makumaro.net

Apprehension

Vyanne prepared tea again over the weekend. More scones, sandwiches, and here in the picture, cream puffs and miniature chocolate cup cakes.

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I’m semi prepared for the run next week, but it seems like I’m not pushing myself all the way again with the training. The most I have done is two rounds at Princes Park, doing a time of about 40 minutes, which is a little less than half the 14km I’m required to run on Sunday. I have better shoes this time around, a slightly better understanding of how to run, but yet I don’t have the trial run experience of doing the entire track in the time I’ve set for myself. Heh, maybe the excuse is that it’s too long to train for an hour and the half to see if I can do it.

I have a chance to go run again tomorrow, I really should try and push myself harder to see how far I can go.

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A little apprehensive about work. Month end is generally the best and worst of times to work. On the one hand, I’m constantly kept busy with something to do and it can be challenging for me. On the other hand, I’m not quite sure I know exactly what I’m doing sometimes and the problem is you really need to know the whole system to understand why things are the way they are. Unfortunately, there isn’t like any manual you can read from to gather information. I don’t know how to ask questions at times, as it really is the case of not knowing what you don’t know.

I wish I could be more upfront and open with people, but environments are political and sometimes things are best left unsaid, no matter how much you’d like to voice your opinion and get feedback. You just know at times, that the answer is what you’d expect to hear but not what you want to hear. You’d like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that they may be different, but people cling on to their ways and habits, that sometimes it’s difficult to change.

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Just wanting the next 10 days or so to pass quickly by.

A Digital Notebook

Vyanne went all out and prepared a tea party on Sunday. She was nearly finished making her cupcakes, tarts, scones and sandwiches before deciding on who to invite for tea. Fortunately our friends all live within walking distance of our place so it was easy to get people to just waltz over.

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First free day I get due to the perks of where I work and I didn’t even plan what I was going to do with today. Was planning to get the car serviced (the car dealership picks up the car, so eventhough I pay a bit more, I save time on having to send the car to service myself) so I decided to take today off. Heh, will try to get as much done as possible today.

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(Side rant for archiving purposes)

I’ve been looking for a way to jot down notes on the fly where ever I may be and MyTextFile is pretty decent to use but it gets a little cluttered after putting too many thoughts into it. The other problem with it was that if I had no access to the Internet, I can’t really jot down anything. Now I have two applications that help, with MyTextFile useful as a quick and dirty method to note stuff down. The apps I’m referring to are Dropbox and TiddlyWiki. Heh, they don’t sound like inspiring names, but when used together, they are pretty helpful.

Dropbox is basically a sort of filing system in the cloud, where you can install this little app in your computer, and have it sync the Dropbox folder. Basically you just drag and drop files into the specified Dropbox folder and it automatically syncs to the Dropbox server. Now, if you are working on another computer with Dropbox installed, when you start it up, it automatically connects and syncs the files that you changed on another computer. There is also a web interface (which I use for work as I don’t want to install stuff on my work computer) where you can access all the files you have in your Dropbox folder. Upload an edited file from work in the Dropbox website, go home, and you get the latest version synced to your desktop when you login to it. No need to carry USB sticks to sync files or forget to unplug it when you leave for home.

So Dropbox solves the problem of having a physical copy of the file when you are offline and syncing it to whatever device you are using when you are online. Now to explain what TiddlyWiki is, which is basically just a SINGLE html file that works like as a wiki to note stuff. This is as portable as it gets as you don’t need to install any software (any browser can render a html page) and being a single file, syncing it to Dropbox doesn’t get messy.

There is a slightly steep learning curve involving learning the syntax to format words but once you get used to it, it’s fairly quick to setup globs of information that link to each other in a coherent manner.

Now I’m just keeping daily thoughts, links to properties I’m looking, guides to setup Linux on systems etc. all in the one file. It is easily searchable too so it makes for a fairly useful notebook.

Targets

Red is one of the colours my camera struggles with. It has a tendency to overexpose the colour and sometimes you are left with a bright red object where all the detail has been blown out.

I’ve switched to shooting RAW for whatever shots I make, so while my computer slowly chugs along to process it, at least I still have a chance to save the picture in question.

On a side note, there are many nice looking gardens in Melbourne, especially in winter when it rains a little more. I’m starting to take a little more note of the different types of housing available and in the process, become more familiar with the surroundings of Melbourne.

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Pulled a muscle while at the gym today. I was overenthusiastic in doing some weights and now my shoulder feels a little shoddy. Probably should just stick to running.

I’ve been thinking (it seems like a hobby of sorts to me, doesn’t it?) a little today while idling at work. I’m doing lots of things these days, rotating between tasks, but there doesn’t seem to be any tangible target that I should be working towards. Again there doesn’t seem to be much of any sense of achievement going on. Used to set more targets towards getting things done and back then, it mattered to me what I got done.

These days I’d do things but it seems to matter a little less if I get any of the things I like to do done. Going round in circles with trying to motivate the self. Think I’ll just sleep on it tonight. Just going to turn in early.