discontentMy previous post heralded the beginning of a month of absolute failure and misery.
I sorta tried something different in December. It... was ok, I guess. Then January hit and it went away.
I spent January and February trying desperately to make LC happen. Sorta. January and part of February, anyway. And March.
And... it didn't work. I guess I did some of the script work on my 2013 schedule, and some of the coding, too... but ... it's kinda frozen for the past month.
I can't get Amazon and Kickstarter to work.
Overall, I'm extremely unhappy with the past six months.
On the upside, I have an interview with App Academy admissions today.
I read Nick Winters' book, the Motivation Hacker, on Tuesday. I immediately decided to attempt a success spiral of simple tasks to get me back up to doing the things I want to want to do. So I picked seemingly simple tasks:
- 1, fix the battery on my PACMate
- 2, get Amazon and Kickstarter to work
- 3, get Skype set up for video calls on my new laptop running windows 8
- 4, clean my Laptop fan.
So far, I've only accomplished 3. My goal was specifically to do all of this before today's interview (I wrote 48 hours, which would leave me with an extra two hours to prepare for said interview).
I severely underestimated the difficulty of all of these tasks.
- 1, I either need to get my parents to basically serve as my avatar, or I need to (A) find a screwdriver, (B) find a replacement battery, which involves either (C) ordering one online or (D) going to a store that may or may not have it. None of those are simple tasks! I really don't like talking to my parents, and besides, they're busy all the time and have continually forgotten about the battery issue over the whole 9 months that I've been mentioning it. I looked all over the house for a screw driver yesterday, and couldn't find one (and none of the keys/silverware/etc I tried could do the trick). It's not clear to me whether or not the battery is a unique design; if it is, I'd need to spend an extra $100 to get the correct one from Freedom Scientific (an example of how to get people loyal to your products to agree that you are a horrible company. Did I mention that Jaws costs twice as much as a new computer?). I haven't ever ordered anything online other than digital products, and I don't have access to a credit card. Going out and buying a battery myself would require I get a cab ($25 or so round trip), which I've also never done. Ok, accomplishing this would be one heck of a victory, but it's far from the simple task I painted it as!
- 2, Amazon clearly hates me. After filling out the same forms three times, and only once getting sent back to Kickstarter with a "Something went wrong" message, I'm pretty sure I'm approaching this the wrong way. Oh, and that 3 times was just this week. I've tried it before and got sent in circles then, too.
- 3, this one was not as easy as I'd hoped, either. The Skype web site auto-detects your OS, and the "look at Skype for x" links don't do anything on IE in Windows 8, and the Microsoft store is... terrible. I was also told that Skype for Windows 8 was awful, and the desktop version was desirable. So I had to download it on a different computer and transfer it via Jumpdrive. Luckily, it actually installed after this (which is more than I can say for any other program I've downloaded on that computer other than NVDA). Still haven't tested the video call functionality, but that shouldn't be as big a deal, I hope.
< - 4, what the fish was I thinking, putting this in a list of simple tasks? I don't have compressed air! I don't have screwdrivers! I don't have a clue what the inside of my laptop looks like! There's no way for me to clean the fan without getting someone to help! And both options there (my parents / go to a computer shop) have the same problems that were mentioned in 1. Ugh!
*beats head against the ground repeatedly*
Honestly, at this point I'm hoping that the App Academy thing works out. Maybe I can start a tech/multimedia company in Arkansas (cost of living is way lower than Sanfrancisco / New York, I actually own land and a building there, etc). But I'm almost certain that spending time in one of the App Academy locations, with access to the rationalist communities there, and all the public transportation and sidewalks and things that make it possible for me to actually exist outside of my room, will have no choice but to make me much more powerful. I wonder if that's a function of location, though? If, after all that, I still live in the middle of "no sidewalks and two busses, AR", will I go right back to being a helpless pile of failure?
What's really bugging me, though, is that I've been working on Jeqostuff for years. Hetra is the youngest, and it's at least ten years old. The pseudo-Jeqo Suuri Bunshoudai is 9. Taoe / SD in something resembling an identifiable form come from 2002 at the latest, but incorporate lots of things that were solid from way before that. EC and LC come out of 2000. And all of these incorporate things I've been toying with since 1993.
Why am I not awesome yet? I don't intend to settle for being a whiny pretentious basement nerd. Every year for the past 6, it's been "No more bullcrap; things will happen this year." And I'm still here, making the same complaints!
I'm calling Radio Shack today. Just that is scary enough that I'm hesitant to precommit to it in the dramatic, no room for retreat, ship-burning way that Nick Winters recommends. Let me say that again: I'm too afraid of making a harmless phonecall to bet $10 on me actually doing it. This is unacceptable.
I'm thinking about turning this into the sort of journal worth sharing--one where I try new things and report on their efficacy, make an active attempt to improve and try to bring other people into it, either for their benefit or to create social pressure to succeed. I'm mostly afraid to do so because of all the stuff I've posted here before now, seeing as most of it is... stupid.
Oh, on social pressure to succeed: People were excited when I posted my plans for LC. I'm still here, whining about how I haven't finished it yet. Internet pressure is not effective unless it is constant. People forget and move on.
Ramble ramble whine whine ramble ramble.
