A lot of times when I would start a side project, I’d try to pre-plan all the work I’d think I’d need to do on it—building a large todo list. This makes sense because my work is often trying to plan and execute on engineering projects. The only problem is, time is limited to some nights and some weekends for side projects, so… I’d never actually work on the list. I started a new little project over the last couple weeks, but instead of pre-planning it I tried to just explore, be curious, and build out my idea. This has of course led to many tasks being added to my todo list, but they are specific and actionable because I am finding them as I work on the project. So just start working on the side project, you will find the tasks.

I’m constantly overwhelmed with all the things I want to do. From learning new languages to buying an FPV drone to blogging on this site—it’s almost a task just to keep up with the new things I want to try or learn. Unfortunately it often leads to me doing nothing or just watching YouTube. It was YouTube though that brought me across the idea of an “Energy Portfolio”. The big idea is to write down all the things you want in a “backlog” or “bucket list” then have 3–4 items in an “Active” list at any time. I’ve been trying it for the last few weeks. It’s hard but the biggest thing is to give myself permission not to explore all the ideas and just focus on the few I’ve currently chosen.

First week at Adobe was great, I’ve learned a lot already, started meeting the overall team, and have started a couple small learning projects. At one point I joked I was “drinking from the firehose”. One person shared the gif below and another said I found the “marble in the oatmeal”. A first week including UHF references might be the best first week.

Last week Nat and I took part in a video editing challenge from the folks at TMS Productions. Most of the footage comes from them, but I added a few shots of me typing a script to add a bit of a story. Honda’s Rebel website has a tagline of “Escape the Ordinary” which I thought would play nicely with the idea that someone is writing a screenplay about riding this motorcycle to “Escape the Ordinary”. Also, all Music and Sound Effects came from Epidemic Sound.

One of my favorite things about learning languages is learning different idioms from different cultures. I first noticed this when learning German and learned that the equivalent idiom to “That’s water under the bridge” is “Das ist doch Schnee von gestern” (“that is snow from yesterday”). Tonight in studying Portuguese I learned that instead of “I smell a rat”, they’d say “aqui há gato” (“there is a cat here”). 😆

That ten-week Japanese class I mentioned has finished. Next up is level 2 which starts in a couple weeks. Reflecting on what I’ve learned has been really interesting. The books this class go over are written to be simple and have common words repeated often. Those words I think I’ve learned pretty well just by reading and rereading the short stories. It feels great to read a story in a foreign language and have that feeling that you aren’t translating in your head but just imagining the scene from the story. However, when watching something on Viki without subtitles I still miss a lot and have to rely on guessing from context. I think this story method of language learning is really great for me but it’s a journey.