School is like an earthly hell

 So...we all started school and on my behalf I would really like tell a student's view of the high school so far. The colleagues are the best thing at my school because they are really cool...ok, the most of them at least.They are all very different, there are fat ones, wired ones, there is one which has so much dandruff that it would make everyone look the other way and my advice to him is... have a shower, please...for god's sake, there are smart ones, there are tall ones, there also is a skater in this hole bundle...and I think that I have included everyone in this. 

 Returning to my point, almost all of them are really great and this is one of the things that doesn't make me regret getting in this school. Almost all of the girls here are pretty, which is as well another pro of entering here. 

The teachers are also really cool, like the maths teacher or the history teacher, which are both funny and know how to make their classes enjoyable. Oh...and finally I get to say something about the  english teacher, which is awful and doesn't even know how to teach or how to make herself pleasant to her students.   

All in all, I have some awesome colleagues, whit which I get along very well and I hope that everything will go as good from now on.

Remembering Facts: Using Mental Associative Chains

An image can help your memory... 
For how long?

This is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering. Forming a chain of images. Simple, huh? Let's try!

As an example in this post we will work with a person facts. Consider the bio snippet of Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness from Wikipedia:

Halldór Kiljan Laxness [ˈhaltour ˈcʰɪljan ˈlaxsnɛs] (born Halldór Guðjónsson) (April 23, 1902 – February 8, 1998) was a twentieth-century Icelandic novelist, poet, and essayist; author of Independent People, The Atom Station, and Iceland's Bell. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

We have a few numbers and books to relate with him. I assume implicitly that I will always remember his nationality (something which may not be true in all cases) but you can treat nationality in the same way that we will treat book names. First, we need some kind of placeholder. If you have read some of his books you could use some place or city appearing in them. As I know (and even saw) he had a white '69 vintage Jaguar, this will be my placeholder. Let's start with the dates.

REMEMBERING NUMBERS

There are several techniques you can use to remember numbers and years. Usually, in the hard-core memorisation books it is suggested to use something called the major system, where you assign to each number a letter or a few letters, and then you form words with them. This word will be the key to decode the numbers. It is comprised of the following number-sound combinations:

Number	Sounds	Memory tip
0	s, z, soft c	z is the first letter of zero
1	d, t, th	d and t have one downstroke
2	n	two downstrokes
3	m	3 downstrokes
4	r	last letter of four
5	l	L is the roman 50
6	j, sh, soft ch..	script j looks like upside 6
7	k, hard c, hard g, q	capital script K looks like a pair of 7's
8	v, f	think of a script f (which has two loops)
9	b, p	p is the mirror image of a 9, b is a rotation of 9
-	vowels, w, h, y	WHY+vocals: use them anywhere to fill the gaps and form words

Based on the description from Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It(Amazon link, Bookdepository link)

For a while I had tried using another system: mobile phones assign to each number any of 3 letters, except for 0, 1, 7 and 9. The first two are for special signs, the two last have 4 letters. What I did was moving s to 1 and z to 0. To further simplify, I used only consonants and left away the vocals in this. But the major system is in some sense simpler, as it assigns sounds and not only letters. Let's try to use it here.

Let's start then with the date of birth, 23rd of April, 1902. The day and month are trivial to remember: it is the international book day, linked to Cervantes and Shakespeare's death dates. It is also Saint George, a special day in Catalonia. For the year, we can assume we know it is in the 20th century and only encode 02 which result in s/z/soft c + n. Two-letter combination can be tricky to come up, but we can form a few words: son, zone, ozone, sin... If we needed also the century (setting aside the fact that we could create a fixed image for 10 up to 20 to use as century indicator), 1902 would give t/d+b/p+s/z/soft c+n. As you see, forming a word with 4 letters can be even trickier: you should split them in groups of two letters.

Now, add an image to Saint George fighting the dragon. Which word to use? I'll usezone. And what is the image? Saint George (wearing a bib) is playing 1-1 basketball inside the zone being heavily guarded by a big, green dragon. The bib part is to remind me this is birth.

Now, his death 8th February 1998. We can encode month-day combinations (which are not as easy as before: always use tricks if you can) as DMM (0802 or 82) or MMDD (0208 or 28). There is some ambiguity in both choices, and as such you have to play it safe and be consistent. As a Spanish speaker, the natural way of date sorting for me is DDMM, thus I'll use 82: v/f+n. Now 1998, 98 gets b/p+v/f. An anthropomorphic phone eating beef, using as a table a tombstone.

To remember when he was given the Nobel Prize, 55 is l+l, and our writer is named Halldór Kiljan Laxness. Which happens to have two L's in the name. Here I assume I will always remember this, too and create an image of him with his prize, as a reminder that the date is hidden in him.

Let's start to form the images: Laxness sitting in the driver's seat of a pearly white Jaguar, typing furiously in a typewriter, with a Nobel prize in his lap. Behind it Saint George wearing a bib is playing a 1-on-1 basketball game, fighting to get a good position inside the zone against the dragon. Behind the car a big, anthropomorphic phone is eatingbeef (picture the beef as you enjoy it, taste it mentally... medium, rare?) and using a tombstone as table.

REMEMBERING NAMES

Remembering names is far, far more specific than numbers. We want to remember the names of his most relevant novels (according to the Wikipedia snippet).Independent People, for me, makes me think of the painting La Liberté guidant le peuple. The Atom Station, a big red London-style bus stopping below the Atomium, in Belgium. Iceland's Bell is the Hallgrímskirkja bell swinging full force.

If there is some possibility of forgetting his nationality, use some strong related image to add to your mental placeholder. For Iceland, I could use any image of my road trip around Iceland, but a good one even if you've been there are the images of Eyjafjallajökull erupting just above the car.

We just need to place all these images around the pearly white Jaguar. We can place them in the car's back seats: the painting, a big reproduction of the church and a big red toy bus, each laying in one back seat. I'm counting here on remembering the atom part just from having the image of the Atomium and the bus implicitly. This can also lead to easier forgetting, but sometimes you have to trade off simpler images with perfect recall.

DEVELOP YOUR OWN KEYS

This can only get better with practice, and you can use it for people, history or whatever you come up with. Find your own imagery and fill your characters with expression and unforgettable facts. Use your life and previous knowledge as basis to form images (like I used Saint George) that are significant for your mind, don't rely on others for this. As with the memory palace technique, practice makes perfect, and I can assure you that you will be able to store a lot of facts about important people without problems.

Can you still recall the images we have used? And still remember the major system? Remembering the major system can be the tricky part, just keep trying! If you found this post useful, please spread the word!

Nightwish "Sleeping Sun" with lyrics, Tarja Turunen

Within Temptation - Mother Earth

Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique

Picture courtesy of Shanidar

In this post I'll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I'll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages. Sounds good, doesn't it?

The technique we'll be learning is called the memory palace, and is also known as themethod of loci (for the latin word locus meaning place) and also the mind palace. A very useful tool in everyone's toolbox!

THE MEMORY PALACE

The memory palace technique began in the 5th century B.C., when Simonides of Ceos, poet, was attending an unfortunate banquet in Thessalia. While he was away to talk with a courier who asked for him outside, the hall's ceiling crumbled, killing everyone. There was no way to recognise the corpses... Until Simonides realised that it was no problem to recall who was where, without having done any effort.

Think about it: It is not hard to remember who sits beside the host, where your friends sit, who is beside them and so on. This dawned upon Simonides, and he is credited as the "inventor" of the memory palace technique. Widely spread through antiquity, there was not a lot of written accounts on it: it appears in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herreniumand Cicero's De Oratore. It is not that strange that there were no written accounts, it is like writing a book about how to put your trousers on. Everybody knows how to do it.

The memory palace is well suited to how our brains have evolved. Back in our nomadic days we needed to know how to get somewhere (the lake, the plain) and remember what was there (fresh water, hunting). By taking advantage of this fact we can build an array of impressive memorisation techniques, to ordered or unordered lists.

Remembering lists may sound lame, who wants to memorise a list...? But lists are just an ordered array of knowledge! What you study for a history exam is a list of ordered dates accompanied by facts and causes (sub-lists). When you learn a new recipe, it is a list. A telephone number is a list of numbers. A poem is a list of phrases.

YOUR FIRST MEMORY PALACE: BUILDING AND FILLING

From Will Sculin@Flickr

Let's start by creating our first memory palace. It does not need to be a palace, in fact, it should not. Just think of your home, and as a sample I'll assume is really small: from the door you get to a small hall, connected to a living room which leads to a kitchen, a WC and a bedroom with a balcony. This is a sample, to memorise correctly you have to visualise your home or any other place you may know very well. You can of course use this mental image of an imaginary house, but memorising may be harder, be warned.

Now consider the following shopping list: lettuce, bacon, onion rings, SD card and oranges. We want to memorise it. I picked a short list to make the post shorter and make it fit in our small imaginary home: try your hand with a longer list if you don't believe we can do it with longer lists.

To remember the list, we have to place each item somewhere in our mind palace. This of course can mean one item per room or several items per room, each one in a special spot in the room. The simplest method is to put each item in its own room, when you are confident enough, create additional trapping space in each room. Thus, our small 5-room house could be easily a 5, 10 or 15 places memory palace.

To place an item, we have to visualise it in the room, and to make sure we remember it it has to be an extremely odd image. It has to leave a clear impression and to do so, it has to be surprising, bizarre or sexual, among other options. If the image is dull, remembering it is close to impossible.

Begin with the list. When we enter the front door, we are greeted by Kermit the frog, only that this special Kermit is made of lettuce, like a talking lettuce. Can you see it? Feel the freshness of Lettucit's leaves? In the living room a stampede of pigs followed by Kevin Bacon with a fork should be bizarre and clear enough! In the kitchen, Scarlett Johansson plays hoola-hop with an onion ring. You enter the bedroom, and to your surprise, the bed is a gigantic SD card: you can hide the bed by pressing it in to be read. Finally, you open the balcony to find that the sun is now a big, luminous orange. It starts to drip juice over the desert in front of your window!

You should put all these images in a place you know like the palm of your hand: your home, the house you grew up, your office. This is very important.

You may not believe it works at all, but you will be surprised. I wrote the first part of this post in the afternoon, and now more than 3 hours later I still can see clearly all the images. Of course this is a short list... But it would not matter: you could remember a list 5 times as long as easily as with this one.

FINDING AN ARRAY OF MEMORY PALACES

To remember a lot of things you need to have a lot of places to put all these memories. You will need to find your own array of memory places. The first time I considered this problem, I thought about creating imaginary palaces, linked somehow by corridors. The problem? Artificial palaces get blurry very quickly, and you tend to forget them. It is far, far better to use real places, or at least places you can revisit in real life, like pictures from a book, levels in a computer game or buildings you can visit.

Then I started to think about houses and places I could use... And I found that there are plenty. I still remember school mates houses from 16 years ago, hotels I've been, buildings I have visited. I am sure you will find a huge array of places you can use. To begin with the technique, use very known places, like your house or office and as you get more confident with the technique, start using older places.

FINAL WORDS

You have to get the knack of the method. Get some degree of experience in converting everyday objects (like lettuce) into long-lasting impressions (like Kermit the lettuce-head). This only comes with practice, like walking around your images of memory palaces. Practice, practice, practice!

Timeboxing: You Will Work Like Never Before

DON'T MISS THE LATEST POSTS LEARN TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING: THE MEMORY PALACE TECHNIQUE OR REMEMBERING FACTS: USING MENTAL ASSOCIATIVE CHAINS

If you are an avid self-improvement reader, you know already whattimeboxing is. But maybe you don't harness all its potential For the rest,timeboxing is a time management technique focused on time spent, not tasks done. Therefore, you will need to set aside some project tracking system to have a clear idea of what you are working on. The concept of timeboxing may sound really simple, but it is really very powerful. This post is as much about timeboxing as it is about my personal approach to timeboxing.

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Do you remember your college or high school days? Those papers you only seemed to start writing 3 days before your due date? If you do, ask yourself another question: which day saw the best of you in terms of work done and work focus? If you ever did this, the answer will be, without doubt, the last night.

When we are in a real hurry to finish something, we start to produce our best work, or we break down. The good point is that timeboxing techniques can help both types of workers: those thriving under pressure and the ones who avoid deadlines. You can raise your productivity near your maximum without breaking down.

Timeboxing's basic premise is to allocate a certain amount of time (oddly named a time box) to your tasks. I. e. work for 1 hour in your lawn. But there are several ways to allocate this time, and also several ways to deal with your timer bell once the time box is over. And this is what makes timeboxing great: flexibility.

ALLOCATING FIXED AMOUNTS OF TIME REPEATEDLY

This is one of the simplest ways to do timeboxing. You allocate a certain number of timeboxes (of say, 30 minutes, 50 minutes) to your day's (or week's) tasks.

This method, simple as it is can work wonders. I found it out as The pomodoro technique, a freely downloadable ebook from here.

ALLOCATING A VARIABLE AMOUNT OF TIME REPEATEDLY

This is of course more flexible than the previous system. You decide for how long you want to work on a certain task in your to do, either for the day or as a total amount. For example, today I may work no more than 30 minutes in drafting this post, and should not work on it for longer than 2 hours.

RING THE BELL: KEEP ON WORKING OR STOP COLD?

These are two possible approaches when the bell rings. There are other possibilities as well. You may set a "reserve time" for each task to keep on working if it can be completed in that time, or you can set a new box at the end of the day.

Keeping on working works better when your initial span was short and the task at hand is big (really big). You use the time box to get momentum on a big task to keep on working on it, assuming once you start it won't be that bad. I personally don't use this too much for a simple reason: it leads me to be really tired too early in the morning. Last Tuesday I was preparing an exam, and had to write the exam statement and solve it. It was a programming assignment, so it took quite a while. And despite I had clearly defined boxes of 30 minutes for each task, I just did around one hour and a half (according to my logs more like 2 hours) straight without even moving... And I felt wasted after that, took quite a few hours to get enough momentum to work more. I suggest you better adhere to a strict pausing regime.

Stopping cold means that when the alarm rings you just finish where it rang. You may write that last phrase, or compile to check if what you wrote works, but can't keep on working on the same task after this. This is what I have found definitely more useful! Why? Well, when there is a task I don't like, working for 30 minutes on it is really no big deal. And I can do it around three times a day. Think of it: with this approach you can work for 1h30 (or more, depends on you!) on the tasks you dislike! On a first read you may think just that!? I work a lot more! Ok, I ask you Really? Do you work more than that on your hard tasks? I mean those big things you never seem to start, or that long term project you are always deferring or procrastinating on. And of course, 1h30 is just for the big ones, and now I am starting. In between big tasks you can cram a lot more!

HOW I USE TIMEBOXING

My approach is based on the variable length schedule and stop at the bell, with some tweaks. I have a projects list (not complete: only short to mid term projects, future projects are not in this list until I have not cleared others) and each day I fill my to do of the day.

I usually schedule for 10-12 items in the list, adding up around 3 hours of purely work time. I'm currently gauging how much more I am able to add to the list, looking for my golden spot. I'm still juggling with it, this is why you may think 3 hours is too little, I think it too. But I've managed to do more in a day with this method than in a week of my previous state of continuous procrastination with a pinch of work in it.

My future plan (and currently I am already doing it but ignoring it) is to add a rest time to each task. For example, proving a theorem or doing LaTeX for 30 minutes are more tiring than proofreading one of your papers or reading an article for 30 minutes. I would then schedule for a 10 minutes break in the first two cases and for a 5 minutes break in the lat two cases. But as I said, for now I rest for as long as I want. Which is not that much, really, some days I've found that at 13:00 I was almost done with all my (scheduled) day worth of work!

If this happens you have two options, and which you decide is up to you and your current energy levels. If I'm feeling energetic, for example, if that happens on evening Tuesday, I might add a few more schedule tasks to the list, not a lot: from one to three.

How I tackle my day schedule depends on how I am feeling.

If I don't feel very much like working I start with some small task for 15 minutes with 5 (real) minutes for rest, something like doing LaTeX or proofreading, and then turn to a big task. After the big one, I turn to something unrelated and not very tiring: if I am at home I may fold the clothes or do the dishes, water plants. If I am at my office, I may sketch a blog post (if scheduled!) or read a page or two of some paper I am interested in, deeply but really slowly, as this is supposed to be a "relax" time. After this unrelated task I usually tackle another big task if I have enough time before lunch/dinner. That big task may be related to the previous big or not: it doesn't matter. After each four tasks (which I number 1-4 in my to do) I take a longer break, from 15 to 20 minutes. Repeat until you clean your day list.

If I feel like working big, I start straight with my first big task, and then go on with a more relaxed one. You can also start with two big tasks, if you are really in an amazing mood! You can continue with your small scheduled tasks and repeat until you clean your day list.

At the moment I am resting for quite a little longer than I schedule, but usually manage to finish all tasks on time (maybe late at night!). Why does it take so long?

WHAT TO DO WHEN DISTRACTED

If some external circumstance forces me to stop my current task before the timer runs out... I eithe write it down (if it can be deferred) or I solve it in the moment. If I have to solve it, I stop the timer and reset it at the start time again. This way I get to work a little more on that big task: basic probability (and Murphy's law) says that the hardest the task (i. e. the more time you give yourself to do the task) more easy it is for someone to come in and stop your work. See it as a way to overcome big tasks: one small step at a time.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please share with your friends with Twitter, Reddit or StumbleUpon. This would make a difference!

Young Empires - White Doves

Like the lirics; again never heard before, but interesting...

The Gaslight Anthem - "45"

Never heard it before but caught me from the begining

Bon Jovi - No Apologies

Like a night time melancholy...:))

Into The Night

Nickelback - This Means War

S.E.X - Nickelback - Dark Horse (CD QUALITY)

Nickelback - Lullaby

Dougie MacLean - Another Time

We're following another time

Dougie MacLean. Ready For The Storm

Kiss it Goodbye - Nickelback

"Hollywood is plastic but baeutyful to eye..."

Nickelback- Trying Not To Love You lyrics

Bottoms up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT7EcNHovJ8&feature=BFa&list=AL94UKMTqg-9BOrxAgak4da4KtPfqNRUXF

Drink it up!

Nothing without love?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCcTMdnkSW0&feature=autoplay&list=AL94UKMTqg-9B0_SSFht95M4ZlQOt5JZdZ&playnext=2

Without love, as this song says, nothing would exist, or would it? Enjoy it, that is all I think about it!

Hey god are you the one to blame?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hlcUMNeBc0&ob=av2e

It's easier to blame another one for our mischief and harder to take the blame upon ourselves 

Our way

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YcSmYFkWmY&ob=av2e

A little bit of music for those not afraid to take a chance and do it their own way

About life

1." Thinking is not always ... comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting."

2." You and I? Never. We've too much power to act here; that is all. In this area, the powerless ones are always the most powerful."  

3."- What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine.
- This is philosophy, Fool. I have never had time to study such things.
- No, Fitz, this is life. And no one has time not to think of such things. Each creature in the world should consider this thing, every moment of the heart's beating. Otherwise, what is the point of arising each day ?"  

4."- You make no sense! You went somewhere to discover your place in history? How can that be? History is what is done and behind us.

- History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.The future is another kind of history."