I’m not dead, just restin’
In the meantime I take reference questions
On Hobbies
Sometimes I have these anxieties where I have no hobbies, or no true hobbies. But I think the true thing is I have been in denial of my hobbies.
Write now I am writing this blog in the wonderful Textmate Blogging bundle. I do most of my writing in Textmate, from interview preparation to my book reviews. I don’t really have an excuse to open Word anymore, except when jobs place their postings up as .doc files. Built into the blogging bundle is the Markdown syntax and some other fun time saving tricks which makes writing HTML or CSS or anything else a lot faster. I also don’t use Word anymore for academic writing or my resume, having completed switched to the markup based LaTeX.
Over the weekend I purchased an old CDROM drive for $6.95 CDN to intall Xubuntu. People might have heard of Ubuntu. Xubuntu is a version packaged with a light-weight windowing system. I installed it on this old computer—actual the one I bought with me to my undergraduate degree. It is a Pentium III, and according to the bios only 1.0 GHz.
I hooked it up to my television and a keyboard for only 30 mins. After doing the initial install I’ve connected to it from my laptop through the terminal program SSH. I mostly use it to download things from the Internet and watch videos on the TV (thinks I can initiate from anywhere on the Internet).
A lot of this time off from my job search has been trying to realize what I actually enjoy doing.
Today I continued to work on designing my own Wordpress template from scratch, which should be ready very soon. And I just caught myself reading about Advanced SSH Techniques. I also have been working on designing a Content Management System for a non-profit organization.
Not that I necessarily want to be entirely technical in my work, but I think it is an important set of skills to have in my toolbox.
