Tag: Gardening

This Week In Links: 2013-04-07

  • 5 Things You Should Be Doing If You’re Unemployed – I’m not unemployed (far from it, this week has reminded me of that), but it is always important to keep in mind that even the things that seem most certain can still surprise you. With the possible exception of number 4, you should be doing these things even when you’re fully employed. So I am, and so I will be.
  • I’m sure everybody has seen this by now. If you haven’t, don’t click on the link before making sure you have nowhere to be in the next hour or so.
  • Paul Graham’s ‘How to Do What You Love‘ was certainly an interesting read. It made me think about what I enjoy doing in my spare time (playing around with servers and programming), and what I do at work (playing around with servers and programming). The two match up, so I must be doing OK, right?
  • R&D-I-Y certainly looks like an interesting concept. Like the open-source cola of many moons ago, this seems like another good attempt to use the FOSS methodology to create real physical products. And the idea they’re working on, to create farms that will fit in a small apartment so that individual people can grow food! I found out about this through a pretty cool TED talk.
  • Speaking of indoor farming, I thought these instructions to grow celery from its leftover base is pretty cool – and could probably be applied to a lot of vegetables, if we were creative.
  • And one of my favourite ways to waste time on the Internet: reading about time management.

How to Study

In theory:

  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.