Showing posts with label aspiration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aspiration. Show all posts

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Another milestone. Another step forward.

A few weeks back, I started to toy with the idea of setting up a wordpress website myself for to get myself more committed on developing the financial aspects of my life. And after brainstorming some names and some discussion with Dearest, I went on to set it up on last Wednesday night!

It's something new for me. Usually, I would just go for the free and convenient choice, like this blogspot. haha.. but I would want endeavor to be more professional, so I decided to go for wordpress, with my own domain name. 

The contents that I will be working on that financial blog, would be the things that are relevant to my current life trajectory, like savings account, cpf, hdb loan, etc. I'm not sure how things will go, or whether would I have enough contents (and motivation) to keep that blog going, but I think it's good to just try it out first! I believe those contents are worth sharing, and they would benefit those who come across. 

As a young adult in Singapore, it's not easy earning money while trying to save up for future plans (e.g. wedding, house, family), and also preparing to support our aging parents. All these, and the desire to gain financial independence, is pushing me more and more as I approach my 30 years of living.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Progress Update

It's been more than a week since my last post.
I figured I should sit my butt down in front of the computer to properly chart out my progress instead of scrolling through the never-ending pages of Facebook, or playing games on Steam, or viewing random Youtube videos, or ... seriously, there are tons of things that are more attention-grabbing and have short term gratification than typing out this post.
But still, in order to live my life, I should evaluate myself more often through blogging.

First of all, I have been quite satisfied with myself on being consistent with improving my physical well-being.
For the past 12 days ever since I have recovered from my recent cold, I have exercised for 9 days, and each time is around 30 to 45 min. Hurray~
It hasn't been easy for me to cater time to exercise; to put on my running shoes, get out of the house, and pant like a dog in view of others.
I would have to say the greatest motivation for me so far is the impending Spartan Race on 15 Nov.
I'm left with 1 more week to prep myself so I wouldn't die from running through all the obstacles.

Previously I was quite into working out at home using the Sworkit Lite mobile app due to the haze which restricts me to indoor activities.
However, the recent weather seemed to have cleared up the foggy sky!
Perhaps it is due to the increased in efforts (or the acceptance of efforts) to extinguish the fire.
Or, it could just be the wind.
No matter what, I'm grateful for the good weather to get my body sweating outdoors!

I felt that it is important for me to get my body conditioned to running some distance instead of just staying indoors and doing static exercises.
I have tried out 2 methods so far:

1) Running 2 km with a 5 kg body weight + arm strengthening exercises

I did this twice, and decided to drop this method.
Although carrying an extra 5 kg load sounds pretty mild, the weight pulled down my speed quite significantly.
It seemed to be good training.
But it caused my back to hurt a bit at the end of the 2 km run.
I figured that the 5 kg load is putting too much burden on my body to train efficiently.
So after 2 tries of this, I decided to give up on running with the 5 kg load.
I felt that the body weight vest would be utilized better when I'm doing static exercises at home.

2) (400m + 10 burpees) * 6

I came up with this routine to train my body in running short distances and also the prepare myself for the possible burpees that I would be doing during the Spartan race.
So far, this routine has been a good workout (i.e. I felt like dying, but not dead yet).
I would probably continue this for the week coming up to the race.

I don't think all these physical training is sufficient to prep myself well for the race.
But it's probably near the limits to what my body can take given the time constraints.

As for my self-guided Java Learning journey, it has been rather sporadic.
It was hard to build a routine of reading and practicing the materials taught in the book, most of the weekday nights I'm quite exhausted from work and exercise.
I did most of my learning on the train if I managed to find a seat while I'm travelling to or from work.
There are 16 Chapters in total, and I'm only at Chapter 3.
It's getting more sophisticated, but it's also getting more interesting =p
The experience of writing codes is rather similar to answering Mathematics problem sums.
Both are finding logical solutions to a problem, and there are also multiple ways of approaching the problem.
Sometimes, I also have to try certain things to see whether a certain approach would work.
Lots of trial and errors.
Feels like learning Mathematics all over again! Wee~!

In starting a habit of reading, I tried to force myself to read a book while I was waiting for dearest to get ready to chat at night.
I only managed to do it for 2 nights so far. haha..
Ya, reading is definitely not my thing.
Therefore, in order to keep to it, I have reduced my daily aim from 15min to 10min.
Hope that helps! >_<

I haven't been doing much micro time management.
That means I'm just doing all these activities on an ad-hoc basis without much planning before hand.
I probably should start doing more planning to ensure that these habits will follow through even when I'm hard-pressed for time.

On a side note, blogging is also become cumbersome because of the time I have to invest to writing this kind of long post (because I could have used the time to play games and watch Youtube videos).
Since it's a way of keeping track of my progress,  I should probably have a schedule for writing on my blog.
Therefore, I have decided to publish at least two blog posts per week; one on Wednesday, and one on the weekends (either Sat or Sun).

I also want to list down some of the topics that I would like to blog on in future so that I can remember them.
I will try to figure out how to put this list on the blog.

So far, so good.

Living my life.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Project Aspiration: Java Apprentice

As I am still recovering from my cold, so I can't really exercise.
I decided to get started on another thing that I have been putting off.

For a while now, I have been generating ideas that could either be helpful to the society (or me), or they could be a secondary source of income. I logged down all these ideas in a private notebook and really hope to work on some of them one day. The main challenge is that these ideas require programming skills to materialize, and I have almost zero experience in it. I could hire a programmer to do the job for me, but how fun can that be? plus I don't really have a lot of money to hire them, especially knowing that it's not certain that these ideas would eventually have a ROI. So, I decided to just learn it myself, and this became a part of my aspiration.

The first step to being an app developer is to learn programming.
But what programming language should I learn?
This was something that bugged me when I started to toy with the idea of developing app.
However, a quick search on Google could easily solve the problem.


Link
According to the above flow chart, the programming language for me to start on is ... Java!
There's also an interesting analogy of the programming languages to the characters in Lord of The Rings. Apparently, I'm going to be Gandalf.

I have saved a few websites to learning Java previously. 
But I think I will start with a more conventional course from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 
The course is called, "Introduction to Programming in Java".
The link to the course can be found here.
It feels like I would having a proper learning structure to form a strong foundation if I start from here.

I didn't have the time to start on any of the materials yet, but I will.
In case I start to procrastinate again... Let me set a target.

By the end of this week: At least 4 hours.

By the way, I have added a habit lists for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly to the side of the blog, and also included a habit tracking Google calendar at the bottom of the blog. 
Let's hope these will keep me on track.

Time to rest for the night and hope the cold will go away~