Big Night Out

Finally! Tonight is the big night.

No, not a date or anything boring like that. Duh!

Tonight I am finally going to see The Dark Knight properly in a cinema. “Officially” for the first time. ^.^ Yay! The long wait is over and I will finally be able to enjoy the movie in all its splendor on a big screen.

It kind of figures that I had to catch a cold a couple of days ago and have been feeling like crap ever since, coughing my lungs out, running a fever, feeling breathless after walking from the living room into the kitchen - all the usual symptoms. Thankfully, it’s slowly getting a bit better again, at least the cough. Will that keep me from going to the cinema tonight?

Like hell it will. I have waited too long for this to be held up by a lousy little cold. After all, it’s not like I have to do anything once I’m there, so it shouldn’t be too strenuous. As long as I manage to keep the coughing under control I should be fine.

I just can’t wait to see my boys.

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In some blog or other I just stumbled upon this link to an incredible and inspirational video on YouTube.

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. I say “was” because he died two days ago from pancreatic cancer. This video shows his last lecture, given last September, when he already knew he would not have much longer to live. The topic: Achieving your childhood dreams.

I know I am coming very late to this. According to the counter on YouTube this particular copy of the video alone has been watched by almost 4.5 million people to date (and I’m sure there are countless other copies of it floating around out there).

Honestly, I don’t even remember all that many of my childhood dreams, much less would I still be interested in achieving them today. Also I had never heard about the guy before and even after watching this lecture I am still a bit fuzzy on what it was he actually did for a living (besides teaching, of course). But what he had to say nevertheless touched me deeply, as I am sure it will everybody who takes the time to listen.

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Sorry for any weirdness that you might have witnessed during the last 20 minutes or so. I have just updated both my blogs (this one and the playground/testblog/thingy) to WordPress 2.6.

And again, even though I am still not using the Automatic Upgrade plugin, everything went through without a hitch. I don’t actually see anything new, but I haven’t been looking too hard, either.

As far as I can see from here, everything should be working fine, but if you notice anything amiss, please let me know.

I’m not dead, and I haven’t abandoned this blog either. I’m just a bit busy offline at the moment and don’t have much time to sit down and write proper posts. Besides, it’s still bloody hot here (did I mention I hate summer?) and I’m just too lethargic to do anything I don’t exactly have to.

Recently, I have changed my ISP and spent 4 days on the phone last week, discussing my connection problems with several dozen different hotline people (none of whom could help me so far, because the problem is not the connection itself, but the modem - but they are not ready yet to believe that, coming from a mere customer and a woman at that *sigh*).

Last week I have finally listened to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (the audio version, obviously), which a friend sent me a while ago. It is not exactly a normal audiobook, but the recording of an actual seminar, hosted by David Allen. It consists of 8 CDs and it runs for approximately ever, but it’s very interesting and Allen himself seems a pretty likeable guy. I still have to get my hands on the original book one day, but at least now I know what all the fuss with this GTD stuff is about. I doubt I will ever be disciplined enough to implement the whole system, but I definitely learned a thing here and there to boost my productivity (which, as the queen of procrastination, I clearly need to do one of these days).

Right now I am doing a complete backup of all my data again (the last one was months ago), burning everything on DVDs. This will probably keep me occupied for the next couple of hours (my DVD writer is not exactly the fastest model). But it is fun and it helps me go through all the stuff on my external harddisk and decide what to keep and what to delete.

I do this backup because I had a little scare last week, when I thought my computer was in the process of self-destructing. It was making really alarming noises when I started it up. I just bought a new harddisk a couple of months ago, so it couldn’t be that. Turns out, the little fan that’s cooling the processor was dying. I guess, if that thing really had died on me while the PC was running, I could have kissed my processor good-bye (and with it pretty much the whole computer). As it was, I bought a new fan (for literally 3,50 €) and everything runs smoothly again.

Funnily, that made me think of the Firefly episode “Out of gas”, where Serenity is stranded in space, because one little part of the engine broke. And when Mal tells that to this guy on another ship, the guy says: “But that’s a nothing part.” To which Mal replies: “Yeah, until you don’t have one. Then it appears to be everything.” — Isn’t it great to see how much of Joss Whedon’s writing applies to everyday life? Oh, and isn’t it strange that I can still quote whole passages of dialogue of this show by heart, even though I haven’t watched it in months? Yes, I am a geek.

And speaking about things I am obsessed with: I have just ordered the DVDs of all 3 “Lord of the Rings” movies from a guy on hitflip. The special extended versions, of course. 12 DVDs to look forward to! Yay! Not only is it high time I owned them, but with this I also blew all my points on hitflip, so that I can finally close this account. I liked the concept of the site in the beginning, but it never worked all that well for me and since I mostly only used it for books (which works much better on Bookmooch anyway) I might as well give up on it completely. One less account to keep track of.

Image found on HughLaurie.net

I just found this video over at Get Rich Slowly and thought what this guy is saying about storytelling is equally true for my own current situation.

On the surface he may be talking about storytelling, but what he actually says is true for pretty much any kind of work:

When you start out, you have dreams and ambitions and you have big plans. But what you actually produce is crap. And the worst thing is, you can tell it’s crap.

“A lot of people never get past that phase,” he says. “A lot of people at that point, they quit.”

But - here comes the consoling part - he goes on to say that you have to understand that everybody goes through a phase like this in the beginning and the people who actually manage to achieve success with any kind of work are obviously the ones that don’t quit. The ones that muddle through and keep bumbling along, trying to get better and learn from their mistakes.

And what can I say, he’s right. Now, coming from somebody who just quit something, this might sound a bit hypocritical. But, you see, this course I quit was most emphatically NOT one of my dreams. It was just something that seemed like a good idea for, like, 10 minutes, and then like a bloody mistake for the rest of the time. But I was too scared to change the whole situation with a drastic break.

Now I have finally made this break and a huge load lifted off my shoulders. I am brimming with new ideas and plans and, yes, even dreams which I will start working towards now. But I can see already that as of yet I am not very good at what I am planning to do in the future. But instead of letting that stop me, I will go on with it anyway, muddling through and doing my best until, hopefully, I will be good enough to actually make a living off it. And it was very nice to hear that I am not alone in this position.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On another note: Ira Glass - who is this guy? I never heard of him before, but after watching this video (and the other 3 parts of this talk) I think he’s adorable. Not to mention funny.

And because of that I was curious enough to check out the website of his show “This American Life“, where I found that you can actually download whole episodes of the radio and tv show. Great. Now how am I supposed to get any work done in the next 2 weeks or so? *sigh*

Oh my gawd. I did it.

I just quit this damn molecular biology course.

And that’s all because of Tim Ferriss and his book, the audio version of which I have been listening to obsessively over the last week.

I still can’t believe I really finally did it. I have been fantasizing about making this call literally for months. I was so very close to doing it about a hundred times - basically every day while I was sitting in class and dying a little inside I made my mind up to call as soon as I got back to the flat. But for one reason or another, I always found excuses not to.

Until today.

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