1. Start up laptop.
2. Make a cup of tea.
3. Open a textbook.
4. Read the textbook. Write notes.
5. Google the **** out of anything that doesn’t make sense.
6. After an hour or so, go to step 2. After 2 or 3 repetitions, go do something fun for a while.

Note how simple this seems.

In practise:

1. Start up laptop.
2. Make a cup of tea.
3. Open a few textbooks and arrange them neatly on desk.
4. Check email.
5. Check Facebook.
6. Check blog statistics.
7. Go get another cup of tea, because the last one has gone cold.
8. Go and sit on the deck for a bit.
9. Water the garden.
10. Unload the dishwasher.
11. Take out the garbage.
12. Check Facebook again.
13. Clean bedroom floor.
14. Go grocery shopping.
15. Read Hack-a-Day.
16. Read Wikipedia articles on things like DIN41612 connectors and VMEbus.
17. Read the VMEbus specification. In full. Get bored.
18. Go outside and sit in the sun again.
19. Parents are home, go inside and look busy at your desk for a while.
20. Write a blog post.
21. Polish the dress shoes you haven’t worn in years.
22. Make a catalogue of every single computer part you own.
23. Consider building a new alarm clock for a while, then decide not to.
24. Watch a season or two of Daria and/or Coupling.
25. Watch every Star Wars movie in order to decide which is best.
26. Purchase and install a new ADSL modem.
27. Plant some chilli plants.
28. Plan a holiday. Spend an annoyingly large sum of money on airfares.
29. Realise the first exam is only a day away now.
30. Study.

I’ve just started my second year at university. My degree is supposed to be three years long, but I’ll stretch it out to three and a half because I failed stuff bigger is better. I’m still doing computing. This year comes one of the units I’ve eagerly anticipated: Algorithms. It’s programming in C, finally, after a year of Java. Also comes a not-so anticipated unit, ICT Project Management. It’s as dull as it sounds.

I’m not really sure why I’m at university. Mostly just because I can’t figure out anything else worth doing. I could go get a job, but having done that before, university seems much easier. I enjoy playing around with computers and programming, but I’m not quite confident that I really want a job as a programmer… I should probably figure that out soonish.

After resigning from Principal Computers again before I left to move to Berlin in July last year (which I ended up not doing, sadly enough), I’m now back there working Saturdays again. And I still jump every time the phone rings. Talk about Pavlov’s dog.

I’ve started playing around with Cisco networking gear again. This time I’ve got a 3550 switch, which strangely enough is more of a 24-port router than a switch. It can do some weird and wonderful things. I can’t wait to do the networking unit at university.