The battle within Click here to comment

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I plan. I constantly plan. I plan to the point where it becomes paralyzing for me to act when something doesn’t go according to one of many plans that I have. I don’t let myself flow down the river, but instead keep trying to hack my own way and work, sometimes against the current that is pulling me towards my destiny.

The battle within. Lately I’ve been trying to plan long-range what I want to do with my life. I’ve been having this recurring notion that I’m not seeing the forest from the trees, the same way I keep thinking I see alot of folks. People concerned with only today, what needs to be done today, what they need this week, what they would like to have soon… what about in a year? What about in ten years? What about long after they’re gone?

But what’s my problem? I think I have an opposite problem, where I plan and try to see too far into the future that I’m not seeing what’s going on now. How does the saying go? It’s not the destination, but the journey. Sometimes I feel I focus too much on the destination… sometimes, I focus on it so much that I forget what I need to do today. And even worse, I try to figure out what my next goal is, and I try to take a big piece of life and plan it out, just to end up nowhere because the piece is too big for me to handle, and I become paralyzed by my sense of failure that I can’t make heads or tails in my own life.

Why does it matter? At the core of my being I know all I want to do is help people. I want to help alot of people. Alot of people. I’m best at my job when I believe with every fiber of my being that what I’m doing makes a difference… I’ve seen it happen, where I will endure all kinds of difficulty to work for a cause that I believe in and want to see work… ask my uncle who took advantage of that personality trait of mine.

So what’s the alternative? My mom told me just a few days ago, “Don’t think too much about what you want to do later… it will come to you when the time is right.” That will definitely free up alot of my daily stress if I follow that advice… and probably will enable me to do what I’m supposed to do.

A few nights ago, I came to the conclusion that I would find work after this job, versus going to school full time. That’s what I want to do… I want to be a programmer. I can’t get a great coding job right out of this one, but I think if I had a while to get back into the game and programming again, I think I could pick it up. Then I could focus on doing good work, which will enable me to do more, like go to school.

Truly, the more I think about it, the more I feel that this is the right path. The million dollar question is, what do I want to study, and when I figure that out, can I get into a good school? I had a 2.4 GPA coming out of UCLA, so I have no idea what school out there would pick me up. Believe it or not, I think I am most likely to get into Harvard, simply because I know for a fact they interview everybody… I probably wouldn’t even get that far with other schools. I just have to look for other schools out there to maximize my options.

-TJ

Hear me… RoR? 1 comment

I know I haven’t been updating enough as of late, but I can explain this in one sentence.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft.

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And I work/live at night.

Alright, so two sentences. Anyway, I’m getting a bit WoWed out… guess that’s bound to happen when you grind a toon from 1-70 in 3 months… alot of sleep dep happening there. So today, instead of playing, I was reading up on Ruby on Rails. First I hit up on the RoR tutorial about building a simple recipie book. I have to admit, that really blew my mind as far as how easy it is to build basic CRUD for a database web app. The #2 thing that always seems to creep into my mind, however, is “What’s the processing overhead?” Lord knows I’m very far from being some kind of expert at optimal processing code, but I still think about it. So then I happen upon a few web blogs while looking for “wordpress rails”, thinking I would find a Ruby on Rails implementation of Wordpress, and it confirmed my suspicions that there’s always a catch when something is real easy.

I have to admit, I did have my suspicions when I got to the part in the recipe RoR tutorial where it demoed how Rails will automatically discover changes to the database and account for them… unless there’s some kind of caching, and right now I don’t know, that will be a very slow system… dynamically making code to make a website work sounds good but it’s alot of overhead, at least that’s what it seems to me.

I’ll have to look into it further. I’m impressed by the concept, as it’s the first time I’m looking into RoR, and I’m pretty sure I can benefit from learning it, but I think for the time being I better hone my PHP/.NET/JAVA skills if I want a job when I get out of… my current job.

-TJ