Bruno Miranda

Camera Equipment for Sale

I am selling my camera equipment to explore new hobbies, here’s a list of items I have for sale and their prices. 

• Canon 7d (incl. 32GB Transend CF card) $1300
• Sigma 30mm 1.4 (incl. Sunpak filter) $400 
• Sigma 18-50 2.8-4.5 HSM (incl. Tiffen circular polarizer) $160
• Speedlite 430EX II $225
• YN560 Flash $40
• Benro A-150EXU (incl. tripot bag) $50

Items can be purchased together or separate (although I am willing to discount it even further if packaged together). Everything is in perfect shape, lightly used, no scratches or flaws of any kind. Shipping cost is the responsibility of the buyer. 

Contact me at bruno@bopia.com

Don’t give yourself permission to fail

I love the idea of owning a product, most people do. The thought of working for oneself, having no boss and making a nice profit entices some to start a project. The truth is, most people are in love with the *idea* of running a start-up. Planning, developing, selling, maintaining and improving the product, not so much. At first things are going great, but soon you start cutting corners because you’re tired from a long day’s work at your day job. You impatiently want to see results before they are deserved, and when you don’t the first thought is to give up.

It’s all too easy to give up. The commitment level is low and you have little more than some invested time to lose. You still have that full-time job. You think to yourself: ‘This idea wasn’t that great’ or ‘I’ll wait until I come with a better one’.

To be in love with the idea is easy. In practice things are much different. You have to put in a lot of sweat and tears to make something good. If it were easy everybody would be doing it. Starting something on the side is the safest bet, but it may be too safe for most. When you give yourself permission to fail, you must likely will. Work on your product at the beginning of each day, before you are too tired from your other daily activities. Don’t give yourself permission to fail. 

Undelete git branch

The following will show you a list of all the dangling commits:

fsck --full --no-reflogs | rep commit

As such:

dangling commit d4f0cbafdc63dcd14c876x41a9415049d6aeed85
dangling commit dcf8db2121610910a87bebf4b3007bbdc74125e6
dangling commit c8f94b0c44c79faa29df9f2d6e441a5325f0d568

You will then have to run git show on each of those hashes in order to find the commit you are looking for. I suggest doing something like this:

git show dcf8db2121610910a87bebf4b3007bbdc74125e6 > branches.txt  
&& git show c8f94b0c44c79faa29df9f2d6e441a5325f0d568 >> branches.txt 

There are better ways of doing this but this one worked for me and it’s simple enough. Now you can look at the commit messages and find the one commit you are looking for. Once you find it, create a new branch and cherry-pick the commit into that branch.

git cherry-pick c8f94b0c44c79faa29df9f2d6e441a5325f0d568

Now you have your branch back with the commit(s) you expect.

100 Light Bulbs Brain Teaser

A while back I ran into the following brain teaser and thought it would be an interesting way to asses the cognitive skills of a prospective employee:

You have 100 toggle switches, each connected to a corresponding light bulb. At first, all lights are off. You then press every single toggle, thus turning on all of the bulbs. Next, you press every second toggle (ie. 2, 4, 6, 8,…96, 98, 100) so that all the even numbered bulbs are turned off. Then you press every third toggle (3, 6, 9,…93, 96, 99) and every fourth toggle (4, 8, 12,…92, 96, 100), and every fifth toggle (5, 10, 15,…90, 95, 100), and so on, and so on, until the last two sequences, which are every ninety ninth toggle (99) and every hundredth toggle (100). Question: Which light bulbs will now be on?

The puzzle should be easily solvable in your head but it makes for an even better assessment to ask the candidate to solve with code in under 5 minutes.

Give it a try in whatever language you are most comfortable with. Here is my solution.

UPDATE: It appears I misunderstood the language, notice the use of the word toggle. The switches should be toggled regardless of their current state. Thanks to Chris Saylor for pointing this out. Here is the new solution. 

Most Obvious Yet Ignored Concept About Concentration

If you can’t find the will to concentrate on your current work, stop. You shouldn’t be doing it. 

Yes, some people will have to go their entire lives working-for-work-sake, doing what they don’t enjoy; it doesn’t have to be you. Do you need to remove distractions in order to concentrate on Call of Duty 4? I don’t think so, you just sit down and focus on the game. You better play it well otherwise you die. See my point? Do you need help concentrating to masturbate? 

You don’t need the best tools, you just need the right ones. A faster computer will not make you a better designer. TextMate 2 with split screens will not make you suck less at writing tests, writing tests will. VIM will not make you a better programmer, programming will.

So if you are a programmer, just sit down and program. At first let go of all your distraction blocking tools and start with baby steps. Set a timer and program for 30 minutes, just start moving your fingers, see what you can do in that time then repeat. The same applies if you are writer, designer or even a student.

Eventually your work will pull you in, time will pass and you won’t notice, that is if you like what you are doing. I talk to a lot of people who have all these tools and techniques to enhance their ability to concentrate, to focus, to be more creative  It’s all bullshit. If you need all this ‘stuff’ just to keep you on your chair, doing your job… you should be looking for a different job.

Remodeling

After a couple years I decided to refresh the design of the blog. In the meantime you can access the archives at http://brunomiranda.com/blog