Author: cheerfulchaotic

On Friday, I told the person in charge of such things that I want a san fran transfer to the team with the focus closest to my areas of interest, some time in august or september. There is a new person in those shoes since my abortive transfer to seattle. I wonder if/when I will hear back.

On a totally unrelated note, it’s nice that CTA wants the hearing impaired to be able to hear messages over the rattling of the heavy trains on their dilapidated rails, but it be nice if they didn’t pump the volume up high enough to create more hearing impaired people.

Thirdly, Pliny noted that I seem to focus on the negative quite a bit. Pretty accurate. I’m thinking about making myself post something positive, every day, and then, hardest of all, not qualify it. Maybe. We’ll see.

Is now down below $1,000 for the first time in many years. If it’s not gone by next paycheck (two weeks) that’ll be because I prepurchased flights for all summer to lock in low prices and it’ll be gone by the payday after.

w00t, I say, w00t.

I got a new pci wireless card for my ubuntu desktop (D-Link WDA-1320). Ubuntu support sites identified it as a "works out of the box" card. And as soon as I remembered that my roommate/network admin uses hardware address authentication, I was indeed able to get an IP address. A little playing around with settings and I could even ssh to an old account from my undergrad days, though it is ass slow. But no other network connections seem to be working. I can ping just about anywhere with no major problems (except an occasional message about a wrong data byte). But firefox keeps timing out, and downloading new drivers doesn’t seem to work at all. It’s about 2 out of 4 bars (and hovers around 50% on what I’m guessing is signal strength) on the wireless control panel.

Looking at the card itself, the activity and power lights are blinking in sync. That almost helps it make sense. I’d be willing to throw good money after bad to get a wireless card that gave me none of these headaches.

I don’t know why I thought getting steel cut oats was a good idea. Especially now that I clearly see they take like 3 times as long to cook as regular rolled oats. They’re still just oats. It’s not worth the 10 cents I saved. Learn from my mistake. =)

It’s really annoying to me that my noise cancelling headphones are also high quality cell phone signal receivers. Such that I can’t use my own cell phone for t3h intarwebz or even ride the train in noise-cancelled peace without the deeply unpleasant noisiness of my or others’ usually silent mobile phone chatter disrupting. Bleh.

Over the past three weeks, I’ve had a goal of 3 hours of cardio per week.

Starting with three weeks ago and ending last week I did

• 2:45
• 0
• 2:00

Barely better than half on average. So, still a ways to go, but better than nothing.

Guests:

• Philippe
• Spencer
• Lisa
• Pliny

Menu:

• Tempeh Mushroom Pate with Baguette
• Mixed greens salad
• Potato Leek Soup
• Broccoli, carrot, and string bean risotto

Results:

• Success!

(and a cleaner kitchen)

TSA searched my bags, found the board games (they look like a liquid on the scanner? Really? Are you that stupid or do you think I am?). Then to complete the purification ritual, they had to scan my board games, and the suitcase that they’d already excavated.

Totally Superfluous Agency.

My current job involves strategic planning. Some of the distinctions I’ve encountered in the course of this job have inspired some applying-work-concepts-to-my-life thinking, to whit:

• strategic planning: determining mission, setting broad goals, and identifying potential challenges and thinking about how to address them. I spend a lot of time on this. I may identify more goals than are practical. (E.g. I will learn spanish, gymnastics, to play the guitar, therapeutic massage, and swing dance. I will earn a promotion and a phd. I will find a job better suited to my interests. I will slim down and bulk up. I will eat well and stay healthy. I will see the world. I will complete a marathon and/an ironman. Build a relationship with a most excellent man. Raise one or two awesome kids. Have sufficient $ that I can do what I want.) Some of these goals are complementary (pretty body and heart health) and some are not (promotion, phd, and new job). Narrowing the range or at least prioritizing them would help.
• operations planning: or resource planning, making sure I have what I need (time, money, support and assistance) to do what I want. Other than believing I have infinite time (big problem), I seem to do okay at this, so more work required.
• implementation planning: organizing the resources you have to accomplish the goals you set for yourself. This may involve operationalizing abstract goals. (See also “get fit” -> “3 hours of cardio per week”). This is budgeting, scheduling, and all those other boring and essential activities. Aside from operationalizing goals (the better to guilt myself with, I suppose), I basically do not do this one. This is where I fall down go boom.

Each type of planning informs the other types of planning. Each is an ongoing process. It is not sequential.

I’m not saying I need to plan every moment of my life, but a little more thought about how I spend my life, particulalrly focusing on the concrete day to days might help improve the quality of my life, or at least make sure more of my plans make it into reality.

I set an exercise goal for myself last week: 3 hours of cardio. I did 2 hours and 45 minutes. This week is not starting off well, none so far. More on that in the next post.