Posts Tagged → goals
Exams? Done!
It’s been quite a while since my last post. I’ve been busy. Not a good excuse, but it’s all I’ve got. I had 2 exams left at the end of September and I’m glad to say their finally behind me. It’s quite an achievement for me and it’s implications are only now beginning to dawn on me.
No more exams.
It’s a mind boggling thought. I can not believe that from now on I can actually learn what I want to. Don’t get me wrong. I definitely picked the right school to go to and the courses themselves or rather the ideas for them were mostly OK. The problems lay in the execution of these courses. Some went too deep yet others went to wide. Professors didn’t seem to get were the sweet spot is. The worst thing about it was, that they didn’t seem to try or even care and find it. This left us students frustrated which is not a way to go if you want to motivate young minds. I must admit that these last 2 exams took everything I’ve got to get through. But I did it and I’m really proud of myself.
So what does this mean? It means I’ve only got one thing left to reach the end of the path that is formal education – diploma. On Friday I’m going to hand in all the forms and papers to make it formal. If you’re interested my thesis is going to be about Recommender Systems. I’m still waiting on a formal title, but that’s my mentor’s job. I’m actually really looking forward to getting to work. Should be fun.
Just to keep this a wholesome post let add that this is the only part (finish school) of my New Year’s resolution I’ve been working on. With exams behind me it now makes it a lot easier to focus on other goals. My parents were kind enough to help me through the past few months financially, but getting a job is now quite high on my priority list. I’ll also start working out as it started to warm up outside. Socializing is probably the last on my list, but I’ve got to make sacrifices somewhere, don’t I?
2011 New Year’s Resolution
Yet another New Year’s resolution post, you might say. Well, it is. This post is meant for me to share with you my plans for this year. But more importantly its purpose is to put these plans on black and white, so they don’t escape my mind.
Let start with what I accomplished over this past year. As I didn’t yet have a blog back then, I posted this on Facebook:
2010 New Year’s resolutions? Got those. Maybe too much of them, but the biggest ones: Finish school (due date January 2011), finish at least four small and one medium/big project and go on one bigger trip (probably Australia). Other ones are of secondary nature or still under consideration.
Unfortunately most of these fell through. Why, you ask. Let’s see – Australia didn’t work out because I didn’t have enough money. And school just got dragged out a bit. I did manage to publish at least one small project – MvcOpenID. And this blog can be another one.
But it’s 2011 now, so let’s focus on that. A few goals will closely resemble last year ones. As I don’t have that much school to worry about I’m also adding some new ones. And here, in order of order of importance, they are:
- Finish school – With some luck I’ll finish it by June, but the end of September is the ultimate goal to get my diploma.
- Get a job – I want to stay in Ljubljana, but for that I need a job to pay the rent. This goal is a bit on the urgent side, as I need the job by the end of this month. Wish me luck.
- 4 web projects – I won’t specify sizes this year, but I hope at least one of these 4 will grow into something bigger. This is the only real all-year-long goal and as I want to make a career with web projects, I’m setting a goal at at least 300€ a month from these projects.
- Travel to USA – This is 2011′s big trip plan. Me and my mates are planing to go to the west coast of USA. You know – LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, maybe a bit of Mexico. The trip should take place at the end of summer or in the start of fall. After all of us get our diplomas. This is another reason I need a job.
- Loose weight and get fit – This is a topic I’ve written about before. I’ll give it my all this year. And because they say goals work better if your specific – I want to have 70kg and a six pack before summer.
- Socialize more – I’ve been neglecting my social life a bit over the past year as I focused my attention on school and career, but I hope to find time and get out a bit more.
There you go. Seems a lot to do, eh? Well it probably is. But I’ll give it my best shot. I’ve read an interesting article about New Year’s resolutions and it gave me an idea. I’ll have some kind of a goal management system that will keep me on track and enable me to further specify my goals. I’ll of course write about these goals and how they’re coming along right here, on my blog.
Well that’s that. Wish me luck and if you have any New Year’s resolutions yourself, share them in the comments.
A Brand New Start
Up and out of bed at 8:40 am. That hasn’t happened in a while now. At least for a month if I recall correctly. I’ve been dealing with exams at college and as usual I went into a free-run sleeping regime. It basically means that I slept when I was feeling sleepy and studied while at full capacity.
As every year at the end of September I can finally create a daily routine for myself. A bit of consistency in my daily life. Getting my sleep in check is of course the first thing. Hence today’s early wake-up time. But this year is a bit different. I have 2 exams left and after that the diploma. This means that right now I don’t have any obligations and I can finally concentrate on myself and my projects.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time now and a have quite a few things I want to concentrate on:
- Physical  fitness – If you remember I took up jogging during the summer, but had to stop as I was unable to learn because I was too tired. Well I’ll be taking jogging up again. I start next week and will report back. I think I got a few good ideas I want to test out.
- Social life – This past month has been a disaster in this area. Mostly I’ve been at home studying and the urge to go out and just hang with my friends has built up inside of me. So that’s what I’ll do
- Projects – Small web projects to be exact. As the college era of my life is coming to an end I have to build up my business. To do this I’ll be starting with a few small projects I’ve been thinking about for a while now. I’ve already started on one, but ran into a problem with my hosting. I’ve been dealing with support over at Arvixe. They seem to be a good ASP.NET 4 hosting provider, but Visual Web Developer 2010 Web Deploy was messing up my permissions. Well this morning we’ve finally sorted things out which means I can start with the coding part
- The rest of college – As I said I’ve got 2 exams and the diploma left. This are still my top priority, but for at least a few weeks I can’t do anything about it.
- Job – I’m also thinking about getting job. I need money to be able to stay in Ljubljana. And of course I want to reach total financial independence from my parents. It would also be good to get out of the apartment for a few hours each day. I don’t want a very engaging job on the other hand. A regular 8 hour work day would be nice, so that when I get home I can focus on my projects and building up my business.
Well this may seem like a lot, but if I organize myself I should have more then enough time to fit it all in. I think
Let’s Kick This Blog Off
So this is the first post in my new blog. I say new because I had blogs before, but they never really turned out the way I wanted them to. Either I made myself write too much and ended up writing about things that didn’t really matter, or I wrote too seldom because I just wanted to write about the ‘important’ stuff. Well this time around I really thought about what I want to write and I came to a conclusion. I’ll write about things that are helping me reach my goals. So no facebook-like updates. With that said I’d first like to set my goals. Or rather share with you the goals I see myself pursuing in the next 12 months.
I’m currently finishing college. There’s really not much to talk about there – school’s school and that’s that. It does bring an important change to my life though. Being so close to finishing this chapter of my life made me want to make something of myself. Well, even more than before. I’m studying computer science which means I’m a programmer. I’ve been a programmer since the age of 10, if I remember correctly. That’s about 13 years now. So setting the 1st goal is really not that hard – finish school and get the diploma.
I always liked creating stuff and programming is was what I could get my hands on early on. This is also where I see myself in the future. At least the career part of my life. With internet b(l)ooming I found an (almost) perfect platform for using my creativity. So here lies my second goal – bring to life (start and finish) at least 4 of the ideas that are in my head. I’d really like to create a sufficient passive income with this as well, but that’s of secondary importance. The key to this will be motivation, determination and discipline. I got motivation, some determination, but I’ll have to work hard on my discipline.
The third goal is more of a physical nature. Over the last year or two I’ve let my body go a bit. Not too much. I’m at 78kg with 178cm of height. This puts my BMI just under the upper limit of normal weight-to-height ratio. That’s all good, but I just don’t feel good/happy about it. Though I like doing sports this is where my lack of discipline kicks in again. Extreme sports like skateboarding, wakeboarding, snowboarding are some of my
