25 June 2009

The end of a chapter

Finally, I have finally satisfied one of my curiosities enough to move on to another. I have read enough books on fitness to proudly say I know enough about this topic to achieve my goals. Now just a matter of executing the knowledge and realizing my dreams. I've read tonnes of books and each book has its own point of view as well as new information to either completely throw me off my path or renew my faith in believing in what I'm doing.

So this begs the new question, which other curiosity do I satisfy? Much like what I read in my fitness books, at the end of the day, we get fit to survive and this leads me to functionality. I know it's always cool to get all buffed up and ripped, but at the end of the day, having huge arms does nothing but intimidate people and potential threats. From a usability point of view, they're quite useless unless you're trying to be a paper weight :P I have nothing against buff dudes, heck I admit I'm working on adding mass too but I guess at the end of the day, you got to do stuff for he bigger picture.

So, seeing as how I've progressed so much in both my fitness knowledge and physical being, it would lead me to pursue my drumming life and work on improving that. In fact, today while I was practicing drums, I realized I'd been spending far too much time on isolation exercises and my ability to just play the drums had gone down. So I decided it's time I got back to playing the drums and just followed the musical exercises in my books and kept at it. I'll do more research about the best way to advance my drumming later, because if my drumming never improved any more, I'd still be able to live.

What I won't be able to live without is my web design skills. I've recently been looking at improving my skills and got introduced BluePrintCSS. When I took the time to understand this framework, it took me back to a while ago when I used to read book after book about the best ways to make HTML websites and boy has that come in handy. All the neat little tips and tricks have helped not only save me time, but made me a living. All those cool frameworks I used to dab and learn about, stuff like jQuery used to make me all hot and excited because of all the cool things I could do with it! And then it all stopped, I got so caught up in the actual work, I got a bit out of touch with the new tide of the web. The funny thing is, I can still do my job, just there are better ways of achieving the same/better thing. Kind of like saying you can still get your message across via snail mail, but email just makes it soooooooooo much faster/better/easier.

This begs the 1st question of any quest: Where do I start?
Well, to be honest, I don't know. I'm ready to run back all the way to the basics, but that's not what I'm worried about, it's the source of this knowledge/refresher that I need to be certain about. I am a big fan of Friend of Ed (heck I'm a moderator on their forums, that's how much I love them) but I've been so out of touch I don't even know where to start with their books! But fear not for the web I have....the web! Yes, the mighty Internet to the rescue! I guess with any project of mine, it all begins with research. So here we go, for the next 10 days, my quest will be to find the best first step to re-invent myself as a new media designer/developer. Oh and a kick-ass drummer and comedian and you know the rest :P.

Oh and I've recently started on the book 4 hour work week. Long live audio-books! I'm only in the beginning and well so far I'm still not 100% sure what the book is going to be about but I do know that a lot of people are raving about it, so let's see what's the big fuss :P If anything, at least it'll make those mundane trips on the train a bit more productive. Sigh, I love and hate productivity. It's like a drug to me. Kind of like that addicted feeling you get when you work out and suddenly stop? Oddly recently I've managed to mentally avoid that weird feeling because I've finally convinced myself the importance of rest from exercise and I have results to prove its usefulness! Now if only I could convince myself of the importance of some "do whatever" time :\... oh well maybe this book'll be the magic pill!

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2 Comments:

Blogger chris said...

I really used to think buff muscle guys wasted a bunch of time working out. But now I think that it's another way to achieve perfection in something. The greeks honored athletes with the oplympics. So working out could be just like painting or doing music.
And c'mon Vivek. I've know what you're doing with you're new super tight muscle shirts. haha. Keep up the fitness goals mine. I'll try to do the same.

02 July, 2009 10:02  
Blogger Vivek Mahbubani said...

Ahaha all I can say is long live clothes-shrinking cheap ass washing detergent :P

02 July, 2009 10:47  

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