Education
Goals For March ‘09
So this is something that I was inspired to do by Erik Kastner over at his blog Meta|ateM. He did it last month and was fairly succesful and it also goes along with something that I have thought about and possible written about, providing people public knowledge of what your goals are so they can hold you accountable. So here is my list for March.
Get a working prototype of my Main project finished.
This might not get done but I’m really hoping that I can as I spent the past month working on the algorithm and design of the system. I think I can get the base down in 2 weeks but some of the higher functioning algorithms will take a bit longer but I have to build a working test body before I get to them.
15 posts
I know I was lacking last month, in fact this is the first post in over 2 weeks. I’ll be finishing a bunch of posts I’ve been working on and should be able to hit 15 fairly easily.
Find a new car
This is new as I just totalled my car an hour ago, at the time of writing. I was planning on looking more towards the end of the month but looks like that clock was stepped up a bit.
Build up my chipstack on Full-Tilt
Lately, I’ve been playing more often I haven’t reached a point where I’m able to sacrifice money from my daily life so I just play for fun and intellectual challenge. Right now, I’m at 3,000 and I want to reach 10,000 by the end of the month.
I’ll update you guys on how I did at the end of the month. Oh and for those of you that subscribe and visit the site I’m wondering if the new design is more pleasing to you?
Killing Time Sinks
Just over a week ago, I started playing World of Warcraft(again) and I was have a great time getting back into the game. Unfortunately, for you guys it completely knocked out my time for blogging and also some of my other things that I enjoy. My estimate for in-game time is over 40 hours for the week, that’s a full time job, what the hell could I have been thinking. So I’m going to write down a list of ways to seek and remove time sinks.
Do a Weekly Analysis for 1-2 Weeks
You don’t have to over thorough with you tracking, but every couple of hours write down what your doing. If you do something that could take a few hours write before you start and when you end, including the time for each. At the end of the week, compile all that information and look for stuff that appears rather excessive and see if you can cut it out; for me excessive would be anything above 6-8 hours for the week. Obviously, you can’t cut sleep, dining, or commuting out completely, but it is possible to cut back.
How to Cut Back
If say reading too much(though I don’t think that’s possible), you could cut the number of books available to you so that you read them more slowly and cherish them, or maybe it’s a social activity, you can cut your funding so that you have to stay home. Find a way to either make the time have more value, rather than desaturate it with over use, or put a flow valve on it so that you can constrict it. If it’s possible you could also just go cold turkey and cut it completely, this was my choice in canceling my subscription and removing the software from my system.
Find Something Productive to Fill the Time
This is the big one anytime you try to stop a habit, you need a distraction to prevent you from going back to your old ways. You need something that you find interesting and will add value to your life. Here are a few, some that I plan on using
- Blogging( I know I already am, I want to do it more frequently)
- Freelancing
- Programming
- Reading
- Focused Topical Learning
- Get A Job
- Head Back to School
Computer Issues & A Few Ideas
For everyone who waited for something Tuesday and Thursday I’ll apologize. I ended up doing a clean install trying to get my burner to work Sunday evening, because I wanted Windows 7. So, instead of doing anything productive I spent my time on my computer searching for everything to get it back into working condition and coming up with ideas for posts, improving some products, and just flat out re-evaluating my own purposes.
It’s sad to here that Steve Jobs is stepping down, but maybe whoever takes over while he’s gone will start making improvements to their fringe products like iTunes. Just the other day I was using it, as it is my default player, and I realized that Window’s Media Player had a better user interface, though slower and not as pretty. In WMP, if you want to listen to an album by itself all you have to do is double click on it’s art or right-click on it’s title and select play. iTunes doesn’t have this it takes at least 2-5 clicks and some search through different menu’s to get to play just an album, that’s quite a disrespectful use of the the user’s time.
In other news, people have started to look at the education bubble that we’ll be facing in the next few years. John Robb’s article “Industrial Education” has caused a stir, “There is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree.” I like how he’s done this because his analysis comes toward the same view as my posts from early last year on Social Perception and Personal Economics of education where I discuss the topic, but he also comes up with some great ideas on replacing it.
That’s all I have to say this morning, I’ll be back in a few days with new posts, now that everything is back in working order.
