Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Tracking Joy

With so many uncertanties in the world today and in life in general, the "what if's", "but's", deadlines, etc. can unfortunately creep forwards as we proceed through life's work and play and be used to dampen the feelings of Joy or Happiness that might be felt over an achievement or even over a momentary thought or feeling.
When we have a moment of happiness or joy, we need to make sure we do not follow it up with a dampening thought.
If we do not learn to recognize, allow ourselves to feel and hold on to the moments of happiness or joy, then when things get tough there will be nothing positive to hold on to to help you make it through the uncertain times. If you are religious, I suppose you can "look to God"; but I prefer to focus on something more tangible.

As an example, I was working this morning and quickly got a login procedure working in a large web application. It felt good when done; as how to best make it work was alluding me yesterday. I could have easily dampened the good feeling by thinking of how much more work there is and deadlines but I didn't. A few minutes later I had an email for a support issue that started yesterday. I resolved it in about an hour. It felt good. I could have dampened it by thinking about the entirity of the application that the support was needed for. But I didn't.
So Hopefully, I'm learning to Track the Joyous moments.

Well. Back to work and tracking the joy.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Numbers with 4

Every number between 1 and 100 can be created by combining 4's.
1= 4^0 (where ^ is "power". 4 to the 0th power)
2=(4+4)/4
3=(4-(4/4))
5=(4 + (4/4))
Note. There may exist more than one solution. For example, 5=4+(4^0) or 4+(4/4)
6=((4 *4) + (4+4))/4
...
Try some others.