And now this!

Well, the first Starcraft was introduced back in 1998 and took about 4 years of my life to recover from it ... guess what happen tomorrow ?!

Unemployment Benefits

There's a list of things that I enjoy while being unemployed, I'll make a list:

• Not having to get the car in the morning to go to work
• Not having to drive into the traffic-jam at the same time as all other people
• Not having to have smalltalk with colleague about what I did last night
• Not having to pretend to work, and instead browsing reddit all the time
• Not having to eat fast food in 30mn and pretend that it is okay for my health
• Not having endless meeting with a boss, that has nothing but hatred toward his employes
• Not having endless training session and trying to stay awake as the trainer is talking about licensing mode of a product.
• Not having to fill worksheet on how I spend my time at work (and cheat)
• Not having to answer customer calls and forcing myself to stay quiet, while I listen to their complaints or rants.
• Not having to use Windows Vista (corporate official OS)
• Not having to use Outlook, or Internet Explorer (because they're mandatory corporate tools)
• Not receiving "confidential mail" with actually no information or no content worth the time to read them
• Not being part of a stupid corporate environment that made me feel empty and dead inside
• Not having to drive back home at the same time as all the working force on the whole planet, participating to the environmental pollution once again, and pretend it's okay because everybody do that.

And it's only from the top of my head ... I bet I can do better ... Yes, there's one more :

• Actually being able to open NSFW links from reddit during the day

But yeah, I missed receiving a paycheck.
I guess the old saying is true "you can't have one cake and eat it too!"

I've got a confession to make

As you may know I'm recently unemployed and so got a lot of spare time ; I really wanted to set my priorities and start from fresh my new life with new (good) habits and was thinking naively that the first thing to do was to define what I really wanted to do in life (that was my last post anyway) - I've even pushed the gusto by writing that I would come back with optimistic answers.

But since then nada, ... and I want to explain why and make this confession :

I'm hopelessly addicted to Reddit.

This began about a year ago, I just registered (because I've seen that little tiny alien head on a Wired.com article) and I even if I was used to social community website (like StumbleUpon or digg.com)  I knew from the very first day that this one was different.

Because there was a twist, something that get you hooked and that's the mix of being part of a community that for me is very representative of the internet (in all it's craziness and glory).


Basically it's like in Matrix (the movie featuring Keanu Reeves) you have the internet you see - and then you have the unseen internet, with hidden comments and upvote that only the reddit community can access.

Reddit is clever, it's smartly build and full of hilarious people (and trolls).

Let me share with you my daily addiction :

First I open the reddit page (having a look on the side in case my little envelope would be orange, telling me that some redditors have sent me a note).
Here on the main page is displayed all articles with a score for all subreddit I've joined.

Now the process starts, I would check the witty titles and the little picture on the left and immediately upvote Linux related subjects (maybe I shouldn't say that).

Next I open a few links and read the comments (also upvote the comments) and it feels good to reward people that makes you smile or laugh with karmas - sometime I put a little comment too,,,

And after 30mn (that looks like 5 minutes), I close reddit - do some important stuffs and incidentally when I got into a website that can be potentially interesting I would automatically submit the link to Reddit - to see what the other members would think of it.

And that's were I fall into the all read and upvote phenomenon for another half an hour.

Why is this so addictive ?

The killing feature is that instant feedback from others, also the fact that you'll always wonder what will be the reactions to the link you've just posted - (and the disappointment when your score is 0 ; man I hate when this happen).

Thanks to Reddit I've been able to overcome my fear of talking in public, I've been informed on many internet meme (which got me to witness Narwhal wrapped in bacon at some stage) ; discover many websites I wouldn't have found otherwise (xkcd.com is one of them).

But I want to put a stop to that ... Because I feel spending 3-4 hours a day for it, is getting in my way of doing what I really want to do.

Conclusion, I think ... I will have to delete my account at some stage*sob*

The risk of not knowing "What You Want"

I'm still struggling to find the big plan and there's a trap I'm trying to avoid as much as possible lately and it's to be busy doing things, not knowing why I'm doing them for on the big picture.

Being without a real job means my spare time is like a blank sheet of paper and for mysterious reason I don't like emptiness - which lead me into filling the blank with doodles - that in real life means I'm getting busy or getting distracted doing unnecessary things ... The ugly fact is that it keeps away my mind to answer the most difficult question I'm struggling to find : What do I really want to do.

A few things I'm considering are :
Start painting again
Start learning a foreign language
Freelancing
etc ...

And after 5mn of introspection I found myself "googling" after something and inevitably ending up on reddit, facebook or again watching youtube videos and wasting my precious time.

Reading this post : Defining Success: If You Don't Know What You Want, You Won't Know When You've Gotten It - Helped me to put some ideas on paper - next post will be more optimistic

Time to ask the right questions

In my previous entry, I wrote that I'm starting to focus on my projects - because now I've got time to think about what I really want to do.

Funnily enough answering this simple question isn't very simple - I guess because probably as far as I remember I could never really ask myself such questions, events or people (parents, teachers and later bosses) would always push their agenda onto me.

But since I'm now out of job, for the first time I can confront with these questions, What do I really want to do in life ? 
What is it that makes me happy ?

And then I found some clues in this blog, and it make sense to me - because I've experienced those moments

 "when you become so absorbed in what you’re doing that an hour becomes a minute and a day becomes and hour. You blink and it’s time to go home, but you’d kill to be able to stay just a little bit longer."

But it was ages ago, when I was developing in Turbo Pascal ; I was so into it that  I would skip a meal.
Blessed time, but I will have to find something else, because TP isn't much of use nowadays ...