I think I’ve got my groove back.

For a while there, I’d lost my groove. I’ve always been seriously interested in constantly learning new things about computers, and learning new things in general. For a while there, my interest was waning somewhat. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, although I know many people will tell me it was my other half. Haha, yeah, that works.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been wallowing a little in my own self-pity. There was an interesting story on Triple J’s hack programme Friday, about how kids — well, young adults — these days are stressed out to the max when it comes to making life decisions. Australia’s quite a well-off nation, and our high-school graduates are faced with so many choices because of this. Straight into work, tertiary education, travelling the world, dole bludging even. The comparison is made to the era of our parents whose career choices were extremely limited. A good example would be my own mother who finished school at the end of year ten, whose only marketable skills at the time saw her placed into any of the following roles: secretary, typist, or administrative assistant. Yeah, you see what I’m getting at?

These days, we have so much freedom in terms of choosing our career paths … it’s quite stressful. The point is made on the programme that it sounds spoilt, but the burden of choice is extremely taxing on our young minds, and it’s not an easy decision at all.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I’ve never really know what I wanted to do. Parents and teachers always asked during high-school, and even before, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” — which I think stemmed from their own upbringing, and the mindset that you were destined for some arbitrary role in society of your limited choosing. They asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the children whom they were asking. In my case especially, as I’ve never really had any life goals.

I want to own a sports car, and I want to own a house one day. The time frames are pretty undetermined. Though these days I’m thinking more about those two goals, if you’d asked me about those things three years ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. These things do take time.

So for the last twelve months or so I’ve been doing not much with my life. Just studying and working when I have to, and in my personal time, chillaxing. Which is fine, but I think I neglected my self-learning a little. I dropped out of the loop for a while. In hindsight, I can see that it was a good thing for me to have done. I was getting bored with it all, and I needed a change of pace. So I spent time with my girlfriend a lot, and more recently started wasting time playing World of Warcraft.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to neglect my personal time now that I’ve re-energized myself. I’m going to devote more thought to my personal time so that the time I do spend on myself, and on others, is more worthwhile.

Work has picked up, though. Not my main job, that’s still pretty bland. I don’t care about finance so much. It’s remotely interesting, and I’ll pick up tidbits as I go along, but I won’t actively teach myself about it. My other job however has started off excellently. I’m my own business and I’m doing some research for a guy who does full IT system implementations for small businesses. The twist is that he does it using all open-source software. You know how much I love open-source.

So last Wednesday, my first time working for him, I spent some of the day researching ways to do unattended installations with Ubuntu Linux, and then I spent the rest of the day starting to implement our first revision of system we’re putting in place. I spent the entire day working on my laptop (Arch Linux), logged into his server (Ubuntu), using awesome open-source tools (Firefox, Tomboy Notes, vi, etc). It wasn’t restricting (licences). I didn’t have to learn to speak another language (Microsofteese). I wasn’t constantly worried about lack of documentation (third-parties).

So now even though I’m about to spend my Sunday fixing not one but two Windows PCs for friends and family, I’m not in that poor a mood. I’m going to fix one by installing Ubuntu on it and having all the Windows-only apps run in a virtual machine courtesy VirtualBox, and the other I’m charging for. So that balances out for me!

Anyway, the Ubuntu ISO has finished downloading, so I better get to it.