Lent Commitments… Uh oh…

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.

Books

Definitely want to finish up Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age… I think I might do my first ever book review on this blog on this book. Heck, it’s the first non-programming book I’ll be finishing up in years.

The book Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers) doesn’t seem that useful… at least… $20 useful. This book definitely adds to the online documentation at macromates, but I feel as if the pdf version of this book should have been included with the crazy price of TextMate. Definitely want to take my time with this book, though… seeing how I use this app hourly.

Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers): What is wrong with the manufacturer of this book? The text is printed on a slant. It’s readable, but it bugs the crap out of me. And also, THIS?

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 to come in the mail. I know for a fact I will love this book.

Summary: Read Hackers & Painters by end of the month. Textmate, take your time. Founder’s by the end of next month.

Consulting/Freelancing/Blogging/Entrepreneurship…ing

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:

• College of Education
  • Get Active Directory working in ColdFusion
  • Templates for moodle working
  • Fix moodle bugs, submit to moodle CVS repository
• Freelancing
  • Finish up drupal customization
  • Finish up portfolio
  • Actively seek out clients
• Blog
  • New template, new categories, new… old posts… blah blah blah

Summary: Get work done. Finish redesign on paper by end of the month. Finalize what is to be done with hanmeta.

I Can’t Sleep

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…

There goes the diet.

Been at Siebel for about 9 hours.

Instead of looking at the business-related “documentation” I’ve accumulated over the past couple of days (I cannot believe how useful my Entrepreneurship class notes packet is…), I’ve decided to go and wear the coding hat again.

More and more, I see these two natures battling within me. I really want to be able to wear the two hats well… do I really have to pick? Can’t I be both?