I’ve not updated this blog in a few months now. I was actually surprised about that myself. Its been busy, to say the least.

Toronto Free Net

I’ve been volunteering at the Toronto Free Net and they’ve had me working on some shell scripts for system administration. It is a lot of fun, and I’m learning about many of the standard unix tools. Very cool stuff.

As a side project, I’m trying to make all the shell programs that they want me to make in the common lisp language. So, I’m learning a bit about porting programs to other languages. This is nice. Its certainly showing me things about CL that I didn’t know before. I’m enjoying doing programs for others; its making me learn new things again. I like it.

Android programming

A friend of mine convinced me to start learning Android programming and making apps with her. I’m excited about this. I’m working through the ‘getting started’ tutorial on the Android developers website, and its being a pain in the ass. First of all, the emulator that they provide is very slow. Excruciatingly slow. I don’t like that. I’m used to the REPL way of getting immediate results. I guess I should get used to slow, but I don’t want to. Perhaps I should just get myself an Android device so that I can do the development and see the results a bit faster. I’m not sure about that yet.

In addition to that, I’ve got to learn JAVA programming. This isn’t fun. Nowhere close. But its a language with a lot of jobs, and I want a job as a programmer, so I’d better just bite the bullet and do it well. I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. And do it well. And do it well on time.

Web development

A contact of mine just asked me to work on a website that they are working on. I’ve been asked about my experience with webdevelopment, wordpress, and jquery. I don’t know anything about jquery, having never used javascript. I’m going to learn how to do that today. This is another skill that will help make me marketable in the job market. I like this.

Does anyone have a time machine?

So how am I going to do all of this while working full-time at a day job? This is certainly going to be interesting, if I can keep up with it. I’m going to have to start working out again to build up my physical stamina so I can do this. P/PC balance, as Stephen Covey says. It is a logical thing to do.

And another thing that has pushed me to decide to begin working out again is my back. It just blew up on me yesterday while sneezing, and I don’t want that to happen again. I was actually worried a few times through the day that I’d be stuck in a wheelchair. I had to call off work yesterday and today, but that wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been able to do some programming instead. I couldn’t; the back hurt way too much. I need to get back to taking care of my body. This is unacceptable.