Winning : rethinking the daily routine

Lately I'm trying to get rid of bad habits - like browsing the net for hours, and procrastinating ...

My daily routine (that I've carefully designed some months ago) is getting nowhere, and I'm pretty sure that if I'm setting up a nice work environment, I can have things done.


My initial idea, was that I'd start an account on blogger, facebook and even tumblr and some other website, to post some of my work - the end result, is I'm spending most of my time browsing and reblogging stuffs I like, instead of producing new stuffs.

What could I change in my life, that could make a tremendous change ?

I remember that question from a coach manager - Usually being so afraid of someone thinking I'm doing nothing I jump on the first thing to get me busy and ... end up getting very busy doing nothing.

Does this make any sense ? I think I should stop for a while, and disconnect ... maybe for a week or two. Last time, it helped ...

Time to re-read the "7th habits" a book written by Stephen R. Covey - and it has many good insights ; building a method or a series of habits designed to make you successful,  you've got to realize first that you're the programmer of your life, then you have to think of the program you want to run (the end result), then write it (that's the daily routine) and basically run the program.

Daily Challenges

When you're unemployed and therefor in complete control of what you could do at any moment given during the day - it's a blessing and a curse. It really depends how you are going to handle that Freedom of choice.

But what to chose ?


In the business world, everything you do is based on profit (pretty much) ; but if profit isn't a goal to pursue then what is the motivation ?

If I spend 2 hours learning "Java programming" or practicing "Tai Chi" in a park, I make a choice - if I stay in front of my computer browsing youtube or facebook, I'm following links and actually after a series of micro-choice (clicking other links) I end up spending 2 hours doing ... nothing.

But is it really nothing ? is it completely meaningful to click on links on the Internet ?
If you think about it, no .... the website you're browsing is making money with these links, and that means you're acting as a gentle benevolent drone generating revenue for them.
Which is fine, since they pay for storage, powering their servers etc ...

I said doing ... nothing because it's not a choice you made conscientiously : you never planned to spend 2 hours clicking and browsing, you just did it, you were passive.
Something else made the choice for you ... and it's the website (or specifically his design).

But if you learn a new programming language or you practice some sport, you make real choices - you live your life - we don't have much Freedom if we don't actually use it, we can pretend to be Free, but if we never experience this Freedom - what's the point ?

It's like saying I'm rich I have thousand of dollars in the bank, but if you never withdraw any money - then the money become a concept, an illusion ;  useful only to have a nice feeling of comfort but it's not real.

Dealing with addiction

I have to come clean on something, having some spare time (still being unemployed) and an Internet broadband access, sometime it gets out of control - I spend too much time browsing than working on actual stuffs, and this is getting ridiculous.

That's something you can't really fight efficiently ; I mean usually there's 2 scenarios :

• I wasn't looking for something "saucy" but there it is in front of me, because of some link I just clicked

Now the last way I found is actually to look at the offending picture and thinking "I respect you (dear woman), I acknowledge that you're a beautiful person and I appreciate what you're showing to me, I really hope you have joy in your life and you're happy to do what you do ... Thank you!"

• If I'm actively looking for something "saucy" because (I guess) I want a little "instant gratification"
  

Then I'm trying to remember that little story about the 2 wolves, that goes like this :

 An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.

" A fight is going on inside me" he says to the boy.  "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.
One is evil - he is anger, envy sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.
The other is good - he is gratitude, joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy ,generosity, truth, compassion and faith.
This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather which wolf would win.

The old Cherokee simply replied, " The one you feed."

The best customers

Interesting week, I had some troubleshooting to do on an iBook G4, a good "old" Apple laptop (6 years old) - the little bugger has around 1 hour autonomy on battery (not too bad), run 10.4.11 and has a powerpc processor (it was before the big switch from Apple to intel processor).

The complaint the owner had was that the wacom tablet wouldn't work properly ... I couldn't fix the problem on the phone and decided to go there directly - after some testing it  appears that the tablet was working perfectly for Photoshop but not for Gimp - that's where my "spider sense" started to tingle a bit ...

Remember I said, the iBook G4 was running 10.4 - well, to run Gimp on this you need to have x11 installed, and the owner had it installed just fine from the original install DVD - the issue was that when in Gimp you tried to setup the wacom - it simply reported that there was "no extended input devices found" - even though the tablet was plugged and running fine for other application - Gimp would recognized it though somehow, but without the pen pressure.

At this stage we had gathered a good amount of information and I returned home - found out that x11.app for 10.4 can only be upgrade up to 1.1.3 and that the tablet support was only available after x11.app release  2.x (that would be available for 10.5 and 10.6)... I explained that to the owner, he was a bit disappointed and told me he would not upgrade (because the iBook G4 wouldn't probably be able to handle the upgrade (his words)), but he was used to this kind of behavior from Apple, and was planning to buy a new one anyway...

Apple customers are the best!

You have to remember that back in 2001, most of the Apple computer were running Mac os 9 and Apple was pushing really hard his customer to move to the brand new Mac os X - while in the same time, promoting the fact that the PowerMac G4 was better than other PC because it was powered by a powerPC processor (with the altivec ...). That was one huge switch, then later PowerPC were replaced by Intel Processor - there was another huge step forward, but each time it means all the software would need some sort of emulator (you had to run "Classic" to run your old Os 9 application in OS X) and all the new intel based application can't run on PPC powered Apple computer... which means you have to buy a new one... 

You really have to be pro-Apple to accept all these without complaining, I mean their machine are well designed, but they get obsolete quite soon (matter of 3-4 years). 

Now the conclusion to all this is ... it's good for the business.