Falling back into a routine

I'm falling back into a routine.  The first few days were a fight to get the routine going.  The few days afterwards have been empowering.  I can't say they have been great.  But it's been a lot easier keeping the routine. 

I think that's with all new practices.  The initial period is always horrendous.  It's a few days or a few weeks of thinking about doing something, but never doing it.  It makes me think of Confidence and Paranoia from an episode of Red Dwarf.  Lister ended up getting sick, and his confidence and paranoia came to life as external beings.  Your confidence, to paraphrase Lister, is the guy who tells you you're great, you're wonderful, you're sexy, and everyone loves.  Your paranoia tells you you're stupid, you're ugly, and everyone hates you. 

Both are just competing opinions in the brain.  The answer is simple and obvious: trudge on regardless.  Start regardless of what you think. 

It gets easier to follow the routine through days 3 and 4.  Though the first few days are pretty much like pulling teeth. 

Is it automatic yet?  No.  No where near.  But it is at least to the point where I can see a benefit in going through the motions and doing the exercise.  I'd generally say give something at least two weeks, but I know I haven't done that before. 

But then I'm also influenced by the thought that people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.    Broken down, some goals aren't that hard when spaced out over a year.  There just has to be definite progress throughout.  And there almost never is definite progress.

Recent books I've read:  
The Four Hour Chef by Tim Ferris

The Boring Details

I've been spending a lot of time contemplating automation recently.  Automating things is rather great.  But I think there is an unwritten side part to automation.  I'm going to write that down.

In order to automate anything, you must first document the entire process.

After reading that sentence, you are probably thinking a lot of sarcastic comments.  I'd like to agree with you, but the stupid simple is what most people miss in the first place.  How often has business classes shown case study after case study of ridiculous levels of bureaucracy that can be removed and processes that can be streamlined by knowing the process. 

But then that involves a lot of boring drudgery.  That's the part that no one does. It's a simple thing, but doing that simple thing is all that really needs to be done.   By the end of the process of documentation, you've got an in depth understanding of the events that take place.  Often in the process you start thinking about why certain things are done, and you realize just how much time you can solve by automating.

I looked at the same idea when I was fighting the Windows Automatic Installation Kit.  Sounded like a great idea.  I could never get the network drivers to work on my builds.  So I basically burned through a lot of crap and none of it worked. 

So after that, I went back to partial automation and partial manual.  If part of the process is copying files and creating directories, why not automate that?  A batch file is perfectly acceptable for that and it becomes automatic and the same everywhere. 

I want to do the same thing with network discovery, but Python is giving me hell.  Something I'm not certain of is causing me problems.  I can't get the data file to create.  

Anyways, I guess this is the call to do boring but important things.  Documentation is boring.  But it solves a world of problems.  It also gives you the ability to solve all sorts of problems in the future.  And it gives you the best ability: delegation.  If you have something well documented, you can then delegate the task and give it to someone else.

finishing projects

I actually finished Causality Crimes today.  At a whopping 21,123 words before editing, it probably shouldn't have taken me more than 2 years to finish.  I started (keeping track) in January of 2014.  At that point, I was at 3,000 words.  August, 2016 I'm finished at 21,000 words.  It didn't go the way I would have expected.  I don't know what I thought about the story going in.  It's probably going to require some serious rewriting.  I started out in a first person omniscient and moved towards a third person.  I'm not sure that was the right thing to do with this story.  It might have been a good transition.  I don't know.  I'm going to have to get a break from the thing to figure that out.  I'm not even sure I like the title any more.

With that complete, it's off to finish the second story I was writing before finally publishing my second work.  Short stories, collection 1.  I may try to find a physical book, but I'm doubtful.  It will probably be another Kindle release.  I'm okay with that.

Now it's off to re-read what I've written about a nightmare turned story called The Gray Lady about an intergalactic space virus.  It might be interesting.  It might not.  I've got to finish it to figure it out.

And yes, it really was a nightmare I had that started the entire thing.  I took notes.  They were...
-nasty intergalactic space virus
-makes non-sentient life forms sentient
-tries to kill sentient life forms. Red bands on top of armsthat wrap around to cover the wrist and slice through.

Bands are capable of being cut or broken
-Creates telepathic capabilities in sentients, but none have ever lived through a case of it.
-Called the Gray Lady because it creates a gel/smoke/shade likeshadow around the foot when infected.
-100% infection rate. 100% lethal. Any ship infected is blasted out of the sky, no questions asked.

Amazing what a completely screwed up dream can turn out.  

CCNA

One last day before the CCNA.  

After a bit of testing, I'm pretty good on the LAN side.  It's WAN and routing protocols that I need to spend the most time on.  I can get the necessary points out of studying OSPF, EIGRP, PPP, and Frame Relay.

Still working on Mnemosyne on my studying.  I covered the LAN side way too deeply.  Basically means I can answer LAN side questions without a second thought.  But WAN and routing protocol side is weak.

On the practice tests, I've been getting about 65%.  So that means I only need to improve 20% or so.  Easy.

Back tomorrow afternoon with results.

Learning the Right Lesson

I finally set a date to take the CCNA.  Actually, it's the part of the CCENT.  So I'm doing the two part CCNA thing.  Anyways, now that I have a date I have a limited time left to learn everything that I could possibly need to pass this thing.

And I'm doing everything different again.

See, success is a bad teacher.  I think I heard that from Bill Gates.

So far, I've had success.  But there were certain places that I had limitations.  Mental gaps in the knowledge.  I should be strong in all the information, not just sections.  But there are sections and specific information that I needed that just wasn't making it into my head in the correct manner.

It's funny.  At one point I was turning my CCENT notes into a book to sell.  That project was abandoned for various reasons.  But the main one being that what did good for the CCENT may not be good for the CCNA.  How can I know?

So I've been using Mnemosyne.  It's a flash card program that allows you to create your own flash cards.  So you end up getting a lot of flash cards that you study.  It seems I heard about flash cards for years, but always avoided them.

I didn't avoid them because they were complicated.

I avoided them because they were work.  I didn't need to work to learn everything.  Until I did.  And the methods I was doing weren't working.  And they didn't work for years.  YEARS.

So now, it's time to quit avoiding work.  Because that's what all this searching has been about.  Avoiding work.  And flash cards are work.

You are what you repeatedly do.

I think Aristotle said that.

Success is a bad teacher.

So if you want success, you must repeatedly do something.  And it's probably going to be work.  And it is going to suck.

And you can either do it now, or spend the rest of your life avoiding the work.

And you will keep ending up in the same scenario: wondering why you only get so far.

You are what you repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.
Success is a bad teacher.


Strangeness indeed.

redirection

I started listening to Scarcity again.  I've got it on audio book, so I can go back through the thing whenever I feel like it.

I think I'm beginning to understand something.  I was going to call this post the Kansas City shuffle, but I wasn't sure if that was correct.  So I decided to call it redirection.  I don't know if that makes it a lot different, but it seems more accurate.  Going back to to what I was actually going to talk about.

The thing I noticed was something Scarcity pointed out, but didn't provide an answer to.  It makes me realize how Alcoholics Anonymous works as well.  All major projects and adjustment schemes operate on the same principle.

Scarcity (the book) points out that being focused on something causes us to ignore other things.  The social and mental problems generally are caused by an incorrect focus.  So the answer to solve the scarcity problem is redirection.  And that's why everyone suggests exercise.

But I just made a jump there.  To get that jump, you have to go to a different book.  For that, it's over to Mastermind.   Mastermind points out that in order to think of something, you have to redirect your mind and let the unconscious processes work on the problem.

So, the answer to solving those stuck in a rut problems seems to be redirection by causing a mental separation.  The task needs to be sufficiently tedious to take the mental process away, or grind it down.  Exercise and manual labor seemed linked to the process.  Shoveling dirt for an hour or two or running both result in the brain not thinking about what it had been thinking.

So the answer to the rut problem seems to be exercise.  Or at least one answer to the problem.  I'm sure there are others.

Which makes me also wonder if the authors of scarcity ever went back to look at scarcity mindset on people who practice meditation or mindfulness exercises on a regular basis.  Meditation could easily cause that same mental separation seen by exercise and manual labor.

Though it makes me think that whatever the mental separation exercise is, it should be different than the day to day task.  A manual laborer couldn't use manual labor to create separation.  I say that, but I'm mostly guessing at this with no background in psychology.  I guess it's just what I've grown to understand.

Maybe I'm crazy.  But then again, exercise is considered a habit dominated by the rich over the poor.

things in control

Seems strange to me that people are obsessed with things completely out of their control.  I can understand a little worry when it comes to something in your teams control.  That's normal.  But completely out of your control and your realm of influence?   That's just humorous.

How can someone obsess over the treatment of another person while sitting on their couch, stuck to a phone?  What gives phone monkey the right to dictate anything?  The person that's not even capable of real action is completely obsessed with other peoples action.

My wife asked me about the weather.  She wanted to turn her phone off for the night, but there was a vague rambling of a storm.

I do not live in a ramshackle hut.  It has survived every thunderstorm thrown at it so far, with only the loss of a few shingles.

I told her to turn it off.

And what if the storm hits?

We have two tornado sirens in close range.  They test them on the last Friday of the month.

We have three kids.  All sleep with sound machines.  Which means as long as the power runs they will sleep through anything.  Should the power go out, they will go into full panic.

Our kids are also relatively afraid of thunder and lightning.  They often need comforting, or possibly  daddy shirt if the weather gets too bad.

I guess you could say I'm not terribly worried about the weather.  It's either going to rain or it isn't.  I'm not terribly worried about politics.

When you think about presidential politics, you have to think of it as a foot ball season.  No matter who you root for in the regular season, it always comes down to AFC versus NFC.  And other than a few pictures, there's not a lot of difference between the two.

There is no radically different candidate.  All those have been wiped out, and will always be wiped out prior to general election.

So what you get is a generic amalgamation that's pretty much what the last guy was.  George W Bush wasn't Satan, and neither was Barrack Obama.  Neither "destroyed the fabric of our nation" like they were declared to have done if they were elected in the first place.

The only things I worry about are the things I can control.  And I seek to understand so I can attempt to bring things that were previously out of control in to control.  Simple.

I was watching an interview with James Mattis.  He was asked if he still carried a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.  He answer that was true.  And his reason was thus...

There is nothing new under the sun.  Everything you are experiencing has been experienced before.  This situation is not unique.

I'm expounding on a short comment there, but the truth holds.