Reflection

When I first came  to Florida to live, I had a million and one aspirations. I was in the land of opportunity and had so many goals. I wanted to get into investing, particularly real estate. I wanted to start my own business. I wanted to continue my formal education. I wanted to grow as an individual. Years later, I have been able achieve a few things on my original list. Most notably, the masters degree that is still on its way in the mail. I had a multitude of opportunities to get into investing, but was always too afraid to really get started. Lucky for me the real estate market crashed followed by the stock market and I wasn't in either. I probably would have lost lots of money. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, I fell the call to get back the zeal I started with. I have even more reason to do so now that I am married and the wife and I are planning a baby soon.

I stumbled on a great article on Tim Ferris' blog that got me thinking about what to do with my time, now that I have completed my degree. I have a lot of bad habits to replace with good habits. One good habit that I have managed to cultivate over the last 2 years has been long distance running. Running and me have a long negative history. I used to hide in the bathroom during physical education class in high school so that I could spare myself the embarassment of running in public. People often said I ran like a girl. These days I have run a number of 5ks in decent times and am training for a marathon. I started running late in life, but I see a potentially long running future ahead of me. I think its the same with investing. I lost steam in that department. Besides the horrible economy, I think my real issue is lack of people skills. I have had this problem all my life, it was especially bad in high school. Running has taught me that, it doesn't matter how late you start, you can be still be successful. Success or not, I will die trying.

Waiting...

Waiting for my machine to shut down. Its taking way too long. They are supposed to move me downstairs to my new office home, but i cannot finish packing up my computer peripherals until this thing shuts down. It says its trying to install a Windows update, but i think its caught a snag.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Today was a productive Saturday. I started the day saying I was going to do some school work and actually did that. I got all my reading for the past week done so that is a great accomplishment. I got to reading an article by David Remnick about a newspaper in Israel called Haaretz. I read the piece in the most recent edition of the New Yorker. Yes, I read the New Yorker now. I don't know why I feel some sort of elitism when I contemplate that fact. In any event, the article was quite interesting as New Yorker pieces tend to be. It made me think about how much I don't know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I hear snippets about the issues in the news, but those are just sound bites. The only way to really get a feel for the issues would be for me to read more deeply as I did today. I think its true what Nicholas Carr says about our generation. We read wide, but not deep. I think that subscribing to the New Yorker is one of the best things I could have done to reverse that trend in my own life.

First post for the year.

I preached today! As always I heave a sigh of relief for finally getting through it. Yesterday I spent a significant portion of the day reading my Bible and gathering my thoughts for what was supposed to be my grandest speaking achievement. Somewhere around the middle of the day I realized that I had set my sights a little bit too high. I don't know why I always do that. I tend to be very optimistic about what I should be able to achieve in a given time period. I started yesterday thinking that I would have my sermon wrapped up by noon and thus I would have time left over to do school work and a few other chores. I called my father later in the evening to get some advice at a point when I was felling particularly stuck in the preparation, but I got the answering machine instead. None the less he called me back and reminded me that it takes about 40 hours to put together a good sermon. I will file that away for next time.

Yesterday morning, I went running with some co-workers along the A1A. I love running along the A1A, it is a great change from the drab surroundings that make up my neighborhood. Apart from the occasional sighting of the ocean, I like the feeling of running with so many strangers. Apparently everyone likes to run on the A1A as I see runners of all ages, shapes and SIZES. I am thinking of running on the A1A next week as well. On the subject of running, I think my whole personality has begun to change ever since I began running. People always say that I seem to calm as a cucumber and that nothing gets to me. They say that only because they can't see into my head. But these days, it has become alot more true. Running really does mellow you ought and relieves your body of stress. I think it's also made my mind a lot sharper.

So that's yesterday, and this is today. I feel there is alot I need to get done today and I have no idea where to start. I was just fiddling around with my new kindle. I had the last version of the kindle, that is the one before the latest version but I have decided to give it to my father who loves reading maybe almost as much as I do. So, I spent the last 30 minutes or so transferring my books to my new kindle and then the thought occurred to me "This is just busy work and I am not working on any of the things that I need to do". Things like school work, or cooking dinner, or trying to figure out what is wrong with my mom's laptop or writing in my blog. Every week that I don't write in my blog I die a small death inside. I really want to make writing a regular part of my week. Just like I am dedicating all this time to weight lifting and running and learning spanish and developing my career and so on and so forth.

This has got to be the most rambling post I have every written. The question now remains as I wrap up. Should I post this so the world can see this piece of random garbage? Or should I just file this one away and spare everyone the agony. Since I know, no one is reading this blog, I might as well post it and cross my fingers.

Writing something, anything

I want to write more. I haven't written in a while. I think I have substituted writing substance for writing quickly. Hence, my regular maintenance of my Google Buzz and semi dedication to my twitter and facebook feeds. If I want to be a better writer, I need to find the time to sit down, no distractions and just write. Put on some good music and let the creative juices flow. The book I am reading now "The Lie that Tells a Truth" - John Dufresne, suggests writing every morning. I get up plenty early already to adhere to my exercise routine. Looks like I should get up half hour earlier to write first. I think I can do that.

Any way, today is my wife's birthday. So I am spending the day thinking more about her and less about me. I know some will say I don't need to wait till her birthday to practice that and I agree!

Objective C

I have to write a paper on a programming language for a course I am taking. I wanted to do Ruby, but alas someone else beat me to the punch. The professor wants no repeats, but I was able to petition for Objective C. Now I have been curious about Objective C for a long time. Not just because it happens to be the language used to write iPhone applications, but also because I have heard some interesting comments about Objective C. Comments like it is horrible and one of the worst languages to code in.

I installed GNUStep on my Windows laptop last night and gave objective C a try. My gosh! it is a weird language, especially if you are used to C based languages. It has this concept of message passing to objects, so instead of $object->foo(), you would write [object foo]. It also has some other weird mechanisms like forwarding which works a lot like php's magic methods.

However after a whole night to sleep on it and a couple more little apps under my belt. I find that I don't mind the syntax any more. I am looking forward to delving more into the special features of the language. I wonder now if I will have so much fun working with Objective C that I forget to write my paper.

Finally shelled out money for a phone

In February, I bought a new phone after talking about it for some time. My then current phone was dropping calls, turning off at random and looking awfully shabby. Ordinarily these would not be good enough reasons to change my phone.

Infact, I have owned only 2 phones in my life before this one and the only reason I changed the first one was because I moved to the United States, well, and because I seemed to have misplaced it 1 month before the move. I had that phone for about 6 years. My policy with regards to cell phones has always been, aim for the cheapest and most durable. Camera phone? No need for that. Colored screen? What for? I didnt care much for polyphonic ringtones much less mp3 based ringtones. All my phone needs to do is to make and take calls and send text messages. And maybe also fit in my pocket.

But, despite all of this, for phone number 3, I ended up buying a T-mobile G1. This is by far the most expensive phone I have every bought. I got my previous phone for free and the one before that was probably quarter the cost of the G1, even in 1999 dollars.

The G1 has a camera, mp3 playback support, a touch screen, 3G internet, GPS and compass, accelerometer, bluetooth and wifi support. It has a maps application, a desktop, and it has a google search box on the desktop. I dont really consider this phone a phone at all, it is more like a pocket computer.

The other day, I took a walk with my new phone and it dawned on me, what it means to be constantly connected to the internet. If I was hungry, I could do a location search to see where I could go to eat and get turn by turn directions of how to get there. I could find a nice tree to sit under, turn on some good music and read the news or a book. If I wanted a particular song and didnt have it, I could go online, purchase and download it (almost, the G1 is limited to only being able to dl music over wifi). If I caught sight of some interesting fauna (I saw an aligator and a snake once), I could snap a photo and upload it to my favourite picture sharing service, picasa, flickr, facebook or even twitter. This I gather is the motivating factor behind me finally becoming an semi-early adopter. The value-add and the potential disruption of life as we know it is profound, interesting and even sometimes disturbing.

Of course, not everyone sees owning such a powerful device worth the money. I can understand that, I was in a similar position for many years. Many people worry that being always connected to the net is a bad thing. I agree! and I also disagree! What I agree with, is that it is disruptive but like it or not, it is the emergent trend, which I think will continue to emerge and grow. The prices will come down, it will get more secure. Being constantly connected to the net, I believe will become second nature in a future world. It's a bad thing and its a great thing. I would love to get into more specifics about what I mean by this, but that will require multiple blog posts. I may just spell out my thoughts as time goes by.

I think some of the hottest new technologies are the location based (tom-tom), touch based(microsoft surface), space based applications (Wii). I think that the combination of these technologies and others will lead to increasingly natural form factors. Think no more sitting down, hunkered over a keyboard, peering at a computer screen. I can't wait to get completely free of the computer as we know it. It has done its time.

Buying the G1, for me was like a dream come true. To me it represents the beginning of the kind of technology I was excited about when I was aged 8. This is the future I envisioned I would one day be able to see.