Welcome back
I haven't been able to update for about four weeks. The reason for this is that I, rather uncharacteristically, decided to dive into the work of updating my blog with four days left before school started. I had been making excellent progressive during the past three weeks, and cleared off a ton of tasks. The remaining items that I had left seemed manageable, so I felt it prudent to start in on another project before school started.
What I didn't foresee was that Movable Type, the blog software I use, and the theming capabilities that it comes with, are iffy at best. Actually getting a particular layout to work with my blog, based on my own anecdotal evidence, is very fiddly work. On top of that, I have very little CSS experience to draw upon, and just don't really enjoy doing the work. Although the idea of using themes was to avoid having to do any of that, the themes that you are given are quite limited, and if you want to go even just a little bit outside of the box, you need to be willing to get your hands dirty. I was not fooling myself that this would be necessary, but didn't anticipate that school would get as busy as quickly as it did, and that installing a theme would bring down my whole blog.
If you are viewing this site directly, you can currently see that it's extraordinarily ugly (and I'm actually surprised you've read this far if that is the case, instead of just refusing to accept my imposing something like this on your sensibilities). If you're viewing it in an RSS reader, then that's all good, and really the main aim to which I publish anyhow.
Still, people are bound to be googling my name from time to time, and it sucks that this is the ultimate result that they end up at. Enough of that for now. Change will come, at some point down the road, and until then, we're all stuck with either using a feed reader (which you should be doing anyway - check out Google Reader if you haven't yet), or reading text on an ugly site.
Law School
I don't know what I can write about law school at this point that won't end up coming off as hopelessly optimistic or simply trite.
Suffice it to say that I'm really enjoying the faculty, the classes, my classmates, and the subject matter so far, and that although I'm sure the workload (and consequently, the stress) will increase as time wears on, I'm optimistic in my belief that I will continue to feel positive about both my decision and the new field of study that I have chosen to pursue.
Law bears a lot of overlap with a way of thinking that I have pursued and espoused for a while now: skepticism. Being in a degree program where we are not just encouraged but expected to make use of faculties that focus on seeing both sides of an issue and determining the most effective ways to argue for either of those is challenging and rewarding.
Dancing
The fall term has kicked off at Vibestreet Dance, and things are going great. I've finished giving my third class so far this term, and have also started giving some private lessons. The students seem to be enjoying what I'm putting down, and that's good, because I really am too.
So far I have taken the class through the basics of popping, waving, and tutting, and this Tuesday I will be giving an intro class to locking. Although I am nowhere near the locking instructor that some of the people I've been fortunate enough to train with are, I think that I am good at conveying information in a way that other people can understand, and I do spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand the fundamentals of these dances. I'm excited to teach something that is still very new to me, and especially a dance that I have so much respect for and that has so much history behind it.
Giving private lessons is also a new experience, and allows for a much more organic approach to teaching. Whereas class teaching requires that I keep things at a basic level, stay on track and can only address individual students for a brief period of time, teaching one-on-one with someone allows us to follow diversions that may come up, and to spend much more time on a specific piece of foundation if the student is having trouble with it.
I was fortunate enough to be awarded a small scholarship by Liz Vaesen, an instructor in Vancouver that brings hiphop workshops over to Victoria about six times a year. As a result, I'll be taking a dance workshop tomorrow in old school hiphop and locking from Keeley Kaukimoce. It's an honour to be chosen for something like this, and quite humbling. Homework allowing, I'll blog about my thoughts post-workshop.
Productivity
School is busy and requires a lot of time, but by staying on top of classes, reading, and managing my time effectively, I'm finding that I still have time to fit everything else that I want in. We are given classes only from Monday to Thursday, and Fridays are reserved for make up classes.
So far, I've spent my Friday's studying and fitting in a game of squash around lunch time. With a little bit of discipline, it's pretty easy to avoid falling into the trap of treating Friday like your weekend, and getting through a ton of your work. I get up at the same time I do on the rest of the weekdays (6:30), put in four hours of studying, give myself two hours off, and then come back for another four hours. By the time I'm heading out the door to meet up with friends in the evening, I've completed most of my reading for Monday and Tuesday.
One of the most valuable habits that I developed through my previous work in project management, and learning and applying the principles of GTD, has been minimizing and eventually quashing the tendency to procrastinate. Defeating this bad habit is one of the better ways to squeeze more time out of each day. You don't actually gain any more time, but you are now controlling 100% of how you want to spend that time. Whereas, when procrastinating, you are forced into undertaking activities that fit with the aims of procrastinating (typically short in duration, because you won't allow yourself, mentally, to start anything big, knowing that you've got something else you really should be working on; usually somewhat fun, and usually a bit of a distraction - Facebook anyone?).
If you're interested in more tips on eliminating procrastination, check out some of my archives related to Productivity and GTD. Ah, excellent.. clicking on those links currently appears to be broken. Bah. Well, look for those later then.
The rest
I'll end on a curio that Bay and I picked up this weekend at Future Shop, shown below:
This little piece of plastic acts as a power-free amplifier for my iPhone's speaker. If you look, you can see taht the plastic has a series of curves cut out of the interior. These curves operate on a similar principle (presumably) to that of many brass instruments, and you can see that at the end the cut-out spreads out into the shape of the bell of a trumpet. Simply by putting my iPhone into this device, I can amplify the signal considerably, without needing any power. Although you can see a wire coming out of this guy, it is simply cable that connects my iPhone to my laptop. This can be removed without affecting the way this device operates, and is simply there to allow me to use the amplifier as a dock as well as it's original purpose.
I've got my homework/study space set up at home on our dining room table (though it's pretty easy to move to the office), and I can use this dock to hold my iPhone when it's acting as a remote to our home stereo. That looks like this:
Kind of cute right? It's pretty functional too. When I want to listen to my voice memos, the amplifier serves quite well, as I just turn on my speaker and shoot them through it. Makes it quite handy to process those ideas at the end of the day or week (during my weekly review).
Anyhow, enough of that. More to come now that I'm back up, but until then, at least I'm publishing again.