A Quiet Moment to Reflect, Regroup, and Rethink

The madness of the past few weeks, has taught me the importance of quiet time.  Time that I can truly reflect quietly and calmly work on the next steps I need to take.  Most of the week I have rushed, ran and tired to compact as much I could into a single day.  But you can only do this for so long before you have to slow down.  While life fills up with small, urgent tasks, those tasks are rarely that important.  Not to say I can forget about the small tasks and go on living comfortably.  Those small tasks after all act as the components of the large important projects in life.  Yet three ideas that have helped me recently are: 1) to keep the important projects in the front of my mind; 2) remember the scale of importance between the day-to-day tasks and the goals in life; 3) maintain balance in one’s life.

Anyways, enough philosophizing for one post…

While I was riding on the train back today, I tried to catch up on some e-mails.  And I found out about the new version of WordPress was available for my sites.  Thanks GoDaddy for being an awesome web host and sending out e-mails notifications of those kind.  Anyways after some twiddling with the new WordPress update, I decided to do some house-cleaning of my website.  One of the slight modifications I made is the new title of the blog.  Yes, I am back to using “The Art of Being Dorian”.  This has been the best title so far, and while thought about using the geeky “Transmissions from High-Earth Orbit” or obscure “Mlaren Racer” or the nice but misleading “The Zen of Dorian”.  (Misleading because even though I like Zen as a design methodology or as a general idea of simplicity, I am not a Buddhist nor do I follow Buddhist philosophy, culture, etc.)  Plus, I good friend of mine in Ireland loved this name back in the day.  And so it is back.

Also note that I dropped the “Hacker, Gamer, Writer” moniker.  Hacker, yes if it means coder and not cracker as it means in conventional terms.  And while I still enjoy playing the occasional game, I rarely do so.  So by definition I fall out of the “gamer” crowd. Just like I’m not much of a boarder since I rarely have the chance to go snowboard, surfing or windsurfing.

So this blog I will dedicate to writing articles about coding, writing and living well.  I think it will be most benefit for everyone.  And I will enjoy sharing my knowledge in these fields, more so than the random ranting that I’ve done in the past.  I hope you enjoy the new blog!

 

Updates – justCheckers Open for Business

An update from the justCheckers website:

Cleaned Up and Open for Business

2009, November 17 – 18:02 — Dorian Pula

It took a while. A much needed upgrade, some changes to bring this site back into the larger multi-site effort I’m involved and some re-integration work back into SourceForge… and justCheckers is back! Finally there are no more blockers to getting back into coding, and hopefully moving this project forward. The plan is to finally get around to implementing the work I’ve meant to implement for so long.

So justCheckers is open for business… and is seeking new developers.

And some other updates:

I’ve restarted work on my stealth project as part of the “larger multi-site effort”.  In addition, I’m almost caught up on responding to everyone’s e-mails and messages.  I should be free enough to restart my writing and work on other long-term projects.  I’m really excited with the progress I’ve made, and I hope it continues this way.

Move It!

Today I realized I need to get a move on.  I realize now that I must capitalize on the opportunity that is justCheckers.  Originally I set up as a project to learn and advance my skills in programming Java and project management.  I learned a great deal from that project.  And after the project’s stalling, I assumed that no more real opportunities arose from it.  Today I realized I was wrong.  There are a multitude of possibilities that I can exercise in either this project or a similar one.  I’m debating what would be the better move, but I’m leaning towards working on justCheckers for now.
Also I planning some rather massive work on this blog too.  I have plans, and I see clearly how I can capitalize by achieving them.