Limited Bandwidth

It has been a difficult few weeks. I have been busier this last month than I have been in a long time, and I have been having a little trouble keeping focused, keeping up on all of my projects.

I am currently:

• Working a full time job
• Getting my general education credits in order so I can transfer as a junior
• Beginning a part time internship
• Studying for my CCNA exam
• Trying to live my life

The hardest part is staying focused and driven on all of these projects. Willpower is an exhaustible resource, and I have been running out. I get to the point at the end of my workday where I want play ingress (more on that later) or go see a play or have a nice dinner with my Novia. I am running out of bandwidth and need to find out how to accomplish all of my goals. 

Perpetual

I am here at school again. I am waiting for my Physical Anthropology class to start. We will be watching yet another video. I think that I could probably teach this class at least as well as the teacher does. The hardest part of this class is reaching back more than 10 years to when I first learned this stuff in freshmen year of high school. I haven't studied (other than reading the chapters in the book yet I am very confident that I will pass the test next week.

I just keep getting the feeling that I am wasting my time with this class. I just need to focus and finish the class and earn the credits.
Some days it feels like I have been taking classes here forever.

Plan B

It has been a confusing few years. I have gone from one job at a small company to a very different one at a mid sized company. I have lived alone, moved back home, lived with my girlfriend and finally moved back home again with her. I have had many different plans and goals and some have been accomplished, some abandoned, and some obviated by circumstances. I am constantly re-evaluating what I want to do and be. This makes it difficult to definitively state what my plan is. All I can do is say what my plan is now.

I have been going to school with the aim of earning some form of bachelors degree. This is ever more seeming like a plan B. For a long time I have been of the opinion that the really successful people in the world do not need a college degree to achieve their success. I reluctantly embraced a return to school, and have been taking classes again. After a careful examination of the Bachelors degrees that are reachable, I have come up with CIS or Business Management instead of the more interesting Computer Science. I have become more and more interested in programming and although CS is the degree that would get me there, the required classes seem too onerous to be a real option.

I have been attempting to learn programming and to meet programmers. First, I went to the first Los Angeles "Drink Up" hosted by the website Github. This website offers code hosting, version tracking, and bug tracking. While there, I met a couple of guys who run Lemur Heavy Industries, a guy who wrote this Rails Tutorial and had some good conversations. I have also met some programmers while playing Ingress. Add to this the very enviable work situation of my friend OrangeWolf in programming freelance and as an employee. I want to do the kinds of things that these people do. I want to make useful application and work on new things.

I want to have a job where I am creating things, not where I am playing hall monitor to keep people from deleting their browser history or telling them why they have to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. I understand that every company needs tech support, to fix broken computers and help clueless computer users, but I don't want to be that guy.

My plan now is to learn programming skills wherever I can and to build a portfolio. I need to build a cool website as an exercise in building something and as proof of what I can do. I plan on going to programming related social events and meet as many people as I can. The hard part is that these goals have no timeline and I have nobody to be accountable to but myself. I also have school taking up my time. I will need to find a way to set and achieve the goals on this while maintaining my progress on school.

One of the most important skills in life is being a "Self Starter" and I need to figure out how to make myself into one.

Overwhelmed

School has been kicking my ass.

I have been doing homework for hours on end: building network designs and writing programs. I have fallen a little behind. This was further exacerbated by the fact that I had to work last weekend to help shut down and power back on the servers at work for a scheduled power cutoff that wound up not happening. I think that I finally have a chance to catch up this weekend. I have four programs to write (and haven't started) and I have a simple network to put Access-control-lists into. I will have to remain cut off and focused but I think that I can get myself clear before Monday.

Huntington

I am taking a computer science class where I am learning the programming language C++. The hardest part of the class is finding time to do the work. Because I am familiar with HTML and CSS, and had started to learn JavaScript, the concepts of programming make a lot of sense to me. Despite having difficulty keeping up with the assignments, I am in a position to help some of the other students. The student that I have been helping the most is unsurprisingly the one that I sit next to. This student (lets call him Jim) is eighteen years old and is going into computer science as a major. We first got talking when he was having trouble loading the text editor / compiler on his laptop because it was running windows 8 (which is still in prerelease preview). Since then we have talked a little more each class session.

This last class session we spoke about some more personal matters. We got to talking about our shared love of coffee (Jim works at a Starbucks) and I told him about how it helps me focus and keeps my eyes lubricated (I have shitty tear ducts). I also mentioned that I don’t like the addiction part of it. Jim told me that isn’t the worst part for him as he smokes. We got into a discussion about smoking and how one gets started in such an anti-smoking culture as Southern California. All this was regular small talk until he told me why he isn’t afraid of the consequences of smoking. Jim’s family has a history of Huntington’s Disease.

What more do you say after something like that. None of us know when we will die but Jim has a better guess than most. He alluded to having watched his family members go through the wasting effects of the disease and told me that he has thus far avoided learning too much about it. He is trying to focus on living his life and not think too hard about the game of genetic roulette that he is subject to. After a rough pause and some sad words we forged on to easier topics, but I have not been able to shake the thought.

This really made me grateful for my health. I know that I would react in a different way than Jim has and try to learn all I could about the disease. I would get my DNA sequenced and find out for sure if I had the gene. What terror it is to know that you have a 50% chance of an incurable degenerative disease when you reach somewhere around 35 to 40 years of age.

What an unfair world we live in.

Redeployment

My brother’s Deployment ceremony was this past weekend. The last two times he was sent off to war he was stationed in Washington so I wasn’t able to go to the ceremony if there even was one. This time I went. I had to leave early because of a test in the Cisco class that I was taking but I was there for an hour. The ceremony was essentially a block of solders sitting while some officers talked about how proud they were of them and of the unit in general. Then they sang the army song and fell out.

It was an emotional ceremony for me because it called to mind how it was during his second deployment to Iraq, when I wasn’t sure if I would ever see him again. My brother is very important to me. He has been my guide and friend and has helped me find my way more times than I can count. Anyone who knows the two of us can see how similar and how in sync we are.

This time I am less afraid for his life. I know that he will be working at a higher echelon than the last time and that he will not be on patrols. What I am afraid of is that he will be hurt, not hurt physically but mentally. I know that war has changed him. Seeing and doing the things that a soldier does and being in a place where there are people lurking with hatred in their hearts waiting for the chance to kill whomever they can has altered the landscape of his life. He can no longer enjoy fireworks on Independence Day, and he gets angry and frustrated quicker than he used to.

I am afraid that he will come back even more changed. That the scars that are already there under the surface will be added to. I am afraid that he is paying into this war with his mental health and his best physical years. I am afraid that he will come back and give in to the thought of being a career soldier and spend the rest of his life in the armed services, where things are structured and predictable.

Seeing this ceremony made me a little emotional. I am afraid that I could lose him, angry that he has to go, sad for everyone who's family has to be kept apart for this mad war. I hate seeing him go willingly to where he will be hurt again. He goes for honor and duty and because he promised he would and I would never ask him to forsake all that, so I stand by and watch it all happen again. It is hard to keep from going into a rant at this point. I want to ramble on about political will and cultural incompatibility but that isn’t the point. The point is that I don’t want to lose my brother.

Most of this is my Homebrewed Mead