Layered Thoughts

I don’t know what to make of a situation where I pour milk into my bowl of cereal and find that the milk is a white frozen slush. I’ve never had to wait for my milk to melt. This is a new one.

Alright so I did my 7th workout of the last 8 days. Other than feeling pretty sore in the legs, I’m overall stoked with myself. As long as I make sure to get to the gym at the right times (the Pacific Beach 24 Hour Fitness is a Bro Fest, dudes with their hair done wearing nice clothes and shit) it’s an awesome experience. Yesterday I even pulled off an hour and forty five minute workout!

Right now I’m just trying to get my whole body back into workout mode, trying to get over that initial soreness shock that comes with not working out consistently for a long time. Probably in another week or so, I’m hoping to either find a good workout plan to follow or just design my own (designing my own would simply take longer, so I’m still up in the air about it). Since I’ll probably design the workout plan in a spreadsheet, I’ll be sure to upload it here for anyone who might want to follow along.

Other than that, I’m just trying to get my life back on track in regards to productivity. I have a bunch of projects I want to do personally as well as professionally so I need to step my game up and make things happen. As I go through that, I’ll probably be writing some posts about how I’m overcoming certain addictive qualities I have with using the Internet.

Also, I’ve adopted a little system that Jerry Seinfeld apparently uses to stay consistent with a long running project. He simply has a big calendar on the wall in his workspace that he puts large red X’s on each day he does what he’s supposed to do. As the “chain” grows, he becomes more and more reluctant to break it. Simple, but it seems pretty cool. I’m going to test it out with this blog. I printed out a simple month of May calendar using Microsoft Word and I’m going to put an X over each day I write a blog post. I’m obviously getting a late start as it’s already the 10th, but hey, it’s something. 1 day down! Peace

Well, I’ve learned that the difference between saying you will do something and actually doing it can sometimes be pretty devastating. So rather than promise to write here more often and promise to do anything else anymore, I’m just going to actually do the things instead. Letting my actions speak for themselves I guess. I went to the gym yesterday, it was nice to go again. I’ll be going today when I get home from school, two days in a row! haha. Til then…

I have Mr. New President streaming live on Hulu right now as I write this, and he just said that we are witnessing events that define a generation. Perfect words to describe what Americans realize during the succession of every President.  As we transition over to a new leader, those in my generation at my age are watching someone take over the reigns of a country that we are soon going to try and lead ourselves. Mr Obama is leading my generation as of today. Hopefully he can lead this country to a point where we will all be able to witness the next generation watch their President take over.

So here I am, cruising around on my bike through Mission Bay along the boardwalk this last weekend, when I realize that I’m surrounded by a ton of people staring at both horizons.  I wasn’t really paying too much attention until it got to the point where I was swerving from potential accident to potential accident attempting to remain as out of it as possible.

But then I looked up to my right and was staring down the face of the biggest moon I had ever seen, in broad daylight, with the sun setting behind me, and I had to stop.

I felt like it was my duty to take some pictures of what I was staring at.  Yet all I had was my Palm Treo cell phone.  Great phone, awful camera.

Regardless, I grabbed it and pulled my bike over to the side and pointed my phone at the moon and then realized in my viewfinder was what seemed like a professional photographer with a lens on his camera that looked like a damn cannon barrel.

So to avoid the irony of taking a shitty picture of something with someone taking a much better version of the same picture in my own shot, I moved a few feet over and continued taking some pictures.

And these are what came out.  To be fair, a few of these are from the next day when there was another crazy sunset at the beach, but still, all of these are from a 24 hour span of time, taken within 10 blocks of what I have called home for the last year and a half.  Pretty great.

Days like this really make you slow your life down and enjoy yourself.  I definitely took an extra long bike ride that day.

Also, if you click on any of those images, they’ll pop up into a lightbox over the page, which is pretty sweet.  Except for the fact that they’re a mile wide. Oh well.

Peace.

I’ve never really been one to have resolutions when it comes time for the new year.  But now as I am more independent and older and working to live on my own and put myself through school and eventually make a good living for myself, I think it’s a good time to put together a list of goals and get a little bit more disciplined. So here is the list I have come up with so far:

1. Read A Book A Month: To be fair, my goal is actually to read at least 12 books this year, as I’m sure some will be read much more quickly than others. I’ve realized that reading is much more important that I had previously thought.  I have been caught in the trap of only reading short articles online in the last year, which is good for quick information, but bad when trying to grasp larger concepts.  So I have decided to read as much as possible this year, basically filling in my gaps of free time with books.  I’ll stick mostly to non-fiction as I want to read to learn rather than read just for entertainment, though the first book I have chosen is the fiction novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (It was written to exemplify her philosophy though).  I’ll mostly be focusing on reading about philosophy and religion as that is what I enjoy reading the most, but I’m sure I’ll gather a few computer books along the way.  I’m hoping to add a page to this blog that lists all of the books that I have read or plan on reading along with my notes about each one.
2. Read The Bible: I’m an atheist.  That’s most likely never going to change.  But in order to further my study of religion and the philosophy of religion and the reasons why nearly everyone else is religious, I have decided that I need to read the Bible.  I have found what looks to be a great study Bible, the Holman CSB Student Bible, that is written in a more modernized English which should make things a little bit easier to follow.  I’m sure this reading will bring about a fair share of blog posts…
3. Do Better In School: This goes hand in hand with the reading goal.  What holds me back from getting straight A’s is my tendency to procrastinate.  So my goal is to eliminate that procrastination and get ahead of the game from now on in school and raise my GPA a bit.
4. Write On This Blog More: I have done pretty well so far (except for these last two weeks, but it was the holidays and I was on vacation) but I’m hoping to get at least 5 posts on here a week from now on.  I have about ten different post ideas with notes going already, and plan on continuing to use that system to brainstorm ideas, and then pick and choose ideas from that collection to officially post.  I’m hoping to keep a high level of quality and originality for each post and plan on focusing on computers/programming, philosophy, and religion as my topics.
5. Get Back In Shape: What kind of resolution list would this be without this one?  I used to be in pretty good shape.  I’m not in bad shape now, I’m just not in good shape any more.  So I’m going to be realistic and set my goal for the gym at at least 3 workouts a week, with an almost 100% focus on weight training.  I’m tempted to follow the system in this book, The New High Intensity Training: The Best Muscle-Building System You’ve Never Tried…
6. Go Camping: I do go camping a few times a year with a lot of my friends out at Lake Buenavista by Bakersfield and its a blast but it isn’t real camping.  I want to get into more wilderness type camping, and even more I want to get into backpacking and minimalist camping, including making shelters and eating wild plants and fishing/hunting for dinner.  I really like all of that stuff and have never really done it and want to get into it.  I have a trip planned with the girlfriend at the end of March but I’m sure she won’t be down with me not bringing a tent and sleeping in a cave so maybe after that one.
7. Start My Company: I have a business partner.  I have a well developed concept.  I have the knowledge to program the web app. I even have some seed funding.  I’m ready to start a company whose product is a web application.  I know it will succeed, it’s just a matter of doing it.  And what better time to start than the beginning of the year?

Seven goals.  I think it’s a pretty modest set of goals in reality and I think I can manage reaching all of them.  I’m hoping to post enough here to build up some pretty good traffic because that would be a huge motivator to keep posting frequently so I might experiment with some traffic building ideas.  But I don’t want traffic to become the main goal of the site so I won’t go too crazy with any of that. So we’ll see how everything goes.  I’m sure I’ll have a lot of updates on here about each of the goals listed above and how I’m doing with them.

I’ve always known that I have a potentially unhealthy fascination with the internet.  Some would argue it’s with good reason; there is literally everything on the internet. Everything. But recently (last few months I would say) I have seen myself and my work output drop significantly.  I’ll have bursts of creativity and productivity from time to time, but for the most part I’ve just been screwing around online reading about stuff that I will probably never touch again.  A perfect example of the effects of this is my bookmarks folder in Firefox right now.  There’s hundreds of sites in there that I’ll probably never go to again, but at the time I found them, they were THE thing that stole attention for some period of time. Or even better is my RSS reader.  I used to religiously check my news feeds multiple times a day, a pattern I only recently broke, simply because there was too much shit to read.  I subscribed to too many blogs and literally felt like I was drowning in information everytime I logged in, so I just quit. I have 898 unread blog posts in my newsreader right now, and I would say the last time I logged in was about two weeks ago. 898 Even if I would have kept up with reading the newsreader everyday, that’s still somewhere between 50-100 blog posts a day to read.  At first, those subscriptions served the purpose of keeping me in the loop for a few different fields I was interested in, namely web design, web development, programming, and the Packers.  Now they are just remnants of something that started me on my path towards information addiction and subsequently, information overload. That overload has killed my ability to produce work.  The lack of work output has seriously affected my life in a few areas that I wish it never did and I am truly sorry about it. I did a search for information addiction on Google a few minutes ago (please refrain from pointing out the irony of searching for information about information addiction on the internet, I know it’s hypocritical). There’s actually a wikipedia entry about information addiction, albeit a short one, as well as another entry about internet addiction.  Upon reading both of those, I realized that I was actually suffering from some sort of disorder.  Basically a technological ADD. There was also an interesting blog post about what I came here to write about, although the author took a little bit more of a literary approach to the description and prescribes a bit more serious solution to the problem than what I would like to take right now.  But there was a quote in there that really got me.

“Information is an analgesic. It not only dulls the pain involved in actually Getting Shit Done, but if you do it right, it actually feels like you’re doing something, instead of avoiding doing something.”

That sums up my reason for why I check these sites everyday so obsessively.  They make me feel like I’m getting something done when in reality, I’m just treading water in the pool of progress while everyone swims past me. So what steals my time and why?  I spend a lot of time on Hacker News, simply because it’s a constantly updated social news site about web startups and technology and programming that actually contains intelligent discussions for each post.  Sounds harmless, but I have come to read it so often throughout the day that it is interfering with the deadlines that I need to adhere to to ensure that I can maintain a way of life that is comfortable and healthy.  I also sit on Reddit a lot, railsforum.com, myspace and facebook of course, and random Google searches that lead me onto weird informational journeys to places that I’ll probably never need nor even return to in my life. I’ve developed an idea in my head that I need this information.  I need to keep searching and traveling the interwebs, learning about new ideas and concepts and tools.  But in reality, I only need what is important for making sure I can be happy and can make people around me happy. A lot of my friends know about my random ideas that I have constantly. I call my girlfriend a few times a week telling her about my new million dollar idea.  But I never do anything about them.  Or at least I haven’t yet. And it’s not because I can’t.  I have the knowledge and skills to do nearly all of them right now, or at least the means to find out how to do them.  I’m just so obsessed with information and other people’s stories and projects that it’s impeding my own ability to succeed. And that’s just plain bad. So how do I fix this? Well, it’s basically going to come down to me breaking the habit.  There’s not really a treatment for the problem that I can see.  I just have to stop. So that’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to stay off of all of the social media sites I go to everyday during the week.  I will only let myself go to those sites on Sundays, generally mine and everyone else’s laziest day of the week.  The other six days of the week, I will only work on the projects I have in my head and on paper, write on this blog (this might entail a little bit of internet research, but I’ll keep it limited as I have a few pretty good topics in my head that I really would like to write about, and I’m really starting to like writing on this thing, so I’ll let this one slip), and keep on pushing towards making a better living for myself and the people around me. I’m going to experiment with a few different ways to keep myself organized and focused.  The first I’ll start using is some sort of To-Do list system.  I’ll be writing about what I find works the best in the future for sure. I owe it to everyone around me just as much as myself to start making more progress in life.

The scariest thing in the world is to look back and realize you’re in the same place you were a few months ago.