Preparing for Short Talks = Harder Than It Sounds

Preparing

My talk was a bit more difficult than I had thought it would be. Trying to cram all of the knowledge that I wanted to share into a 10 minute time window was very difficult. I would certainly choose a less technical, and more of just a showy talk subject for a 5-10 window "lightning" talk.

The good news, was that the other speaker didn't show up so what ended up happening was I got the chance to talk about Vim and Tmux for about 45 minutes which was awesome! I went into a lot more detail, and answered a lot of questions as well.

Progress

I didn't get QUITE as far in my website as I had wanted to yesterday. It felt like I really didn't make a large amount of progress in terms of pomodoros in general. Honestly, with my schedule shift and having the 6-7 hours in the morning I have been quite productive and able to get a lot done without needing the 2 full days off. I don't feel terrible about not getting 12 hours of pure progress done, but I would like to get a day where I can pull that off.

I met with Sashi with LeagueJunkies and he gave me an overview of the website, and the technology being used to run it. It is way more involved than I had first thought, as he is essentially building Facebook for League of Legends players. It will be interesting to try and refactor tests into a completely untested code base, especially since I have yet to do a full project of my own with testing. I'll be focusing on as much TDD learning in the coming weeks as I can squeeze in.

For my personal website, things are pretty much coming together. I've finally gotten the framing complete. Next I'll have to focus on getting my typography and color scheme the way that I want it. There is still a good amount left to do after that, such as small tweaks to sizing, various features I want for my blog, and overall polish. Oh, and let's not forgot making sure everything is fully responsive for viewing on different screens!

I wrote my first actual article for the blog today, in order to coincide with the talk I did last night. It is a list of advice for learning Vim and some resources that I used in order to gain competence as well as links to setup and my dotfiles that I finally got backed up today with RCM.

Need more podcasts!

I am getting to the point where I have no more podcasts to listen to. So far I have listened to every single Ruby Rogues, Code Newbies, Entreprogrammers, Ruby 5, and a very large majority of The Freelancers show, Javascript Jabber. I still have a fair amount of Giant Robots podcast to go through however after that I am not familiar with any other really high quality ones to listen to so I'll have to do some research on that.

Going forward

Overall, I'm happy with my progress while at the same time I am very impatient on moving into my next role. Hopefully with all of the work I am doing to follow best practices I'll be able to slide into a great company that emulates that so I can learn quickly over the next year or two.

That's it for today, see you on Sunday!

The new website design is slowly coming together

Designing with CSS is like trudging through mud

My website design is coming along slowly but surely. It takes way longer to do things, which when I begin them seem like it would be very quick. It took me about 2 hours to get all of the kinks out of positioning my top nav bar for my website, due to some positioning issues and pixels coming out of seemingly nowhere lol. Here is what the current iteration looks like.


I now have to wireframe the footer section, and get the content area to have an aside, or widget pane. Once the basic framework is done, I can start tweaking the typography and coloring of the page. Overall it's close, but I definitely have a ways to go. I am hoping to have it about 90% done by the end of the week (that 10% being the part that will take the longest if you know what I mean)

Productivity

Yesterday I was able to complete about 12 pomodoros. Towards the end of the day I was a little confused on where the rest of the time went haha. After about 12 hardcore focused sessions my brain just gets fried I suppose.

The major win was just learning more about how the Bourbon family of tools works, and some additional CSS styling gotchas. Today I have a lot of chores I need to get done, as well as preparing for my talk so I'll be a bit scattered. I spent several hours this morning viewing Upcase videos on workflow, Tmux, and Vim in order to get some ideas for my talk.

That just goes to show that by teaching and doing talks you will become a better developer, as it forces you to become knowledgable in the subject you are presenting. That said, I'll really think hard about what I want to learn and then make that a topic that I present on in the future!

Well, that's it really for today. We will see how the design is shaping up in a couple of days. See you then!

Web Design is Difficult for my Developer Mindset

Productivity

My new schedule began yesterday, and I feel really good about it. Since the majority of my productivity is in the mornings, having a night schedule allows me to just go straight to bed after doing a bit of reading when I get home, and then now I have 6-7 hours to do personal projects and learning as opposed to before where I was getting in 3-4, and then coming home to veg out for 4 hours.

By switching down to 5 hours of sleep I was feeling a little groggy during the day at first, however I am already getting used to it I believe. I may even be able to bump it down to 4 hours in a few weeks. I was actually considering an all day "hackathon" for myself for one of my two days off in order to just try and get all of my website up and running like I want it, and maybe even a few bits of content. I would sleep for sure, for like 4 hours but the idea would be to shut out any other distractions and go all out on that one project.

Roadblocks

I had a LOT more trouble than I had predicted as I began trying to get some basic styling done on my website. I honestly didn't even know where to start, and on top of that I had a ton of errors that I ran into along the way with trying to get syntax highlighting set up for the code, as well as getting the Markdown to generate properly.

I ended up going with Redcarpet for the Middleman blog, however I wasn't able to get Rogue to auto generate CSS. I finally figured out that I could just go download my own which worked out alright. Now I am going to have to go in and individually style up the entire set of elements ranging from the text, to headings, bullets, tables, etc. That will be a huge task for me, being that I haven't EVER done or even seen a page styled like that.

Due to my lack of knowledge there I took a step back and I'm going through the Upcase Sass fundamentals, as well as a workshop with some interesting videos discussing "Design for Developers". I've already learned a ton just from the small amount I've gone through, such as sketching out designs, typography, and other concepts that I was really fuzzy on. I grabbed a couple of suggested books that I may flip through to see if they would help, but honestly I really just want to see a well designed website that I can read through and copy some elements from for the moment.

Going Forward

I met up with a guy working on a new website in pure rails that is willing to mentor me a bit and let me work on the site with him. I'm going to have a call with him tomorrow, and see how everything would work out. Anything I can do to meet with other developers and get help is great for me.

Overall, I'm mostly looking forward to getting my website finished up so that I can begin working on a capstone project, or decide to contribute to an open source. I haven't decided which way I want to go yet. There are so many things that I CAN and/or WANT to do and learn, but I have to focus on the tasks that will give me the most leverage in finding a job now, and then I can continue learning topics which I have on my radar, while getting paid!

Public speaking, Blogging, and Networking Oh My!

Writing a talk is a new thing for me. I have over 1400 Youtube videos created,
and the process was always extremely simple. I just write out a small outline,
and read off each bullet point by expanding and free-form talking over it.

Now I have to keep several things in mind, such as what the audience is going to
see, and what time limit I am constrained to. Also what is the most important
information? It definitely is a new thing, but I am happy to be on the
challenge.

I started off by doing the outline format that I generally do with my videos,
and then kind of spoke through parts of the talk out loud, but then I thought
maybe I should write a bit of script...meh. I just am not a script person. It
feels so dirty.

Instead I think I'll just keep the outline, and time myself once or twice doing
the whole talk to make sure I am meeting the time limit while also covering
everything that I need to. If anything, I may just do a screencast version
beforehand, that way I am as prepared as I can be.

So, I went to the most recent meetup and found that I may be able to get in a
good talk for next month at the big web dev one. I'll definitely put forward
that idea, unless I come up with a different idea. I do notice that from what
I've seen, speakers stick to one talk and then iterate on it in multiple
settings so perhaps I'll do that. It would be cool to speak at one of the really
big conferences later.

I've finished up my resume, updated my LinkedIn, and got some basic styling done
for my new website / blog. I still have a lot of work to do there, but my goal
is to really have it at least functional by next week. I did take some time from
that task however to focus on getting this talk right, and also I spent a good
chunk of my usual free time with a friend who is moving and I won't see any
more.

I've been continuing to seek out communities where possible. I joined in on the
chat with #CodeNewbies, and joined RubyNewbies Slack team, as well as
CodeBuddies.org. I was considering posting up on Reddit with an offer to
pair/mentor new coders so that I could learn more by teaching, and if possible
attract someone better than me to be MY mentor. That is the one thing I still
haven't been able to find. I know that I can massively increase my progress if I
can find someone who would be that role for me.

I got a lot of bookmarks organized with really cool resources for learning
programming and various tools etc. I will probably create a resource page for
those things also and I think it will be very useful to other people.

The list of employers that would be great to work for is getting larger. VERY
soon, I believe that I'll start sending out apps to them. I do know that it
would be better if I could get contacts with people within those companies in
order to reference my way in. Perhaps I'll put together a plan to contact and
"stalk" some of them so that I can get in easier

Chances are, I'll wait to finalize the talk until my day off so that I can do it
with full voice. In the mornings, I have to be quiet so as to not wake up my
roommates. I mean, waking up at 3am I'd hate to use my booming talk voice to
practice haha.

For now, I'll work on putting together my portfolio and tying my whole landing
page experience together, and then move on to getting the blog at least
presentable for reading articles. It's such a good feeling to have a lot of
these things come together, although at the same time I know i have such a long
way to go. Good stuff!

That's it for now, see you next time...

Sleep? Who needs sleep.

I hate sleep. I hate eating. I wish I was a cyborg! Seriously though, think of how much of your life is WASTED sleeping. Just THINK how much experience, how much of a difference you could make, how awesome life would be if we didn't have to spend HOUUURS sleeping and eating.

Well, I've scrunched up the eating part as much as I can without literally hiring a personal chef to sit meals in front of me while I'm coding. I batch all of my week's meals up into slow cooker meals which take like 10 minutes to eat, and can be eaten while reading or watching a screen cast. I still spend probably 2-3 hours total a week on the shopping / prep though. I may consider cooking for a whole month out and freezing meals.

As for sleep, meh. Just meh! Well, I would totally be down for doing the Uberman schedule atm (sleep 20 minutes every 4 hours) but I am a slave to a job so that won't work. On the other hand though, I have learned recently that I can move my schedule down to about 4-5 hours of sleep safely. Studies have shown that 5 hours of sleep is actually more healthy than 8 hours. HA! I was at 6 hours, which is pretty optimal but I'll give 5 hours a whirl for this next month and see if I feel any worse or if my productivity suffers. So far so good though!

I got my Middleman site up and running. You can check it out at colbycheeze.com. Chances are it won't look as shitty as it does as of writing this, because I'll be rapidly iterating on it. I just threw it up so that I would feel pressured to fix the most important stuff quick, now that it is public. Hey, that's all the rage now days right? Just ship it! haha.

I was asked to do a talk at our local Ruby meetup, so I am excited about that. I'm going to title it "Level up your workflow with Tmux and Vim." The talk is next week, so I'll have to devote some time to condensing some fun hacks to show off into a 10-15 minute time slot. Obviously I can't school everyone on how it all works, but the idea is to plant the seed of "Oh, WOW! This is cool, I want to learn more."

I think I'll do these dev blogs every other day now, rather than just twice a week. Now that I am adding in an extra hour to my day, and possibly even two because of a new work schedule that will have less traffic (less commute time), I'll be getting in essentially a full work day of Pomodoros in the morning! Well, I hope anyway. Hah, I swear nothing ever goes as planned.

My schedule should look something like this:
Friday through Tuesday:
- Wake up at 5am, get started with the day's project / learning / content creation at around 5:30 after getting water and coffee.
- Get in 3 full pomodoro cycles (6 hours, or 12 total pomodoros)
- Do any "getting ready" and/or work on "tool sharpening" until I have to leave for work around 12
- Get home at 11-ish, wind down by getting the coffee and water ready, reading tweets or w/e, and reading a book for an hour or w/e.
- Bed by 12, and rinse/repeat.
Weds and Thurs:
- These days will basically look the same, except I have a huge chunk of day to be more free with doing less important but still "want to do" tasks and reading various blogs, looking over videos, researching stuff etc.
- I'm also more likely to relax a bit and maybe play a round of Mario Kart on one of these days, since I guess that's something we as humans are supposed to do to avoid burnout.

Well that's it. Time to get back to tweaking my new website, and possibly finish up this talk for next week. See you in two days!

I Think It's Time to Start Looking for Jobs

I still have quite a lot that I want to learn with Javascript, although for a large part of it I am just sharpening my memorization of various things. The main stuff I probably need to work on is working with Ajax and API etc. Other than that, it's just about looking up what I need to do in documentation etc.

Overall I am pretty sure I'm totally ready for some kind of Jr position at least. I know for a fact that I would be useful to a team, and I really want to join up with a company doing extreme programming / agile practices so I can learn much quicker. I am going to go ahead and push back the Javascript completion schedule until I have finished up my personal site, resume, portfolio etc. This will actually work out better anyhow, since a lot of the javascript projects are front end oriented (obviously) and therefore I can post them up as part of my portfolio.

I have been building a little snake game using Coffeescript at work. I really enjoy writing that instead of Javascript, as it is so much cleaner and it just compiles straight into Javascript anyway!

I've been stuck REAL hard trying to get this stupid Middleman blog set up. It is probably the most difficult thing I have done since I began learning programming. There are so many issues with things not working and it is VERY obscure with very little in the way of how to set it up. If I can't get even a basic page / workflow set up by the end of tomorrow I'm just going to scrap it altogether and say fuck it, I'm doing Wordpress. As much as I hate the idea of doing that...

Most of the work that I've done in the past few days has been around getting the hang of Sass, Javascript, and Coffeescript syntax. I didn't really finish up the test suite for the Javascript project, as I am a bit unsure of how some of it works when I need to do a full integration test or whatever. I'll have to figure that out later also.

Right now I have so many beginning droplets of info on how to do things, but I should probably start on a full on project soon that way I can really get all of the experience put together that I need. I'll probably do something with the personal finance website idea that I had. Basically I'd be converting my excel spreadsheet that I use to track things into an app that someone else could create a login for and use. That would allow me to integrate the rails knowledge, and javascript front end as I have to generate the main report for all of the data that is entered.

I'll have to map out everything, but it shouldn't be a TERRIBLY massive project if I keep it mostly simple, and build out the core features.

I came across a few more podcasts recently, which is great because I have been somewhat running out of episodes to listen to on my other ones. I got pointed to Phaser as a cool 'flash like' game building platform. Overall that's exciting to me, I may have to check it out because I did enjoy building those small games and what not, and now that HTML5 isn't so bad I could probably whip something up in there and have fun with it.

So, all of this time..these past 2-3 months I've refused to let myself do the usual stuff during my 'off-time' such as watching my favorite shows. I KNOW I am committed to this learning, because I haven't even watched The Walking Dead now that it is back on, which I really enjoy. I'll have to let myself marathon it later if I am able to make some great progress. Perhaps once I complete The Odin Project I'll take like a week and just chill out and play games or catch up on tv shows.

One thing that I AM letting myself do tomorrow though, is go on a date with someone I've been chatting with. Should be interesting, but I told her I'm pretty busy and can't devote a lot of time to relationship stuff. More than anything, I just want to move into the next phase of my life with programming and blogging.

Not as easy as it seems!

Lot's of topics this week. I've really been picking up the pace a ton! I can tell I am getting super anxious to get through the rest of my learning, and finish up my personal site. It's starting to invade my every thought, and I'm getting really sick of my current job to the point that I've contemplated just cold turkey leaving, which makes no sense because I can't afford that.

That said, things I'm currently working through never tend to be as easy as it feels they should lol. I really wish I just had a person or group of people to work with that I could bounce questions around to. As good as I am at self learning, I can see why a lot of people fail at it. This shit can be stressful.

So, two things that held me up this past week were building my personal site / blog, and this Javascript project I started. With the blog, and using MiddleMan...there was a lot of learning and figuring things out. I am still not very far along. Good news is, I don't have to pay for hosting. I do have my domain set up at colbycheeze.com to point to the middleman site that I created via Github pages.

Now that that is done, I still have to completely design the layout and figure out how all of the posting and stuff is going to work. This will be a full out project I've learned. I could have definitely just gone with a basic wordpress simple no hard work site that would just require searching out a prebaked design, but I guess I just wanted to do it the hard way lol.

It's okay, I still need to practice my HTML/CSS skills so building up my actual site will be a great avenue for that. I've essentially made it my "Final Project" for the CSS section, rather than doing some non-important and forgettable clone that I tuck away into a folder.

The next thing that held me up real bad was the VERY first freaking Javascript project. Honestly I could have gotten it out the door much quicker, but I've decided to start off on the right foot and use Jasmine testing. Problem there, is that I guess I just don't understand how the require works on it and I've spent like 2 hours debugging the very first test not passing. I may be on to a solution, which I'll be working on after this post.

After getting burned out and frustrated on the Javascript, I decided to join Upcase for the forums and some of their video series / tracking etc. I figured 29 bucks after saving myself the 60 in hosting wasn't so bad. Anyway, I spent about 5 hours in total yesterday working on tool sharpening. I've gotten my Tmux/Vim workflow going a bit smoother. I still have a lot of work to do, but it feels great to be able to fly around in there.

Finally...I LOVE PAIRING. Holy crap it is so great. I cannot wait to get into a situation where I can pair daily. I got my sister to come over and I helped her through one of her projects (which uses C lol). C is a shit language (like appearance wise) and her instructors coding practices are even shittier haha. That said, we were able to work together to figure everything out and it was a lot of fun helping her learn VIM best practices and stuff.

The one thing I would do better next time though, is let her do more of the typing. I did a lot of it at first because I can fly through VIM, but it definitely would have helped to let her drive while I assisted in the background.

Well, I'm a bit torn between working on Javascript stuff and getting my site all built up. I know that in terms of getting a job, I have to start focusing on my portfolio, resume, blog and putting out applications etc while on the other hand I may have a bit of imposter syndrome even though I told myself that I didn't. I am PRETTY sure I could get a job, but I also feel like I would just totally bomb an interview if they ask a lot of tech trivia. I can DO the work, but I am shit at some of the terms and on the spot questions...but hey that gives me a visible goal to overcome.

Overall, I am happy with the progress but the bumps in the road hurt the most. I want to FLY through this stuff, however I suppose if I was doing that I wouldn't really be learning or growing. The idea is that the things that are most important and will push me the furthest are the things that are the most difficult and icky to get through. I'll keep that in mind going forward and power through the roadblocks. Until next time...

So, I don't hate CSS AS much any more

Alright, well I am coming up on the end of the HTML5/CSS3 section of The Odin Project. This entire time, I've really hated HTML and CSS...because I feel that it is messy, and I never really considered myself an artist which is what I think of when I have to do some CSS positioning and coloring etc.

So, as I've learned...design and art are a bit separate. Design is more centered around what I actually enjoy. UX/UI is about user experience, efficiency, etc. I'm totally okay with getting more familiar with these concepts now after getting introduced to all of it. Also, CSS is quite messy but tools like SASS bring it around more and make it reasonable. Things have changed so much since the days when I had to make ugly as hell tables to position my little pet projects in middle school.

Sure I have a ton of things to learn before I can really be a front end guru with HTML / CSS, but I feel SO MUCH better and more knowledgable after just the past 30-40 hours of learning about it. I have most of the basics down, and I know what to look up or where to find answers when I have to get something done, which is really the main idea with programming IMO.

For a lot of the projects, I didn't go 100% into them (most of them are based around cloning existing pages that look great). Sure, I won't be able to show off my half-done stuff as a proud part of my portfolio, but I really don't mind so much on that. My main concern is to learn the concept, and move on. My goal is to get all of the basics put together, and create a portfolio project of my own choosing.

For tomorrow, I've decided to clone a responsive personal page using Bootstrap and Sass. That should bring everything full circle, and I'll be sure to make it fully presentable of course. Once that is done I will be moving on to the Javascript / Jquery section, which I'm predicting at somewhere around 2-3 weeks.

My VIM productivity is slowly getting better. I have a "tools.md" tab open at all times, and if anything feels like it is slowing me down, I write it down there as something to find a plugin for or a way to improve my workflow. Some things I have done already is an auto-updater for editing html/css, so I don't have to alt tab and refresh for every single page. I also can do copy/paste easily, control+s for save, and a few other small things. I'll be creating a post about getting all set up as one of my first official colbycheeze.com blog posts about the whole process of setting up my Mac environment and the (IMO) must have customizations for VIM / Tmux.

As for my personal website / blog, I am pretty sure I'll go with MiddleMan from Thoughtbot, which is a static site gen. I can use Disquis for comments. Octopress also looked pretty cool, but I'm mostly fanboying over all of the cool Thoughtbot tools these days lol.

Things are really coming full circle now. I have learned so much, and there are so many barriers I have broken down. That said, I have also opened up all of the doors and possibilities for areas I have way too little knowledge of. Nothing I can do about that, because there is no way to know everything. The main trick now, is to show other people that I am the best choice to hire! Until next time...

To the dark side! (Becoming a Mac User)

So, the day has come that I would have never predicted. I am now a Mac user. Damnit Apple! Why must you make such amazing products and ecosystem that makes everyone use you. Oh well, it's not so bad. The only problem is that now I feel like I need to get a damn iPhone so I can sync things up. Android to Mac doesn't work so well (or at least I haven't found a great solution yet).

I have a few tweaks to do still, and I'm waiting on some adapters to get my 3rd monitor, and my good keyboard working but it's coming together. I've kept notes on setting up my environment and I'll probably make that one of my first blog posts for my new website. It took me most of the day to get the Tmux/Vim setup good enough for me to want to use it. I am still making a few small tweaks, but overall I'm really happy with it.

I have a few other productivity tools downloaded also, like Alfred, and BetterTouchTool. I really like the gestures, so I got one of those bluetooth mac touchpads. I still have a mouse nearby in case I need more precise click/drag stuff to be done, although for the most part I'm doing my best to never leave the home row. I've got most of the shortcuts memorized, and I am using Vimium chrome extension. I was trying out safari at first, but that just didn't have the plugins (or vimium) that I want.

So although I lost a week to waiting on the Macbook to arrive, I feel good about my progress. I have given myself some soft due dates on when I want to complete the CSS3 sections from The Odin Project, so if I get stuck on something I'll do my best and move on. I don't want to run into another massive road block like I did with the final Rails project. I don't even know if I am going to go back and finish that to be honest. I'd rather start a whole new project, doing TDD from the start and doing something I am more interested in, since I'd want it to be more of a "show-off" thing for my portfolio also, and if I'm not interested in it I won't put as much effort.

I probably won't polish up these little learning toy projects all the way either, a lot of it is that last 10% (which is a HUGE difference appearance wise) that is mostly just tweaking small things, rather than locking down the concepts. For example, on my positioning project I felt really good after learning a few tricks with the box model, and getting some colored squares and plain text positioned how I want, but to completely match up with the New York Times page and add in all of the content I'd have to spend a lot longer on it. All that would entail is figuring out fonts, copying over images, and other stuff that feels boilerplate rather than productive learning.

I'm sure I'll have enough headache with that stuff once I begin building my blog and trying to get things the way I want there.

I have a huge list of ideas for posts to write, so I am looking forward to getting started there. I haven't placed creating the site on the top of my priority list just yet, as I am still researching and asking around about what platforms would be best to use for a personal site + blog. I'm hoping to have something going by the end of the month however.

So the new estimate to finishing up to the end of The Odin Project is somewhere in the middle of March, rather than in the first week. No biggie. That gives me about 3 months to work on projects, sharpen my skills, and be on the lookout for jobs before the summer hits. I am so damn impatient with it because I can't stand my current job, but hey...that's all the more motivation to work hard and keep learning!

Dev Update 2/2

Well nothing major to report from this week. Essentially we can count out 2 weeks from jan. I am waiting for the macbook pro, which should arrive today, unless James is not around to sign for it. Which he might not be. Ive tried to relax, and keep my mind off of things, but that has been very difficult. Every day that goes by, I want to work on a project and move on to a real job more and more.

I looked up another potential blog plat called pistach.io which allows posting from evernote...might be cool but I might buckle eventually and just do wordpress. Its just simple and has a lot of plugins for what ill be doing. Depends on if I can get it to run okay in a /blog directory while my main site runs on rails.

Ill be moving on to learning css3 this coming week. Hopefully I don't get bogged down too hard on anything. I really want to blaze through it so that I can begin focusing on javascript learning, and have that nailed down by March. During this past week I was planning on getting through some books but most of what I have is technical, and there was little point in anything  but skimming it for reference points for the future. The best way to learn the material is to actually code things.

I hope to have a good experience jumping into using a macbook for the first time. Hopefully it doesn't tale up the entire day, and I can begin focusing on coding. That said I am just going to go straight into vim from the beginning, and pick up any tricks and plugins etc along the way. If I can force myself to start off with best practices I feel that's I will have the best results in the long run.

Dev Update 1/29

Well, things are moving along nicely. I was able to get quite a lot of content brainstormed out, and a few things written for my upcoming blog. I have yet to actually CREATE the blog, as I am in a bit of decision limbo as to how I want to implement it. It will be a section alongside my actual personal website, so I have reservations about doing just a plain wordpress website. I am looking for solutions to get it working with Rails. It would be great if I just had a simple setup that pulled in Markdown. I know there are solutions for that, however I want to make sure I can still have dynamic elements in there, rather than just a static site.

I didn't do nearly as much work on the Facebook-app as I could have. This was due to not focusing on "the most important" tasks. Well, I did start off with it in the morning for 2 hours, but then I transitioned to other things and while I DID a lot of work, it wasn't on the high value stuff. That is something I'll be course correcting going forward. A great quote I heard today was, "When faced with two decisions, choose the one you don't want to do." The idea being that you are focusing on tasks which are difficult, because they generally the most important. Great words of wisdom IMO.

One thing that magically worked out for me, was that I finally put up a craigslist ad to sell my desktop PC, since I am trying to get a laptop in order to be more mobile and attend meetups, and visit the Geekdom coworking space downtown etc. To my surprise, I got a LOT of interested offers right away, and in fact ended up selling my PC AND all of my Youtube recording equipment such as the green screen etc for around 1600. This allowed me to have just enough to afford the new 15" Macbook Pro with retina display. It is a beast!

The downside to that is I'll be waiting until around Tuesday (just under a week). I'll probably jump on my roommates computer and start knocking out some of the CSS and Javascript sections from TOP, since most of that can be done in online editors etc. Other than that, I imagine I can get a good bit of reading done between here and there. Exciting times ahead!