Forgot this was here..

Oh my, I completely forgot I had this blog, interesting.  So, updates?  I’ve uploaded some new shots on ModelMayhem, they may be fun to check out.

I’m only about two shoots behind (though one has been sitting on the backburner for a few months now – had a difficult class to get through), and the last one was a lot of fun.. Lone Fir cemetery.  I’m very curious how it turned out.  I got there around sunset so went from just-enough-light to shooting at 1200ISO and barely seeing the trees… let’s see what this little camera can do! 😀

I did just finish an online Stanford cryptography course too.  Very interesting material, I learned a LOT, but also quite difficult.  Part of me wants to take the next one in the series but I’ve already been working with that material in my day-job, and I’m about to start up school again in just a few days so there just isn’t enough time.  Oh, and I’m going back to school.

I’ve also been learning how to code for Twine 2.0, very nifty little scripting language.  Not the most powerful thing in the universe, but good for it is trying to do, good start for writers wanting to build interactive stories.

In a month or so I’ll also be taking up woodworking, I’m signed up for some classes dong that.  Never took ‘shop’ in highschool so this will be both challenging and exciting for me.  I would love to get to the point where I can make convertible (multi-purpose) furniture.  There are some really awesome ideas out there, and I have a few of my own.. no idea if I’ll be able to get good enough to build them right out the gate but hey.. more skill more better.

So yea, that’s where I’m at, keeping busy, loving life!

Mother’s Ballad

Hard we fight against the world
But kind she is to me
No matter what we have to face
By my side I know stands she

Sometimes she lifts me from the ground
“Son, that’s not the way.
Come storm and thunder we won’t break
When with the wind we sway.”

And mountains become but rolling hills
Deep forests, simple stroll
The night becomes the brightest day
Tough challenge just a goal

Sometimes she’ll smack with a gentle paw
“Son, that’s not the way.
Work hard my boy and don’t give up
But leave some time for play”

And deserts become full of life
Miracles can be pulled from stone
There are dragons in the very clouds
When I know I’m not alone

Sometimes she stops me with kind voice
“Son, that’s not the way.
I’ve walked this road and jumped that cliff
Stay far from the ocean gray.”

And if one or a dozen years pass
Still the fairest she is to me
With kindest eyes and loving heart
My mother stands by me

And if first my ship should leave the port
Who else would cry for me
And I know when I reach those misty shores
There I’ll find waits she

Design Patterns for Life

This is a partial bit of what I posted on my blog at work, just extracting out the end which talks about what I plan to do about this / call-to-action.

—-

So a brief overview of a Design Pattern:

Programming Design Patterns

Game Design Patterns

Environmental Architecture Design Patterns

Photography Lighting Design Patterns

Design Patterns are essentially (if I had to sum it up myself):

People in a field kept running into the same issues ->
People kept making the same mistakes solving those issues ->
People wrote down different approaches to those problems ->
People could repeat the solution concepts and focus on unsolved problems

These are not specific solutions / implementations so much as general ‘A will lead to B so try C’ ideas

The issue with Design Patterns:

Sticking to the beaten path means you may miss some really interesting solutions
Forcing yourself into a pattern may cause issues if the pattern does not fully fit

The benefit of Design Patterns:

Even if you do not fully use a Pattern, you can still understand the problems it was solving
If you are solving a higher level problem you don’t need to redesign the lower level problems

And now for new thoughts

The more I am learning about Design Patterns, the more I am seeing them (or the absence of them) in every aspect of life.

There are social Design Patterns – appropriate behavior in a meeting, a dance space, a brain-storming session (Miss Manners and SRUM come to mind)
There are art Design Patterns – Feng Shui, Color Schemes, art genres
There are money Design Patterns – How to Buy / Sell Used cars, marketing
And of course much more

The beautiful aspect of DPs, when laid out well, is that they are straight forward, easy to read, easy to grasp, and repeatable
Which leads to the other beautiful aspect of DPs – they are habits.  In other words, once understood, they become part of our new framework through which we see and translate the word.  This has side-effects of course if we let them completely over-ride our view of the universe (and look at them as laws as opposed to suggestions), but used appropriately they can slow down our world.  They also help explain common mistakes.  There are very few ‘new’ challenges in the world, there are just a lot of challenges that people have tripped over and solved that we do not know the solutions to.

My thoughts on proper use of DPs in regular life?  If you see a problem, search for the solutions to it.  Reduce the solutions to their underlying DPs (DPs that seem to cover the idea behind most common solutions you’ve discovered).  Understand it.  Each time you have to solve the problem, if there is little time then apply the DP.  If there is more time think about alternate DPs for solving the same issue (and use the DP as a reference for what potential problems your new DP has to also solve / if the problems the old DP was solving are of a sufficient potential value to need solving in your case).

The next part on DPs (in my opinion)?  Present them to others when you have come up with them.  Get peer-feedback, maybe you missed something?  Misunderstood something?  Maybe they can help others, or generate more ideas that will improve your DP?

[… remainder removed …]

Online degrees, the why and why not

Georgia Tech to Offer Online Degree

A link to this was posted on Facebook a little bit ago, and does have me a little worried as to the perceived value of the degree that I got, and where it is about to go.  So, for those of you considering offering online degrees, or taking them, I thought I would throw out there a couple of my thoughts and experiences.

First a little background, with no names posted since they are neither important nor do I want to give the impression that I believe it is a school-specific issue.  I have developed out a class for one online college, developed and taught classes for another online college, developed and taught classes for three physical colleges, gone through two degrees at physical colleges, one degree at a physical college where I lived off campus, got one certificate through a fully online medium, and done remote learning with various professors at various times.  And of course I have friends and colleagues who have done each of those things as well and whom I talk with about the experience.  Here are my take-aways from that.

Advantages of Online College for Students

• Works around real-life work schedules.  One of the biggest problems with physical schools is that not everyone is privileged enough to have school paid for, not to mention rent and cost of living during that time.  I have worked at least one job, sometimes two or even three through most of my degrees (and that is With help from my wonderful mother), and the hardest part is not the exhaustion but the balancing act between work and school scheduling.  If you have an understanding job, great, if not then physical classes are often only offered once every two semesters, required for higher level classes, and set at very specific mid-day times.
• Recorded Material – Teaching in physical classes, a professor will sometimes go on a tangent.  An interesting one, you learn a lot from it, but it won’t be in any form of class notes.  If the professor even bothers putting up class notes.  Many (including me for a lot of classes) don’t believe in them because it discourages students from paying attention / writing this down in order to improve retention.  In online classes though, everything that was said was recorded and you can go over it as long as you need to in order to learn it
• Cost – Online classes do not require the same facilities and should be (unless the school is trying to milk you for money), cheaper.  Not to mention that they are often taking in much more students then they would otherwise, so per-student costs should go down
• Location, Location, Location – Not everyone can go where their favorite school is.  I live in Portland at the moment, but I would love to take more classes with Georgia Tech if I went for a PhD, it really was a great school (administrative issues aside).  I am not about to leave a job that I absolutely love, or the friends I am making here, just for that though – an online degree would solve that issue

Advantages of Online College for College

• Cost Savings – No physical location to maintain, no worry about campus security and PR issues related to the town, and keeping up the facade of the website is significantly easier than providing activities on-campus do draw students
• Easier to schedule for professors – Teachers are people too, and they often work in their field, do research, want to go to conferences, or just generally have stuff to do.  It is really hard to schedule them, and if one has to leave suddenly good luck trying to shuffle everyone around after students have already signed up.  Online classes mean the class happens when the teacher has time to log on, and you see her post when you log into the class
• Rack ’em and Pack ’em – There is a physical limit to how many students you can stick in a classroom, and there is a perceived (and real) limit to how many students a single professor can pay attention to at any given time.  Online, that perceived limit goes up (but it shouldn’t, it should actually go down), and that physical limit starts being limited by your servers and code base, so more money!
• Location – Why get money only from those in your community when you can get money from Everywhere!
• Privacy – My favorite part of teaching online was actually privacy.  Teaching in a physical classroom meant that even in my private life I had to always maintain a certain persona, a certain respectability.  Online, not so much, students won’t recognize my face in public so I can be the same as any other human being, leaving work at work
• Easier travel plans – Teaching online means you can teach from anywhere, anytime.  If you are going on vaction you can still log on and finish out your class, with no need for a substitute teacher

Disadvantages of Online College for Students

• It is all getting recorded – There is little playfulness and even less honesty in an online environment.  You may think that recording means accountability (the teacher will stick to what he said about an assignment, harassment will be noted and taken care of, etc), but it also means Everyone – including the teacher – is watching what they say very carefully.  There will be no real-life teaching anecdotes about a company he worked with that would get him in trouble for slander.  There will be no teasing to try to get you to work a bit harder.  No teacher will not his head in agreement when you gripe about some aspect of the school.  I hope this will not be misread (and this is just me saying something in a blog), but it is essentially one of the scariest parts of communism (and I was born in a communist country) – you are constantly watching what you say and feeling like someone is sitting over your shoulder making sure you are in favor of the ruling party, and falling in line.
• Teachers have LESS time for you – that may sound counter-intuitive, but there are reasons for it.  First off, it takes time to type up a response to you.  I type upward of 74-80 wpm which isn’t bad, but a full *real* response still takes me a while.  And there are a lot of students, most of whom do not read my responses to other students, and each one needs an actual personal response to understand the material.  Secondly it takes time to read what everyone posts.  Think of how long it takes you to just browse Facebook, and that is small unimportant posts and pictures of kitties.  Now imagine every one of those posts is actually important, and you have to understand what is being asked and the underlying issue causing it to be asked, track down resources for your responses, put together examples (because you can’t just draw them up on a whiteboard), and then do it all over again because the next person asked the same thing subtly different.  In a classroom you can address an issue once, maybe twice, in real-time, and move on.
• No physical interaction – People don’t just talk with words.  They talk with expressions, physical gestures, quick sketches, they point to a key on the keyboard you may have missed, they pair you off with someone next to you for quick impromptu exercises…  Little of that can happen online, and it takes a Lot of words to come close to explaining a simple subject
• Not real time – Sure, you could video-conference a few people, or stream just the teacher (which limits getting to see what the other students are doing and means the teacher can’t see anything about her student’s reactions), but for the most part online classes actually happen offline.  Two screens, one person.  In a conversation, a decent teacher can within a few sentences drill down to the actual issue, then target that with the responses, then a few more sentences to make sure the material came through.  Doing that when response time can be minutes or even hours apart… it just doesn’t work
• Group sync – Online degrees Will have people from different locations, with different cultures, languages, norms, and environments.  Even taking classes off-campus put me at a severe handicap in my last degree (finding out about important upcoming events, being able to do study-groups, developing actual friends in my field, and just having general conversations which often lead to important tid-bits of information I would otherwise miss), and I was actually going to physical classes.  Online that effect is quadrupled.  You can visit a youtube video with people (but be careful what it is, you are getting recorded), but there is still fairly little gestalt forming.  And cultural differences and language-barriers can be figured out in-person just from seeing people’s expressions, but online it is much easier to have misunderstandings
• Standardized Material – This is a Bad thing.  I know it sounds otherwise, and true – it is good to know that students all share some basic core knowledge coming out of a class.  But standardized also means less reactive teaching, which is a strength of some of the best professors out there.  This means that, while he covers the general needs of the class, he listens to what each class actually needs and tunes the course to that.  I’ve had classes where there were more programmer-interested students, so I tweaked the lessons to cover more of their interests, and I’ve tweaked classes for art-focuses, design-focuses, or even just general styles of learning. Sometimes some classes lack underlying foundations so you take more time with that, and sometimes everyone is pretty advanced so you help the ones who aren’t separately and throw extra challenges at the rest.  You can’t do that online to the same degree – the course has to be submitted before the class starts, very often it is a course someone else wrote and that you have little to no control over, and everything is being recorded.  The last part means that you become very paranoid about how you teach, in case some student goes on to say ‘well in this class you gave assignments like this and in this class you gave them like this which is not fair.’  Students Must be able to fail, and must be challenged to a high degree
• Hard to stand out – You really are just a number online, even in small classes.  While teaching I did my best to get the  gist of who each student was.. but it was very hard and I have to admit I didn’t really retain the names.  I don’t see those student’s faces to memorize them, I don’t joke around with them before class starts, none of them stay after-hours chatting about their projects (and online it is time-consuming enough just getting to the core of the issues), I don’t see them in the hallways after they finished my class…. I can’t grok them.  And I try, really really hard, but… it is hard.
• Hard to focus – In a physical classroom there are no distractions, and there is no putting off the class for a few more minutes.  In an online classroom that is not the case.  You need to take the dog for a walk.  Your job just called in.  You are exhausted.  These are not things that can be taken lightly, they are major challenges of taking online classes and you have to be Really good at focusing to succeed, or have a really driven teacher that rides you until you get your work done – and the later is hard to find online because he may be worried that you will complain about him

Disadvantages of Online College for Colleges

• No professor compensation for stolen property – A teacher is a valuable commodity to a school because she knows her material, is up to date on her field, and is providing that information to students.  She is getting paid for that, not for writing a book or otherwise giving away all her trade secrets to the college.  In an online environment though, her lessons immediately belong to the school.  Effectively she has turned over all the things that made her special, put them in a format that anyone can teach from, and then… well, if she is fired the school still has all that material available.  And if she teaches somewhere else now does she have to re-develop all her lessons since the school has the other version?  What are the copyright laws on that?  That is not a really strong incentive for the great teachers to teach online.  (Not to mention that a teacher could easily steal the material from previous classes and take it with her to her next job)  For the classes online there is actually a lot of material I had developed that I did Not use – because while I wanted all the best for my students, the school was not paying for perpetual rights to years of research on the subject
• Copyright issues – Ok, we should never infringe on that, of course.  But I’ve still played snippets of videos in class anyway, and I’ll show students a relevant tutorial that I found online because I think it will help them.  When you embed that in a recorded classroom though, that can quickly become a legal nightmare.  So… you skip it, and the students don’t get the material that is important to them
• Everything is being recorded – This opens up a lot of issues with training teachers, monitoring them and students, and all kinds of liability for the slightest infractions.  Infractions that in day-to-day we would not bat an eye over.  I am not talking about the big stuff that Should be caught, but small off-comments that are misread, cultural differences, questions of fairness.. lots of stuff we take for granted in normal conversations.
• De-valuing the program – People do not respect online degrees as much as physical ones (and the reasons above somewhat support that belief).  If a school starts being thought of as ‘online’ than the whole value of the school goes down.  It is like tying the stock-price of your main product line to some start-up with financial troubles.

I can really see why people may want to get a degree online, and why colleges may want to get in on that… but it is Not the same thing as a physical degree.  I am not talking about ‘printed books versus digital books, because paper feels nicer in your hands’, I mean that there are major and significant differences that lead to completely different experiences and outcomes.

If it has to happen, I suppose the take-aways I would encourage for schools would be

• Keep class-sizes small – Don’t overload your professors because you think class size is not a limit anymore.  An online professor Can teach 30-40 students, but it will involve doing a lot of cut-and-paste.  A 12 person class is actually about as high as I would go if you want the same level of interaction as a physical classroom, and no more classes for the professor than you would have otherwise
• Get video working well, and quickly – You need students to have face-to-face time with each other and the faculty, human beings are wired for it.  Not only that, but provide a space at your campus (ie. private offices) where teachers can go to teach from when they do video conferencing.  Places where you know the technology is stable, the white board is behind them, etc.  Teaching at home is infinitely more comfortable, but so much easier to get distracted too
• Negotiate Rights over Lessons – if you expect the material from a class to get reused by other faculty, make that very clear, make sure it is understood, and compensate accordingly.  The second you start thinking of or treating online teachers as interchangeable is the second your school’s value hits the ground – because at that point all you have is an online book with a public forum and a customer support line
• Require minimum hardware, Provide minimum software – Everyone has to be completely synched with this stuff.  On campus everyone uses the IT computers. If they don’t, a teacher can look over a student’s shoulder and still figure out the slightly different buttons.  This doesn’t work online, everyone has to be on the same page and students will have trouble with that (they can’t afford the computer, they can’t afford the software upgrade)… you have to require it and enable it.
• Do NOT apply corporate business standards to a class – Teachers are not business people.  If you try to treat them that way, to make them talk and act that way, you are destroying the enthusiasm that makes them want to share their knowledge.  You want your teachers a little out there, a little controversial, a little mean if necessary, pushing students to do better instead of going with the ‘everybody is great!’ line.  And yes, sometimes things should not be fair and standard for all students – your best students Should be held to higher expectations, they are your flagships.  You need to figure out a way to develop these values and institute them in an environment where anyone can screenshot any screen and use it to try to get a free ‘A’.
• Give teachers freedom over the class – It is tempting to say ‘well, we already have the class written out, just teach that’.  No!  Every teacher has a different style and pace and that is a good thing.  You did not hire them to record a class-on-tape from a script, and students will quickly sense if you try that – not to mention suffer from it.  Give teachers the tools but let them do the class their own way.  Don’t look over their shoulders, don’t require X numbers of student submissions per week, don’t tell them what tests they have to give out.  If a teacher wants to do only two assignments the whole semester, let them.  And yes, they will stumble initially, just like every teacher has stumbled since the beginning of time until they figured out their pacing in an environment.  If you want a real class though, and a real teacher, you cannot be quantity-focuses or standards-focused.  Just watch the students coming out, and communicate to the professor if the students are stumbling in their next classes as a result, so they have some metric to adjust their classes by – but let them do the adjusting, not anyone else.
• Standards can be stolen – Just to drive home all the stuff from the above.  Your core material, all the standard stuff, can be stolen in a heart-beat.  Sometimes maliciously because a school wants to compete with you, sometimes innocently because a teacher leaves for a different job that pays more.  Don’t bother trying to legislate that (no one appreciates companies that try to use the law to make money).  Your teachers, and their teaching methods (which can change each semester / quarter) are the Only part of your online school that will ever remain unique.  In a physical campus you may have dorms, pretty gardens, great classrooms… online you have code features (which can be replicated), material (which can be copied and re-worded), reputation (which has to be constantly fought for), and teachers.  Do NOT standardize them or the classes to save money, I cannot possibly say this enough.   Classes MUST change over time, and they must change naturally (not through consumer-polls or by the marketing department) in order for the school to remain competitive
• Out-of-class activities – Even online, you can still form groups for unrelated topics – photography, robotics, drawing, etc.  Provide those groups, maintain the infrastructure, pump money into them, provide incentives and visibility.  You need to form communities in your schools, even more than in physical campuses where the communities happen naturally

Model Mayham

My profile got approved on Model Mayham! Now to just get more content up there….

 

I ran into this image from a while back… I didn’t particularly like it then, but seeing it again it kind of grows on me a bit.  So, figured I may as well share.

And here are some more recent photos, along with my playing around in Lightroom for a bit (still not my forte so had to fall back on Photoshop a little for clean-up of artifacts).  These were mostly me practicing with my new camera (Nikon 7100) which seems to work fine with my flash (Yongnuo YN560-II – in retrospect if I had gotten the cheaper model it would have had less power but auto-sync levels…) and my fixed 35mm 1.8 was able to work fine with the fairly dim umbrella lights I had.

 

I just got some softboxes so I’m pretty excited to see how those are going to turn out (since Flash goes by too slow for a shutterspeed over 250).  I am also signed up for a Rose City Photography Studios beginner class.  It is just one day (the 25th), 3 hours or so, but the photographer running it seems very good in his portfolio so…  may as well see what I can learn.  I know I want to ask for more info on (1) Getting good full-body shots with a 35mm in a small space (for the above I was backed up pretty far in my room), (2) Better techniques for guiding the model, (3) Tips for doing the blurry background effect when the subject and background are close and you are using a fixed lens, (4) Backdrop tips, and (5) Lighting tips – and whatever else he inspires to mind.

I am excited to be diving deeper into art again, and surprised how many people at my new job are not only into it but happy to share their experiences.  Some of the people on our intranet are absolutely fantastic photographers, and so incredibly fast on response time that I don’t think Jimmy Johns could reach me before them – talk about professionals!

Blind God – Excerpts

I may not have mentioned this before, but I have been working on a book for a while (well.. two really).  I am about 27K words into it now (will try and wrap it up around 80-90), but I thought it might be nice to post a few excerpts from it.  These are ones I have not actually worked into it yet, though I have an idea where I will be putting them.

Conversation with the Fae
This part is a conversation one of the boys will be having with an irish fae that he encounters.

But look, my shadow lengthens,  runs ahead,  a happy pup chasing dark dreams upon a lark.  I must follow lest I be left behind, to garish light or blinding dark.
—
So the thoughts of humans shaped you?
Indeed, and what a laugh they must have had – the Brits especially.  To think that for a turn of phrase, a single lifetime’s muse, the gods of the Green meadows and the Wild Hunt now speak with the bard of Avon’s voice.
But when humans forget you does that mean…
Oh worry not about us, human.  Worry of what shall happen when you forget yourselves, and what portraits you paint of Man until that day.

A Dream of Despair
I am not 100% sure this is where it will end up, just an idea.  I’m thinking it will go during one of the characters dark night of the soul

And when you face your greatest loss, the greatest of need, then give with an unburdened heart and no expectations.  And when you are most tired and despair washes over you, then lift up your hand to help another stand.  And when you are most angry, the most hurt, then reach out with love and compassion.  And when you are most afraid, then stand tall, a shield against any storm.  And when your last breath leaves you, when death comes to you like a tender lover, then know life eternal.

Tips on time / project management

A few of my friends appear to be wanting to work on time management (I think I have have at least three mention difficulties with this just this month) so I thought I would throw something together.

There are a lot of resources out there, for example:

• 20 Steps to successful time management.pdf
• Powerhomebiz: how to prioritize your day to accomplish more 
• FOCUS: Self Assessment – Achieving Your Highest Priorities
• Franklin Covey webcast

But here are some of the big take-aways that I’d suggest focusing on.

Set up the initial plan / dream

• Figure out what you want to do.  Allow yourself a day to just brainstorm (and type it up so you can copy-paste from it later) all the things you really want to do
• Take that list and break it up into parts that relate to each other.  For example, ‘learn to hula hoop’ relates to ‘get more exercise’, while ‘study programming’ may tie in to ‘make an awesome game’
• Within each category, find dependencies / relations (and if need be add requirements).  ‘Sew a cool coat’ has a lot in common with ‘Sew a vest’ – both require that you (1) Get a sewing machine, (2) Learn to sew basic stitches, (3) Learn to sew from a pattern.  So add those three things in there, and then pick one of the projects to depend on the other.  For example, say that learning to sew a coat requires you to first sew a vest.  Why?  Because the skills from one will make the other easier.
• Then try to bunch everything up into groups, making one big ‘Goal’ out of several smaller ‘Projects / Milestones’ composed of lots of little ‘Tasks’
• Prioritize – (Primary) What I want *cannot* work if I don’t do this, or If I don’t do this now it will really push me back if I have to come back and do this step later (Secondary) What I want will work but be crap if I don’t do this, (Tertiary) What I want will work fine without this but it won’t really be very good.  Primary stuff comes first, Secondary along-side it but you dump it if you are falling behind, Tertiary only happens if you are staying ahead of your schedule.
• You can also break your work down such that X is required for Y.  X may be Secondary, but if Y is primary and can’t happen without X, then X may as well be Primary
• Be sure to prioritize both internally (the tasks that make up a project) and externally (which of your big goals is more important to you?)
• Set up a big timeline for yourself.  ‘This whole thing will be done by X’  (Goal, Objective).  Be sure to have a way of measuring success.  Spreadsheets are a Great way to do this (I may try to set up a generic one you can reference if I find the time)
• Set up a smaller timeline for each interesting part in there.  ‘This vest will be done by Y’ (Project, Milestone).  Be sure to have a way of measuring success
• Grab the things that have to be done soonest and figure out the individual steps to get to them, and set up timelines for yourself for that.  ‘I have to learn how to sew this stitch type by Z’  (it is ok to have investigation-objectives, where the only goal is to figure out how something gets done / planned out, etc) (Tasks).  Not all things will be measurable, but if they are then be clear on measurements
• Evaluate your timelines – are they realistic?  How much time do you need to assign to this each week to get it done by a certain point?  If your timelines are not then your only choices are to (1) cancel a goal (don’t do that, you can do this!), (2) see if you can condense or cut off some parts of that goal (maybe you don’t need to make three vests before moving on the coat, maybe one or two would be ok), (3) move the dates around, (4) find more time in the week, or (5) find someone interested in helping you.  Try going through a week documenting what you’ve actually done and for how long during each day.  I bet you that you have more time then you know, and stuff you can move aside

Implementation

• Focus on outcomes, not actions – Is what you are doing actually helping in a significant way?  This is really important for perfectionists and procrastinators alike!
• Dump stuff – if something is taking too long, is it as critical as you think?  Can you do something else that would be more time effective?  Do it!  Your spreadsheet is Yours, and it is a Tool – use it and update it as needed (but be honest why you are doing it, don’t do it as a way to excuse procrastination)
• Get out of your comfort zone – Don’t bother working at home, it won’t happen.  Ideally, find a work-buddy.  They don’t have to work on the same stuff as you, but they do have to commit to the same time-slot.   Accountability really moves projects even more than money, while comfort zones drain our time without us even realizing it.  Try meeting up somewhere where you won’t be too distracted, but also won’t have an opportunity to wonder off and find your own distractions
• Find the best tools for the jobs, but don’t waste too long on learning / finding them.  Google Calendar takes care of scheduling.  Outlook handles tasks well.  Google Spreadsheets are great for tracking any number of things.  For whatever you are doing, chances are that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel, take a quick look to see if what you want is already out there so you can move forward with something more interesting.  But!  Schedule learning those tools, with clear deadlines.  If you go past them, stop and move on, it is incredibly easy to get lost in learning something that is not directly contributing to your goals.
• No means no.  If someone else needs your help that’s nice… do you have extra time to help them?  Go for it.  No?  And what they need is not critical?  Say no.  Do they just want attention, and you have been giving them attention?  Say no unless you are ahead of your schedule.
• Don’t keep switching what you are working on, it takes a little while to really get into headspace, every time you switch a task you are resetting that counter.  If you are constantly switching you need to go back and re-do your timeline and priorities
• Be careful working with others.  It can save a lot of time, but if they start dragging you back / not doing what they said they would do by when they said they would do it… cut loose and move on by yourself.  It is not nice of you, but it is even less nice of them to not keep their promises on something they Know is important to you
• Record your progress as you go – check in with your spreadsheet every day.  If something is done, mark it ‘done’.  Not done but working on it?  Mark it as in progress and list what percentage of it you think you have done.  This will give you an idea of where you are falling behind so you can see what to change.
• Don’t feel guilty if you fall behind, but Do look at fixing whatever you are doing

Show Off! (ie. “Profit!”)

• Don’t work in a vacuum, when you do something be proud of it!  Show it off to friends! Sure, it might be geeky, but they are your friends – it is their Job to sit through it anyway, you do it for them after all.  Don’t underestimate that burst of pride and energy when it comes to finishing your other projects
• Join groups for your passion – and post your progress on there.  Ignore the trolls, but the others will really help you along and who knows – you may even learn something new!  (Maybe you are about to reinvent the wheel and not even realize it, which is fine if your wheel really Is better… but if it is just another wheel move on to something cool)
• Don’t get drawn into other people’s projects!!!   If your stuff is not getting done, get your stuff done first!  Only join other projects if you have extra time, or if the time X invested in their project would save you X+ time on your long-term projects or significantly increase their quality
• (as per comment) Set up rewards for yourself for meeting various milestones.  There are various ways to do this – rewards can be days off where you do nothing, or objects you have been wanting, or moral boosts.  For example, if you need to, put money aside for them over time – set each task a ‘cost’ that you pay into when you start the task.  Manage it so that completing all the tasks should have let you save up the number of $ that you need for your reward, and make sure you actually reward yourself, don’t buy groceries or whatever.  Another approach (I forget the name of the book but can find it on request) is that you assign each task a high dollar value (like hundreds and thousands) that you ‘earn’.  On completing a milestone go in and do mock-investments in the stock-market with the money you have ‘earned’.  (There are many sites where you can do that).  You will feel great about all the money you are earning, and you will learn about the stock market and investment options at the same time (for when your projects do really make it big)

Continued Education

I am likely not going to teach again for a good while (if I should return to it at some point), but there is a lot of education out there that I would love to pursue… So here are some of the links that sound really interesting (all free and reputable as far as I know), which I hope to explore very soon.  There is a Lot I still want to learn, and who knows how many years to learn it all.  For what purpose?  .. what a curious question.. because I do not know it.

https://www.coursera.org/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
http://www.academicearth.org/

So is education getting too expensive for you?  Budget vs. profit not matching?  The above are free, no more excuses.

And of course… http://www.ted.com  – I will likely start posting some of my favorite topics here soon.  Just about every episode makes me wish I could change the world…

I’m wondering if I could at least assemble an agency of temp-workers who volunteer their time for interesting projects.  Like… Kickstarter but giving people instead of funds to interesting projects that help the world.  Not permanently volunteering in food kitchen, but say you have a few months coming up and would like to help fight desertification, or grow an experimental tree-house, or take part in an artistic happening.  Hmm… I might try to assemble that soon.  Maybe I’ll take a look into building it by the end of the year – if you decide to steal the idea that’s fine but please tell me, I’ll help.

Poem: Flower garden

Stranger walking through the garden,
Which love ye more, the rose? The lilac garland?
And if they should love the Sun as they love you
Love each other, the rain, the morning dew
Shall Love then Hate in you become?
Who loved them more, you or the Sun?