Another sleepless night. Sigh, this is getting ridiculous. What's it take go get some sleep?!? The Ambin isn't working, at least not good enough. I'm going to go back to bed in a bit but I figured if I can't sleep I should do something. It would have been better to try and get some real work done but instead I'm here. Oh well. If I had an ounce of discipline I swear I'd be king of the world now.
I want to get back into programming. I'm doing a little PHP for a small internal app at work but I'd like to do more. There's so many programming languages I'd love to try, too. Plus I've finally decided to try and get passable in C. My ideal would be to learn Assembler, C, Eiffel, PHP and Ruby. I can do small things in PHP now and I took a C class ages ago (plus working with so much open source) so I can write very trivial C programs. I've never done Assembler or Eiffel or Ruby enough to do more than "Hello World". I'd also like to get back my COBOL chops. I did 6 or 7 years of COBOL programming, mostly new apps as opposed to legacy maintenance. I did do my fare share of Y2K stuff, of course.
The problem is that my time management skills absolutely suck. Hard. One of the projects I was involved with a little while ago (until my health became such that I can't even read mailing lists anymore) was originally all done by one guy. He decided that for the next major release he'd open everything up to the world and let others be involved with development. One of the guys on this list was a young guy who'd never done C programming, let alone X Windows. He jumped right in and in a few months was one of the core developers. Much longer ago I had a friend who was a stage manager for theatrical productions at Disney World (or is it Land... The one in Florida). While his wife was pregnant, got a laptop and taught himself programming beginning with Assembler and moved onto serious, heavy duty stuff. The last time I talked to him he changed professions and was doing some high paying consulting and app customization work. The open source world is full of people who have families and jobs yet still have the discipline to set aside some time to hack. I spend way to much time laying in front og the TV watching crap I don't even want to watch or aimlessly wandering the web being distracted by any little useless bit of info I find. Even now I could be reading a chapter in one of the books I got specifically for (re)learning programming. Instead I'm here typing this.
Well, that was all very depressing. Maybe when school starts my son and I can do our homework together. That might help. This would all be so much easier for me if I was taking some kind of class or training. I do much better in those kind of situations than trying to do something myself. I need a plan. A guideline for what to do and when to do it. Maybe if I setup some kind of schedule or something... But then I'd need to get motivated for that, too. Catch-22!
Damn! There's only one more cigarette left. I really need to quit these frelling Eclipse cigarette's (again). I want to get back to Tae Kwon Do again with my son and this smoking isn't going to make it any easier to do. Plus quitting would save me approximately $90 a month. That's $1080 a year! That would sure be a big help with the debts and stuff.
Well, I better call it a night. It's 0155 and my son will be up in the morning dragging my ass out of bed so I'll need all the rest I can get.
No comments:
Post a Comment