I Give Up!

... But that may be a good thing.  Lately I have been fighting a lot of things in for my "career" which has just put me in a HUGE state of negativity all around:

• manager sidelining me
• falling behind in skills
• trying to find a better job but no luck: many recruiters that just run away... 

So much struggling but what for? Really what’s the point? A bit of extra money. 

Seems not worth it… too must time and energy spent/wasted.. and don't forget I've got a whole bunch of personal problems as well and well... guess shouldn't increase my chances of sever depression?

Not sure if I am already in it or not though...

But I am going to try to get back on track… so maybe a belated New Year’s Resolution:

• Eat healthier and exercise more... meditate, mindfulness? I read exercise and this stuff could help me feel better about myself 
• Read more Amazon library is now at 1400 e-books, and well the majority sound good
• Write some personal programs, look for joining an Open Source project also seems Java is the way to go... Scala
• Maybe learn some Go hear that new language is heating up...
• Eat out but healthier a bit more
• Figure out exactly how much money I would need to retire... doubt I will even live to 40.

Yes.. figure out how to enjoy life NOW

The Powerball is (was) at $1 BILLION!.... Pfffftt........

So awhile ago you probably heard the jackpot was at a record breaking $1,000,000,000+ ... but only  ~ $600 million lump sum…  before taxes…  after that maybe only $300 but that was split 3 ways.

This post is really late as I forgot and well wasn't in a blogging mood for the last 3-4 months... more on this later...

What they didn’t remind us this was that most likely this is the new normal. AND that the odds of winning anything is now less than half of what it was before.  

Another way of looking at it?  

The states get to collect more and more interest while somebody tries to win the jackpot and of course in the end they take a larger chunk from taxes too…

In other words:  your state and federal taxes just went up… and the lottery has now become more of a money black hole… 

But sometimes I guess you do need to buy a ticket to keep a bit of hope alive... Lately I've bought 1 ticket a week because well... it's been rough... 

Candidates for 2016 US Presidential Election

So given how the US seems to be going to s -- uhm -- pieces, I figured I might care a bit more about this the Election since I am now registered to vote. I'm still not too sure what I want though but it seems to be a choice between anarchy and more anarchy....

What happened to bipartisanship, cooperation, and compromise? What are these politicians... 5 year olds that just go "me, me, me..." all day?

Anyway back to the topic at hand, I was looking for a cheat sheet where I could compare all the candidates views and other info.... I couldn't really find one. I did find insidegov.com although it's really slow, has ads, and can't seem to compare all the candidates in a single side-by-side way...

Also each page seems to be 2MB large... What? Probably all the ads and tracking...

Anyway, I was also itching to do some programming and use some stuff I'd been learning from reading algorithm books last month... so I wrote a program that extracts all the info (that can be easily gotten), organizes into a SxS, and dumps it into Excel:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwHjtARwf-GFWEV6cENNUFRBQXc

This is a summary view and there's more detailed information on the site but.... I have other things to do at the moment...

A New Year

I’ve been in a very bad mood lately as lots of unhappy things have been going on these few months unfortunately and also why I didn't blog again. I also seemed to have been burned out as well, because of these and also like 4 weeks of studying algorithms.

I think a sign of burnout is that things that you usually are interested in… no longer interest you or bring you happiness, fulfillment. For me, I like being productive and efficient but coding, reading nonfiction books, surfing Quora and news sites, and even watching my favorite TV felt…. Meh. 

And so these last 3 days in decided to take a “vacation”: none/very little productivity and huge doses of fun. Winter makes that harder... hence the Taiwanese drama binge. 

Yes… more TV but I haven’t watched this genre for over a year and had a few that I hadn’t gotten around to watching… It’s been 10 hours already and may still go…. I forgot how funny they were and that’s the big thing. They also have great music but I can no longer hear them… :( but still a good recharge... I think… we’ll see… tomorrow…

But that’s the thing… you’re emotions and mood set your tone towards things around you.

Law of Attraction, self-fulfilling prophecies, positive thinking, whatever you call them… I can say it’s quite true. After going into a better mood… I feel better now, feel like I might be able to do something again…

It feels like I hit a RESET and now time for A New Year!

Now back to binging…. This is the dangerous part of Taiwanese dramas and maybe binging in general... once you start… you may not be able to stop… easily. 

Styles' BasedOn Default Style

Just a small how-to/tip... and note to self.

Often you want to modify a control's property while keeping the others the same (maintain the other properties' values).

<Style TargetType="Label" BasedOn="{StaticResource {x:Type Label}}">

This modifies the Label type within the context, but retains it's previous style (in my case a ResourceDictionary).

Deciding to Take Responsibility

After watching Joelle's TED talk and reading her book, it just hit me that most of my life, I wasn’t really taking responsibility. I was responsible in certain areas but in terms of health and actually wanting to live… not really. I trusted things (and people) were going to turn out how they did and I could only go with the flow.

Basically Come What May thinking. My disability and my environment kinda of reinforced that.

Doctors: nothing you do will make a difference… eat whatever you want and hope for a cure

Parents: make the best out of your current situation, you can't really hope for more.

Work: you did a great job… keep working hard (for the little that we give you).

And of course myself: I am disabled, things are hard, what exactly can I hope for? Why set high goals when it seems they will be unreachable, just try to make the best I can out perhaps just enjoy the life you have left…

Well the last part after the or and that thinking in general might be the cause of the downturn in health… I really like chocolate, meat, junk food…. Don't like exercising but hey… I didn't matter… there what the doctor said and you know do I really care when I do.. But then again that belief had to come from somewhere...

So seemed dying ASAP isn't such a bad idea because there's nothing in this world that I like… other than maybe some food and TV. Hence why I binge on both...

But after watching her and Martin Pistorius’ talks, something inside went off… can I actually do better than my current situation and were decisions I made correct or just heavily influenced by my environment?

Did I place my trust in the wrong people… maybe I should've just done what I did back in school…

If I want something done right, got to do it myself. Got to take responsibility… for my own life… all of it…

But now the question remains… is it too late? But I guess YOLO right?

Alright time to give it a shot!

Writing Blog Posts With Word

So just a random tip. If your blog supports input via HTML and you prefer writing posts/drafts in a nicer editor (Microsoft Word, any that supports saving as a HTML file), YOU CAN!

Write the post in Word with all the standard formatting.

DO USE

• standard headers and paragraphs
• standard formats: bold, underline, italics
• links are OK

DO NOT USE/AVOID

• bullets
• indenting/tab/multiple spaces
• images (has to be inserted in the blog)

In Word Save As Web Page, Filtered 

This is very important otherwise Word uses it's own HTML style. May not apply to older versions but if you have this option, use it.

Open the document in a good text editor (recommend Notepad++). Skip the <style> section.

Highlight all the text in your document, should be easy to spot, and copy it

Create a new post and select the HTML section and then paste it all in.

Save the Post and then switch to the regular editor and clean it up. The issues should be minor and very quick to clean.