mcpantz.org

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’d know I hate mornings.  We’re not talking cutesy Garfield grumpiness, we’re talking it’s-sharp-objects-time distaste for life.  College let me cement a lax schedule in my life, and working from home lets it continue.

Over Christmas break, my sleeping schedule got completely discombobulated, since I had about eleven consecutive days.  For the next week, it was difficult for me to get up before noon, and was getting worse.  Finally a couple weeks ago, a couple naps aligned my sleep schedule in such a way that I was getting up between 5 and 7 am; something I haven’t done since my high school days.

So far, the major difference is how I use my time.  I usually spend the hours between midnight and 4am doing a lot of nothing.  It’s me time, but I’m usually surfing the internet or watching TV.  When I get up early, I eat (something I used to not do as well), relax online for a while, then get to work.  The relaxed pace of the morning has helped me concentrate on my tasks a lot better than before.  This also lets me leave my afternoons open to socialize or work on my own projects, which I’ve been lamenting for quite a while.

However, it’s harder for me to stay up late.  During the week I’ve been going to bed at about midnight or so, but on weekends I rarely get to bed before 4am.  Yes, my social life is just that draining.  I’m worried about flipping schedules again, but I think I’ll be able to maintain it.

I did unintentionally crash from about 5pm til midnight this past Sunday after a particularly draining night and a brunch with friends that didn’t leave me but five hours of sleep.   This is probably also a result of sleeping only about 6 hours a night; and my body wanting to play catch-up.  Either way, I’m going to need to find a balance, what with work and play once again coming into conflict

For the past few months I’ve been working with a friend of mine to establish a hacker space in Chicago.  When we started, ther was ofthen just the two of us attending, and whoever else we managed to unsuspectingly wrangle into attending.

For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of a hacker space, let me give you my vision of the project.  Most of the people involved in this, including myself, are interested in projects that don’t always fall along the traditional lines.  We’re interested in science, technology, crafts, and more often than not the intersection between these areas.  We want to tinker, to create, to share ideas.  To go about this, we’re essentially creating a mad scientist’s clubhouse.  We’re collecting power tools, electronics (both broken and functioning), building supplies, and anything else we think is useful.  I have an old ham radio I plan on jury-rigging up to *something* via serial port.

Since Eric, myself, and a few others started drumming up interest, we’ve come along way.  We drummed up an excellent name from a friend of mine at Verecundia; Pumping Station: One.  We’ve started to visit other similar groups, and look at now defunct groups (Dorkbot Chicago, I’m looking at you), garnishing interest.  Things started to take shape, and here we are.  Our evangelistic efforts have now placed our pledged initial membership  group to over 20 people.  This is not far from the target sustainability level necessary to keep the place afloat by membership fees.  We’ve registered as a non-profit organization in Illinois and gotten our IRS numbers in order.  We’re investigating spaces and soon we’ll have our financials set up, collecting membership dues, and vote on our bylaws.  And most importantly, we’re learning & creating.  In essence, we’re not far from having a grass-roots, non-profit, self-sustaining art & technology collective in the span of six months.

I invite anyone in the Chicago area, or anyone who may be passing through, to follow the progress of  Pumping Station: One.  We’ve got a lot planned, and we’re always looking for new members to contribute ideas.

So here we are in 2009, and in between the hangovers and days off people are considering what they’d like to achieve this year.  I already accomplished my major goal (see last post), but there’s still much I’d like to do before I feel like I’m living a completely sane and productive life:

• I’d like to start working out again.  I don’t specifically mean getting pumped in the gym, but to get back into martial arts or somehow train myself  physically.  I’m not wasting away, but I want to make sure I still am in good shape.
• I want to be more of a polyglot, both spoken and computational.  I want to pick up Python and Haskell in the coming year, though using darcs, haskell’s community-standard revision control system, isn’t all that appealing to me.  Beyond that, I want a good excuse to start practicing my spoken languages again, as my German’s always been abysmal and my Spanish could use some polishing.  If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll pick up French; but that’s got a snowball’s chance right now.
• In addition to adding new languages, I’d like to expand my toolkit.  I worked as a web programmer for half a year a while back, and I’d like to re-vamp those skills in Perl so I can put things together myself, and actually work on the web projects I’ve had in mind for a while.
• While it’s certainly not a major issue now, I should be putting 15-20% of my take-home pay into savings.  I’ve got a couple recurring withdrawals set up to do that right now.

All in all, my goals are relatively modest, but I feel like that’s what makes them achievable.  Call me back in a year, and we’ll see where I am.