When quantity turns into quality

I am wishing everyone a new year full of adventures and achievements; I hope you will be more productive than you were so far, and that you learned from the mistakes you've made in 2007.

Usually I make a list of achievements and significant events that happened; as well as a list of projects that failed (then I attempt to see which elements lead to failure). Let's see...

Somehow, 2007 appears to be a disaster, because I have never been so tired, so sleepy, so out of power, so out of time. A constant headache, absolute lack of will to get up in the morning, no mood throughout the day... The bright part is that I have friends who fill the void, and help me stay afloat. In fact, friends are those who have directly or indirectly influenced almost each positive item in the list that you will read a bit later.

The paragraph above sounds like a very good excuse to enter a state of permanent depression. The truth is that things are much better than that, if you are able to look at them from a different point of view. Actually, I think this year marks the beginning of a new era; a minor twist will transform all of the above into good news!

The cause of all failures is nothing/no one but myself. Not lack of money, lack of instruments, or hostile circumstances. On the contrary, now I have all the tools I need, I can afford anything (within reasonable limits), and there is no external pressure that prevents me from doing something I want.

Just think about it, there is no "if only I had X...", or "I wish there was no need to do Y". I have all the ingredients, they are tuned to their optimal values, the only remaining bottleneck in the whole system is me. Changing myself is so much easier than changing the environment, or changing other people, because it is just a matter of "re-programming myself" - patch some software components in order to get better results.

There are less fortunate scenarios; for example, if I had to grow myself another hand (that means modifying hardware), or change the physical world around me (ex: move to a different area in order to get a decent internet connection) - it would require an incomparably greater effort.

In other words, all the variables are currently set to "optimal values" and I may not worry about them for another year; throughout this period I can focus on the single remaining bottleneck - me. I can experiment with new strategies and new approaches without having to get my ass off the chair. That's a luxury! ;-)

This reason alone is enough to consider 2007 the marking point of a new era. The years before it were invested into tuning the environment and obtaining the right instruments; while the years that will follow are going to be invested into getting the most out of myself (by applying the available ingredients). A new iteration in life is about to start, another jump from quantity to quality.

Obviously, this is not the first time, nor the last time it happens. I am glad I made it thus far, so it's a good idea to press Ctrl+S before screwing things up :-)

I want to thank all my friends for helping me reach this point. Happy new year!

Here comes the list of items, in no particular order; "good news" and "bad news" were mixed.

• Graduated
• Visited the Netherlands
• "Unit promoted"
• "-1 finger left"
• Became a CUC player
• Improved previously established social links
• Frequent football games
• Frequent badminton games (when the weather allows it), with aggressive_mode enabled ;-)
• Purchased and read a lot of new books
• New site
• Eps time spent on computer games
• Failed to complete project A (I never knew something could be postponed so many times, for so long)
• Failed to complete project B, after investing so much effort into it, I still have a clean sheet in front of me
• Developed my drawing skills
• Did not get the most out of my social skills (if I did, several projects that don't depend on me directly could have been finished)
• Signed up for driving classes
• Participated in some important meetings and met a few big fishes of the local IT industry
• Failed to buy a bike
• New desk
• Wathced the entire Samurai Jack series
• Migrated most of my home stuff to Linux

Todo list for 2008 (beta; in no particular order)

• Get a bike and explore the city
• Get the driver's license
• Try to implement "watch a movie at the cinema every two weeks"
• Finish reading the new books and apply the skills in practice
• Buy the other books I want
• Visit the Netherlands
• Be more careful with my fingers
• Start a new software project (perhaps make it open-source?) which is not work-related
• Meet university colleagues more often
• Make sure the "Project A fiasco" never ever happens again
• Use the digitizer more often
• Minimize the number of unfinished projects
• Make sure my mother becomes familiar enough with her computer in order to succeed doing her usual stuff without my assistance
• Be more direct with people at work and feel no fear to force my opinion upon them (usually it is better than accepting theirs :-)
• Update the image on the site when seasons change
• Update this list
• Attend more live concerts
• Either learn to read faster, I learn to spend less time on Slashdot

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