TWID May 9, 2020: Books and Plants

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


It has been a while since I posted here.. but I decided to bring back the TWID posts again

I have been reading a lot lately, since I am already home for 60 days, I decided to read some of the big books I own or re-read them.  I already finished the Stand, almost done with Gotham and I am 35% done with the Lord of The Rings book.

I read 10 pages per day of the Gotham book and then I usually have a book I read at home and one while I commute. Since I am home now, I read the commuting book in the morning

Here is a pic of the books I owe but never read (except for the Lord Of the Rings book)



At the end of this post, you can see all the books I finished, what I am reading now and also what is in my backlog/queue to read.


Here you can see some of the seeds my son and I purchased




That's right.. the second one from the left in the top is a ghost chile... not sure yet what I will do with those.  Maybe make pepper spray or some extremely hot sauce   :-)

This is what the plants looked like a couple of weeks ago



This is what it looks like today

As you can see they are ready to be planted outside. It still cold at night but after Wednesday May 12th, these should be fine to be transplanted


Here you can see what the plants look like 2-3 weeks ago with a fan blowing on them

Put a fan blowing on these to prepare for the harsh outside world when they go outside around Mother’s Day #gardening #tomatoes #peppers #ghostpepper pic.twitter.com/BT5UcG5oAI

— Denis Gobo (@DenisGobo) April 25, 2020

The reason you use a fan inside is to strengthen the the plants, this way they don't break when you put them outside and it is a little windy on the first day

This Week I Tweeted

One Trader Started The Day With $77,000 In His Account; By The End He Owed $9 Million

As a result, crude was actually trading at a negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah’s screen had it at 1 cent; the reason: Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel.
At midnight, Shah some very bad news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He’d started the day with $77,000 in his account, expecting that his biggest possible loss was 100%, or $77,000.

Ouch that is so bad, who knew oil could go negative....


Can't quit Excel

This happened to me.. pasted a lot of data into Excel on a VM and then tried to cancel it and quit.... nope.  So I just used task manager to kill it

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

You know about waitfor delay but did you know there is a waitfor time?

You may or may not know that WAITFOR has TIME in addition to DELAY

Did you know, I sold kinderzegels while in 6th grade?

When I sold kinderzegels as part of school (semipostal stamps that benefit child welfare)

Mindmap Diagram Codes

This is pretty cool, you can create a mindmap, code on left.. output on the right, you can share it as well

Looks like this

Some Progress

Books finished so far/in progress

In progress

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 78% done

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome  20% done

The Two Towers 21% done

Done with these

Book	Completed
Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept	01/04
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers	01/25
Alexander Hamilton	02/12
The Quick Python Book, 3rd Edition	02/13
The Gene: An intimate history	02/17
Moonwalking with Einstein	02/27
The Somme	02/25
The Art of Learning	02/16
Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally	03/08
The Tudors, a very short introduction	03/17
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917	03/18
The Body: A Guide for Occupants	03/30
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean	04/07
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything	04/11
Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To	04/27
The Stand	04/30
Fellowship of the ring	05/07

Books in the queue

These are next... in no specific order

• Return Of The King 
• The Silmarillion
• The Library Book
• The Histories
• Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War 
• The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City 
• The Wind Through the Keyhole: The Dark Tower IV-1/2 
• Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio
• The Godfather 
• The Terror
• A Legacy of Spies 
• Four Past Midnight 
• A Random Walk on Wall Street
• Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused
• Marathon: The Battle That Changed Western Civilization
• Walden Illustrated

Books to get
Here are the books I plan to get. These were either mentioned on more than one podcast, recommended by friends or are new books from authors I like, for example Eric Larson's latest book about Churchill and the Blitz

• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz by Eric Larson
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• The Prince by Macchiavelli
• The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart
• Hero with a 1000 faces by Joseph Campbell
• The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield
• Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
• Permutation City by Greg Egan
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami
• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Innocent Anthropologist : Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley
• Shogun: The Epic Novel of Japan by James Clavell
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

Running progress
My goal is to run 800 miles this year, this means about 4 runs of about 4 miles per week

Miles        Percentage
279.57 34.95%

So far that burned a bit under 43 thousand calories

Interesting quote....heard it on a podcast... don't remember which one  .. sorry  :-(

A fool never learns

A smart man learns from his mistakes

A wise man learns from the mistakes of others