Learning Something Every Day of 2016: June Report 'Half Way There'

A bit late on the update this month, as I spent part of the Canada Day long weekend at a rental cottage with my family. Happy Canada Day!

spreadsheet screenshot, things learned by date

The things I learned in June.

Previously:

There’s Good News And Bad News

The good news is: I made it to the half way mark! Huzzah! I am very pleased with this result-so-far. The bad news is: Lots of interruptions this month. The other good news is that the things that were happening to interrupt weren’t particularly bad things in themselves, but I did let them distract me from making progress on learning a thing.

This mainly came down to me upgrading my computers for, and then receiving, my VR hardware. Yes, I bought both an Oculus Rift and a Vive. Because it’s the future that’s why. Setting up new hardware never takes only the amount of time it seems like it should take. It’s always much much longer. It’s particularly longer when you decide to swap the hard drives between two computers and then need to go through Microsoft support to reactivate Windows on both of them. Or when you realize that the old case you were going to use isn’t actually large enough to fit your new graphics card.

Point being, I missed 4 days this month. Not happy about that, but the thing that will really decide whether this was a problem or not is whether I let it derail me long term, or I start to make a habit of skipping days and excusing it. These are definitely the kinds of things that usually cause projects to get forgotten and abandoned, but I’m optimistic that this will not be the case this time, due to my 30-minutes approach, and focus on tracking progress every day.

Making a Thing, Month 3

I had some good runs of progress on my game project this month, but finished just shy of 50% of days where I worked on it for the month. 1 in 2 days seems like a fairly decent pace, since I’m often spending more than 30 minutes, maybe an hour or so when doing game stuff. But it appears I only put in about 9 hours of work this month. Not great, but it’s also not nothing, and progress was made, which is the most important thing.

Now that summer is here, the weather is nicer, and there’s more stuff in general going on with friends and family it’s easier to run out of time in a day to get things done. This isn’t really what my plan was originally conceived to combat, which was having time but spending it poorly. Long term if I ended up not getting any work done I might feel otherwise, but short term interruptions, when those interruptions are meaningful parts of life, I think are acceptable losses to The Plan.

Topics Of Note

I started reading through Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design but dropped it, as it wasn’t giving me a whole lot, especially not compared to The Art Of Game Design. It is largely a manual for the Machinations game simulation tool, which was part of my interest in the book, but the tool and website are beginning to rot, and the book was feeling more how to do things specifically with the tool than any broader insight.

I’ve spent a little bit of time playing with the VR support in Unity, but didn’t have adequate hardware at the time. Now that I do, I hope to keep digging into that long term.

The more random thing I spent a fair bit of time on this month was reading about Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchains, day trading, ForEx in general, etc… Trading has been on my to-learn list for quite a while, and it was high time I learned a bit more about crypto currencies as well.

Some of the things I learned were:

I’m not surprised that I’m not good at it, given that I knew virtually nothing about it until very recently. And I do feel like I learned a lot from the endeavor, so that’s a win. I’m particularly interested in trying out some basic algorithmic trading using my exchange’s API, so that path may continue into the near future.

Checking The List

TL;DR

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine.