When I was a student at the University of South Carolina, someone mentioned to me that a mutual friend of ours had set the South Carolina record in the beer mile. "What's a beer mile?" I asked.

It turns out that a beer mile is a chess boxing-like hybrid sport, simultaneously testing one's fleet footedness and ones beer chugging ability. The event begins with the competitor opening a 12oz (or more) can/bottle of 5% ABV (or more) beer in the staging zone. The brave soul then chugs the beer as quickly as possible before beginning a quarter-mile run. At the end of the quarter mile, the competitor opens a second beer and repeats the performance, and likewise for a third and fourth lap. Vomiting before the completion of the fourth lap results in a penalty lap, though no penalty beer. The complete rules fill in the other details.

My friend, the apparent SC state champion beer miler, seemed uniquely suited to the event: he was both an NCAA 1600m runner and a heavy drinker. Perfect for the event. Word on the street was that he had run it in some mind-boggling time like 6:30 or something. Really crazy, but not my cup of tea. I forgot about the beer mile.

Last year, my interest in the beer mile was renewed when someone told me about a race in which you eat an entire French dinner, with a course after each leg of the race [citation needed? can't seem to find the race on the internet]. I remembered the beer mile, and put the event in my 35 by 35 list, ensuring its completion (or at least, that I wouldn't forget it about it). It wasn't until six months ago that I got serious about it. I floated the idea to my friend Jacob who, like my college beer mile champion friend, was both exceptional drinker and runner. He loved the idea, and we ended up talking about it often. He found this insane video of what appears to be the world-record beer mile, and we were inspired:

We started talking strategy. Where and when could we do the run such that we wouldn't get hassled under Virginia's archaic public drinking laws? The track was the obvious choice, but when? The track is almost always populated, so we never came to a consensus. Instead, we both found ourselves in the Myrtle Beach area over the Fourth of July and took it as a sign.

The Sunday after the Fourth, Jacob met me at my parents place. We originally intended to run on the beach, but the combination of high tide and lots of people pushed us onto the road instead. Our enthusiasm was infectious, and my family and some friends came out to cheer us on (actually, laugh at us) and time our attempt. My buddy Geoff also decided to run. We lined up and GPS'ed a 0.25mi course. We acquired a case of the classic, Bud Diesel, like our hero in the video above, set up our cans, and prepared ourselves mentally and physically. Even at 9AM it was crazy hot, and we were sweating before we started. Here's us lined up to go:

Someone counts us down and fired the starting pistol. We grab our first beer and chugged it down. The beer is pretty warm, as it had been sitting out on the driveway while we did all our preparation, and it foams over the top of the can. Not a good sign. Regardless, we all did pretty well on the first lap. We get back, pop the second top and start drinking. The second one is much harder than the first. By this point, Jacob is already in a commanding lead, with Geoff and I roughly neck and neck. The second run felt pretty awful, and as I opened the third beer I announced that this was the worst I had ever felt from any exercise ever. Also that I felt like a giant bubble. I was having trouble burping to get rid of the carbon dioxide in my stomach, and it was not going well. I slogged slowly through the third beer. I thought briefly about giving up, throwing in the towel, but I reminded myself that the list item was complete a beer mile, not attempt a beer mile. Right before I finished my third beer, Jacob crossed the finish line on his final lap, and the support crew announced his time: 10:05. He slowed down and immediate yakked up a bunch of foamy lager.

I took off running while he was still cleansing himself of impurities. I pushed on, barely running with a belly full of foam sloshing around. I hear everyone yelling, and here comes Jacob passing me on what turned out to be his irrelevant penalty lap - you only have to run a penalty if you puke before the race is over. I finish my third lap. I open the fourth beer. I stare at it. I drink some. I feel terrible. I am sweaty, my stomach feels awful, its 9:10 in the morning, the sun is beating down. Geoff is beating me. Somehow, we both finish our beers and take off running, Geoff a few steps ahead. I see him slow and bend over, and he loses it, booting in the middle of the road. I realize I am going to do the same and turn into some bushes.

I puke and it's nothing but foam, two big throatfuls. It all comes out in the second one, and like magic I feel totally fine. This is seriously the highest gain in personal wellbeing I have ever experienced. Plodding ahead, I was completely overwhelmed by how terrible I felt; after my moment in the bushes, I felt... well, maybe not quite 100%, but super good. I take off sprinting, hit the turn, pass Geoff. I am actually running for the first time since the first lap! I cross the line and immediately turn for my penalty lap. I am really running hard, and I finally finish the race! I don't even feel that sick, though I am totally out of breath after sprinting a half mile. My dad jokingly hangs a leftover race medallion from a previous half marathon around my neck. Here's me after the race:

My penalty lap time turned out to be 1:38, which isn't really that bad for the last of five quarter miles. Here are my splits:

Each split includes the preceding beer as well, so beer 1 + lap 1 took me 2:07. As you can see, the third lap (really the third beer) was the most brutal by a wide margin. As a bonus, Geoff was wearing his Fitbit, so we also have all kinds of cool stats from his run. Here's the output:

So there we have it. My first beer mile, and my first item off of the 35-by-35 list. Hilarious, gross, difficult, incredibly painful, and lots of fun. No regrets.

A couple months back I turned 30. Like it or not, resist it or embrace it, at least from a numerological standpoint it is a serious milestone. About three weeks prior to my birthday, I was talking to my younger sister and she mentioned that she had finished putting together her 30 by 30 list, a list of 30 things she wanted to accomplish by the time she reached my venerable age.

Naturally, I wanted to put together a similar list, but I realized that I would have to accomplish something awesome every day (and two some days) for the rest of the time before my birthday. Rather than pigeonhole myself into 30 pieces of low-hanging fruit, I decided to give myself another 5 years and create a 35 by 35 list. Strangely, it has taken from then until now to complete the list (maybe the list itself should have been on the list? meta.).

Without further ado, by 35 I hope to...

1. Surf in the Pacific
2. Live abroad
3. See the Aurora (either one)
4. Automate all of my income
5. Speak basic conversational Spanish
6. Boulder V8 outdoors
7. Redpoint 5.13a outdoors
8. Learn to ride a motorcycle
9. Cook a whole pig
10. Read all of Terry Pratchett
11. Build a beautiful piece of furniture
12. Finish the LA Times PoMo list
13. Finish the Time book list
14. Finish the AFI Top 100
15. Kill, dress, clean, and eat an animal
16. Play music for money
17. Write some songs I really like
18. Run a sub-20:00 5k
19. Brew an excellent beer
20. Complete a beer mile
21. Learn to serve a tennis ball
22. Play Chopin op. 48 on the piano (this will be nigh-impossible)
23. Go to Cuba
24. Ride in a helicopter
25. Eat at a 3 Michelin star restaurant
26. Learn to sail; sail on a long trip
27. Get a fully tailored suit
28. Play a full game of Diplomacy in person
29. Finish the Sight and Sound top 250
30. Climb a big wall and sleep on a portaledge
31. Finish a whole NYT Sunday crossword in a single sitting
32. Start another startup
33. Close the Heavy Grips 250lb gripper
34. Be part of a successful startup exit
35. Go one full calendar month without buying anything

Maybe this post will keep me hungry, who knows. Wish me luck!

Every so often, I see a blog post about removing choice and effort from your life in order to focus on what is "most important." These articles cite things like Steve Jobs wearing the same black turtleneck every day as ways to ease our cognitive load, improving our ability to think and reason on issues more critical than our clothing choices.

Indeed, this type of thinking has even evolved into a sort of life-optimizing startup culture. It's not enough to use a dishwasher and wear only jeans and hoodies; now Soylent even aims to remove the need to prepare food for ourselves. These are all seemingly valid ways to remove some of our cognitive load, but are they the correct way to approach the ultimate problem we are trying to solve? In other words, does offloading some of our daily cognitive load really help us better focus on core problems?

In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores some of the research surrounding happiness. One conclusion is that humans are at their happiest when they are in "flow." Flow is the mental state you experience in which you are completely absorbed with the task at hand. The following conditions need to be met in order to experience a state of flow:

• You are doing an task with clear goals and obvious progress.
• You have clear feedback on how well you are doing.
• You are confident that you can complete the task.

There are also a couple things that can help you stay in flow:

• The task is perceived as challenging.
• There is little to nothing to distract you.

As mentioned above, we humans are at our happiest when we are in a state of flow. Another nice side effect is that we efficiently accomplish our tasks at hand when we can enter the flow state. In fact, I'd guess that what most of us would claim to be after in our daily work life (and perhaps especially for startup founders) is to spend as much time as we can in the flow state, working on our problems.

But as we are so often reminded, work isn't everything. The so-called work-life balance is a constant source of conversation, and not just among entrepreneurs. Interestingly, the research on flow applies equally well to preparing dinner as it does to building our products. That is, we are at our happiest when we can achieve a flow state regardless of the activity. For me, this means trying to cultivate an interest in my daily activities outside of work in order to better set myself up for flow. Though research is unclear on this, it may very well be the case that by "practicing" our flow, we can achieve something akin to the autotelic personality.

Even if we can't, though, I'd rather spend my evenings trying to craft the perfect omelette instead of "offloading" my dinner choices to Soylent. In general, while shedding cognitive load may help us better focus on what we deem "important", I feel like it shouldn't come at the expense of the vibrancy and wonder of everyday life. By trying to cultivate a state of flow in all things, we can discover all sorts of things that are seemingly mundane but actually fascinating.

I was once wrapping some gifts with a friend of mine. As usual, I was rushing through the process of wrapping my gifts. As a result, my wrapping was ugly and slipshod while his was neat, clean, and elegant. I remarked at how hard it was to wrap gifts, and how good he was at it. He responded with some advice that I won't forget: "It isn't really hard at all. You just need to have some craft."

How many throw-away tasks, like wrapping gifts, do we go through each day? Tasks that we rush to complete because we feel they don't matter - washing dishes, cooking dinner, even hanging out with our friends - and in doing so, don't really apply ourselves completely? Taking this approach to our daily tasks ensures that we won't enter the flow state.

Instead, try and see each task as an opportunity to have some craft. Make your daily activities into challenges. Take the time to wrap your presents neatly and beautifully. Wash the dishes as efficiently as possible, and try to use as little water as is necessary. Try and build dialogues with your friends and family rather than just sitting swilling beer (this one is a little close to home). By insisting on having a little craft in all things, we build an environment conducive to flow, and ultimately increase our happiness. And who is to say that that happiness doesn't feed back more positively into our work life than the shallow value gained by offloading these tasks?

This year has been a year of much growth for me, and though ultimately I didn't complete all my goals, I did try a bunch of new stuff, some of which I really liked.

Goal review for 2013

• Lifting goals. With my primary climbing partner out of commision with a new son, at the beginning of this year I decided to try to focus on some powerlifting goals to switch things up in the exercise department. Having done (self-directed) Crossfit for a couple years prior, I had a good foundation for the primary lifts I wanted to focus on (squat, deadlift, press, clean, snatch), as well as having a decent base to start from.

  My lifting buddy and I set out on the road to swoleness with a copy of Starting Strength, the best place to start as far as I can tell. My lifts immediately started progressing, and I became more confident in my form. The most surprising thing to me was the effect of diet on lifting. If you want to get stronger, really a lot stronger, eat as much as you possibly can! For me, that meant trying the GOMAD thing, which, incidentally, really works.

  Ultimately, it's all about the numbers. In 3 months of the 'beginner' programming from SS, my lifts went:

  • Squat: 295 -> 320
  • Deadlift: 295 -> 345
  • Press: 145 -> 155
  • Clean and jerk: 205 -> 225
  • Snatch: 165 -> 185 While not quite hitting the 2X bodyweight goals I had for myself, I felt good about the gains.

• Reading. I set out to read 50 books in 2013, and as of today I have less than 100 pages left in the 50th. So close. I read some really excellent works though, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as exploring graphic novels a bit. Some favorites are:

  • A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter Miller, Jr.
  • Feeding the World - Vaclav Smil
  • The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie by Agota Kristof
  • Everything ever written by Milan Kundera

• Get my spending way down. Late last year I started reading Mr. Money Mustache, and the whole 'eschew materialism in favor of doing things you love to do' concept stuck with me. I spent the first part of this year getting my spending in check, and at this point I am spending between $1,000 and $1,200 a month, with my yearly costs factored in. This is a far cry from where I started, and I must say it feels very liberating to acquire almost nothing.

  Additionally, I decided that many of my things that I already had were nonessential, so I purged hundreds of books, DVDs, musical instruments, kitchen gadgets, and other "stuff" from my life.

  On the other hand, I did acquire something big in 2013: another home. Specifically, I bought a small condo within walking distance to town, and I love it. I burn maybe 1/4 tank of gas per month, and that is almost all in climbing travel. Additionally, I got a good deal on it, and while it is tying up a good bit of my capital, it has lowered my monthly burn rate significantly.

• Improve my knowledge of web software and deployment. This was a resounding success. I rolled out several side projects this year, each of which taught me many things. Web servers, datastores, security, queueing, infrastructure automation tools, and more.

• Take on a social good project. I worked with my friends over at Maryland Nonprofits to help create a spacefinder for nonprofits, focused on low-cost sublets. This tool promises to help nonprofits in the Maryland area find homes for themselves so they can focus on their actual missions. This isn't quite finished yet, but it is nearing release, and I am excited to see where this goes.

• Climbing. After my stint lifting (and brief forays into Olympic lifting and Crossfit Football), I decided to get back into climbing after all. My original goal was to boulder V6 outdoors, and while I haven't quite crushed it yet, it is on the near horizon. The last time I went out before the end of the year, I climbed three V5 boulder problems.

• Travel. This goal is always on my list. This year, I was lucky enough to have time to take an 18-day road trip with one of my closest friends. From Virgina, we drove north to Chicago and beyond, ultimately taking highway 2 most of the way across the northern part of the country. Along the way, I saw and met some excellent people, I got to do the greatest hike I've ever done, I saw tons of wildlife, I got to see my sister, and I got to see the City Museum in St. Louis, which was the sleeper hit for the trip as far as I'm concerned. While 18 days isn't as much as I would like, all in all it was still an excellent trip.

• Create some cool side projects. Like traveling, this is a "forever" goal. This year I released my first "major" side project, Silvi, aimed at improving institutional (and personal) documentation. I also toyed with YellowCap after talking to my mother, a landscape professional, about one of the problems she has in her business: keeping clients up to date in the face of changing situations (backordered plants, weather, etc.). Lately, I've been working on Photobooth Creator, a spin-off of an afternoon hacking project to put together an HTML5 photobooth for the MiserWare holiday party. Additionally, I've done myriad other smallish projects, ranging from games to libraries. You can find most of them on my Github page.

  Along the way, I've grown quite a bit as a developer. Deployment methodologies, integrations with other systems, new languages, and improving old ones have all made my fu much tighter.

New goals for the new year

Based on the amount of flux in my life at the moment, 2014 promises to be an exciting year. Here are, as of now, the goals I have for the upcoming year.

• Make $500 on a personal project. Word on the street is that the first $500 is the hardest.

• Get Lasik. Thanks to an incredibly generous gift from my parents, I will be getting my eyes did on January 28th. I am excite!

• Work on a project with Chris Poirel. Chris is an old friend, and a genius to boot. I don't know if he'll have time with his new job, but I'd love to work on something with him this year.

• Read 25 challenging books. Both nonfiction and fiction, and I expect to read several less challenging books as well. Along the way I'd like to read A New Kind Of Science. Stephen Wolfram fascinates.

• Boulder V6 outdoors. Carry-over from last year. The psych is high though, so should be an early one to knock out.

• Write and record five songs. I've tried this one before, and I have trouble sitting down and actually doing it. We'll see.

• Learn to fish. I feel like this is almost a birthright.

• Kill, clean, and eat an animal. As a meat eater, I feel like if I can't do this then I don't deserve to eat animal flesh.

• Become conversation in Spanish. Just started Rosetta Stone. This is something I've wanted to do for some time.

• Build a major(ish) project in a functional language. Functional languages seem awesome to me, and I use functional features of many of my favorite languages, but I've never built anything serious in a pure functional language. UNTIL NOW.

• Travel. I've already got a trip lined up to India to speak at the NAE IAFOE symposium in May. I'd also like to take a big destination climbing trip. Again, a "forever" goal.

• Create some cool side projects. I'm foreseeing a genetic programming framework for Clojure (with the comments in Spanish!). I usually just follow my interests for side projects, so we'll see.

A minimalist's view

I am undeniably a software fanboy. I work in the industry, I have aspirations to entrepreneurship, and software is my favorite hobby. I like helping people learn how to create and manipulate software. Creating something, something powerful and lasting, where nothing was before and using nothing but your own wits is and will remain one of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of my life. Recently though, I've come to realize that there is a deeper promise of software, one that offers a compound benefit to all of us. Software serves to staunch slightly the wound that threatens all of our well-being and the well-being of the planet on which we live: rampant consumerism.

[Sidebar: I say staunch and not repair because software doesn't really solve anything at a fundamental level. To escape from the 'more is better' cycle, we need to shift our perceptions about what makes us happy and what is really valuable, and this will require participation from all levels. Ourselves as individuals, our friends and family, our media and our ostensibly "society", up to the level of policymakers and economists, everyone will need to rethink priorities for a cure instead of a stopgap.]

What do I mean? Here are a couple of examples:

becomes

becomes

becomes

...and numerous other examples. Somehow, under the guise of lower prices, software and the Internet have convinced millions of people to get rid of vast swaths of their things, reducing manufacturing output, waste, and footprint in one fell swoop!

Space

"So I threw out all my old Backstreet Boys CDs when I got my iPod, so what?" It's true, it may seem like a somewhat trivial example. However, aside from the ongoing benefit (you haven't bought many CDs since then either, have you?) this reduction, and any reduction in the literal footprint of the things we purchase may translate into a reduction in the space we feel we need to live. Smaller apartments and smaller houses in turn translate into a reduced environmental impact, as energy requirements and sprawl are reduced.

Furthermore, though the death of the local shop at the hands of the Internet is generally considered to be a bad thing, one happy side effect is that fewer shops are being built. Less development means less sprawl, less construction waste, and less energy to keep those buildings lit and heated. Though it's hard to say for sure, odds are favorable for a net-positive reduction in energy overall moving from brick-and-mortar shops to online venues.

Waste and pollution

Like the movement away from brick-and-mortar shops, the slow death of the mail has been lamented by many. Ignoring the socioeconomic benefits of mail delivered everywhere, it is hard to argue that the amount of waste paper generated versus email was a good thing. Similarly, the environmental costs of moving mail from place to place won't be missed.

More generally, software has allowed us to eliminate many forms of waste and pollution, both obvious and subtle. A giant pile of discarded junk mail is one thing, but we're also getting rid of the over-packaged media goods we purchase. Though we're really just touching the tip of the iceburg thus far, telecommuting is cutting down on emissions from our vehicles getting us from home to work and back everyday. Built-to-be-consumed items like calendars are not only cheaper but better when they are digital.

Attitude

As mentioned above, a reduction in space and waste isn't solving the problem of consumerism. To really address the issue, we need a change in attitudes. Though I don't have any proof for this, I personally think that eliminating our common "collections" - DVDs, CDs, books, and the like - we are retraining ourselves to stop collecting. The mentality that a bigger collection (of anything) is better, that more is better, is the root of the problem of consumerism, and a source of much pain and frustration, not to mention waste and pollution.

I also think this elimination of visibility will continue. Smart phones and their capability for software have let us consolidate our telephone, Gameboy, iPod, GPS, camera, and alarm clock, and are working on our Kindle and television. The removal of brick-and-mortar stores will cut down on window shopping and impulse purchases. [How we will fare versus truly targeted advertising and marketing that follows us everywhere is another story, and perhaps a worse one in the end.]

Perhaps our collections just shift. Instead of DVDs, we collect apps; instead of electronics we collect followers. If that's the case, then we'll just be trading one kind of consumerism for another. Ultimately it's better for the environment either way. I hope, though, that software will deliver on its promise of a simpler life less encumbered by the burden of a desire for more at any cost.