Thursday, June 23, 2011

Good bye, my good friend

I said goodbye to my buddy Jebediah tonight. He's been suffering from a deep infection in his snout, and stopped eating about a week ago. Try as we might, there was nothing we could do. Tonight after work, he passed away peacefully in my arms.



He used to miss me when I'd go to work. He'd wait for me in the morning by my briefcase like this. I miss him already.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Deciding to get busy

I'm having a difficult time sticking to the task of studying and furthering my career, even though I'm highly incented to do so. Here's my thought and plan from my network blog:

It's incredibly difficult for me to focus on geekstuff when the weather finally starts getting nice, and I think we may be in the one week per year of decent weather Minnesotans get. My study routine is faltering and I'm behind schedule terribly.

I'm having trouble waking up early to study, which has historically been my most productive time. My schedule is to wake up at 4:00 AM sot hat I can get an hour of studying in before I get ready and go to work. Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe I'm not as motivated as I once was. I'm just having much more trouble getting out of bed and into the groove and many times I sleep right through the alarm. It's time to change the routine or fail.

When I consider the reasons I'm struggling, I think lack of sleep is a major issue along with distractions in my study area. For instance, all my guitars are sitting here, begging to be played every time I sit down to do some Routing. Here's what I've done and am doing to combat these:

  1. Agreed with my wife that this is of utmost importance and I've reinforced our collective decision to move forward with this career path
  2. Decided to got to bed earlier - with the time set as 9:30 PM to be in bed. The way things work out now, I get to bed by 10:30 and we sit up and talk or watch TV until 11:00, then by 4:00 AM I'm shot and unable to get up
  3. Take down my drumset and put up a "work-workstation" where I won't have anything other than work to distract me. On this "workbench" will be my laptop, some paper and pens, my study materials and various routers and switches. There will be NO GUITAR or MUSIC RELATED ITEMS HERE.

Focus is the key, once again.