Hey, it's me again. I haven't been posting nor updating the site because I was too busy studying for college. Know that I have passed all classes this semester (with a decent score, mind you) and I am free until the second semester starts in August. So here we are. There are many things I wanted to write about, so expect a couple of posts in the near future! There's a little announcement at the end so if you don't feel like reading all the post, at least check out the las paragraph. Introduction's over.
I have always been a person that would start anything that seemed remotely interesting, and then give it up after a couple of days. If you check out any of my profiles where I track stuff, you'll see that the "plan to x" or "dropped" lists are far longer than the "completed" ones. I wonder why is that. Not being able to finish things and getting closure is quite frustrating, so I made up my mind to put a stop to that and started finishing shit, and boy, was that a good decision.
You see, even though I wanted to get back to the beautiful habit of reading, I was afraid that I would give it up again and even MORE books will be left unfinished. So first of all, I decided to finish all the books I dropped, so that later I could begin new ones without feeling guilty. At the same time, to get used to reading more, I decided to aim for reading 50 pages of just about anything a day, really, whatever did just fine, as long as it was something I had dropped (there are some books which are 1000+ pages that I'll leave for later).
Thanks to that I was able to finish Animal Farm, The Kybalion, The Man in the High Castle and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a short amount of time. Pretty cool, huh?. I wish I had read them sooner, 100% recommended.
Having done all that (and not without the help of the knowledge ingrained in the books themselves), I realized the huge importance of little accomplishments, such as finishing a book, and the huge boost of motivation that they can give you. Now I am more wary of the things I begin, only to do so if I am pretty sure I will finish them. That is why it is important to keep realistic expectations and don't try to bite more than you can chew (although there are certain cases when that can be useful).
You might have noticed I stopped posting about my game engine, that alone says a lot, right? If we extrapolate my previous experience to programming, it is clear that first, one should tackle little, manageable projects instead of jumping straight into something complex which is likely to be dropped, like, I don't know, a game engine.
For that same reason I decided to target small "utilities" instead, which are interesting enough and very likely for me to finish. I have come up with a couple of ideas and started working on them, the first of which is p2padga, a simple bittorrent client built using libtorrent and ncurses (yes, this was the announcement). I implore you read the disclaimer, and if it's not much trouble, give me some feedback on all the features it lacks and the shitty programming. I mean, I have downloaded some stuff with it, so even if it's overflowing with segfaults, at the very least, it werkz on my machine.
Seeing that I am able to actually do something to the point it is usable makes me really happy and fills me with eagerness to keep doing things. So yeah, going back to the topic, you should probably try your best and finish what you start.
I know your attention span is even shorter than that of a goldfish, so I will put and end to this here (the post was long enough anyways). I really missed posting here. See you! (^.^)
P.S.: the screenshots are not related at all, I just find them really lovely. But do yourself a favor and watch 天使の卵.