Goals

I've got a couple goals before I end this year. The first is getting caught up on all my emails and doing a personal year-end review.

The second is to finish something significant. I don't care what it is as long as it get's done.

I love moving forward...

I love doing things that make my life better, even by a little bit. It's the only way that I can sleep easy at night. Why do people not strive to do something with their life, just going day to day seems like a fate worse than death.

Another Week

It is important that you actually live your life day to day instead of trying to just get through the week.

Late nights...

I'm up late tonight. Just messing around by testing software (blogo) and what things I can do with it. I'll probably go to bed soon.

So what?

For most of my life, I've been driven by two distinct fears.
1) That I'll wind up like one of my drunken relatives.
Hiding from life using drugs and alcohol. Not caring about what happens to them or the world around them, but only for the current enjoyment.

and

2) That I'm not as smart as people think I am
That all the awards I won were just a fluke. That someone would one day say "Wait a minute! He doesn't deserve this"

So much of what I've done has been because of this. I initially went to school thinking that this would eliminate the chance of my fears coming true. It was there that I got a taste of what else was available to me a life outside of fear. A life where I did things because I wanted to do them.

But things sometimes don't go according to plan and I find myself in a situation I never thought I would be. And it wasn't until this moment that I begin to understand my fears a little more.

With my fear of winding up like my relatives, I understand why people would do something like that to themselves. They are afraid of the world. When problems show up we all have a choice on how to deal with them. We can stand up and make the best of it or we can run and hide. There are many places we can hide. A drunk stupor, sleeping away the day, reading the latest fantasy novel or playing the newest video games.
But those problems remain, and they only gain strength when you run. This causes some people to search for more and more ways to get away.
I want to say we should pity people in this situation, but I've walked that path too many times and I can tell you that your pity won't to anyone any good.

My second fear was something that I didn't understand that I had. Being "smart" has been something that I prided myself on, so much that I used it to define who I was a person. But I let what other people where (un)able to do become a measurement of how "smart" I was.
When I scored high on an exam, project or paper, I would think "Ha, I'm able to do this better then you!" and part of me felt validated. Validated that I spent the time and effort to do it. Validated that the choices I made, either related to the exam, paper, etc. or not, were good. And this worked some what, but it didn't truly make me happy. Quite possibly because it was all in an effort to combat my first fear.
The trouble with doing something like this, is that you can't always be on top. Someone somewhere is better than you. It may not be all things, it could just be one subject, but when you have a mentality like mine...
It always looks like a personal failure.
It felt like I was secretly competing with everyone. Better grades, better projects, better everything...

I'm tired of it...

I made my decisions, I will live with them. To those who did better than me in school and later on in "the real world". Congratulations.

I don't want to compete with you. It only makes me recent you and myself. That's no way to live.

Late Night Early Mornings...

I've just finished my second all-nighter for work this week. The weird thing is that I don't mind too much and I'm wondering... Why don't I do this for myself?

MTV and the abuse of "Live"

I was flipping through the channels tonight and I came across the MTV music awards.
Wow, times have changed. The set looks like it was put together the day of. The musical performances are a mess with some of them being used to help cut to commercial.
The worse offense is the blatant abuse of the word "live". The actual awards are already posted. All the live performances that are supposed to be going on at this moment could not possibly be happening...

Bots Maru!

The year is 2008 and we still have a problem of automated bots! What is wrong people! Just because this is "The Net," doesn't mean that everyone on it wants to meet young and exciting people who want to jump your bones.

Who needs a website?

Well, I think I'm going to put the dream of having my own personal website on hold. Recently, I looked at how much time and effort it would take to make my ideal website and realized that I just don't have the desire to put a lot of time and energy into something like that any more, especially since there are so many (free) alternatives out there.   So let's look at all the reasons that I wanted a personal site and why I think that the cost to benefit ratio is just too high.

A personal space on the Internet

For a lot of people, getting noticed is the reason that they start putting themselves out on the World-Wide Web. When I was in high school my teachers would say, "it's a great place to put your résumé so you can get hired." Have some pictures? We'll you can post those bad boys up so everyone can see your "art."
That's great.
But with social networking being what it is, I no longer have to worry about finding web hosting, creating both design and content, or driving traffic.

File/project hosting

I know of a couple services that allow you to host files with varying degrees of control (password protected or available to the public) as well as different levels of bandwidth and total space.

One problem

I feel that there is one major problem with relieing on these services. That is the problem of control. As much as these systems offer they can't give you complete control. Some don't allow you to remove the ads that they put on your site, or restrict you from using javascript, flash or any other new technology that you just found out about 15 minutes ago. Want to have your own domain? Well, that might cost you. Want to take all the work that you've done and go somewhere else? There's no way to export it. Want to read your old work from a year ago? Nope, you can only go back 20 posts (I'm LOOKING AT YOU MYSPACE!!), you should have backed it up yourself if it was that important.

 

 

 

What? Not top 10/5 list of examples?

Yes, I know I don't have a list of examples for all the services I've talked about here. Not because I'm being lazy, but I think that if you are really interested you should look and learn for yourself.

Reviewing Financial Goals

A long time ago (maybe a year), I took some time to sit and think about what my financial goals were. Although I only had 5, I divided them into 3 different areas: short term, Midterm and Long term. It was my intention to have these goals defined so that when I open up my wallet or think about buying something I can think "hey, does this line up with what my plan in life is?"

Hmmm....

Well, after writing them down I put them in my backpack where I soon forgot them until I realized that I was basically going from check to check. "I need to make these a priority!" I yelled in my head. So thinking I was the smartest person in the world, I set up a reminder in my Google Calendar to send me a copy every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I still get the messages, and my ultra smart brain knows exactly what to do with them...

DELETE!

For the curious, here are my financial goals:

Short Term:
Always have 10+ dollars in my wallet.

Midterm:
3 Months of income saved away for 'rainy days'

Long Term:
NO DEBT, except mortgage.
Be able to afford a house.
Small side business

Next action

I've been told that when you are stuck with a certain project you should sit back and think about what the next action is. That is to say if you only had 5 minute to live or work on something what is the one thing you can do to move the project forward.

So, what is the next action for my life?

Oopsie!

I'm a little bit of a mac guy. When it comes down to it, my favorite operating system is Mac OSX and I really feel that Apple has done a pretty good job as far as quality in a lot of different areas. This doesn't mean that they aren't prone to mistakes and/or doing things that seems to have very little fore thought.

Take, for example, the Apple newsletter you get after you sign up for itunes or .mac/mobilemess. I know a lot of people opt out because, really, who needs another peace of email to sell you something, but I like it because I might come across some deal or hint.

 

In today's newsletter I saw the following headline/ad. I've been planning/dreading getting my finances together for a while, so I thought I would check out what Apple has to say about quicken.

Much to my surprise, it turns out that quicken only has a two (2) out of five (5) star rating with all the Apple users on the site.

Well, well. I can only think of two reasons why something like this could happen.

1) Someone just picked out some applications with big names that people might recognize to make this newsletter "more relevent"

2) There is some kind of contract or back alley deal so that quicken can advertise to this group of consumers.

3) Apple wants to highlight the fact that quicken sucks on the mac so that intuit actually get's to it.

The horrible crash

Recently, I was doing some work on my home system and... uh... kinda destroyed my system. I'm hoping to get it up and running soon....

One social butterfly caught in a storm

I would describe myself as someone who would be there if you needed him; only a call away when times get rough.

But, the truth is, I can't be everywhere at once and I can't nor do I want to drop everything every time some one calls. It seems that in the last month or so people have forgotten that I'm not able to do something like that that anymore. I've got responsibilities that I can't shrug off or simply put to the side.

To be honest, I would love to be with all of my friends and be able to make everyone happy all the time.

I can't.

Goals setting for June

I've got a short list of goals, but that only means I want to focus a lot of energy on meeting them.

1. Establish a good habit of waking up and doing a small routine including stretching and light muscle conditioning
2. Finish reading "The Circle" by Laura Day
3. Make going over the family budget with my more enjoyable by making it a more regular event and looking at it as way to see what ways we can improve
4. Finish a self directed paper about Psychotropic drugs and their effect on children
5. Spend more time writing in my personal journal
6. And drink more water

Using Windows Live Writer

I think this is one of the best Microsoft products that I've come across. The one thing that I enjoy most about it is that it is free and fairly easy to use.

One more thing.

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No more excuses...

I've got a whole world of opportunity ready for me to reach out and grab.
My wife is done with school.
Work is leveling off.
I've got all the books and resources I could need.

The only thing stopping me is me.


And that scares the perfectionist in me. Now that I have nothing and no one to point at and say "This is the reason that I didn't do such and such" or "The reason I couldn't do this better is because of such and such". Somewhere along the line I learned to be afraid, somewhere along the line I decided that it was better to not try then to attempt to follow through; to actually follow my dreams and desires for something.

I don't want that anymore.

Review, review, review

I feel one of the best things anyone can do for themselves is have a regular review schedule (at least once a week or more).

I might need someone to help cite, but I thought I had read somewhere that the review is the one piece that people have trouble with. Although the rest of “system” is important (especially the “do” part), it is my opinion that if you really want to commit to GTD methodology and (more importantly) you life goals. You have to review where you are and where you are headed.

Breakdown: Collection: What good is collecting if you don’t look at it after you’ve collected it? Process: Are you sure this the right thing to do with this stuff? Organize: Did you place that tasks or reference in the best place? Is it time that you did something about that one project you’ve put off? Do: What are you doing? Is it really what you want to do?

I understand that you can get stuck reviewing things forever and that the end result of all of our actions should be to actually do something, but (to say my point again) reviewing is one of the most important things to change my life.

Wow, It's May

Time goes by so fast....

Early mornings

I like to do things early in the morning.

Catching the excitment

All this week, I've been running into people who want to get into cocoa programming. I'm glad, this means that we can look forward to getting more people making applications, demonstrating what the api's can do and making increasing the mac development community.

So, where does that leave me? How is my own development coming along.

Honestly, I'm not doing much with it. I've got a 6 month old daughter, wife, work and a thesis (that no matter how many times I ask won't do itself).

But....

Cocoa currency tutorial

So I decided to do Apple's Cocoa Application Tutorial again. This will be the third time that I've done this on Leopard and I feel kind of weird about it. After all, isn't one of the definitions of insanity doing something over and over again and expecting different results? How do you justify doing the same contrived example over and over again?

Simple, this is practice and practice makes perfect. My goal for doing the example is the same as when I first did it. After running through it I want to be able to generate simple programs without having to look at a reference. I'm not looking to become a master programmer after just one tutorial, but I want to be able make hello world pop up after hitting a button.

I'll be happy with just that....

for now.

Today's Goal

Really what IS today's goal?
I go on and on about how I want to be a cocoa programmer, but what exactly does that mean? After I finish all the tutorials and examples what do I want to do with it? I mean, if all I do is want then I'm just a wantanbe...
Hmmm....
I've got an idea for a project...

King of my own domain....

Wow, I actually went out and did it. I've placed another foot print on the internet.