There is no end in sight.
Not trying to sell shoes or anything, but seriously… if you’re in doubt, if you’re in pain, if you’re depressed, if you’re not wanting to, if you’re lazy, if you’re bored, if you’re sick and tired, if you’re actually “sick” sick, if you’re unable to…
Just do it. You’ll feel better. I know I’m feeling better.
My motivational speech to myself for the day. Huzzah.
And man… there goes the feed subscribers because of my mistake…
Before the month’s over… and I have to do yet another one of those crazy Month in Review’s… I think I need to take this time to refocus a bit.
Originally, it was:
Initially, for Lent, I had given up things like YouTube, TV shows, and movies. Then I started to play Quake… ONE. Oh man, how much fun. I think I must have sunk a good chunk of time into it. Well… I’m going to say this here: All forms of electronic entertainment is forbidden until Easter.
This includes: ANYTHING Flash, ANY passive media… It’s quite hard, seeing how almost EVERYWHERE I go, there’s a TV on or a browser open to YouTube. Time to strategize how to avoid those situations…
Bible reading is going well. Kinda getting behind (I think… I’m not sure…), because I’m really trying to learn Philippians before Easter… but that’s only an excuse. By the end of this month, I want to be fully caught up. I need to do some math in terms of how many chapters I, then, have to read to catch up. We’ll see, at the end of the month.
Let’s just say I’ve broken… a few of them. I probably pulled a JK^extreme again and went overboard on making up incredibly difficult and unnecessary commitments. For example, I picked up playing StarCraft again. It’s fun. It’s not nearly as addicting as before (I’ve matured, hooray!), and so I’ve been playing to get my mind off of things… I didn’t really feel guilty about playing it, but after thinking about a little bit, I feel bad that I didn’t feel guilty enough to not start it up.
So what do I do… Do I go into insane failure layer mode, give up everything and just forget about Lent? Well, I have to question my motives in even setting up these incredibly insane goals for myself.
I don’t want to give up something that I don’t do normally anyway. So something like watching TV… I don’t do it that much to begin with. I might do it occasionally, but giving that up to…
You know what? From the time I joined Covenant Fellowship Church until now, I’ve never been a fan of Lent. I’m still very much unsure of why we even do this thing. While going through the Internet, I ran into this interesting page: The True Meaning of Lent. While it is from a different denomination than mine (PCA), it definitely brings up many great points.
So before this turns into a post that I should create a new category “Religion” for, I’m going to end this here with this:
I’m going to get rid of all the things I’ve abstained from. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to go start getting addicted to gaming or movies or whatever, but that I won’t be feeling guilty whenever I break the “promise”, or at least, the illusion of it that I’ve created for myself.
However, the things that I’ve decided to add to my list of “things to do”, I’m going to keep. Reading the Word as well as memorizing Philippians has been incredibly helpful for me (even though… I’ve fallen behind quite a bit). I’m not doing these things merely because they’re on the list, but because I genuinely believe that they are helping me in my walk with God.
As soon as I focus on doing the positives, these unnecessary things will fall by the wayside anyway. I just need to make sure I follow through with the things I know will help me grow.
And seriously, Josh Kim, it’s your pride for setting up these insane goals. You wanted to feel all high and mighty if you kept them, right? You idiot…
I love setting up myself for failure. Yummy.
Summary: Read Bible. Memorize Philippians. Keep fighting. Don’t waste time.
Definitely want to finish up Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
The book Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers)
Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)
It’s not just this book, but it’s also the case with the TextMate book (it’s not as noticeable because that book is thinner and the pages are thicker). I hope it’s just this batch of books of the Pragmatic Programmers series. I asked for a return on this one… so I won’t be able to dip into the Ruby on Rails just yet. Besides, I want to learn more Ruby before I go deeper. Should I just go and buy Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
Waiting for Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
Summary: Read Hackers & Painters by end of the month. Textmate, take your time. Founder’s by the end of next month.
I felt like all these things go hand in hand. This is basically my life, or at least, it should be.
I like my “job”. I like having a steady income from a part-time job with College of Education at University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign. I like having clients to work for. I like setting my own hours (as you can see with the insane timestamp of this post). I like working wherever I want… from my apartment to the library…
I like my blog. I love being able to write about whatever’s on my mind on whatever subject I please. I love being able to strategize about how to best present the content, the information… how to monetize… ahem
I love thinking about the company I’ll be starting soon. I love doing market research. I love being my own marketing department, almost tearing my hair out trying to come up with a cool company/service names. I love imagining all the services I could provide through the company. I love thinking about the tax benefits of incorporating from one state compared to another.
The only problem I see right now… is the lack of health insurance. I don’t bring in enough to have a personal plan for myself, nor do I have health issues to begin with… it’s just something that bothers me from time to time.
But in terms of things to get done before the end of the month:
Summary: Get work done. Finish redesign on paper by end of the month. Finalize what is to be done with hanmeta.
I’m currently sick. And yet, I don’t really feel like going to sleep.
I really hope I don’t start writing another post tonight…
A few more things about Google Reader.
I think the best way to use Google reader is to use space and shift+space to go through stories.
I thought that the space button went through one post each at the time, but I found out that it either does one post at a time OR if the post is longer than a screen’s height, then the behavior of the space key changes to a “page down”. It’s ingenious. I can go through all my feeds with one hand… kinda… which leads me to my next point.
Currently, I’m having to command+click a title of a story to open up in a tab. There needs to be another key that opens up the story I’ve selected in a target=”_new” window.
I tried the enter key but all that the enter key does is open up the story in “list view”, and it does nothing in “expanded view”. Blah.
I like to read my posts backwards than how Google has set it up. I like to read the posts that were posted earlier than those posted later. I’d much rather go directly to the post: I don’t want to hear some garbage summary on the original post. (I love posts that add thoughtful and meaningful content to the original post… but that rarely happens in this digg world.)
So going back to the first point: I have to use shift+space rather than space to scroll through my stories… Kinda clunky, but it works.
It’s quick. It’s painless, to a certain extent. It’s not as clunky as Vienna…
Plus, it’s a web application. Half-minus, it’s Google. (Google is neither on my list of companies I love nor on my list of companies I hate…)
I swear. Sometimes, writing on this blog turns out to be something like leveling in World of Warcraft: I can’t stop it. I gotta level up just once more or turn in one more quest.
I didn’t know this, but there’s a tiny movement against having “www” subdomain in links. Just visit no www to read up on some of the reasons why.
>Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.
The reason why the site was “down” for the better part was yesterday was that I installed this: no-www wordpress plugin. The silly mistake I committed was that I forgot when I set up JoshKim.org, I had asked for any request to “joshkim.org” to be sent to “www.joshkim.org”.
If you visited either one of those links, you would bounce back and forth… and back and forth… and back and forth… until the browser gave up on the request. I don’t know about you, but I got this strange looking error that wasn’t a 404 or anything I’ve seen before.
I realized this error after finding out that there wasn’t any server outage reports on the Dreamhost Status Page.
Just a heads up to those that might want to follow with the rest of the Internet in making it a “www”-less world… and so that those people won’t make the same mistake as I did.
I’ve decided to ditch Vienna for my RSS feeds. It’s been getting on my nerves with a lot of little bugs (double downloading, “recent post” count problems), and I decided it’s time I should make the web app jump for this type of application.
I’ve written before on how a problem encourages me to move and try something new. Here’s what’s relevant from that post.
Feeds
- I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
- I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
- I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…
Looks like I’m going to be going against my own words. I still don’t like online apps for certain things, but for feeds, google reader is quickly becoming something that… just works.
Only a subset of the advertised short-cut keys work for me, since I turned on “start searching when I type” feature in Firefox (BonEcho for the mac users). But these seem to work:
I think there might be more, but this is more than enough, I think.
What would be really nice is if I had the ability to scroll down an article using a shortcut key also. For example, if the post I’m reading is longer in height than the window it’s in, I want to be able to scroll down on just that story. I’d much rather have j and k be the “scroll key” and have l and ; be the “next/previous post”… thereby solidifying Google’s love for vi. I’m probably asking too much.
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