Choose Positive Thoughts
In my last blog I invited you to try to stop complaining…for an hour, a day or a week. How did that work for you? It is more challenging than it seems. That's not a reason to give up, however. It's just information for you, awareness that complaining and negative thinking may be more deeply ingrained than you realized. Hopefully, this awareness will act as an incentive to practice being positive and grateful more often. It really can and does have a wonderful impact on your own mood and those around you. Here are a few more simple ways to help you shift from habitual negative thinking or complaining into more positive and uplifting thoughts.
Did you know that, on average, you have between 60,000-70,000 thoughts a day? Of those, approximately 95% are repetitive and about 80% are negative. OUCH! Do the math...that's about 50,000 negative thoughts each and every day. It's no wonder you feel mentally stressed out and physically worn out.
First, as soon as you notice yourself having a negative thought, CUT IT OFF. Whether is after the thought is over, or in mid-thought, CANCEL, DELETE or STOP the thought and insert some other, more positive thought in its place. Remember, you always have the choice to decide which thought you want to hold on to and which you want to release. In time, you will raise your awareness and be able to catch yourself before the thought is formed.
Second, LABEL THE THOUGHT; imagine it as a leaf drifting by on a stream or a cloud on a windy day. "Here I go, having another one of those negative thoughts." This places the thought outside of you and you begin to realize that you are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are simply mental constructs and you can choose whether to allow them to take up space in your brain or not. Once you realize this you take the power out of the thoughts and take back the control.
Third, COUNTERACT WITH THE EXACT OPPOSITE THOUGHT. This relates back to Cut It Off, where you insert a new thought in place of the negative thought. If the opposite thought is too far out for you to believe, then replace it with a better feeling thought that you can believe. For example, if you have overeaten while you are trying to lose weight, you might think, "I'm a loser, I never do anything right, I'll never be able to do this." Or, you could tell yourself, "I slipped. It's not the end of the world. I can get back on track right now." Feels quite different, doesn't it? Your mind can only hold one thought at a time. You get to choose whether it will be a thought that supports you or one that brings you down. Which will it be?
Fourth, EXAGGERATE TO RIDICULOUSNESS. Let yourself get silly with taking your thought to its most outrageous possible outcome. For example, if you are a parent concerned about your child failing Algebra, follow your fear: "if she fails Algebra she won't graduate high school and get into a good college. She'll end up on the street hanging out with some creepy guy, doing drugs and will end up pregnant and broke. etc. etc. etc. You get my drift. We often allow our thoughts to snowball and create scenarios that are much worse that what will likely occur. Hopefully, through the process of exaggeration, you will see the humor in this and start laughing at yourself.
Play around with these techniques and find one or two that work for you. You'd be amazed at what a difference paying attention to your thoughts, and making a conscious choice to eliminate your negative thinking, can make. Simply making a commitment to increase your awareness will bring results. It may feel a little overwhelming at first, but your persistence will pay off. After all, what have you got to lose but a few thousand negative thoughts!
Tournament of Champions betting preview and tips from Ben Coley
Ben Coley has four recommended bets as he looks to double-up in the Tournament of Champions, where he bagged a 28/1 winner last January.
Recommended bets
3pts e.w. Dustin Johnson at 11/1 (1/4 1,2,3,4)
1pt e.w. Jim Herman at 500/1 (1/5 1,2,3,4,5)
0.5pt e.w. Tyler Duncan to lead after R1 at 66/1 (1/4 1,2,3,4)
0.5pt e.w. Jim Herman to lead after R1 at 100/1 (1/4 1,2,3,4)
The Sentry Tournament of Champions marks the start of a new decade of PGA Tour golf, as 15 debutants and 19 past visitors assemble at Kapalua for what has traditionally developed into a rust-shaking shootout, one won by Xander Schauffele after a blistering Sunday 62 last January.
Schauffele is back to defend his title and he's now third best in the market, behind only Jon Rahm and Justin Thomas. That's largely because he won the tournament, of course, but his price having contracted all the way to 7/1 from 28s also has something to do with Rory McIlroy's absence, alongside that of Tiger Woods.
Still, this is an elite field, and Schauffele looks short enough. He was the world number 10 a year ago and he was in good form; he'll tee off this time in similar shape as the world number nine. Of course, we now know for sure what many expected - that his Hawaii connections and course suitability could win him this title - but for all his class, the Californian had to be the first name off the shortlist.
No doubt JIM HERMAN would've been vying for that role with many, but this 500/1 rag makes the staking plan here having impressed when 12th on his first and only competitive start at the Plantation Course back in 2017.
It's impossible to understate the value of a look around, as Schauffele demonstrated again, improving from a debut 22nd to win in sensational fashion. Thomas had done the same, winning a year after he'd been 21st, and Patrick Reed went from 16th to first across his first two goes. The last first-time visitor to win was Daniel Chopra in 2008, and only elite players have so much as threatened to overcome what's a serious disadvantage.
Why would it matter so much here? Because the Plantation is almost unique among courses which feature regularly on the PGA Tour, with the combination of dramatic elevation changes and sidehill lies making it a hard place to figure out, especially once the wind is factored in. Plus, the old greens offered so few pin options that those who'd been before knew exactly what to expect.
Herman is therefore one of just 19 players at a distinct advantage, and that sets him apart from Max Homa, Tyler Duncan and Martin Trainer at the foot of the market, as well as Lanto Griffin, Sunghoon Kang, Nate Lashley and Adam Long a little further up. Towards the front, Collin Morikawa, Matthew Wolff and Joaquin Niemann are good enough to compete regardless, but now surely isn't the time to be backing them.
There's also more than one visit, in which he ranked third for greens hit and finished only three shots shy of a place, which ties Herman to the venue. Back in 2005, when he was an assistant professional in Florida with no real ambitions to make it to the top, he hopped off the boat on which he and his wife were honeymooning to play a round here. Herman says he couldn't resist, and it's clear he's particularly fond of the golf course.
It perhaps won't be worth enough to bridge the obvious gap between his capabilities and the world-class players much more likely to contend, but Schauffele's Hawaii connections were a small factor in his Sunday thrust here and Herman, who won in Kentucky last summer, is sure to tee off in a great frame of mind.
His form since a second PGA Tour victory in the Barbasol Championship has been unspectacular, but he played his best golf since on his final start of 2019, shooting four good rounds for 35th in the RSM Classic. We also know that he can take care of the best players in the world, because his previous win came at the expense of Henrik Stenson in second and Dustin Johnson in third.
In an event where course knowledge has been vital, Herman's eye-catching debut here - when he sat second after the opening round - marks him out as interesting. At 300/1 generally and 500/1 with several, he just has to be worth a roll of the dice.
There is one potential spanner in the works when it comes to that experience angle - the fact that Kapalua's Plantation Course has undergone a full-scale revamp since last year's renewal, led by original designers Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, among the most revered in the game.
The ambition behind the project, one which saw 33,000 tonnes of sand brought in on three barges from neighbouring Oahu, is to restore the course to one which challenges professionals and is fun for amateurs. Mark Rolfing, who helped establish this event, was not alone in feeling that the Plantation had become too much about big-hitting for the best in the world, who could carry their ball over all the trouble and didn't have to think too much about how to approach things.
That view was underlined by Cameron Champ last year, when he confessed to reaching for driver on virtually every tee, and everything that has happened since has been with the aim of making the course firmer, faster, and more mentally demanding. New tees, a couple of which are further back, plus additions like a bunker in the middle of the fifth fairway, are intended to challenge this field to think before they hit; to work out the best angle of attack.
All of this sounds positive, but in the short-term, adjustments are expected to take a while to bed in - specifically the firming up of the turf, which was exceptionally soft in 2019 and has since been completely relaid. For now, we probably shouldn't expect wholesale changes, though early reports do indicate that scoring will not be quite so low as we've come to expect.
With more debutants here than in any of the previous 15 years, along with some potentially world-class rookies like Wolff and Morikawa, we may well see a small shift in the balance of power, and I'm keen to side with TYLER DUNCAN in some way on what's his first visit.
An impressive winner when last seen, taking down tournament favourite Webb Simpson in a play-off for the RSM Classic, Duncan will be walking on air as he tees it up here with a Masters invite safely tucked away, not to mention a two-year exemption.
He signed off last season striping his irons - Rolfing says approach play will be all the more important following the changes - and we know for sure that Duncan at his best is hugely adept in the wind because he's played much of his best golf by the coast.
I also like that he brings some Trinity Forest form to the table, that course also being wide, expansive and designed by Coore and Crenshaw. It's just possible that their return to jeuje up Kapalua brings Trinity Forest into the equation from a correlation perspective, and Duncan was 26th there on debut before a top-five finish last May.
It's asking perhaps too much for him to win, and unlike Herman we're not quite compensated by an outrageous price, so I'll instead back him for the first-round lead. Duncan was fourth and second after the first round in those two Trinity Forest starts, and he shot a career-low 61 in the second round of the RSM when last seen.
Kevin Tway led this last year as a debutant, having won during what we once called the Fall Series, and at 50/1 generally and 66/1 in a place it's worth chancing Duncan to follow suit.
All that speculation leaves us with room for a more serious title contender, and while Rahm and Thomas are the two most likely, it's DUSTIN JOHNSON who stands out at the prices.
Johnson was 5/1 favourite here last year, but now finds himself fourth in the betting after a horrible end to the 2019 season, before he underwent surgery to fix a knee problem which had been affecting his swing and his confidence.
He starts this new year with questions to answer, having long since relinquished his number one ranking to protege Brooks Koepka, and it's hard to be confident about a player who hasn't teed it up in a stroke play tournament since the TOUR Championship way back in August, where he finished last of 30.
However, Johnson signed off the Presidents Cup with a dominant singles victory, and it may prove telling that throughout the event he spoke positively of both his health and his game, telling reporters he was 'really happy' with the way he played.
Johnson has gone well after lengthy absences before, and there's no place better than Kapalua, where he's twice a winner, for him to provide a reminder to the four players above him in the world rankings that he's got plenty still to offer.
In fact, the world rankings should act as motivation - Johnson is now down to fifth, and hasn't been outside the top five since he won the 2016 US Open - so providing he's fit and well, it would be no surprise were this habitual fast starter to bag some more silverware over the opening months of the campaign.
Significantly, his two victories in this event came after disappointing ends to the previous year. In 2017, he'd finished 17th of 30 at East Lake, blown a huge lead in China and then been 14th of 18th in the Hero World Challenge, before taking this title by a whopping eight shots. In 2013, he won it by a ho-hum four, having fallen down to 23rd in the world after a shoddy conclusion to 2012.
That tells us he's used Hawaii as a chance to press reset and fire away at flags, and having been the first player to arrive at the course for a practice round just one day after Christmas, there's more evidence that he means business.
With Rahm having got married during the off-season and likely spent little time practicing, and Schauffele clearly underpriced, there's one player at the front of this market with rock-solid credentials, and one who looks exceptional value. Thomas is the former, Johnson the latter, and the staking plan reflects that belief.
Patrick Cantlay is another obvious candidate, having shown enough on his debut here in 2018. He's a confessed Coore and Crenshaw fan and is set for a huge year, having played in all five matches in the Presidents Cup, delivering three points capped by an impressive display in the singles. The faith shown in him by Tiger Woods will have done wonders for his belief, not that he needed a boost in that department.
He's considered - it's hard to see why he'd be four or five points bigger than his partner Down Under, Schauffele - but there's still not much juice in 12/1 quotes, a comment which also applies to Reed and Gary Woodland at just slightly bigger prices.
As such, Champ is the other one to back if you do want to attack the event with two big-hitting, genuine title candidates. He was 11th on his first visit last year, form of 28-1-MC-23-33-8-27 to start this new wraparound season reads pretty well, and length ought to remain a key asset at a course with wide fairways and where four par-fives are supplemented by a couple of short par-fours the power brigade can go at.
Posted at 1830 GMT on 30/12/19.
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22 insults no developer wants to hear
The technology world is a bit different than the pretty, coiffed world of suits and salesdroids where everyone is polite, even when they hate your guts and think you’re an idiot. Suit-clad managers may smile and hide their real message by the way they say you’re doing “great, real great pal,” but programmers often speak their minds, and when that mind has something unpleasant to say, look out, feelings.
Parsing, unpacking, and sorting the insults that developers sling takes a thick skin. No one likes being told their ideas and code are anything less than insanely great, but some slights are better than others, cutting to the core of your coding faults. In fact, a good insult can contain a road map for moving your project forward. If your rival is willing to explain what you need to do to make your code worth using, well, that’s worth putting up with someone calling you or your code “heavy,” “crufty,” or “full of anti-patterns.”
Some people are explicitly rough, and part of that might be the mechanisms by which we receive insults -- almost never face to face. Linus Torvalds argues that email is an inherently flawed mechanism that often hides subtle cues, like the ones that the marketing department swaps by moving their eyes. Torvalds once told a thin-skinned developer, “it's damn hard to read people over email. I think you need to be *more* honest and *more* open over email.”
For a bit of fun, he inserted a logic bomb into the calls for more sensitivity by saying that his culture includes cursing. Whiners might try remembering that he comes from Scandinavia, the home of Viking warriors.
In the interest of helping the technology world cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, here is a list of some common insults that no developer wants to hear -- but often will. Brace yourself.
“Code doesn’t compile”
These three words may seem innocuous, factual even, but they hide true venom. After all, they signal that the code may run smoothly on your machine, but that doesn’t matter to anyone else. They gave it a go where they wanted your code to run, and it bricked. It could be that they don’t have the right libraries installed. Maybe they’re using a different version of the compiler. They may even have a different switch set on the optimizer. Whatever the real reason, nobody knows, and nobody cares. All they want to tell you is that you skipped the second lesson of programming class, the one when the instructor teaches where to put the semicolons.
“Heavy”
Here, coding and stoner rock diverge. For some reason, “light” is a compliment when it comes to programming and “heavy” is an epithet, like putting way too many notes in your guitar solo. But “feature rich” is a compliment and “missing features” is an insult, so go figure. You can’t have features without adding code and making the stack fatter and thus heavier.
“Suit”
If you associate fine dressing with power and status, in the programming world, you have another thing coming. After all, only the clueless ninnies who know nothing about computers but want to wade in and manage a project would ever wear a suit. The people who build software wear something more comfortable. A cross between a kimono and kilt might be nirvana -- otherwise, that old Phish tie-dye or a hoodie if you’re younger.
Linus Torvalds once wrote, “if you want me to ‘act professional,’ I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.”
If you, as a programmer, even seem to be guilty of one of those, you’ll be wearing the epithet, regardless of how you dress for work.
“Full of antipatterns”
Some call them bad strategies, stupid ideas, or sloppy thinking, but programmers like to toss around the phrase “antipattern” to describe a way of building code that isn’t recommended. It sounds more scientific -- and because science is the religion of the console, saying your code is full of antipatterns is worse than saying it’s bad. It’s saying your programming is immoral.
“Fanboi”
Long ago when PCs ruled the planet and Apple was almost bankrupt, a few loyal users continued to sing the praises of Apple and predict that the world would one day come to cherish the beauty and sophistication of its products. The PC-lovers dismissed their addiction by calling them “fanbois.”
Though the Apple-loving nuts were right, it doesn’t mean that someone is now paying you a compliment by calling you a fanboi. They mean you’re willingly ignoring reality because of overzealous devotion to a weird principle or idea, such as Perl or maybe .Net, not that we’re making any suggestions.
“Slow”
Computers are fast. As they say in the marketing department, that’s part of their brand. You might even say it’s a foundation of the brand. After decades of Moore’s Law, everyone simply expects computers to get faster and faster.
Alas, programmers don’t always deliver something that’s fast. Many hardware designers like to crow that they’ve delivered their side of the bargain. It’s the software teams that produce bloated, inefficient code that sucks the life out of the faster chips.
Although turning down the temperature and taking your time results in the best-flavored meats, slow-roasting your code is a no-no.
“N00b”
Could anyone be as clueless as a new hire? They would probably spell this with letters and not digits. (See also: “gnubie”: one who doesn’t grok open source.)
“Resource”
Funny, there’s a whole department bent on relating what’s human in us to the economic term "resource." It seems vital to our employability to at least appear to be resourceful. But if a programmer calls you a resource, he might as well call you a Lego brick in the wall or another cog in the machine. You’re not even a piece of meat -- you're an automaton or function call that spits code.
“Crufty”
Crufty: A design that’s tossed together, often with leftover detritus from other projects. A cobbled-together mess assembled with little foresight or intelligence. A sloppy, stitched-together Frankenstein that barely works. Take your pick, when you see the word “crufty.” Likely, it’s not only your code they’re commenting on; it might be you and your ideas.
“/dev/null”
In Unix world, the null device is a black hole that forgets all information sent to it. It’s mainly used to test device drivers and other code that processes data. As a metaphor, it’s a perfect offhand way to say the memo you wrote isn’t worth storing on disk or sending to the printer.
“Kluge”
Sometimes you don’t have time to polish that side project you put together on the weekends, only to find 2,000 other devs suddenly depend on it. With the second wave of interest come the insults. What is this thrown-together repo in a single file? A solution that’s expedient, not elegant. A cob job. A virtual collection of baling wire and duct tape designed in an instant because that’s all the time there is. This is how your code gets to wear a badge marked “kluge.” At best your programming is seen as a fix that may succeed temporarily but will eventually fail because it isn’t thorough enough to solve the problem correctly -- even if it stands the test of time.
“Bitrot”
Code will generally start to fail as the operating system, libraries, or other systems are updated. The newer versions have more features, take different parameters, or sometimes make different assumptions. In other cases, the programmers have fixed a bug that your code assumed was there. The old code doesn’t fail completely, at least at first. But it starts to get creaky as more and more calls to the OS or the libraries begin to fail. If you don’t invest in renewing your knowledge and improving your code, you start to rot like an old fish. Folks can be harsh when pointing this out.
“Bogon”
Electricity travels through a stream of electrons. Light travels via photons. Stupidity? The bogon particle is responsible for bogus behavior and general bogosity. You'd better hope the bogon flux through your fingertips and the keyboard isn’t measurable. (Note: Opposite of a cluon.)
“Bozo bit”
In the early days, Apple tried to append copy protection to software by adding an extra bit to the application file header. If it was set, the operating system would refuse to copy the file. This worked well until everyone figured out how to edit the header and flip a bit. Although everyone enjoys being compared to Apple, no one likes hearing that a slick new architecture or feature set reminds someone of the bozo bit.
“Brittle”
Code that is fragile and unable to function with any necessary resilience -- that is, what they are saying about the results of your labor. Sure, when your code compiled and passed all of the unit tests, you celebrated. But then someone changed the inputs or tossed in a divide by zero and your code crashed. That’s when you realize there’s more to writing code than making sure it works on the first test.
“Cargo cult programmer”
This insult references a famous tale from Richard Feynman about an ancient tribe that lashed together some logs to build what looked like an airplane. Why? They knew the winged contraptions brought amazing visitors with valuable cargo from the sky. They thought that building something that looked like it had wings would produce the same results. In the case of software, the one who builds a system based on a shallow misunderstanding of the problem is the one who gets labeled a “cargo cult programmer.” One day the half-baked theory you based your work on might look humorous even to you.
“Eye candy”
Some people write command-line code that delivers the answers in simple text. Others build flashy user interfaces with dancing code, flashing buttons, and eye-catching colors. They may even embed several videos, sometimes with beautiful models with eyes that never quite meet yours. Is there anything underneath? The boss isn’t going to look at the code. In other words, a pretty visage covers an empty core.
“Hackish”
The work “hack” is overloaded with various meanings, some positive and some negative. "Hackish" is much the same. Some use it to suggest a clever maneuver that would be appreciated by the wiliest hackers. Other times it’s a trick that’s not quick enough to be a hack, not solid enough to be real.
“Mangler”
"Mangler" has an obvious insulting quality and a subtle one. If you’ve mangled the code -- well, what else can you expect? The term is also used, at least in coding cubicles, as a replacement for the word “manager,” as in “project mangler” or “division mangler,” to show how the artisans feel about the bureaucrats. Of course, managers have a different term for the people who overpromise and underdeliver. They’re called programmers.
“No-op”
Someone who does nothing is a no-op, in reference to a blank binary instruction that flows through the CPU without changing anything. No-ops pad the instruction stream and help with debugging. Some processors use no-op codes with clever representations in hexadecimal. (See “deadbeef.”)
“Randomness”
Some of the cleverest algorithms rely on a steady stream of completely random numbers to find solutions -- some, that is, but not all. In fact, most don't. You can see how those perturbed by perturbations in your code might label it as such. You certainly don’t want your emails, memos, or documentation to be seen as random tacking in hopes of hitting on something important. (Antonym: knowledgeable.)
[Nothing]
The only thing worse than being insulted is being ignored.
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