Representation

I have been eligible to vote since 1996. I find it interesting that for the very first time in my voting life, I will be represented at a national level by a government that I actually voted for. For the first time in my adult life I can safely say that the majority of my fellow Australians feel the same way that I do on the issues that matter to me.

I have spent 11 years in the wilderness, out of touch with society. It's nice to be back :)

Back amongst the living again

It's been a while, and so much has happened yet nothing changes.

In the last couple of months we met Tori Amos, I was involved in a minor car accident, the car was repaired (and looks better than it did before the accident), my knee continues to recover well (I have permission to start running again. Yay!) and Elijah continues to grow and amaze us all.

University sucked up every spare moment that wasn't spent either at work, choring domestically or playing with the boy. I discovered yesterday that the effort was worthwhile as my final assignment mark was returned to me, just squeezing me up in to the High Distinction category, maintaining my perfect record (6 HDs from 6 subjects studied so far). There is still a long way to go as my current pace of 1 subject a semester will see me graduate at the end of 2010 {sigh}. With a bit of luck, the IT skills shortage will rage on unabated until then.

Work has been spotty and at times lacking in stimulation. The new year will bring some personal reflection and evaluation of where I want to be and where we want to be as a family. Interesting times might well be ahead.

Chicks really do dig pink

At least, according to this article on The Economist (Sex, shopping and thinking pink).

Puts those brochures below into perspective I guess.

Boys versus Girls

Two identical pieces of advertising copy. One of these was addressed to me and one of these was addressed to my wife. Guess which one is which?

Getting it right

I'm not a perfect husband by any means. I'm often tired and grumpy, I can be impatient and I have a nasty habit of being sarcastic, glib and dismissive (all at the same time, mind you).

Last week the local paper had a competition to win an opportunity to meet Tori Amos and receive front row tickets to her Canberra concert. Anyone who knows my wife knows she is a huge (obsessive?) Tori fan and we have had tickets to this concert for many weeks already. I knew H. would be busy the day of the competition so I entered it on her behalf. A chance to meet your hero doesn't come along very often after all.

As a consequence of my entry, we now have two spare tickets to the concert, my wife has enjoyed a week of excited anticipation as she waits to meet her musical hero this weekend and, for just a short period of time, I have been proclaimed The Best Husband in the Universe.

See, sometimes I do get it right.

Alive and well

I've received a number of notes from people checking to see how I'm going as the nasty looking photos of my knee are the latest bits of information I have up.

Briefly, surgery went well, recovery/rehab is going even better and I'm making daily improvements.

Life is good (but a bit achy at times).

Feeling kneeded. Again.

I'm out of hospital and feeling okay (painkillers help, although they are a little strong). The worse-case scenario didn't materialise and I am thankful I didn't need my ACL reconstructed. In the end my meniscus was repaired (by cutting lots of it away) and the doctor punched a hole in the cyst that had also grown on my knee. Hopefully that will start draining away, too.

For the not so squeamish, here's the before and after...

Before

After

Slice and dice

It's official - I'm going to be operated on and I'm booked in for Tuesday.

I knew when I injured my knee playing football four weeks ago that it was going to be bad news for me. Straight away I felt something go and I thought "This could be it for the year." Turns out I was right.

The verdict from external examinations is that I've got a very badly torn lateral meniscus in my left knee, a large cyst (the result of significant trauma apparently) and an even-odds chance that I've sustained damage to my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), which is kind of like the foundation ligament inside the knee joint that is very important for stability of the joint.

At best, I'll have a very large chunk of my meniscus removed (what is left of it anyway - I had a piece removed 11 years ago) and the cyst will be drained of the fluid and left to settle on its own. A medium outcome is that the cyst will have to be surgically removed (which is surgeon's preferred option at the moment) through an incision on the side of the joint. Worst case scenario is all of that mixed in with a knee reconstruction where a piece of my hamstring tendon is removed and used to reinforce the ACL. Across the options recovery to full fitness varies from up to 6 weeks to up to (and beyond) 6 months.

Urgh.

The whole thing is going to cost thousands, too. That's after rebates from Medicare and my health insurance, mind you.

Lots of funky (but ouch, my god, they are going to do what?) video and animations at Orthosports.

Braiiiins

Braiiiins
Originally uploaded by smperris

In Case of Zombies.

Threadless t-shirt birthday present number 2.

30 days later...

This is definitely a late post. I am aware of that.

I have been absorbing the lessons from my disastrous attempt to spend 30 days actually doing something...well, anything, really.

1. Have a plan. Knowing what it is you want to do has to be more successful than thinking "Right. It's Monday. What do I want to do now?", because that sucked big time as a method of achieving stuff.
2. Related to the above, spend some time working out where it is you want to improve. Fumbling and bumbling and guessing and hoping it will come to you is probably not going to work. It didn't for me at any rate.
3. Failing is okay. Not being able to get it together has shown me the deficiencies in my "plan".

That's it. It took a week to sort out, but that's it. Distilled knowledge, people. Lap it up.

In the short term I'm reacquainting myself with GTD. I had my GTD mojo at the start of the year but it slowly ebbed away as I get a little cocky that I was on top of things. I let my whole system fall apart. Time to rebuild it.

One of the unexpected side-benefits of this process is that my wife has started to get really down with all the clutter we have in our life and our house. We're slowly working on reducing the amount of useless crap we have accumulated. We have both greatly reduced the amount of paperwork we have lying around the house. The shredder has been getting a really good work out. I have also started to be a bit ruthless about what books I will keep and which ones I will get move on. It's been liberating, in a way.

All up, an interesting experience, and one worth trying again after a little bit of preparation.

"Mind like water".

That is the state I want to reach.

Days 27 - 29: It's a trap!

This 30 Days experiment has revealed to me a part of myself that I was only dimly aware of previously - there's a part of my self that likes to set me up and try and make me fail. It attempts to trap me and keep me down. I don't know why it does this but I am aware of it more than ever. It tries to lure me in with promises of change and success and excitement but then tries to keep me in the same old rut, doing the same old tired things. I need to change this. I also have to want to change this. I think the want is nearly there as well.

The last three days have been mildly productive. I did some study (that's going to be a common theme for the next three months); we both finally filled out those forms I have been blathering about for weeks; I fiddled with our broken camera and narrowed down the problem to the zoom lens in some capacity; I finished backing up the home videos on DVD; I checked out some second hand filing cabinets with a view to picking up a couple for the study/studio/computer room; I took the boy out of the house for a couple of hours to give his mother some much-needed peace and creativity time; and at work I individually numbered 200+ pages in my new files, in amongst the day to day activities that keep the machinery of government working.

Like I said, mildly productive. You can make even the laziest of days seem productive if you go to the effort of listing everything that you have done.

I might not have achieved all that much over the last 29 days, but I am learning a lot about myself and how I work. Trying to make substantial changes to the way I do things without a game plan is like leading my self-confidence to the slaughter. I hope to repeat something like this soon(ish). I intend to be better prepared.

Meal worm in venus fly trap originally uploaded to Flickr by blmurch. Used under a Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 licence.

Merlin Mann: Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann is one of my favourite people I have never met but know a lot about. He's a productivity guru who is the creator of the productivity site 43 Folders and is also my favourite regular contributor to the MacBreak Weekly podcast (I don't own a Mac, but want to).

Recently Merlin gave a presentation as part of Google's regular Tech Talks series on one of his favourites - Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero is about how to efficiently process large volumes of email to keep things under control and your own sanity in check. Inbox Zero borrows heavily (and unashamedly) from David Allen's Getting Things Done process.

If you find you're buried under email and other things and you have a spare hour, it might be worth your while to check this out. It's really interesting.

Day 25 & 26: The train wreck continues

Soon you will be able to look away as this train wreck is nearly over.

Once again work has been up and down. This time I have been waiting for some file covers to arrive from Records Management as I've filled up the files I had. One of them arrived today so I'm in the process of filling that one up. A number of briefings and pieces of correspondence have also started their epic journey upstream through the clearance process. It can be a slow and torturous path at times.

Meanwhile, the metaphorical list of things I need to do around the house continues to grow and grow. I am going to have to turn it into an actual list if I hope to get anything done. While I'm going to do a full review of the 30 day experiment when the time has passed, the number one thing I have learnt out of all of this is that if I don't have a physical list of actions, they are not going to get done.

The second thing I have learnt is that even if I only fill half of my 10 book allocation on the Safari Online library, the potential for time wasting is enormous. Right now I'm splitting my time between the Windows Vista Missing Manual and Ebay Hacks 2nd Edition.

Tonight I need to do some introductory reading on XML for my XML Technologies subject. I also think I'm being lined up to do a bit of video editing and uploading as the boy has been acting all cute again, apparently.

Train Wreck was originally uploaded to Flickr by zimpenfish and is used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike 2.0 licence.

Day 24: Slowly on the move

I was going to provide an update via email sent from my phone but I pushed a wrong button and canceled it completely. This much shorter message is Take 2.

I ticked off some chores (I now have an appointment with a specialist next week to have my knee looked at) but my work is still all process and no endgame. It is my own fault and this experiment is showing me I need to take greater control of my own destiny.

Very little will get done at home tonight. I'm still on the bus coming home from uni. It has been a long day already and I have no desire to make it any longer.

I wonder how you apply labels to a post submitted via email?

Edited 24/07/07 21:40 to fix punctuation and formatting and to add a label. Emailing isn't perfect, it would seem, but it's probably cool for short updates.

Day 23: In review

It's only Day 23 (technically yesterday was Day 23) but I've already decided that this experiment has not worked as planned. My day job is getting done, albeit at a slow and disappointing pace. Things are flat at the office and while there's work to be done, no one really feels inclined to power on through it. I think it's a function of what we do, in that when Parliament sits we're at the beck and call of our political masters and when it doesn't, we hit a slump as the urgency fades away and the adrenaline wears off.


On the upside, I have far less filing to complete compared to Day 1, so there have been some benefits.


It's the tasks around the house that have left me the most despondent with my progress. I started off with some great mental motivation but that didn't last long. There are many tasks floating around in the back of my mind that I have left uncompleted and there are probably some that are even unacknowledged. The only substantial thing I did achieve was to clean up my desk in our study. However, that was a couple of weeks ago and I've fed off that achievement for far too long.


Ideas are starting to coalesce in my mind about where I went wrong. My immediate thoughts are that I lacked structure and planning. I also don't think I was fully committed to it, although I thought I was. Being sick for a week in the middle of it didn't help either.


As for what I actually achieved on Day 23, there's not much to say. My day to day work moved along with nothing getting finished but at least with nothing left behind or ignored. Filing, briefings, general paperwork - all in motion. At home, I began backing up a couple of DVD home videos of the boy so that we can reuse the DVDs in the camera. That took far longer than I expected and thinking about it right now, I think it was because I forgot to reset the power settings of the laptop from Power Saver to Full Power. D'oh.

Feeling Kneeded

The physio has confirmed my fears after hurting my knee on the weekend playing football.

The cartilage is very likely torn and I've been referred to a specialist for an official opinion.

Damn.

There's still 6 games left in the season, plus finals. If I need surgery, even a minor arthroscopy, I can kiss the rest of the season and finals football goodbye.

Damn.

The Communist Party

My wife bought me a bunch of t-shirts from Threadless [1].

Here's the first one, "The Communist Party", in hoodie form.

[1] Disclaimer: that's a Street Team link, meaning if you buy anything after following the link, I get credit towards more t-shirts. And I really want more Threadless t-shirts.

Days 19-22: Fading Fast

I'm failing and I know it. I'm starting to sink at an ever increasing rate and it's somewhat concerning to me that after only three weeks, whole days are once more passing without anything substantial being achieved at all.

Old habits are indeed hard to to break.

Friday saw another pointless day of printing, filing and discarding. This is time consuming and dull but necessary. I should be thankful that at the moment there is sufficient time at work to undertake this activity or my filing would be in even worse shape than it already is.

The weekend saw me sacrifice my own productivity to help boost my wife's. I took the boy out with me for a couple of hours Saturday afternoon to watch our first division team play (and get spanked again - they are not having a good season - of course, we took our own beating earlier in the afternoon so it's a club wide misery at the moment). He got to sit around, eat cold Vegemite toast and yell at the players, which means he had a good afternoon. H. was able to get some singing practice done. Sunday morning I took Elijah shopping with me as I spent some of my birthday money on CDs. He got antsy after a while so I didn't get to check out the bookshop and as a consequence, we were only gone for about 90 minutes. H. was able to get more stuff done around the house that had been bothering her, so I guess it wasn't in vain.

Today has been a mixed bag. I've finally finished the printing and collating the filing for my major work project. All I need to do now is to throw it in its file and folio it (ie manually and sequentially number each page - fun. Woo. Hold me back...). Hopefully tonight I can finish off some financial documents that we've been trying to fill out for weeks (various motivational crises have struck this particular issue). I also hope to try and back up some of the home DVDs of Bugs.

I've got to get this back on track, I'm just not sure how right now.

Oh, I forgot that since my wife gave me a bunch of t-shirts for my birthday, I had to make room for them. As a consequence, I have a pile of old and/or holey t-shirts in the bedroom waiting for me to either throw out or donate next weekend (the nearest charity bin requires me to drive there, so it can wait for the weekend).

Day 18: Fuzzy

Today has been another one of those strange days. I printed off a bunch of stuff that will eventually be placed on my most important file. I need to finish off the printing tomorrow and then do the whole date order thing before I do the big hole punching deal, and top it off with some "folioing" (which means I have to manually number each page). I achieved something, that much is clear. Whether it's all I could have achieved is another thing altogether.

I think my work is expanding to fill the available time, which is becoming frustrating. I can't wait for Parliament to sit again. Then the crunch will be back on.

I now have another copy of the financial forms we need to fill out. That's on the list for tomorrow. Tonight, I need to go to bed.