EPTThat's a strange statement to think about. Time really flies.
I have many goals for this year:
I will re-do a couple of high school courses in order to get into university.
I will also do online courses in entrepreneurship and programming. As those subjects interest me.
I will continue my training regimen, and try to satiate my competitive drive through chess and martial arts.
I will read at least 1 book per month.
I will start my own website/blog by February 15th.
I will re-do a couple of high school courses in order to get into university.
I will also do online courses in entrepreneurship and programming. As those subjects interest me.
I will continue my training regimen, and try to satiate my competitive drive through chess and martial arts.
I will read at least 1 book per month.
I will start my own website/blog by February 15th.
I wanted to totally change my life around within this year, but where I imagined I will be and where I am now do not match up completely. All is not lost however. As much as had changed between now and January, the same amount can change by December.
I have applied to a university to begin technical programming fulltime. As of right now I am waitlisted so I will start to apply to other schools.
My part time studies went beyond what I was expecting. At first I was dabbling in coursera and other online courses, but I discovered part time schooling at a local university and have learned a lot of new things in the condensed courses.
I am currently learning HTML/CSS and Javascript. The big three languages of the web. The reason I got into these was because after I failed to launch my own website by February 15th after not being satisfied with the product, I wanted to learn how to make something better. As such, my little starcraft passion project will hopefully be released in the next quarter.
I also learned of new technologies coming out (particular mobile phones) that will be running apps with HTML5. This completely caught my imagination and I want to learn how to make these apps and contribute to the open source community in a meaningful way. I need a lot of practice with javascript so that I can learn to use some framework and really get down to business. Before that, I need to learn how to make an app, since the only thing I can make in HTML5 so far is a web page.
My weightlifting training has been going swimmingly, albeit with slow progress on two major lifts for the past couple of months. I am disappointed in myself for not beginning any martial arts or even cardio training, something I intend to fix tomorrow.
The book challenge has been difficult. I failed to complete "Godel Escher Bach", that book was simply too much for me. I have spent all of my years reading fantasy books, so even if I enjoyed the complexity of GEB, I was not capable of keeping up with the marathon of big ideas. On the list of things I did read are "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance," "The Brothers Karamazov", "Meditations Of Marcus Aurelius," "The Republic," and "Sun and Steel." These books I found to be much easier to read, though the style in which Socrates debates is extremely frustrating because of how slow it is.
Not on the list, but I managed to get a part time job in a warehouse type store. I earn minimum wage, and its very boring, but at least I have a job. I also started playing Starcraft II again recently. It took about 2 months to get back into masters league, double the time I estimated it to be.take Starting to play again stirred things in my heart, but I will likely never try to be a semi-professional or professional player again.
Other miscellaneous things I wanted to do but failed to do were gain a sense of fashion, and build a second rig for media/programming. These two were because of a recent car accident I had that cost me almost all of my money. This combined with my habit of going to restaurants to spend time with my friends meant that I simply do not have the money to achieve these things.
My failure to continue my chess blog warrants a blog post of its own, as I seemed to have quite a regular readership on it. I can only say that I am sorry. I was more fascinated with the romantic idea of being good at chess than actually being good at chess. The game failed to excite me as it does for thousands of other people, and that greatly saddens me. Perhaps later with more maturity I will return to it again with a deeper appreciation and joy in playing it.
So far I am not satisfied with 2014, but things have begun to turn around. Here's to hoping that the positivity will snowball.
