Young Hands Club

I will break this review into two sections. The first is a review of what I did, and then the second part will be a brief analysis of my methodology and productivity (and lack thereof. )

The Review

This week I dipped out of normal routine in order to setup my base. As usual, the first order of business was knocking out my weekly saltmines work. This went better than the previous week in terms of staying motivated and productive while doing the grind.

The next task I took on was figuring out how to get myself an ergonomic desk and chair. I did some poking around the internet trying to find guides on how to get a healthy setup. The best guide I found online seemed to be one posted by The University of British Columbia.¹I figured out how high my chair would need to be to sit such that my knees form an angle an epsilon above 90 degrees. From there I calculated what height my desk should be so that my elbows form a 90 degree angle while typing. I spoke with a local tico who was doing some construction work nearby, and commissioned a desk with a proper height² that will fit nicely into my apartment. I also spoke with him about acquiring caulk and materials for sealing my apartment’s cracks and unwanted entryways.

Afterwards, I worked on figuring out how to deliver items from the states to CR. I spoke with locals and an acquaintance here who does quite a bit of business.³ He says he uses crbox.cr, but noted that he has run into issues with customs. He informed me it is always better to have a friend bring what you need as personal luggage. I spent some time reading the websites of the courier companies, but as noted in the logs I did not do the job carefully and this task is still incomplete.⁴

During the course of the week, I took advantage of opportunities to speak Spanish. Yesterday I got drinks and held conversation for over five hours with my neighbors.⁵ I also put in a great effort into improving my surfing. Being inside of a barreling wave has eluded me for quite some time.⁶ To fix this, I am trying to apply the takeaway from my ‘verifying my understanding’ article to surfing. I am heavily questioning my fundamentals, such as foot placement on the board. I am also testing the edges of certain parameters, such as how deep⁷ I can be when I catch the wave.⁸

The Analysis

I was not very productive this week. I hardly walked away with anything concrete, all I have are various plans for acquiring parts / setting up my space, but no wheels are set in motion.

I struggle with more open ended tasks. It is hard enough as is for me to focus when I have one clear writing assignment. But when I have to do various small tasks, some of which involve waiting for responses from people, I work inefficiently. There was time spent spinning where I was jumping between deciding to do different tasks and then not getting anything done. “hm okay now I should focus on getting a good desk — err wait no I should read more about picking computer parts — err never mind let’s go back to figuring out the desk.”

On another note, I have learned that taking time to do things carefully and correctly brings you down unexpected paths. For example, when I went to edit a blog post this week, I was unable to access my wp-admin page because my ip address had changed. This required me to update my .htaccess on my server. I’ve had to do this before, so taking what I learned from uploading images, I decided it was best to write a bash script to automate the process. When I looked for a bash command to edit a file in place, I found that this could be done with sed -i s/str to replace/new str/g /path/to/file But, I did not really know how the sed command worked, and remembering last week’s punishment I dared not use the tool without first reading the man page. So I wound up reading how to use sed. This made my “1 minute” task of changing something on my blog take closer to two hours. That was somewhat frustrating, but I walked away with a script that will save me time in the future and a better understanding of how to use a powerful tool.

1. I also acquired some information from a blog called coding horror. [↩]
2. 29.5 cm, I am 181cm tall. [↩]
3. He is an architect that has constructed a few luxury vacation homes and his built his own resort. [↩]
4. Recent help from hanbot leads me to believe it may be possible to source most of my parts locally, and then have perhaps Adam help me with the small bits I can’t find. In any case I still believe it’s worth doing a test run with the best service I find. I would like to be a point man for having items delivered from the US to Guanacaste. [↩]
5. I perhaps drank a tad too much ~ I had roughly six drinks over the span of that time. I don’t consider alcohol as much of a problem compared to weed, because I hate being disoriented and hung over so I rarely get into the habit of drinking frequently. That being said it’s important to note times when I do indulge. [↩]
6. I may have gotten inside of one this week. I went for a barrel and was in the critical section of the wave, but I did not get a good view of the lip curling over my head. Still, the locals in the water cheered and complimented my tube ride. Whether or not I was actually inside, there is nothing special about having done something that you cannot repeat. But hopefully this event is a sign of significant progress. [↩]
7. In surfing terminology, being ‘deep’ means being closer to the beginning of where a wave starts to peel in a certain direction. [↩]
8. This has caused me to go into the ‘washing machine’ a few times. Learning is painful, I guess. [↩]