One hour early a day...

My latest read is Robin Sharma's book (The Leader who had no title), interesting read. But one statement struck me (I more or less paraphrase it)

"If you wake up one hour early each day for a month, in 30 days you will have almost one weeks worth of working time, think of the things you could do"

When i told this to some of my colleagues/friends they say wha sleep less one hour how ? Not enough time to sleep already.

"You have enough time to sleep when you are dead" 

I guess this is the difference between people who do impressive/great things (physically fit, be it in doing voluntary work, open source projects, making lots of money, hobbies, making a difference, side business, execise often) and the rest of us. They spent the time not just dreaming and talking about it but actually doing it. I am not actually saying that you forgo sleep altogether but think of the possibilities that could happen if you think about how to spend your time wisely.

At the end of our life, lets not spend time regretting what it might have been, or what we might have done better.

Remember the saying that you need 10,000 hours to become good at what u do, maybe i should start doing things instead of writing things on my blog :)

Resolutions 2011

My resolutions for 2011.

For the personal geek in me (Probably have little to do with work)

I declare this to be the year of functional programming for me!

Common Lisp 

Begin by first completing Practical Common Lisp and Land of Lisp, and the little pet project that i do when i have free time, the idea of closures and high order functions really appeal to me.

Erlang

Another Functional Language that I hopefully have time for this year. Invented by Ericsson for using in telephony applications, it has some interesting properties like fault tolerant and hot swapping. Since it's designed for telephony (which has something like 9 9's of availability) you can actually swap in code while the system is running which i think its pretty cool.

Hadoop/Map Reduce

Always heard about MapReduce and Hadoop, I shall attempt to read google's paper on it and hopefully setup a working instance.

NoSQL

NoSQL is getting big nowadays with Twitter and Facebook all moving/developing part of their infrastructure on top of NoSQL type of storage.

Learn at least one implementation and see how it can be worked into a project.

For the bookworm in me

Read The Elements of Style, one of the great books on the writing for the English language. Time to get better at my writing, better written communication is essential as you go along ur working life.

Read more "management" style books especially in the realm of making people happy at work, I am quite interested in how great organizations retain their people and keep them happy.
So far i have FISH! tales, Why work sucks from the library here with me.

For the not so fit me

Finish taking my IPPT before June and pass it.

Run at least once a week at least 2.4km.

Attempt to run a half marathon by then end of the year. (Haha this will the hardest one in my list)

For the bad habits in me

Second guessing or interrupting people midway

I don't know if people noticed but i do have a bad habit of either completing other people's sentence or second guessing what they will say. I will let others finish what they want to say before I start, I will try to follow the rule of One Conversation at a time.

Procrastination

I have a habit of procrastinating, enuff said.

For the father and husband in me
Vacation

Hopefully I will have time to go for a vacation, hopefully it will be the first time that I am bringing Chloe overseas.

Better Father/husband

Its quite hard trying to be specific as to what makes a better father, could be a variety of factors but i sorta like this one that I got from FISH! Tales book, "Love for child. is simply being there".

Lets look back again in 2012.

Reflections on 2010

Well 2010 has come and soon will be gone, so time to look back.

I have been married for 2 years now although there are ups and downs but I am happy that I have a nice wife and a cute (and she continues to amaze me everyday) daughter.

Being a father does entail some sacrifices, no longer will you have "your" time, but rather it will be the "family's" time or more accurately the "baby's" time. But the smile of Chloe when she see you wake up and when she is scared and runs to hugs you ( only when the mum in law not around) makes it all worth while. But as for having another one .... lets wait and see :)

Hdb finally decides to give me my house, and it is in the process of renovating, left the painting and the carpentry to be done and it should be ready to move in.

Work wise has been good, finally saw a project from the start to the OSAT phase, couldn't see it all the way to the end though, got rope into another project, as a Software Develop ment Manager, its sort of like a Project Lead kinda thing. Challenging though because the project had already been running for sometime before I came in and there are lots of stuff that I need to pick up and be very familiar with. I am aware of the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle, hope that this is not the end yet :)

On more personal note, I have been trying to pick up the Diatonic Harmonica, practicing while waiting for my wife to go off work. Always sort of regretted that I never did pick up a musical instr ument, haha now trying to catch up. Seems like a lot of people around my age are playing catch up in music, I know a few who are trying to pick up the piano, trumpet and the violin. 

Hope to play like this guy below someday!

or even this guy!

Till the next time...