An inspiring story. A hard one, and one that comes from someone with talent.
I like seeing stories like this, and I think they do give some inspiration to others. Here is someone that was dealt a hard hand in life, and turned it around, with perseverance and hard work.
However this is clearly an exceptional person. I wish we saw more stories from people that were average, or even just slightly above average making a change in their lives, and growing. It’s more realistic, and I think it would motivate more people to actually pursue their goals, rather than looking at someone like this and thinking “I’m not that talented” and I won’t have that level of success.
You should pursue your dreams, not be afraid of the hard work and setbacks, and roll with them..
I don’t know if electric cars are the answer, but I do think electricity will play a larger part of how we move things around in the future. Overall it’s more efficient, if we can figure out how to generate it well, and also provide it to vehicles in an efficient manner.
This article on smart car charging is fascinating to me. It essentially moves the cost of the power from the owner of the outlet providing the power, to the person using the power. I don’t know how feasible this is, or how much it would cost to deploy this in the US, but it’s a good idea.
I am, however, concerned about the security implications. How many people will attempt to hack this and charge others? How much of a legal issue will we have with disputes?
Brad recently wrote an editorial about the career-life balance and asked you to think about whether or not you might be focusing too much time on your career. I write fairly often about the need to manage your career, and learn more on a regular basis. There’s only 24 hours in a day, so how do you fit it all in?
The simple answer is use the 4th dimension: time.
We can’t fit it all in. There’s no way that any individual can work full time, raise a family, be a good spouse, find time for their friends, pursue a hobby, learn more about their craft, and more in a year. However we don’t live in a single year; we live across time.
There are times in our lives when work is busy. There are times in our lives when our home life is busy. Hopefully those times don’t overlap, but that is not always the case. We have to learn to find some balance over time, and work on our goals, not necessarily in parallel, but perhaps sequentially. Spend more time on different parts of your life, at different times in your life.
If your job keeps you extremely busy, then perhaps you don’t focus on learning more this year, or you take on less personal commitments. If you really want to work on a hobby, or coach your kids in sports, or run a marathon, you might need to take on less at work for a period of time. If work is slow, and you are bored, perhaps you ought to spend more time educating yourself on SQL Server and improve your future prospects.
There are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 365 (or 366) days in a year. However we live for many years, and we ought to remember that when we have a busy life. Push back, learn to say no, and learn to be more efficient to fit more things in, but don’t try to fit everything in.
You only get one life, so enjoy it while you can.
Steve Jones
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I bought a Brother 2060 about 5 years ago to serve as our primary printer at the ranch. It was a basic, compact, black and white laser that did a good job for us. It seems as though we’ve had it forever, and I’ve only replaced the toner once. We don’t print a ton, but it’s been a very solid printer.
In that time, we’ve had an HP inkjet, and an Epson Workforce 610 Inkjet all in one that currently works fine, but is very flaky on the network. We’ve been reduced during the last week to saving images to a flash drive and plugging that into the Epson.
That’s because the old Brother seemed to die. The feed for paper (auto or manual) just won’t pull paper in, and so the machine doesn’t print.
I asked for a few recommendations from Twitter. I was thinking to bite the bullet and get a color laser, which might replace both printers, and keep the Epson as a spare. We don’t print a lot, but the kids sometimes need color for school stuff, and we definitely need something to print out the occasional document. Usually so we can tackle the process using the antiquated fax method.
We looked at a few recommendations and were considering the a Brother color laser, but it felt wrong to spend $300 for something that we rarely need. I’d rather fuss with the inkjet when we need it, or even buy new ink.
So we settled on the Brother 2270, pictured above. It’s a low end printer, for $120, and hopefully it will last as long as our previous one.
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