Laurel in NYC

Laurel has been in NYC for the last couple of days and won’t fly back till the 4th of July. It has been a bit lonely without her. I have been working more hours and then playing Rocket League at home at night. Looking forward to her return!

Motivation

Motivation seems to ebb and flow randomly. I would really like to develop a better understanding of how to build up consistent motivation and maintain it. A few influencing factors I’ve noticed on my motivation are:

  • How many calories I ate that day and the day before (more generally gives me a bit more motivation)
  • If there is anything that scares or angers me that gives me drive
  • If I have something I am excited about working on
  • If I’ve exercised too much or too little recently I’ve noticed that can reduce my motivation

General advice from the internet suggests:

  • Set small and measurable goals
  • Develop a mantra (verbal statement reinforcing a positive mindset)
  • Commit publicly to accomplishing a certain task
  • Create your own routines and rituals

 

Smartphone Internet Addiction

I woke up this morning at 6 am with the intention of working on building out phpunit testing for my recruiting application. 2 hours later I finally find myself at my computer after having surfed the internet on my phone in bed all morning. Reddit, Nytimes, Hacker news, Facebook…. they suck you in and don’t let you go!

Video Uploads

Uploading videos to Youtube is a nightmare through their API. All of the videos have to first be uploaded to your server to a temporary directory, then you can upload them to Youtube itself. The problem is that large videos can cause out of memory errors or timeout errors or cause your server itself to bog down.… read more “Video Uploads”