How to Clean Different Types of Floors

Don't use Mop and Glow on anything. It doesn't make them any "cleaner" than any other product, it just puts a layer of waxy film on the floor. Over time this builds up to a waxy residue that traps dirt and dulls your floor, and then the only way to clean it is a very time-consuming difficult process where you strip the finish. Stripping is very damaging to linoleum and way too much effort.

Linoleum is not a synthetic flooring. It's actually made from pressed solidified linseed oil impregnated onto wood pulp. Don't use any products that are designed for synthetic floors (like vinyl, laminate, tile, VCT) because it will damage it. You need to buy a special product derived from linseed oil if you ever want to finish it, but as long as you take care of it the finish will last for years.

Shiny doesn't mean clean. That's an unfortunate American standard that came about by military inspection guidelines finding their way onto government contract requirements, which were then copy-pasted by people writing proposals for local governments, universities, and big commercial buildings. I cringe every time I see a floor with a nice shiny 7-coat burnished luster with loads of dirt trapped inside the finish. As a result, cleaning product manufacturers since WWII have worked hard to associate "shiny" with "clean" because adding oils and waxes are a cheap, nontoxic way to elevate the perceived value of their product.

The floor is "clean" when you see no visible soiling, there's no odor, and you don't feel anything on bare feet. The best way to clean is to vacuum it first then mop with plain warm water. I can't emphasize this enough: vacuum first. A canister with a horsehair floor attachment is easiest but anything designed for hard floors is fine.

The trick is to use a clean mop. If you don't, you'll never get your floors clean. If you're using a regular rag mop, it needs to be washed every time you use it or at least spend time getting it as clean as you can, squeeze the crap out of it, and put it away somewhere with good air circulation. If you don't, all you're doing is spreading dirt around.

Rag mops aren't ideal because of this. Their real purpose is for spreading chemical onto the floor like a giant paint brush (i.e. commercial floor stripping) but they do a lousy job of cleaning. What you want is a mop with easily interchangeable heads so you can toss them in the laundry when you're done. Personally I use microfiber pocket mops like this, but there are velcro styles and all kinds of neat toys on the market now. With pocket mops, you just need 1 pad for every 500 square ft (or 1 per 50 square m) of linoleum for each time you clean. Depending on where you are located be prepared to spend between USD $3 to $10 per pad, so if you can get them cheap buy enough for two cleanings.

Wash them in hot water with your towels and don't use fabric softener or dryer sheets. If you don't have a dryer, they dry in a few hours if you hang them up.

Honestly, you don't need any special chemical to mop linoleum. This really goes for most hard floors but especially natural floors like stone, wood, and linoleum. Tap water in the US and most of Europe has enough residual chlorine to control bacteria, but if your floors are really dirty you can troubleshoot:

• For cutting through hard grease, add 2 teaspoons of Dawn or similar dish soap to a gallon of hot water. The better at cleaning greasy dishes, the better it will do on your floor. Next time you mop use plain hot water.
• For odor problems, pet urine, etc., use a bit of oxidant to break down the residual chemicals. Your best bet is 2 tablespoons of drugstore hydrogen peroxide, but it's unstable and difficult to store. Oxyclean (or a competing brand) is basically a stable, solid peroxide and you don't need much of it, put half a scoop in a gallon of hot water.
• If you have serious allergies, the best thing to get is chlorine dioxide. You can find it at janitorial supply stores and some drugstores. Follow the label instructions but then dilute it to half that strength for linoleum so you don't wear down the finish. (i.e. use 2 ounces if the manufacturer says to use 4)
• If your floor is dirtier than the floor of a Chucky Cheese ball pit, use a proper wood soap like Murphy's Oil Soap. About 4 ounces per gallon of hot water and elbow grease will cut through just about anything without damaging the finish. You'll need to go behind and mop again with warm water to get the residue off, then buff dry if you want it to shine.
• When in doubt, just use a little washing soda (sodium carbonate) to raise the pH of the water. Most soils that are stubborn at neutral pH respond well to a high (alkaline) or low (acid) pH, but acid wears down the finish of linoleum. You can find washing soda at any grocery store next to the detergents. Baking soda isn't a substitute.
• (edit: All of the above works for hardwood floors too, but unless you have sealant, you risk the wood soaking up the water and warping. For hardwood, soak your mop and squeeze the living shit out of it until it's as dry as you can, then mop and immediately follow behind with a dry mop to buff it and soak up the water. The trick is never leave behind a wood floor if it's wet. People say not to use water to mop wood but that's bullshit because every single product from Bona to Pinesol is water-based. The best thing that these otherwise crappy products do is chelate the impurities in the water and buffer the pH. Other than that they just rely on adding a waxy film to make the floor shiny and therefore appear cleaner to the customer.)

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Albert Einstein Quote on Capitalism

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

How to Create a Better World for Yourself

I am only going to answer your question by giving you this information since you've asked. Doing so otherwise would conflict/undermine it's meaning and become an irony/contradictory in itself.

The best and more stable way to move to any dimension is utilizing 'time' and it is done so gradually not suddenly, otherwise you will quickly fall back into the old paradigm/reality/dimension. You can gradually and more permanently manifest physical or non physical dimensional realms utilizing both law of attraction and other methods listed below.. They may work best/faster in combination. But it will only work for you if you are determined and follow this advice, I am replying here to assist you in showing this path and providing you with an anchor point since I now partook the role as a wayshower to you; the seeker of your destiny.

1. The first thing you must do before you can move on and let go is accept responsibility for the now reality/dimension you experience. Even though you don't realize it, up until this point most of your experiences were a result of an auto-pilot program (your protein based DNA software) that allowed you to experience results from learning by observing it's actions, much like your breathing, done subconsciously/instinctively and in rhythm based on an ever changing code. Having read and understood that, you can now control your choices in your reality and what you choose to proportionally experience next. Similar to someone telling you that you can now breathe manually. You not only become consciously aware that you are and can resume breathing manually if you choose to, you can also take control over it and thus responsibility. By accepting this responsibility you cease having the ability to or blaming someone else holding the control of your next multidimensional realm/experiences, you also become capable to take control. Your body offers you certain experiences with unique senses, it is also a tool for spiritual learning and gradual adjustment towards other realms after you shed it. When you are young you have less conscious control of it and your actions, as you get older this changes and you become more responsible for the choices you make including what you choose to put into it.
2. Forgive, love and accept all unconditionally. This act implies letting go of the conflicting reality you currently hold on to consciously or subconsciously. By understanding certain aspects typed here to assist you to letting go then unconditionally/equally loving and accepting everyone and everything, you are letting go of that your previous law of attraction/beliefs/manifestation that led you to experience unwanted realm whether done consciously or subconsciously, you also open yourself up to new and more loving subjective alternate realities/experiences that can sum up to gradually becoming a whole new heavenly realm of experience that you may assume is vastly different from you current one. By 'accepting all' you allow others to experience their ideal heaven too even if it involves 'drama' in their lives. There are beings who wish to experience it and to you it may seem like an issue but in fact what they choose for themselves is proportional to what you choose for yourself, taking it away from them and their choices will also deny you of your will. The definition of evil can be anything that denies another being to choose for themselves what they wish to experience. That is.. unless you may choose to experience it yourself too and become a willing victim. Karma is the matrix of opportunities and it spans across multidimensional space and time both within and the observable without. Doing evil in one lifetime/reality and trying to get away with it may offer you a chance to experience the end of it's proportionally stretched out stick in another, because what you do to others you do directly to yourself. Forgiveness is the act of accepting the current outcome of your negative karma and only then moving on to what you do want to experience next along with its own outcome. Expressing gratitude is being thankful for those who assisted you to play out your role regardless of the outcome, because in the end you take lessons from it and grow/evolve/move on.
3. Be the change you wish to see in this world. The world/dimension you experience now is a reflection of your beliefs and your choices. If you want a cleaner environment then you can achieve it by contributing to it. You can catch yourself seeking media where people are not genuinely nice to each other and have some form of social/racial/gender issues. Each time you pull up a drama feed, ie: violent or conflicting movies/videos/games/news stories. You experience that reality whether you are aware it is fiction or not, your subjectively oriented mind adapts that reality to observe it. In other words you are attracted to that which creates your experience/reality. If you change your target of attraction you thus change your experience/reality. If you take careful observation of your thoughts and find the source of the negative ones you will then have the choice to change it's course too. So?, are you ready to take the leap? Your faith in this awaits or you may choose doubt and resume as usual. Keep in mind, all dimensional potentialities are realities in actuality. The observer is both the creator and the created, of himself from within himself. If you read this far, you've become awakened/initiated into partaking the role of responsibility for yourself and your life's choices and thus the results you've contributed to so far.

That is all. The rest is up to your will to change and contribution to your cause. Remember from the movie "Matrix", a line that goes something like: "I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it". You now have the keys to this door. Whether you choose to unlock and step through it, is up to you.

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How to Achieve Your Goals

Do you obsessively want to accomplish your goals?

Nothing I will write now negates what you've learned about goals before. Yes, they are essential to accomplishment. Yes, there are better ways to formulate goals. There is no lack of content discussing the strategy of goal setting and so I can only assume you have taken your need of goals quite seriously.

But there is one crucial aspect on the topic of goals--crucial--vital--required--if you are not an accomplished person today but want to be tomorrow…

And that is writing down your goals. every. single. day.

Why?

Here's what happens when you write down goals once or twice per year:

• You get distracted.
• Other things falsely present themselves as more urgent, wasting away the time (the one thing you don't have a lot of).
• And worse of all, you don't get obsessed over your goals if you forget about them.

Obsession is what is required to accomplish what you want out of life--because it takes a tremendous amount of energy to change. Name someone who you respect and admire, who has accomplished greatness. They did so because of obsession. And obsession is a brain requirement.

Your brain must be constantly synoptically wiring itself, constantly problem solving, constantly focusing on what it wants. When your brain automatically wants what it wants like one automatically wants to breath--because of necessity to survive--it will attain that thing eventually no matter how stupid, poor, fat, short, or far away from your goals you think you are.

Success doesn't come in a box, and you can not walk towards success in a straight line. Success comes from being obsessed with getting out of your trap, like a man in a straight jacket.

You do know why you aren't successful, right? It's not because you don't have the correct information. Information is free brothers and sisters! It's on the net. It's in the cloud. Information is air.

The reasons you aren't successful are because you're too nice. You aren't successful because you don't know how to sell, influence, persuade. You aren't successful because you don't know how to commit your brain to the activity and practices that build you into a monster.

It has nothing to do with information in raw form. It has to do with practice. But you are trapped in a straight jacket. How do you get out?

Wiggle yourself out--every day, over and over, focusing only on getting out. And whether you're with friends you don't really care about, driving in a car that actually doesn't reflect your value as a human being, or watching a TV show that truly only exists to trap you in front of the TV long enough to show you 10 minutes of commercial air time for every 20 minutes of entertainment--whenever there is a break in the conversation, 2 minutes at a car light, or you finally get away from the TV, your brain will revert to whatever it is obsessed with. Your brain will be in conversation with your goals.

You will absorb new things. And what you don't know that constrains you will reveal itself clearly, in due time, and you will go after that thing in obsession of knocking down more walls--the walls blocking access to what makes life worth living to you--until you reach your goals.

Not reaching your goals is a pain you must feel--daily.

Here's some odd news: you are not a Person. What you think of as the person in your body is merely a conscious loop function. You are a self-illusion and that illusion was given a name. Truly, deep, deep inside you, you are a simple organism in a sensory experience that avoids pain and seeks pleasure. Everything else is merely complication wrapped around and atop that simple you, in layers of evolutionary complexity--which is good because bacteria can't walk to Starbucks or drive a Taurus. But that simple part inside you, that shares function with everything else that is living, is what must be in pursuit of those goals at all times--obsessively.

Think of it as multitasking: while the rest of you is showering, walking, talking, eating, your core function is living in obsession of your goals. You have to be crazy, even if its your own little secret.

So, focus on your goals repeatedly--daily.

You'll notice that I keep repeating my point. Does it annoy you? Good, because you remember what annoys you. It is painful. It is wiring itself into you. Write down 3-4 goals daily--daily--daily.

Write them down when you wake up and get a moment. Write them down before bed. At least write them down once per day, off the top of your head.

If I wake you up from a deep sleep you should be able to automatically recite your goals as soon as I ask, soldier. Your goals should be expressed daily from the depths of your programming.

Surface level dedication is not obsession. Nobody wins a first prize race doing a practice run only twice a year.

Do this. Otherwise, you don't deserve to reach your goals. The unobsessed human gets nothing out of life worth living for. They die mediocre, unremembered, and probably taken advantage of.

Write your goals down. Repeatedly. Daily. Daily.

TL;DR: Write your goals down daily. Daily. Daily. Its the life hack to end all life hacks.

To clarify, a goal is usually long term (eg. Lose 60 lbs). It's an objective, a place of satisfaction. On the other hand, a task is an event, usually short term, that put together with other tasks, accomplishes that goal (eg. Read about Ketogenic diet). So by obsessing about your goals, like losing 60 lbs, and writing that down every single day, your brain will begin to look at the task of reading about ketogenic diet as a rewarding task. Otherwise, you'll procrastinate. You will go months and months without losing weight because your brain just isn't rewarded with any tasks that doesn't lead to goals being accomplished. The trick is becoming obsessed with the goal. Obsession.

Also, writing your goals down daily is a confrontation with yourself, and so you'll see the language you use, and even the goal itself, shift and improve. All of a sudden, you will feel like something is carving itself into you, making room, looking forward to the goal being accomplished. Then all of a sudden you'll find yourself actually working on the tasks you used to procrastinate, or maybe the things you used to procrastinate on have revealed themselves to be part of a false goal. Many things have to shift, between task and goals. Writing them down daily is a simple discipline that makes the difference of finding yourself in a short time vs never finding yourself at all and just living in a bad loop.

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How to use Vim

Vim is a disease. I know this, for I suffer from it. It is a mind-altering ailment that permanently rewrites your concept of text editing, preventing you from ever thinking in the way you used to. When you're infected with Vim, all other modes of editing text become deeply unsatisfactory to you. Other editors will look like tricycles to you. Even worse, you will find endless frustration in being unable to explain Vim to someone that isn't already infected themselves.

I'm a dev team leader, and I do not push Vim on my junior members, for that should be criminalized. Two things can happen when you try to learn Vim: either you fail to master it, in which case it was wasted time, or you succeed, in which case you can never go back, even if you want to.

So, what is so infectious about Vim?

1. Modal editing. Most editors are in a perpetual "if you start typing now, what you type will appear on the screen" mode. This is "insert" mode in Vim, and it is not the default mode. Vim users will switch in and out of this mode to type. But the rest of the time, they are in other modes, usually one called "normal" mode.

What is normal mode? When in normal mode, letters you type will not be text entered on the screen, but rather they are commands. It's like your entire keyboard has become a command panel for manipulating the text in many complex ways, rather than editing the text character-by-character.

Lest you think normal mode is something that just gets used here and there: Vim users will spend most of their time in normal mode. They will enter insert mode to type text, and then immediately exit insert mode. It's that fundamental to the Vim experience.

Visual and Visual Block mode also exist for selecting areas of text in order to perform actions upon them.

2. Text objects and editing commands. Normal mode wouldn't make much sense on its own, if the act of editing text was a character-by-character action like it usually is. One of the core things about Vim is that the single character ceases to be the only fundamental object in text editing. Vim elevates words, sentences, lines and paragraphs into first-class objects.

Text objects are important because the facilitate actions being performed upon them.

Part of why Vim is hard to explain is that any single editing command is usually not all that impressive upon its own. If I have the text:

"something in quotes"

... and I want to replace what's inside quotes, I can use the editing command ci" (mnemonic: "change inside quote"), which will wipe out the text inside that quote, and put me into Insert mode to type new text.

By itself, that's not very impressive. Sure, it's faster than using the mouse to highlight the text and hit the Delete key, but it's not that much faster. What you have to understand is:

1) everything becomes a fast, streamlined text edit command like this. This is a tiny example, and here's some more small examples but every common edit action you'd take can be boiled down into a snappy command like this, and...

2) the edit actions can become very complex. An individual command, like the one I demonstrated, is a tiny thing. But these commands are meant to be composed together into much bigger operations. Much like how programming itself can take complicated manual tasks and turn them into simple repeatable routines, complicated manual editing tasks can be turned into simple repeatable Vim actions.

Why this is useful is hard to explain. It's kind of one of those "nobody can be told what the Matrix is" sorts of things. You don't really get it until you fully experience it yourself. Vim users often describe the act of editing text in Vim as feeling like you're programming text, rather than just editing it.

3. UNIX is your IDE. If you are using Vim in a GUI window, I would argue that you're only half using Vim. Vim is really the editor part of an IDE, and that IDE is the UNIX base system. It is a tool you use in conjunction with UNIX utilities in order to manipulate text. You can pipe a buffer of text into a UNIX tool, and have the transformed text returned to your buffer. This isn't just possible, it is idiomatic. Likewise, your "project browser" is your UNIX shell itself. Particularly when paired with a terminal multiplexer like tmux, Vim and UNIX make for a complete, portable, language-agnostic development environment.

4. Vim springs eternal. As I said in another comment: Vim was here before your IDE. Vim will be here after your IDE is long gone. Vim will outlast your job, your career, your marriage, your life.

Learning Vim means you learn an environment that you can (and, once the disease sets in, will) use for the rest of your career. Long after everything else you know has gone to dust, Vim will be there. Some version of Vim will be running on whatever computer triggers armageddon.

5. Vim is composable. Vim is far from the only editor with plugins. But while most editors have a larger "out of the box" footprint and a smaller amount to which they can be configured and overridden, core Vim is a very small, tight package, upon which you build the editing environment you want with a very deep and powerful level of customization. Vim is a core around which you build your personal editor.

6. Vim operates at the speed of thought. People talk about Vim saving keystrokes and mockingly comment on how that will add up to entire seconds of time saved. It is correct that the value of efficient editing is not best measured in time saved. But what should be familiar to programmers is reducing the interruption of thought. We programmers have plenty of rants and comics about the pain of even brief interruptions of our thought processes. Well, what you don't realize until fully down the Vim rabbit hole is how you are putting up with thought-interrupting manual editing actions that become streamlined into oblivion in a Vim environment (and thus, those tasks you didn't think twice about before are completely intolerable to you now).

7. Even more crazy stuff than I know. I'm still falling down the hole. Years into my fall, I am still finding Vim features which are entirely new to me, which further impact my ability to manipulate a text buffer in new and efficient ways. If it's conceivable, someone has probably already thought of it and made it possible in Vim. Much like Zombo.com, the limit is your own imagination.

TL;DR #2: Look, I said to stay away. It's a bit like Operation: Mindcrime. Don't ever trust the Vim needle, it lies.

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How to Stop Drinking/Using

We start feeling bad so we medicate it with alcohol, drugs, sex, anger, etc. and then we feel shameful because we know we did something that we shouldn't have done. So now you have the original feelings you were trying to drown out and cover up early plus the added feeling of shame for drinking/using again. So, now we medicate the shame with more drinking and/or using and the cycle continues.

The cycle not only continues, but it grows stronger and stronger until we're driven to the brink of complete hopelessness and depression. In order to get sober we have to break that cycle which is simple, but not necessarily easy.

It's simple because there's a ton of things we can do constructively that can pull us out of that shame based thinking, Reaching out to somebody, journaling, meditating, prayer (if that's your thing), going to a support group/12 step meeting, exercising and making a gratitude list are just a few of the ways you can do that But unfortunately for us alcoholics/addicts, those things are the absolute last things one earth that we want to do when we're in that shame based thinking.

So how do you change that?

Well the truth is you simply have to force yourself to do it. You have to force yourself to reach out and ask for help even when your ego will tell you that you don't need to. When going to a meeting/support group is the absolute last thing on Earth that you want to do, you force yourself to go because chances are that's exactly where you need to be at that moment.

The good news is that our brains are adaptive so the more you do those things that pull you out of the shame cycle, the easier they get. I don't know much of anything about the brain and how it works but I've heard people talk about making new neural pathways. I'm a very visual person so I imagine it like my brain has different solutions for different situations that I'm in.

Before I was in recovery my brain pretty much had 1 solution to deal with stressful situations and that was to go drink and/or use. So I think of it like back then my brain had this path between when I felt stress and telling me to drink/use. The path was wide open and surging with electrical activity with absolutely nothing in it's path to stop it. The more I used the more I imagined the road getting wider and more open, like a wide open freeway.

So once I got into recovery, I would feel stress and force myself to do something else like writing for example (which is a huge one for me). I pictured my brain having a very hard time taking the path of writing over the path of drinking and/or using because it was like trying to crawl through a narrow, rocky canyon versus taking the large open lane highway. But, over time the canyon got wider the more it was traveled and it became easier for my brain to accept writing as an acceptable alternative to drinking/using. Now it may not be the wide open highway that drinking/using was for me but it's getting there and it gets wider and easier to travel every time I feel anxiety and respond by journaling.

I don't know if that makes any sense and by no means is it an accurate representation of what's actually happening in the brain, but it's definitely a visual that has helped me in my recovery. I also try to remind myself that the old highway to drinking/using isn't gone, it's still there, as wide as it once was with its abandoned roads. I try to remember that because I truly believe that the minute I go back to drinking and or using, I'll open that highway right back up and be right back where I started.

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, I sincerely hope you find sobriety and the peace and serenity that can accompany it.

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Always Wear Your Seat Belt on Airplanes

I'm a pilot for a living. I never take my seat belt off in flight unless I'm getting up for a very specific reason. Do you know how much energy is wrapped up in the airplane at those kinds of speeds? There have been people that have been straight up killed because they hit clear air turbulence in flight. Even if you don't get killed it could ruin your day.

Seriously, you really want to wear your seat belt, and wear it properly. I've been in turbulence in little airplanes so bad that I thought the wings were going to come off. I've been thrown to 135° of bank in light aircraft. Hell, just commuting to work at my old job in Juneau once I saw turbulence so bad the FAs never got out of their seat on the flight and all the masks fell while we were on approach.

Egregious turbulence is pretty uncommon up in the flight levels where the airlines usually cruise, but you never know what could happen. You know how much your ass gets kicked if you hit a speed-bump in your car going too fast? Imagine hitting that same speed-bump at 80% the speed of sound.

Seriously, wear your seat belt. Not only is safe, but it's more polite than the alternative. Do you know how much paperwork there is if you get killed because you didn't wear your seat belt? The NTSB would be getting involved, There'd be a massive investigation by the FAA to see if any procedure wasn't followed - not to mention the lawsuits.

If you get killed for not wearing your seat belt, you traumatize the people next to you and vastly inconvenience a whole host of other people.

Don't be a dick, wear your seat belt.

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