But, it clearly won’t be a bad thing to know how to program in Rails, even if I never learn any more Rails than the guide teaches me.

This isn’t entirely Neil Gaimen’s strategy at work. I’m also following Nassim Taleb’s advice, and exposing myself to events that have low risks and high potential upsides. I’ve done this ever since leaving law school. When any of these high potential events pays off, I move several steps closer to the mountain. When one fails to pay off, I just discard it.

I’m a lot closer to the mountain now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m Graeme. I’m a self-employed LSAT instructor in Montreal and moderator of /r/LSAT.

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Why You Should Track Your Monthly Bills and Subscriptions

May 10, 2012 by Graeme Blake 2 Comments

Unless you live in isolation on top of a mountain, you pay many bills each month. Internet, cell phone, cable, online subscriptions, insurance, electricity, etc.

These bills have multiplied now that you can subscribe to services on the internet. Do you know how much you spend, when the billing dates are, and how you pay for everything? Most people don’t.

(For those who do track your bills: congratulations, you’re ahead of the curve. Most people don’t, at least not in their 20’s)

I know I didn’t, until I decided to take an hour to look over my credit card statements and write everything down.

You should do the same. Then list the results. You don’t have to be fancy – I made mine in google docs.

I split my list between business and personal expenses. For each entry, I have:

The total price.
The Billing Date. (Why not?)
The Payment method (name of credit card or paypal)

Advantage To Listing Your Monthly Bills

Listing my bills lets me total my monthly expenses from bills and subscriptions. I already knew roughly what I spend for my other main categories of spending (rent, groceries, amazon books, fun, etc.) Now I know roughly how much I spend each month, on everything. It didn’t take very long to do.

Recently, this list was very useful to me for another reason. One of my credit cards is expiring, and I had to update my payment information at every service that used it. I have about 12 bills, and I use different payment methods. If I missed one that used this card, I could lose a payment and possibly have the service cancelled.

But it only took me 15 minutes to fix everything. I just found which 7 bills used the card in question, went to their websites, and updated everything. Now I don’t have to worry about a missed payment.

I got the idea to track my subscriptions from I Will Teach You To Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi. Despite the somewhat scammy sounding title, this is a really good book that gave me some actionable tips towards tracking my finances. Ramit will teach you how to negotiate raises and discounts, and how to automate your saving and spending. Highly recommended.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Steps To Tracking All Your Monthly Subscriptions

Write down all the things you think you’re buying each month. This isn’t essential, but it can help make sure you get everything.
Get your last 2-3 statements for each credit card, and look at your last two months of paypal payments, if any. You’ll want multiple bills so that you can double check, and so that you can look for any weirdly named companies that handle payments.
Open up Excel/Google Docs, and go through your statements.
For each service, enter the price paid, and the date you paid it on. It’s occasionally useful to know billing dates, so you may as well collect them when you do this.
For extra credit, categorize your subscriptions into a few major categories.
And now that you have your bills all in one place, why not ask yourself if you really need all of them.

Bonus: Seeing all my services in one place made me realize that a few had become absolutely useless to me. I saved $20 per month. Not bad for an hour’s work.