Tag: Learning

Starting off 2017

Let’s get this started the right way – 2017 FTW

Let’s try to start of 2017 and spend more time here.  Writing on my weblog used to be something I would do often and I actually enjoyed it, but I never made it a priority and it’s languished.  I look back on it with regret, and that’s wrong – it’s just a thing that happened.

I still work at CenturyLink but I got a promotion last year to management and it’s been a fantastic experience.  I spent the last 6 1/2 months on the road most weeks, travelling across 6 states working with a team of fantastic sales engineers, and that caused me to reevaluate my life habits in general.  Like most people, I have good days and bad so in 2017, I’m going to try to handle things by focusing on “streaks”:

  1. Fitness:  It’s a tired trope of blogs, but I’m going to try to streak for fitness.  I live pretty close to a 24 hour gym and that means that I’ve got opportunity and motive to spend each day there, doing something active.  If I can streak it to 7 days straight, then I’ll try for 2 weeks, then 4 weeks and hopefully the habit is built.  I read about someone that spend last year running 2,016 miles and the idea of doing something like that for 2017 makes some sense.  I can’t run that well, but walking/running for 2,017 miles throughout the year gives me a goal with perspective.  I’m hoping that streaking gym time will push me in other directions like weights and general fitness.
  2. Food:  Food and good eating habits are in my brain, but I usually take an easy way out when I’m on the road for work.  I’m going to find a way to avoid the bad stuff while out of the office and again, streak it until I find a new balance point.  My focus is the streak of good decisions, not the meal-to-meal success or failure.
  3. Structure:  I’m planning my time more because with the new job, the “8-5” of the work day can be very random with priorities.  I’m going to log my time spent on things during the month of January and use that as a skeleton of a schedule for future months.

I think 3 things are enough to focus on for now.  I know from experience in previous years that these will deliver benefits on the side, like stress reduction, weight reduction and “happiness”.

Why bother with Frontier again?

I’ve asked myself the question “Why bother with Frontier?” many times in the last month.  I spent some time talking to people on the Frontier Kernel mailing list about getting involved with the project again.  I learned many things, including the fact that I’m not qualified to help in a meaningful way right now.  Sometimes knowing your limits is as important as knowing your strengths.  In my case, I would need to learn 10 years of C coding to catch up to the complicated environment that is the Frontier kernel.

I think instead I’ll spend my time building the software that I want instead of trying to fix the issues with the existing project.  There are many things about the Frontier coding environment that are appealing:

  1. Editing code in an outliner
  2. Scripting applications to automate tasks
  3. Building applications that work on more than one platform

That said, I think that I can build my own software while addressing my shortcomings.  I have the books and the tools to learn C, compile programs and run them under MacOS X and Windows.  I have the motivation to learn and some spare time.

So, why bother with Frontier again?  Why indeed.