Entries tagged with life

Entry tags:

life

gettin' sentimental on main

(I posted this on the anniversary news post, but I wanted to make a copy of it here in my own journal, too)

Gonna have a moment of sappiness here, but honestly, DW is the reason I have my own house, and a job that I loved. I had taught myself CSS/HTML as a teenager, in ye olde Geocities days, and was kind of interested in CS, but I got to college, took an intro CS course (taught in Java) and absolutely hated it. So I got a biology degree instead and then tried to find work with that.

Then, in 2011, when the first giant wave of RP migrations happened, my best friend complained about not liking any of the existing styles and I thought, well, I know a little bit about coding, and I used to play with custom layouts on LJ - and the result was Marginless (which looking back on is kind of eh, but my friend liked it! Fun fact: the default color scheme and it's name are for the character she used it for, lol). And then I learned that style patching efforts were seriously backlogged, so I went 'well if someone can give me pointers, I'll give it a go' and it just kind of spiraled from there? And I learned along the way that I actually do like coding, I just hate Java.

And after a few years of not finding good work and just working temp jobs, I went back to school in 2014 and got a CS degree, and got hired a few months after graduating at a fantastic company that does application security testing (and it turns out that coding for DW taught me much better security practices than like... a LOT of companies have. A depressingly large number of companies). And said awesome job means that last year I could finally buy my own house, which has been like, a life goal since I was twelve.

So thank you, Dreamwidth. I always joke that you pay me in food and fake money (points), but really, you have paid me in support and mentorship over the last eight (!!!) years.

Entry tags:

life,
mindware

Mindware

This kind of started with

unfuckyourhabitat and discussions of how adding one small new habit to your routine makes it easier to add others, but it kind of solidified talking to

pjf at YAPC, who is a deeply fascinating individual - the discussion we had can kind of be summed up in his wonderful OSCON keynote, which is on youtube here. Basically, my life is kind of a mess. There are things I should do but don't want to do, and things I want to do that I don't end up doing, and basically my life-system is Not Working. This is for a number of reasons:

1) I'm a very poor self-motivator. This is probably at least partially because of depression, though I think a lot of people have problems self-motivating. Basically I obey Newton's First Law of physics, and this is why I didn't got to over half my classes in my last semester of university.

2) Related to (1) - I'm poor at commitment. And occasionally afraid of it, because I have a very high fear of failure (again, see depression plus anxiety), and if you don't commit, you can't fail. But I'm also fantastic at abandoning projects midway through because motivation dried up.

3) I have an awful case of what

synecdochic calls 'goldfish brain' (this is one of several reasons the terrified goldfish is my spirit animal). Basically it's an exciting combination of distractability and short-term memory failure that leads me to do things like almost put the butter away in the cutlery drawer, lose everything I don't keep consistently in the same spot, and forget important things I need to do unless I do them right now.

So! It seemed best to make a list of what I want to do before I figure out ways in which to overcome 1-3 and actually do it.

Long-Term
-Get a job in my field
-Get PR status in Canada
-Own a house

Day-to-Day
-Keep the house clean
-Keep up with my RP commitments
-Cook a greater variety of lunches for work
-Not lose things all the time

Crafting
-Assorted planned knitting projects
-Assorted planned sewing projects
-Deal with the backlog of half-finished and abandoned projects
-Become reliable and skilled enough to make some extra income off my skills

CompSci
-Learn Perl
-Learn Python
-Get my cosplay website out of alpha

Languages
-Learn pronunciation for French, Mandarin, and Cantonese (No interest in the language, but I don't like sounding like an idiot in front of my friends)
-Brush up on my Spanish (I blame comic books)
-Learn Japanese
-Learn Welsh or Irish

This, then, leads to the 'how to do this' portion. The long-term goals are somewhat nebulous, and I need to refine the steps necessary to reach them before I can set that up on any sort of tracker. I've been using Astrid as a possible to-do manager, as it syncs web and my phone, and has a random reminders, which is good for someone who forgets things that need doing. I am, however, open to to-do list managers, as Astrid doesn't have an open API, so no hooking it into other things. So far, that's mostly been for day-to-day stuff/one-off tasks - I can add when I think of it, and come back to it later. The CS stuff - I think for Perl, working on DW bugs may be a good start. For my website, it's honestly just buckling down and writing the damned content. Languages - I have access to some online learning systems through the library, and Anki seems like a good way of reviewing.

The next problem - the big problem - is keeping to the commitments to do things, instead of 'eh, later'. Like the recycling in my trunk I've meant to take to the depot all week. 'I'll do it tomorrow.'. For that, I'm tentatively considering Beeminder. Putting money up for stake is kind of scary (see fear of commitment) but at the same time, money is one of the few things that is sufficiently motivating. Why I skipped classes but I don't skip work.

This, of course, is all very rough-draft right now, and input on what's worked for others is more than welcome.

Entry tags:

Life

I keep telling myself I should post more, but I have all these think-y thoughts that I'm having trouble coalescing into actual post form. And there's not much point in talking about real life because as anyone who follows my plurk knows it's like 60% 'I HATE MY JOB ARGH I NEED A NEW JOB LIFE SUCKS' which... well, it could be worse, but it could be a lot better too. But this job is $14/hr and has extended insurance so until something in my field actually calls me for an interview, I'm stuck with the frustrating job.

In between that, I have mostly been RPing and sewing. Current projects have been my steampunk outfits, which are coming along fairly well, and assorted bits and pieces of cosplay things. I did get my nice big order of four shades of purple dye for Tieria the other day, so drafting something out based on that may be my next project. I'm also kind of knitting again, though this means mostly picking at the Sock That Never Ends. I want to love sock knitting so much but it hasn't been working. Progress pics mostly get put on my plurk for the whole INSTANT GRATIFICATION thing but now that we have image hosting I may post here, too.

Design/dev-wise, I have totally managed to fall off my learn-to-code bandwagon. I think I'm having a problem where I'm sort of at an intermediate stage where a lot of the simple exercises that learn-to-code books/sites present bore me because they're too easy, but I'm still not ready to dive in DW's codebase because huge and very mature (or, as

denise put it, 'our code base is old enough to have an account under COPA'). And I can't come up with a good intermediate project to do, which is what I need to learn.

I also haven't really had the creative energy for design - I think it's all being eaten by sewing right now. I did however dump some content into my cosplay site in hopes of motivating myself to finish it up, and I drafted up a layout design after about four hours of frustration:
( cut for size, etc )
I'm not totally sold on the drop shadow effects - I'm not sure if they're too much or not. All the text will be actual text on the site, not graphics - I just wanted to add nav to the mock-up to see how it looked. The header image may also make a reappearance as a Heads Up theme :)