Young Hands Club

While I carpe diem’d more this week, I went off plan and did not bother to keep my schedule updated. At all times during the week I thought I had a good understanding of what should be the task at hand, so I avoided the overhead of updating my schedule. If I believe I should forgo the overhead of maintaining a daily schedule for the week, it would make sense to go back to my original schedule format that had goals for the entire week vs. goals for everyday. However, I do not think it is a good idea to return to that schedule yet. It is better to pay the price of the extra overhead of maintaining a daily schedule to keep myself accountable.

The daily writing exercise has been quite useful. I will have pumped out seven articles this week while with previous weeks I struggled to produce one. It was painful to write each article, especially the Finding Meaning in a Deterministic World series. Writing these was painful because I know that the articles may reveal some ugly knots in my head that need to be untied. No problem though, writing through the pain gave me a kick similar to a runner’s high. I am excited to keep going for next week. One way to improve that I mentioned in channel is to do the 30 minutes of preparation earlier in the day (as opposed to when I’m tired at night.) I need to begin the writing session with an outline I can count on!

I am thoroughly enjoying studying Spanish. I would like advice on how to best structure my study sessions. I am doing thirty minutes of grammar drills a day and thirty minutes of reading/looking up words in the dictionary. On one hand I see the time spent on grammar drills as “unnatural” and similar to anki. But this week I struck gold and found an explanation of all the uses of the word “se” as well as a terse explanation for how to know which syllables to stress when pronouncing words. Although I may have eventually learned these concepts naturally by speaking / reading more I think that the speed boost from the grammar drills / textbooks makes dedicating some time to grammar worth it.

TheFleet project progressed, but not by as much as I would have liked. One day that you said sounded productive was not too deserving of that statement. There was some spinning that day in the form of flopping back and forth between ‘should I do this’ or ‘should I do that.’ That said I have gained more confidence in my ability to do something useful with short time blocks. I had no time yesterday spent officially on TheFleet project, but I used a spare 15 minutes to find the lines of code to execute to get multiple nicks simultaneously connected to different channels under one sbcl process.

I was asked to include all the events that eat up my time for this week’s plan. The primary time consumers that are not listed normally are: 2hr for cooking/eating, 1hr for showering/cleaning/etc, and 1hr+ on derpage: spinning, entertaining surfpals who come over, playing the guitar, and texting/speaking on the phone with friends from the states. To do my best to make the absolute most out of the day I’ve written a more aggressive schedule for this week, planning ~12 hours for each day. I must note that there is no time allocated specifically for reading the logs/blogs and communicating in general. I plan to do that during part of the time allocated for my primary activity for the day.

1. Monday 12/16

   1.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
   1.2 Spanish Study (1hr)
   1.3 Saltmines (8h)
   1.4 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

2. Tuesday 12/17

This day allows for no wasted time at all since 14hr 15 min are scheduled.

   2.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
   2.2 Saltmines (8h)
   2.3 Trip to town to pick up new keyboard + receive debit card (4h)
   2.4 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

3. Wednesday 12/18

    3.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
    3.2 Spanish Study (1hr)
    3.3 Chew through trinque’s logbot. The specifics of the work (either background CL study, article on getting the bot running, code annotations) are TBD. (8hr 45min)
    3.4 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

4. Thursday 12/19

My computer parts should arrive by this date.

    4.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
    4.2 Spanish Study (1h)
    4.3 Build my computer (8hr 45min) ((This is a rough estimate. I imagine there will be some time installing software where I can do something else in the meantime.))
    4.4 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

5. Friday 12/20

    5.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
    5.2 Spanish Study (1h)
    5.3 Setup my development environment on my new machine. Once the basics are done (installed emacs + V, hotkeys set, etc.) I will return to work on trinque’s logbot. (7hr 45min)
    5.4 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

6. Saturday 12/21

    6.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
    6.2 Plan and review for next week (4h)
    6.3 Spanish Study (1h)
    6.4 Open Slot (4hr 45min)
    6.5 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

7. Sunday 12/22

    3.1 Daily Writing Exercise (1.5h)
    3.2 Open Slot (5h)
    3.3 Proof read writing exercise + plan for the next day (45min)

diana_coman: whaack: at some point you’ll have to review those plans too overall, in one of the weekly reviews, it’s not *all* just “how I changed”.

For this week’s review instead of writing how I changed, I have reviewed the outcomes of the plans I had for the week with the goal of figuring out why problems occurred and how to go about changing myself in the future. I review 4 separate points that descend in order of importance. The first 3 review identified problems that have been discussed with diana_coman, and the 4th point is a review of the work I did with trinque’s published sources.

The 1st point to address is my overall lackluster carpe diem. This week and every week since I started my daily schedule I’ve planned out 8-9 hours of the day, but there are 16 available. Some of the spare time is spent productively: reading logs, reading blogs, responding and making comments, making phone calls to follow up on orders, etc. Except there is also non-negligible time spent spinning / participating in avoidance behavior. When I do something mundane like getting up to fill a glass of water, I often get the sense that I am doing this to avoid work rather than to quench my thirst. To fix this general problem I see a few paths I need to take. First, is I need to plan out my day a little bit more. I don’t think it is right to plan for the full 16 hours, but a 12 hour schedule seems doable. I have also been assigned to list what is eating my days. The next way I can improve is I can get a wrist watch with a timer feature and keep a hand written log of my activities + the time it took me to do them.

The 2nd point to address is the writing problem. I planned 12 hours to writing my rereading article, and wound up spending about 13 hours. While I’m happy I did not let the time spent writing overflow into all my other tasks for the week as I did with my article on meeting up with Adam, I was quite unsatisfied with the result. I discussed briefly this morning why I thought the article came out poorly. diana_coman said I am spending too much time worrying what to write about. I agree. To fix this problem going forward diana_coman has assigned me a daily writing exercise.

The 3rd point to address is saltmines being the focus of my week. As discussed with diana_coman, the only task I consistently reserve a large block of time for in my weekly plan is my day job. And this week I dedicated an extra 4-5 hours to saltmines ontop of my usual 20 hours. ((This was not because I had a surge of passion for my saltmines work, but rather for an opposite reason. I let teenager concerns distract me, and I thought it’d be better to knock out some saltmines hours while I’m not focused than to work on something I cared about while my mind was wandering. This was a bad idea, because my mind wandered more since I was doing something I saw as unimportant.)) To address the problem of saltmines being the meat of my week, I am doing two things. First, I am reducing my saltmine hours to 16 from 20. Second, I am going to plan other work for the morning/evenings of saltmine days. ((This is in line with the solution to the problem in point 1))

The 4th point to address is the work I did with setting up trinque’s src. My original plan was to write a rough draft of an article on setting up logbot. However I only found time to get the bot setup on my local machine + hand write a list of notes along the way. There was a little bit of uncertainty as I was deciding what to do while getting acquainted with trinque’s code. Part of me thinks, and still thinks, that I should not have even ran the code until I had read a book on CLOS, read every line of code + looked up all functions I didn’t know, and figured out CL’s restart tool. ((If I commit fully to this idea I would need to also read about keccak and jfw’s source before using his keksum tool.)) However I wanted to have something concrete accomplished, so I only skimmed the parts of the code I needed to know to get the bot running. This is an area where I am not sure exactly where to go next, and could use some help. I have asked trinque for guidance in #trinque.

(( 0. Sunday 12/08

0.1 Rough draft of an article on re-reading is the most powerful tool (4h)

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: Nothing to add other than the progress on the re-reading article this morning.

1. Monday 12/09

   1.1 Saltmines (8h)

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I logged 11h of saltmines today. As of now I plan to get in a few extra hours of saltmines this week, and then use those hours to work fewer hours next week.

2. Tuesday 12/10

   2.1 Saltmines (8h)

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report : Today was not that successful. I got 9.5 hours of saltmines done, but almost nothing else.

3. Wednesday 12/11

   3.1 Saltmines (4h)
   3.2 Trip to Santa Cruz to open bank account, get more house supplies, etc. (6h)

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did 4hr of saltmines and did a trip to town where I got a multimeter, a mosquito net, groceries for the week, and opened a local bank account (I have to return to town on Friday though to pick up the debit card, I will adjust my schedule tomorrow morning.) I did 1hr 45mins of Spanish study tonight as well.

4. Thursday 12/12

   4.1 Trilema rereading article rough draft (4h)
   4.2 The Odyssey reading block (2h) (1h)
   4.3 Read about computer assembly + prepare boot stick (2h)
   4.4 Read trinque’s irc-bot source (3h)

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did ~2hrs of Spanish study, did an unexpected bit of saltmines (~30min), finished a rough draft of the rereading article ~4h, and got trinque’s irc ping-pong bot connected ~4h. There was a chunk of time I burned trying to set up keccak on my local machine so that I could press the vpatches correctly. I got stuck on setting up gprbuild. I think I may try to use jfw’s keksum, but if that doesn’t work I don’
whaack: t know it’s worth figuring out what’s wrong on my osx 10.9 as I should have my new computer anyways soon. Reading through trinque’s code and playing around with it, I see there are a few topics I need to go over: CLOS, threading with CL and slime, and CL’s exception handling tool/restarts.
whaack: I believe I was more focused today. I had some time where I wasn’t working though: an interruption for ~40 mins when a surfpal stopped by, and I played guitar for another ~20 mins at sunset.

5. Friday 12/13

   5.1 Trilema rereading article final draft (4h)
   5.2 The Odyssey reading block (1h)
   5.3 Read about computer assembly + prepare boot stick (2h)
   5.4 Trip to town to pick up debit card. (5h)
   5.5 Draft article of setting up trinque’s irc-bot (2h)

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I published my re-reading article ~5h, setup jfw’s keksum ~35min, pressed the vpatches on trinque’s page ~1hr (this had a few bumps along the way. for ex: some of the vpatches used keccak for the hashes in the vdiff and others sha512sum. i was using a slightly modified v.pl v99993 which i needed to find out how to further tweak to deal with keksum only having one space between the hash and the filename in t
whaack: he output.) I got trinque’s logbot (different than ircbot) running with a local postgres db ~2h. — All the time estimates are fairly rough. I do not have a draft of an article for setting up logbot as per my original plan, instead I have just a few hand written notes. There was some spinning today, but not an extensive amount. I spent ~1h chopping vegetables into zip lock bags to save time cooking for the next few days. I also had
whaack: a neighbor over for ~45mins in the evening.

))

Note: My computer parts will arrive at the end of the week or early next week. Pcgamingcr sent me photos of the packed boxes, and they informed me they are just waiting for the memory to arrive from their supplier before they ship.

Some other tasks/events on the horizon:

a) I need to start looking for new saltmines work, my contract ends at the end of February.

b) I should look into planning a trip to Panama and (possibly Uruguay as well) for mid January.

c) My mother is coming to visit Costa Rica January 5th – January 12th, so I will be less available during those days.

1. Monday 12/09

   1.1 Saltmines (8h)

2. Tuesday 12/10

   2.1 Saltmines (8h)

3. Wednesday 12/11

   3.1 Saltmines (4h)
   3.2 Trip to Santa Cruz to open bank account, get more house supplies, etc. (6h)

4. Thursday 12/12

   4.1 Trilema rereading article rough draft (4h)
   4.2 The Odyssey reading block (2h) (1h)
   4.3 Read about computer assembly + prepare boot stick (2h)
   4.4 Read trinque’s irc-bot source (3h)

5. Friday 12/13

   5.1 Trilema rereading article final draft (4h)
   5.2 The Odyssey reading block (1h)
   5.3 Read about computer assembly + prepare boot stick (2h)
   5.4 Trip to town to pick up debit card. (5h)
   5.5 Draft article of setting up trinque’s irc-bot (2h)

6. Saturday 12/14 ((My 26th birthday :) ))

   6.1 The Odyssey reading block (1h)
   6.2 Review + Plan for Next Week (4h)
   6.3 Open Slot (3h)

7. Sunday 12/15

   7.1 Revise article on setting up trinque’s irc bot. (4h)

The big errors for the week are (1) delaying my Tuesday schedule by having some people over and (2) burning a copious amount of time on what should have been an easy article.

I see (1) as a symptom of the lack of self-respect problem. My excuse for inviting people over in the middle of a work day was, “it’s a saltmines day anyways and socializing is important. I can’t just be a recluse on my computer all the time.” But as already discussed with diana_coman, socializing should be for Sunday / evenings only. It takes much more mental energy to write & code then it does to chat. That I invited people over on a ‘saltmines day’ doesn’t matter, pushing back my saltmine hours causes a domino effect that hits my other work.

Problem (2) came from both spinning and having an undeveloped writing process. Since the spinning aspect has been discussed, I will share my thoughts on what I see wrong with my writing method.

Currently, I begin with an outline that tries to mention all the points I would like to include in my article. Then I look at the points I wrote and see if a subset support a thesis. ((For my article on meeting with Adam, I do not believe I have a unifying thesis. My goal was to mention what we did together and reflect on some of our conversations. Not having a thesis to guide my choice of what goes in the article may have been a reason it took a while to write.)) Then I attempt to expand those points and make them flow to deliver an argument for the thesis. Afterwards, I revise what I wrote. The revision includes removing chunks of nonsense as well as fixing the wording / grammar / spelling etc of the essay. Finally, I take a break and repeat the last step. ((This process is flexible. Sometimes I just get to writing, skipping the outline. Sometimes when listing what to write about, I make a tiny bullet points followed by a large paragraphs.))

A problem I have with this method is I can’t predict how long it will take to expand my outlined points. I also may be spending too much time writing text I’m going to throw out. One way I have minimized time writing text that gets discarded is I am no longer concerned with the wording of my rough drafts. It is a waste of time to polish something before you know it will be included in the final revision.

—

EOD Reports:

Sunday 12/01

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report: I finished the review from last week + published the plan for next week, completed a rough draft of An Outpost of Progress article, and did a 1 hour session reading The Odyssey. I also did a short review of my backup scripts and found that they are not working – my most recent blog article is not backed up. The issue is that my ssh key is being rejected when rsync tries to connect to my account solely made
whaack: for storing backups of the blog. I believe the first time crontab fired the script that syncs from digitalocean it worked and then the script failed every subsequent time.

Monday 12/02

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report : I fixed the crontab issue and setup apache/php on my toliet box + wrote a script that takes the the backup data and recreates my blog locally. I can confirm now with much more confidence that my blog is being backed up safely. I spent the rest of the day editing/finishing my Conrad post. That took much longer than the predicted 3hr – I spent closer to 6.5 hours. I will use extra time during my saltmine day
whaack: s to tackle the 2h journaling block I had scheduled for today.

Tuesday 12/03

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report: This message comes later than it should, because I met people on the beach that I had over for a couple of hours after my surf session. I know as I type this I should not have had them over since it was during the prime morning hours and I wouldn’t just dip out of a normal job. With that said, I finished 8hr of saltmining and 30 mins of journalin
ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-18 21:20:36 diana_coman: after all, if you were working somewhere, you wouldn’t just nip out because they want you to go to the mechanic, would you?
whaack: g. I also received the monitor+ups and set them up. The UPS is giving me a ‘Site Wiring’ warning so I need to investigate what may be wrong with my outlets here. To do this I need to first pay a debt and learn about home circuitry in the general.

Wednesday 12/04

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did roughly 9hrs of saltmines and 30 mins of journaling. I practiced the guitar for 1hr as well. An expected-unexpected task was I had to exchange the gas cylinder for my stove, which took a little bit over 45mins.

Thursday 12/05

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did 4.5 hours of saltmines, and ~6hrs of writing about meeting with Adam. Despite the time put in, I have a yet to complete a rough draft of our encounter. I figure now that I will need a minimum of 4hr+ extra time to write this article. Even that may be an underestimate. I assigned the final draft to my open 4h slot on Saturday.

Friday 12/06

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I spent just about the entire day finishing the rough draft of my meeting with Adam. I know this is quite a problem. There may have been more spinning, although I can’t say I was too hung up on what to include/not to include today. Part of the issue may have been I made the article too long, right now it is at 1,600 words. I moved my rough draft of my article on rereading to Sunday, and my Odyssey reading b
whaack: lock to tomorrow. I am going to leave the revision of the article as the last task i do tomorrow. I am worried it will drag on and _again_ eat up my other tasks.

1. Monday 12/02

   1.1 Reiview Backup Strategy + Test Blog Recovery (this includes recovering the blog locally or on another machine) Fix ssh key permission denied bug. (4h)
   1.2 Revise + Publish An Outpost of Progress Article (3h)
   1.3 Analyze and journal my thoughts and reflections from my private conversation with diana_coman (2h)

2. Tuesday 12/03

   2.1 Saltmines (8h)

3. Wednesday 12/04

   3.1 Saltmines (8h)

4. Thursday 12/05

   4.1 Write a rough draft about meeting with Adam (4h)
   4.2 Saltmines (4h)
   4.3 Revise meeting with Adam rough draft (2h)

5. Friday 12/06

   5.1 Review + publish article about meeting with Adam (3h)
   5.1 Finish rough draft on meeting with Adam(4h)
   5.2 Rough draft of an article on re-reading is the most powerful tool (3h)
   5.3 Timed reading block of The Odyssey. (2h)

6. Saturday 12/07

   6.1 Timed reading block of The Odyssey. (2h)
   6.2 Review + Plan for next week (4h)
   6.3 Finish article on meeting with Adam (4h)

7. Sunday 12/08

   7.1 Rough draft of an article on re-reading is the most powerful tool (4h)

I will start with The Bad of the week. The EOD reports + the accomplishments are listed afterwards.

Among other topics, I discussed my avoidance behavior that occurred on Friday morning with diana_coman via private messages. I believe diana_coman is accurate in her suspicion that the behavior I partake in that is ‘mind-numbing’ is meant to block thoughts that I find terrible. ((I say that is her suspicion from her question

diana_coman: what does it tell you so terrible that you’d rather shut it down, anyway?

)) I meditated on those ‘so terrible’ thoughts this morning (Sunday) and felt miserable. Perhaps the same thoughts knocked on the door of my conscious mind on Friday. Except Friday I drowned them out, and today I listened to them.

In our conversation I discussed my feelings of inadequacy and how decisions I’ve made have hurt my development. But those are by themselves are not what cause the most painful and repressed thoughts. I can live with the fact that I am far from perfect. What kills me inside and makes me hate myself is thinking of the ways the various modes of behavior and actions I have taken such as: having a carefree solipsistic lifestyle, taking drugs to excess, and messing up my personal development have hurt the people I care about and prevented me from being in a position to help them.

I don’t know the best way to to deal with these painful thoughts. Repressing them is certainly not the answer nor is dwelling on them substantially, since the later will only further hinder development, worsening the problem. The best course of action I see for now is taking time to calmly write the thoughts down and use the pain as motivation to get my shit together and move forward.

—

EOD Reports:

Monday

whaack: diana_coman: EOD / midday report. 6.5 hour of saltmines complete, i have to go drop off the car right now which is going to take me a little over 2 hours, when I get back I will do 2 hours of work related to ordering parts.

Tuesday

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: 6.5hr done of saltmines, I wound up spending closer to 3h today on researching/ordering parts. I used an extra 1hr 15min to read/study Spanish. I investigated the 0000 gmt datetime bug. The problem I am almost certain arose after I revived my dead sql process. mpwp uses the 0000 to signify a null date, and my new sql process has a setting that makes the date invalid and rejects the insert. The new time cons
whaack: uming item I have is I must make trips to the atm (1h by taxi each way) to acquire cash to pay rent and have enough cash to be able to make bank deposits to order the computer parts. I am trying to speed the cash acquiring process up by doing a btc-buy in the us and a btc-sell locally.

Wednesday

whaack: diana_coman: mid/EOD report : Today’s saltmine grind got interrupted because surfpal sold the car and wanted to buy some btc. I took the opportunity to go meet him and got a wad of cash so I can order my computer parts tomorrow. I have 3.5hrs left of saltmines for today/the week, I am going to spend the rest of the day finishing those hours and revising my orders so I can make all the necessary deposits when I go to town tomorrow.

Thursday

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I went to town and ordered the following items for my computer/work station: A cpu, motherboard, graphics card, psu, backup internal drive, a case, an internal ssd card reader, a mouse/keyboard, a monitor, and a UPS. I will write an article with the exact items ordered soon. I tried to open a bank account and learned that I need a letter from a local describing my job/living location/etc. My landlord will w
whaack: rite one for me. The bank told me that I can deposit $1k/month at first, but that limit can be increased over time. I also spent time in town getting various items to improve the state of my apartment. I am pretty exhausted after today’s trip and will have to push back my planned 4hours of reviewing backup strategy + testing my blog recovery. Instead I will do some item unboxing tonight and try to get some good rest for tomorrow.

Friday

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report: Today was a regression in terms of discipline. I did chores slowly and was overall distracted throughout the day. I also sinned and played guitar for 45 mins without having deserved it. What I got done was an article on the ordered computer parts + following up with cococo to make sure they were delivering my items. (The UPS and monitor should be here by Monday.) I also read the two trilema articles on [htt
whaack: p://trilema.com/2017/re-reading-is-the-most-powerful-tool/][rereading] and the bicameral world at least twice each. Unsurprisingly I still need to spend more time to digest them. The main task that I flopped on was completing a rough draft of An Outpost of Progress. I sta
whaack: rted editing something that I had already written, but it was clear looking at my output that my writing was school-like in that it didn’t add a unique insight/perspective. The article in its current state is not too much more than me paraphrasing/plot summarizing Conrad. The other incomplete assignment I was supposed to do today was to read 30 pages of The Odyssey, I will make a small dent into that now before I go to bed.

Saturday

whaack: diana_coman: missing EOD report from yesterday: I began my week review (but did not finish it), had my discussion with you in pms, and then met with Adam for the evening.

I started my week strong with high energy and then slowly tapered out beginning Thursday night. One improvement from the previous week is I have begun applying more principles in my tmsr world to my alt-life saltmines job. The codebase I work with for the saltmines job is an entanglement of wires that produces something resembling a functioning app 75% of the time. I have been guilty of treating the codebase with the same lack of respect that it was treated with before I joined the project. This week I decided to take time to carefully examine how this nonsense works under the hood and fix problems rather than create new ones. I am trying to embody diana_coman’s mentality in an article she wrote about coming out of open sores covered in blood. ((Can’t seem to find the link now.)) This mentality is paying dividends. I have pinpointed misconceptions the previous code authors had and have been able to address some bugs that were introduced because of those misconceptions.

The other success was I made a btc-cash deal and paid for all my computer parts. By next week I should have a UPS and a monitor. The monitor will improve the state of my neck which always has to bend down to read my laptop screen.

On the apartment development side, I was able to prevent a mosquito from costing me sleep. One of the items I acquired and assembled for my house was a strong standing fan, so when I heard the buzzing I simply turned on the fan, aimed it in my direction, and fell asleep. Admittedly this is an awful solution, my eyes were a little dried out in the morning and the noise of the fan is quite annoying to fall asleep to. The proper solution that is ongoing ((Specifically, I have spoken to my landlord about the issue, and pointed her and the handyman who works around here to all of the gaps in the walls caused by either broken screens or wood morphed from humidity. I am waiting for the handyman to acquire all the replacement screens and to finish another project he is working on to start actually sealing these entryways.)) is sealing all the entryways into the apartment so mosquitoes can’t get inside in the first place.

The daily schedule worked for me. I’ll continue with the format for this week.

1. Monday 11/25
   1.1 Order computer parts (2h)
   1.2 Saltmines (6h)

2. Tuesday 11/26

   2.1 Order computer parts (2h)
   2.2 Saltmines (6h)

3. Wednesday 11/27

   3.1 Saltmines (8h)

4. Thursday 11/28

   4.1 Review backup strategy / test blog recovery (4h)
   4.2 Complete An Outpost of Progress rough draft (4h)<
   4.3 Revise order list + make bank deposits for orders + try to open a CR bank account. (6h)

5. Friday 11/29

   5.1 Finish An Outpost of Progress post (3h)
   5.2 Follow up with ordering computer parts (2h)
   5.3 Read Trilema rereading article + Trilema article on the Odyssey + First 30 pages of The Odyssey (3h)
   5.4 Finish An Outpost of Progress Rough Draft (3h)

6. Saturday 11/30

   6.1 Review + Plan for next week (4h)
   6.2 Open Slot (4h)
   6.3 Meet Adam in the flesh!

7. Sunday 12/01

   7.1 Open Slot (4h)
   7.2 Review backup strategy / test blog recovery (4h)

Since I have been giving EOD reports this review will focus on “how I’ve changed” rather than “the flow of events.”

The week began with two stern conversations. The first conversation addressed my laziness and how I lied to myself and subsequently to diana_coman about the hours spent doing my hobbies. The line from the first conversation that hit me the hardest was the last one in this exchange:

whaack: diana_coman: as to laziness I know i should not be ‘that fucking lazy’ but I don’t see how it will click and my ‘real life’ of a man of discipline will begin
diana_coman: jfw: do you know by any chance if dorion is out with the fairies or something? he was meant to pong the pings but dunno if too much excitement lately or what.
jfw: Let me check.
diana_coman: whaack: hm, you know it but you don’t want it, lol.

I had the urge to respond, “no diana_coman, I do want it!” But I checked the impulse, because clearly if I both knew I had a problem and wanted to fix it, I would just…try to fix it.

The second conversation, ignited by my admission of doing halfhearted manual backups of my blog, discussed how I let ongoing problems continue. For example prior to a few days ago I had done nothing to follow up with my original plan of obtaining backup electricity and internet.

So the question is, why does my conscious understanding of the cost of my laziness not manifest itself into action? It’s because it remains just that – a conscious understanding – rather than a visceral disgust of my surroundings. I have it “good enough” to ignore my problems with my coconut water, glassy waves, beautiful sunsets et all.

But from Tuesday onwards I followed item number 4 in the pageboy’s pledge by trying to deeply imagine how I would act and feel if I were diana_coman in my situation. And through that exercise I became repulsed my surroundings. I noticed the dead light bulb, the holes left from the dismounted TV, the lack of a drying rack, the lack of coat hangers, the lack of hot water, ((A common lack in CR, but that’s not a reason it should continue for me.)) the lack of sufficient hand towels. The list goes on and I will spare all the details.

The disgust I felt moved me to address the issues. Doing this gave me two pleasures, one expected and one surprising. The first expected pleasure was the relief/rewards of fixing ongoing problems. The second unexpected pleasure was the enjoyment of solving the puzzles the issues presented. Some issues are simple and left undone only because I don’t give them time. But many of them are complex and require tools as well as a serenity of mind ((

To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom. They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable of independent thought.

Joseph Conrad, An Outpost of Progress. )) to overcome. Coming to a solution via researching the general problem, figuring out the appropriate tools for the task, and using creativity to deal with the difficulties specific to your situation is immensely rewarding.

The disgust I now feel from lingering issues and the satisfaction I get from solving them has taken away my inclination to derp off throughout the week. I hope to god this sticks. As diana_coman said my problem is not that I have “leaks” (in a grand castle) but rather that I live in a mud and stick hut. So once I address all the problems I see around me – the problems specific to a person in a shack – I will have only free’d up time that needs to be used to get myself into a better position. In other words, my fix-it attitude cannot be something that I hold temporarily until my immediate problems are addressed. It needs to stay with me for the rest of my life.

Note that the date window in the title is now only seven days inclusive, down from eight. ((i.e. Last week’s plan was Nov 11th – Nov 18th)) This small detail is meant to represent a new era of my time management where I do not consider Sunday night an opportunity to finish leftover work for the week. In addition, per diana_coman’s advice, I will break this week’s task into daily chunks. The downside of this is that since this plan is more specific, it will need more alterations throughout the week. The upside is I am held accountable for any daily failings immediately.

Each day includes log reviewing as well as a little Spanish study, although these are not explicitly listed. Surfing and guitar are snipped out and are just treated as a reward upon completion of a good day of work.

1. Monday 11/18

1. Saltmines (8h) ((Only did 4))

2. Tuesday 11/19

1. Travel to nearby town to pickup chair ((Mugui won’t deliver my chair to the door, and they don’t have an office. They gave me the personal number of the delivery guy, and I have to meet him on the road in a nearby county.))
2. Saltmines (8h)

3. Wednesday 11/20

1. Read the man page of rsync and fix crontask so blog gets backed up locally. Write a sane backup strategy with corresponding scripts. (4h) The script that backs up the blog will contain an if-external-hard-drive-plugged-in-save-it-there-too clause. The script will also keep a saved copy of the wget of all younghands posts. (2hr)
2. Saltmines (8h)
3. Make the worthless pathfinder someone else’s problem (2h) Surfpal doesn’t seem to care about moving the car, perhaps because he understands its actual value. ((I told surfpal I will fill it up with gas and drop it off where he likes. He hasn’t followed up with me and if he doesn’t I will focus on taking care of other shit first. But I would like to get it out of the way.))
4. Finish rough draft of first An Outpost of Progress article (2h)
5. Begin list of computer part accessories and items needed from the hardware store. (2h)

4. Thursday 11/21

1. Continue list of computer part accessories and items needed from the hardware store. (3h)
2. Make a trip to town. This includes grocery shopping, getting a cheap phone for backup internet via hotspotting, picking up test item from boxcorreos, and going to the hardware store. (5h)
3. Finish my first An Outpost of Progress article (3h)

5. Friday 11/22

1. Order computer parts or plan trip to San Jose (4h)
2. Read 40 pages of The Odyssey and read while taking notes on the two trilema articles. recommended by diana_coman (4h)
3. Saltmines (4h)

6. Saturday 11/23

1. Write the week’s review + plan for next week
2. TBD / 4 hour slot for making up a task
3. Saltmines (4h)

7. Sunday 11/24

1. TBD / 4 hour slot for making up a task

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