Paper Weight

New Years Resolutions

· JSON Alexander

I haven’t really even considered making these until today, but I’ve been moving towards more of a productive and healthy lifestyle for a few months now. I feel like I should still give names to the ideas though, and there are plenty of good changes I want to implement.

1. Mammal Vice

Eating bad food because my brain signals it, staying up to late for whatever reason, quitting on things because they are legitimately difficult and I don’t have to do them.

Things that gratify my mind and body, but also lie. Funny way to say it right?

Diet’s pretty big and I’ve been doing insanely well by that. Dropped 30 lbs, haven’t even thought of it as a diet, just cooking food now (and nothing crazy either). I want to keep doing that because I dropped to 189 before spending christmas with family in Wisconsin (completely different food env), and even though I havent gained any weight, the number stagnated. Maybe I can aim for higher protein macros and a consistent shopping basis, because more often than not on an off shopping week I just don’t eat.

I need sleep and don’t know how to hack that yet. I sleep pretty well and especially well come school and when I’m at home (mostly because I eat so well). But when I get off that or go out for brews with the boys my whole sleep schedule is hell.

2. Learning Debt

Easy new thing to implement. I must contribute to FOSS. I found a repo today, gh-dash that uses go and has plenty of good issues to contribute to so I’ll do that starting this week.

At least one open source issue a week (worst case a month) for the rest of my life.

It’s what seperates real engineers from those who know what they are doing and can get by. I want to work at a big tech company or in a novel area and that means real learning on the fly of novel technology. The only way one can learn that is by doing and the help of others (in other words FOSS).

Also Italian. I love it, my vocabulary is pretty solid and I can conjugate intuitively to a degree. Speaking is hard, listening is brutal. Duolingo is a joke, but is good for active recall of conjugation rules, sentence structure, vocab. The best learning I’ve ever done was when I did thorough active recall in a notebook after lessons and created my own sentences. That and watching shows in It.

The major problem is the stress of watching or writing in italian. It’s a real strain and seriously requires active attention. But also I’m not a little bitch ass,

so I resolve to watch at least 3 episodes a week of a given show, and do journaling in nvim 3 times a week as well (MWF at least).

3. Travel

All of these resolutions, and my major motivations, are oriented towards a life that I chose to live this year. I like gaming and being at home more than anything, but I want to travel and do. I refuse to allow myself to go another year of my life without being healthy AND jacked, active in my work (from both a learning and career standpoint), and pursuant of my hobbies. I talk about traveling a lot because I genuinely want to do it, but don’t have money, friends who want to travel, or friends with the money to travel. Driving to big bend and camping alone was awesome and is the first of at least 8 other national parks I am going to this year. I also start working in June so I gotta do most of it before then (I’m doing lucanian dolomites when I make big boy money), but I’m gonna hit:

  • Joshua Tree
  • The Might Five (over a week and a half)
  • Isle Royale (if it’s open)
  • Then fly with going whereever I want once I’m working
  • Steelers game once a year from now on
  • Maybe meet my buddies in the Netherlands or London on my Italy trip

I refuse to be bound by the choices of my friends or family, and I want to learn how to travel budget even though I’ll be fucking loaded af boiiii.

Systems Engineering and Emergent Systems

Not really a part of this, but I’ve also resolved to implement a protocol ontop of each standard protocol in the next month as an intro to network engineering. I’d like to be a systems engineer by the time I take my next step as a professional, and I believe from the bottom of my heart that that requires a firm understanding of network programming, DSA’s, and all of my core domain that I will be exposed to naturally in my position starting in June. A non AI workflow is absolutely necessary. I already use a pretty bare bones nvim tmux setup on my arch machine, but documentation like Beej’s are absolutely necessary, and work wonders for that way that an engineer thinks and learns (as opposed to stunting themselves with ai). I’m starting with the short one on sockets and implementing a naive TCP.