Young Hands Club

I’ll be honest, I’m falling behind my own schedule here. My saltmine work really exploded during the last two weeks and it looks like it will only get more intense during the next few months ((They are also cracking down on working-from-home, which I would use in the past to catch-up during the week on TMSR work)). I’ve been having to take work home with me too, this weekend was spent playing catch-up on saltmine work. I was not able to do anything TMSR related this week save for look into new hosters for MP’s commissioned bot.

I need to refocus here and make some adjustments. But specifically how I go about doing that is just as important as knowing what needs to be done, so I will try to plan that out below.

As I see it, there are two main lacks in my life right now: a lack of control over my time, and a lack of control over my financial well-being. Honestly they are both pretty related, and as long as I do not have a handle on any of those things I doubt I will be able to contribute in any meaningful way to things that matter to me.

In terms of remedies to the above, I really need to be focusing more on getting a better saltmine job. ((Defined as one that 1) pays ~what I’m getting now and 2) allows me to work where and when I see fit as long as I get shit done)) I’ve been job searching on the side for the last 8 weeks but have not applied anywhere, and I will admit that I haven’t been keeping track of things I find very well. ((It hasn’t been a very focused search- more like browsing indeed.com and such while in my cubicle at work.)) I even promised a review of what I had found, but I have nothing organized right now; in other words my Master was right in that I cannot even claim that I put in those hours. So, the specific remedy here is that I will find at least two jobs per week and apply to them; and document who they were and what the jobs was, etc.

Related to my other lack (financial well-being) is the two-story elephant I’m typing this review from inside of; I need to get this goddamn house cleaned out and sell it. After moving my gf out of the house about 6 months ago I still have not touched a single box, cleared a single thing out of the house, cleaned up any bits of the yard etc. Meanwhile I’m still paying that inflated mortgage payment every while this cardboard house continues to age in the moist NC climate. I’m also quite isolated these days; my friends and family are hundreds of miles away and I rarely go out save for groceries or errands. I’m going slightly mad each day in this house. I need to start attacking this thing in pieces, so each week I will commit to something related to freeing myself from this anchor, be it simply “go through X amount of boxes in Y room”.

Overall, this strategy where I blindly go full throttle into TMSR work on one leg has not been working out for me. I need to pull back a bit while I dedicate my time to more personal things; basically I’m still a bit of a child and need to grow up a tad before I’m ready to fully contribute.

So, I think I need to pull back a bit while I get my shit together. By “pull back” I mean that I will need to drop some TMSR work to focus on other TMSR work as well as my own shit. Specifically, I think I will not be able to contribute to the OS effort for some time; I simply don’t have the time to invest in the remedial learning while maintaining everything else. Definitely not while I still owe Mircea Popescu that logger at least, and probably not when I still have long neglected maintenance on various infrastructure.

In summation, I’d like to drop my TMSR OS work and focus primarily on getting logger done, then other needed maintenance. I also still owe that last Penance article which I’d still like to publish. My remaining hours I would like to put towards getting my long neglected shits together.

(I will hold off on my weekly plan until I hear what Diana Coman says. Plus I am still thinking about it)

Mp-wp bot testing and production prep. and delivery. Due asap [Estimated time: ? hrs | Actual time: ]

I have no idea how long this is going to take, tbh. I’m currently way behind and stuck on a rock atm but I need to get this figured out as priority # 1.

Let Dorion know if my Gales install will slide from my Jan 31st deadline. Due Wednesday [Estimated time: ~0 hrs | Actual time:  0 hrs ]

It probably will have to slide tbh, but I’ll hopefully know more as the week progresses re: how much.

Auctionbot fix. Due Sunday [Estimated time: 3 hrs | Actual time:  hrs ]

MP has called on me to fix this asap, so I need to dedicate some time this week to do that. It has been a while since I touched that code, but I believe I just need to write a piece that checks the log table to see if the last message in that chan was from the bot before announcing. It should be fairly simple from what I remember.

Spend time researching remote work /abroad work opportunities throughout week: Due Sunday [Estimated time: 1 hr  | Actual time: 1 hr ]

Ongoing.

Total estimated time: 21, total actual time:

Timings on tasks per day

Things that I need to think on for future weekly plans:

• Install Gales
• Penance article series (Two articles remain)
• mp-wp bot ‘spillover’ of code review / testing
• mp-wp bot install guide once review / testing complete
• Recode auctionbot’s “check if previous line was an announce” check to the auction announcing (I know what this means at least, even if that was not well stated…)
• Finish auctionbot autobidding
• How to make the most of my current geographic location
• Other remedial/learning debts that need paying
• Somewhere down the line I’d also like to slim down my archive-process and publish it. As of now it relies too much on python where it doesn’t need to; lotsa kludge, etc.

Prior week: week 5 (Jan 20 – Jan 26)

While I made some progress this week and overcame some (expected) hurdles, I’m currently stuck on a rock with getting the bot set up on the production server. I was not able to get any work complete on the Gales install.

On the waking-up-earlier front I’m still not quite hitting the 5am goal, but I have been getting to bed and rising earlier which has been helping me stay on top of things in general (with more energy and focus to boot). I’ll keep ratcheting my sleep schedule away from the late night.

Going into next week I’m certainly feeling the heat. On the one hand I’m way behind with the logger for MP, meanwhile I’ve left the auctionbot unmaintained to the point MP has noticed. Both of these must be remedied soon or my head will rightfully be on the pike.

Mp-wp bot testing and production prep. Due Tuesday [Estimated time: 12 hrs | Actual time: ]

Final prep for mp-wp bot. I have got the LAMP up and running on prod server. ((I was not used to CentOS so it took some extra wrestling)) I still must stand up bot on prod server and test. I also need to make sure that the log archives I give to MP this time around are A) in the format he is expecting and B) all the logs that he is expecting are present.

Mp-wp bot delivery. Due TBD [Estimated time: ? hrs | Actual time: ]

Once the testing is complete I will ping MP in #t to coordinate a time when we can

Gales build, install, and write-up. Due Sunday [Estimated time: 8 hrs | Actual time:  hrs ]

Time permitting I would like to continue the Gales install.

Spend time researching remote work /abroad work opportunities throughout week: Due Sunday [Estimated time: 1 hr  | Actual time: 1 hr ]

Ongoing.

Total estimated time: 21, total actual time:

Timings on tasks per day

Things that I need to think on for future weekly plans:

• Install Gales
• Penance article series (Two articles remain)
• mp-wp bot ‘spillover’ of code review / testing
• mp-wp bot install guide once review / testing complete
• Recode auctionbot’s “check if previous line was an announce” check to the auction announcing (I know what this means at least, even if that was not well stated…)
• Finish auctionbot autobidding
• How to make the most of my current geographic location
• Other remedial/learning debts that need paying
• Somewhere down the line I’d also like to slim down my archive-process and publish it. As of now it relies too much on python where it doesn’t need to; lotsa kludge, etc.

Prior week: Week 4 [Jan 13 – Jan 19]

While I was able to finish Penance Article #2 and picked work back up on the mp-wp bot, I missed my deadline on said article by a full day pretty much. This in turn left me with less time to work on the bot/logger and will push the remaining work there into the start of next week.

Sometimes the key actions that need to be taken are the boring ones, in my case I need to work on making clear my own priorities to myself. Here’s one to start: I need to increase my *waking* hours dedicated to things that matter, and it is clear to me from these recent failures that I may want to try simply waking up early each day and working on TMSR items *before* I head into saltmine work. It would be an action I can take immediately while I continue looking for remote work. So for this next week I will focus on making this small tweak in my routine.

Penance Article 2. Due Thursday [Estimated time: 6 hrs | Actual time: 11 hrs ]

I will give myself a digestible 1 hour assigned block of time to write on Mon/Tues/Wed with 3 hours Thursday as my wrap-up day.

Mp-wp bot testing and production prep. Due Sunday [Estimated time: 12 hrs | Actual time: 10 hrs ]

Friday I am assigning myself 3 hours to come up with a more detailed plan of attack for this going into the weekend, following the ‘digestible-chunks methodology’.

Spend time researching remote work /abroad work opportunities throughout week: Due Sunday [Estimated time: 1 hr  | Actual time: 1 hr ]

Ongoing.

Total estimated time: 19, total actual time: 22

Timings on tasks per day

Penance article was 1 hour on Monday, 4 hours Thursday, and 6 hours Friday.

mp-wp-bot work was 4 hours Saturday and 6 hours Sunday.

Things that I need to think on for future weekly plans:

• Install Gales
• Penance article series (Two articles remain)
• mp-wp bot ‘spillover’ of code review / testing
• mp-wp bot install guide once review / testing complete
• Finish auctionbot autobidding
• How to make the most of my current geographic location
• Other remedial/learning debts that need paying
• Somewhere down the line I’d also like to slim down my archive-process and publish it. As of now it relies too much on python where it doesn’t need to; lotsa kludge, etc.

Prior week: Week 3 [Jan 6 – Jan 12]

On the positive side I made it through a good portion of the Gales build process and I have been learning things along the way, which was my primary goal.

On the negative I didn’t really take my Master’s advice about procrastination. I ignored my laziness signal and didn’t really start the build/install until Friday night, and as such I have neither the install done nor the install report complete. There have been no real problems that have left me stumped, I just have been making a point to look things up that I don’t quite understand (which are a lot of things) as I go through. This has been great and enjoyable and I’m making progress, but I obviously should have just started earlier so I would have had that extra time for spillover.

My main takeaway from this failure to meet my deadline is that I did not break my planned work up into time-manageable chunks beforehand. This, specifically, is something I will need to make sure I do for this next week.

Moving into week 4 I am going to need to get the Penance article 2 out, followed by mp-wp-bot testing. For week 5 I am slated for take 2 of my attempt to deliver a working bot and backlogs to MP. If there is time left over that week I will pick up this Gales install once again.

This mini-week went alright as far as coming back from holidays go, and I was able to get my hours in that I set out for myself.

The work on the mp-wp-bot code review and testing continues. I’m glad I started the review now because there is definitely spillover that will need to be dealt with in probably week 4. I ended up spending an hour and a half on wrestling with apache on the ‘prod server’ which is running Cent OS (an OS which I am quite unfamiliar with). They apparently had a daemon called “firewalld” set up that blocked all incoming tcp traffic from the default port 80, which took me some time to diagnose. I finally got that set up, but I still need to futz with the php modules it looks like, and then finally get the bot running and ready to run through my testing (which I still need to design).

As for the Gales install, I’m excited to dive in starting next week. I’m sure I’ll hit some roadblocks so I need to make sure I ask any questions if I do and not toil in silence for too long.

I had a good conversation with my master Diana Coman and I have some takeaways that I want to remember for the future. First, wrt killing procrastination, a practical step I can take is to break larger tasks into smaller chunks. This will be something I’ll need to remember for next week. Second, wrt to testing in general, well, there’s a lot of takeaways from that one and I fear I’d just end up rehashing the entire convo trying to summarize, so I’ll just point my future self back to that portion of the conversation instead.

Finally, looking towards week 4 I will need to get penance article 2 complete, as well as the spillover from the mp-wp-bot review and testing.

Gales install. Due Saturday [Estimated time: 13 hrs ((Dorion gave an estimate of about 4.5 hours for when him and jfw guide clients through an install. I figured I’d triple that since I will be doing a more self-guided install (and for time padding). )) | Actual time: 15 hrs]

I was fortunate during the timespan between when I wrote my week 2 plan and now, because while I was away for holidays I had the opportunity to give a first-pass read both bvt’s install report as well as some of jfw’s writings on the topic. My earlier concerns about UEFI were validated once I read spyked’s recent article as well. So, in a sense I was able to get somewhat organized ahead of time.

Specifically, I now realize that I only have one machine that is a viable candidate for a Gales install: my lenovo x61 (aka my Cuntoo machine). (( All of my other machines are newer and suffer from lack of traditional BIOS )) I learned from bvt’s report that the footprint of Gales is quite small (< 1GB) and I have 40GB free on the HDD of that machine. So I figure I partition, say, a 10GB chunk, do the bootstrapping portion, and then install to that partition.

Gales install report. Due Sunday [Estimated time: 5 hrs | Actual time: 0h hrs]

This will be a compendium of my notes for the most part, so I reason that 5 hours is a good estimate.

Spend time researching remote work /abroad work opportunities throughout week: Due Sunday [Estimated time: 1 hr  | Actual time: ]

Ongoing. Though I will note that recently at my current saltmine I have had the opportunity to get my hands on some new projects that are beyond the excel jockey stuff I’ve been doing for the last 4 years. In other words, some of the skills I stand to gain from these projects line up to what I’ve been seeing in my remote work search. It may be worth considering hanging tight for a second to take advantage of this potential skill gaining opportunity.

Notes

I figure that since I am at 19 hours I will push my penance article #2 out to after I finish the Gales install; reasoning being that since my last article took me > 6 hours it would be a dubious idea to try and cram that into this week.

Total estimated time: 13, total actual time: 15

Timings on tasks per day

I spent about two hours on Wednesday looking at my existing partitions on the target laptop. I wanted to see what it’d take to partition the ~40GB of free space I had on it and determined that it’d just be easier to attempt the Gales install on a usb drive. (( I had neglected to give /home its own partition on this machine originally, so I would have had to wipe the partition and copy all of my data back into it. ))
I only started really diving into the build documentation on Friday night and worked the majority of the weekend on it. About 13 hours total.

Things that I need to think on for future weekly plans:

• Install Gales
• Penance article series (Two articles remain)
• mp-wp bot ‘spillover’ of code review / testing
• mp-wp bot install guide once review / testing complete
• Finish auctionbot autobidding [Estimated time: 16 hours | Actual time: ]
• How to make the most of my current geographic location
• Other remedial/learning debts that need paying
• Somewhere down the line I’d also like to slim down my archive-process and publish it. As of now it relies too much on python where it doesn’t need to; lotsa kludge, etc.

Prior week: Week 2 [Jan 2 – Jan 5]

I want to hit this new year running, specifically towards killing procrastination. This will be somewhat of a compact week due to getting back from the holidays midway through. As such, I’m going to mainly use it to start looking into Gales install (( I need to ping jfw to see about if it’ll work on a computer with UEFI. If not I may need to secure a new box as most of mine, save the cuntoo machine, are UEFI boot….)) and continuing with the mp-wp bot polishing. (( I should probably ping MP to see when he’s looking to have another try)) I think I will push the 2nd penance article to week 3.

Work plan for week 2:

• Start looking into Gales install. Get organized, ask questions, start reading, etc. Specifically, I need another computer in order to test this thing on, so that’ll be step 1. After that I will start diving into jfw’s articles on Gales, and also look at Linux From Scratch documentation. Due Sunday [Estimated time: 7 hrs | Actual time: ~6 hrs ]
• mp-wp bot code review and server testing. Specifically, I’d like to first read through the previous specifications on my blog, in the logs, etc. and then make sure that my code is indeed completely to spec. Then I’d want to get an instance up and running on the server I procured for MP, and run it through a predefined series of tests. After that, I aim to produce and publish a vpatch with the changes I have made since the first. Due Sunday [Estimated time: 6 hrs | Actual time: 6]
• Spend time researching remote work /abroad work opportunities throughout week: Due Sunday [Estimated time: 1 hr  | Actual time: 1]

Total estimated time: 14 hours

Total actual time: ~13 hours ((See ‘Timings on tasks’ below))

Things that I need to think on for future weekly plans:

• Install Gales
• Penance article series (Two articles remain)
• Finish auctionbot autobidding [Estimated time: 16 hours | Actual time: ]
• How to make the most of my current geographic location
• Other remedial/learning debts that need paying
• Somewhere down the line I’d also like to slim down my archive-process and publish it. As of now it relies too much on python where it doesn’t need to; lotsa kludge, etc.

Timings on tasks per day

I was a little unorganized coming back from holidays this week. I spent some time over that holiday reading about Gales, with an additional ~3 hours spread out over Thu, Fri, Sat.
Sunday I got back on track with time measurement, and I clocked in two hours of mp-wp-bot work in the morning, with another 4 in the evening for a total of 6 hours.

Prior week: Week 1 [Dec 23 – Jan 1]