The Work Week Ends

As has happened many times in the past few weeks, I had elaborate plans for what to write about today. And… I don’t feel like writing any of them. So instead, I’ll just summarize my day.

Today I worked from home. I had a couple of Zoom meetings, then spent time debugging a few different issues, reading documentation in preparation for another project, and spinning up an EndeavourOS VM to run a test on for a coworker (thanks VirtualBox!). In the late afternoon I went grocery shopping, then I’ve just been relaxing at home. Friday afternoons/evenings seem to be the worst time for me to have motivation.

Just Use the Website

For many years, I’ve heard recommendations from privacy-conscious individuals that if you choose to be on a social media platform, it’s best to just use the web interface, and not an app. That limits the ability of the company that runs the service to track and log data about you. Sometimes I’ve followed this advice, and sometimes I haven’t, depending on my perceived convenience of the app over the website.

Avoiding Temptations

This is a short post that I will probably revisit later. The topic? Avoiding temptations in life. Why today? Because I once again failed, and need the reminder…

I have learned, over the course of many years, that especially at certain points in the day I have very little willpower to avoid temptations. This could be something as simple as avoiding overeating desserts (which I like), to limiting my exposure to social media, to reducing the amount of time I spend watching movies/TV shows/YouTube. To actually achieve my goal in whatever area that is, I often have to completely remove the temptation from my life, or put such severe limitations on it that I cannot easily slip up when I’m tired after work, and I no longer have the willpower to easily keep myself away from whatever the temptation is.

Raspberry Pi 4

I got my first Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) today, and took a short amount of time to begin migrating my Home Assistant setup to it. Thoughts so far:

• I like the increased RAM
• I’m a huge fan of the case I bought, which is black metal (like a computer case), and includes a small fan

I have yet to really tax the machine, so I haven’t seen how hot it gets, nor have I seen its full capabilities. I’m hoping to finish the migration from my Raspberry Pi 3 either tomorrow or next weekend, at which point I’ll re-purpose the RPi 3 for another home project.

Finish Work Week: Check

Well, I’ve officially finished my first full week back at work after 2 months of working from home. Overall, not bad. It will take some getting used to again, but I quickly found myself settling into old methods and habits.

Things that I still need to improve:

• Re-enforce strict wake time. I was still struggling to be happy about getting up exactly at 4a.
• Tighten up morning schedule so I arrive at work at my intended time. Throughout the week this slipped from 15m later than I wanted to 30m. My ideal is 7a.
• Reduce television time post-work. I’ve caught myself watching more than one episode of something in the evening, which offsets the rest of my evening plans, or causes things to get missed.
• Re-enforce strict phone-down and bedtime. I did pretty good on this overall, but I need to get back to turning off electronics at least 1 hr before bed, and then ensuring I am in bed by my set time for optimum sleep.

Do any of my readers really need to know all of that? No, not really. But it’s good for me to think through this on paper (or the e-equivalent of paper, my blog). And it’s a good way to pressure myself into actually doing it!