Challenges, Muscle Memory and Scrambled Routines
Photo by foxypar4
A great deal has happened in the last three weeks. I resigned from one job, ran a marathon, and started a new job. Aside from the big events, there have been several smaller changes in my life. I made the decision when I started this new job that I would look at the challenges that arose as a chance for growth. Typically my response would be to bemoan the obstacles and hide from them. Here are a few of them.
- Learning a new work culture - Every time you start a new job you spend the first week in a whirlwind. You are learning the names of all your coworkers. There is paperwork. There are hours spent getting your computer and workspace organized, more so if your personality is like mine. However, the bigger challenges are learning the processes and projects. This is the first job where I have had to keep a running log of how much time I spend on a particular project and what task I’m doing for that project. I have to learn the various locations that both digital and physical assets are kept throughout the office. Each place I have worked before as part of the IT team, I have had administrator privileges on the network. I could install applications and take care of system configurations as needed. Now I’m a regular user like everyone else. Read more
This is the Droid I’m Looking For
So about three weeks ago I broke down and bought a smartphone. I’ve been working in technology for the last ten years but have never been on the bleeding edge. Mostly because the bleeding edge is expensive and I’m cheap. So it goes without saying that it took a lot of mental pep talks to bite the bullet and buy a phone.
My friend works at AT&T and recently she bought the Samsung Infuse. She really liked it and she let me test-drive hers. I looked at the reviews on Cnet and I found it for $100 less on Amazon so that sealed the deal. Read more
Firefighting & Hedgerows
Over the past month my job has changed quite a bit. Our IT team went from three members to two. So I’ve had to transition from simply being a programmer to being a firefighter as well. During this shake up, the owners decided they wanted me to cross train and learn the networking, phone systems and all the other little bits of trivia that currently only my coworker knows. He came in on the ground floor and has spent the last few years just getting the company up and running. But at the same time the owners have realized that having all that information centralized in one person’s brain is not ideal. So several weeks ago, all approved IT tasks began coming directly to me to execute. If I didn’t know how something worked, I was to ask my coworker to teach me and complete the task. If it was something I knew how to do, I would hand it off to him.
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The Lengths I Go to Organize My Books
A few years ago I installed OpenBiblio on one of my websites to keep tab of all my books. I wrote a Perl script that uses a book’s ISBN number to retrieve the bibliographic information from Amazon and then enter the book into my library. I can now search all my books as well my DVDs and I have a complete list for insurance purposes. Also, now if someone wants to borrow a book, I can check it out and know who borrowed what and when.
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Inside the Cowtown 10K
I was up at 5am this morning and on the road by 6:30am. The race started at 7:30am. About 6:40 I found a traffic jam heading into downtown Fort Worth. It was at this point I decided that if I race again, I will have someone drop me off. Many people were getting out of their cars and running to the starting line while a family member or friend took over to get out of the traffic.
I drove around and found a spot where a parking meter used to be and hoped that the police would be too busy with traffic to give me a ticket. I walked/jogged to the start line and made it with about three minutes to spare.
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Recycled Tech Turned Furniture
I was cleaning my apartment the other day and was moving the old computers I have laying around. I also noticed that I had run out of shelf space and had just crammed books in various places.
Then the thought occurred to me to re-purpose the old computer cases. From the front it looks like an old computer that has passed its prime.
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WordCamp Dallas 2009 Impressions
I spent this weekend “drinking from a firehose” as Jon Pozadzides put it on the first day. I’ve been using and developing for WordPress for the last few years so I wondered what I would actually get out of WordCamp. Several of the speakers reiterated things that I knew but have failed to act on.
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Seminary: A Crucible of Faith
So about a year and a half ago, I got around to responding to a friend’s question of how had seminary affected my faith. Over the last few weeks, I have come back to this question. Some of those things I am still struggling with. The difference now is, my classes this semester seem particularly timely. They are forcing me to take a deeper look at myself. Read more
Coder’s Block
For the last several weeks I have struggled with programming. I completed all of my large projects and found myself with only mundane and/or repetitive coding in front of me. One day it was so bad that I just clocked out early because I could not get focused. Beginning this week, I would start my day by coming up with some little personal project to get into the right mindset. For instance, I wanted to see if I could pull stats from WordPress.com via Perl scripts. I was unsuccessful but I learned some things along the way. Because of this I was able to transition to another project and get it completed.
These little distractions were helping me overcome my coder’s block but I still struggled. That began to change on Wednesday. I was listening to Buzz Out Loud and the discussion sparked an idea. I got to work and began toying with the idea for geek-maps.com. I worked on it for a little bit and then switched over to my work projects. When I got home that evening I worked for several hours on the site. When I got to work the next morning, I didn’t have as hard a time getting started.
As I continued working throughout the day Thursday and then on Friday I noticed some nice side-effects. There was this new energy for my work. I also found that each project built upon the other and solved problems inherent in both. Another side effect was the overcoming of my writer’s block. As I worked on geek-maps, I began writing about what I was doing and the problems I was trying to solve. My purpose was simple. I was writing to let visitors know what I was up to and, it helped me think things through.
Writing for geek-maps, I was not worried about the topic or my sentence structure or the tone. I just wrote. Some authors say that it is the best way to combat writer’s block. It took this experience for me to see the evidence. I have had all kinds of ideas rattling around in my head, but I have not been motivated enough to write. My hope is that with this renewed energy I will begin to put some of those ideas to paper.
Semi-Celebrityness & the New Model for Media
I don’t watch TV in the traditional sense anymore. I canceled my cable subscription a few months ago to save money and I watched too much of it. Even if I knew there was not anything on that interested me, I would still sit and just channel surf.
Currently I have rabbit ears on my TV but I don’t watch broadcast TV that much. I think the writer’s strike had a lot to do with that. All the shows I had been following stopped producing new episodes. The strike is over but we are in a lull waiting for new episodes. So in the interim, I have been consuming new video podcasts. Some are produced by media companies and some are produced by a couple guys with a set in their apartment. There are thousands of audio podcasts but the cost for professionally produced video podcasts is more prohibitive. Many of the shows I watch are produced by Revision3. They are a new media company producing content and distributing it over the web. It seems like they are launching a new show every couple of weeks. I download the podcasts to an old computer connected to my TV and then I kick back and watch the shows.
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