sacha chua living an awesome life

Our cat has a firm idea of what constitutes a perfectly acceptable wake-up time for breakfast: 6:00. I’ve taken to waking up early and making her breakfast, getting ready, and so on.

Today I arrived at work at 7:00. The lights were still dim. I don’t think anyone else was in the IBM office. I got a lot done. I remembered to leave work early, too, and I got a lot done at home as well. I remember blogging about early starts a number of times, and I like it when I can get into the rhythm of it. W- and I will make sure we keep in sync, too.

Preparing a few things the night before makes things so much more convenient. After dinner, I pack my lunch, leave a pot of oatmeal to soak on the stove, and set out all my clothes in the order that I need to put them on. The rest of the time is mine to spend, and then it’s another great morning.

I’m getting the hang of the little things, too. The subway ride is the best time for Japanese flashcard practice, because I’m sitting down. The Pimsleur language lessons are best for dish-washing time, because I need my hands to be free. I’m working my way through French, and I hope I’ll be able to practice understanding conversation when I’m in Montreal.

There’s still a lot of room for improvement. Depending on need, I may make early mornings my personal project time. Right now, I’m relaxed, but not feeling very creatve. There are a number of things I still need to follow up on, including possible tea party plans. (I’m a month late with my tea parties!) But things are good. =)

When I grow up, I’m going to make presentations like this. =)

I feel a bit nervous. There’s a lot of shifting around, and lots of things I wonder about, too. I’m starting to feel a little unraveled around the edges, which is usually an indicator that I haven’t been doing enough writing and reflection. There’s a little bit more left to the Innovation Jam, some more work on my project, and then there’s some more time to rest.

Running on hugs, cough lozenges, and more hugs.

I got caught up in IBM’s Innovation Jam, and I hadn’t realized that my blog was somewhat broken.

Oops.

I’ve disabled a great number of third-party things, including the Twitter Tools feed that made everything go haywire.

Which widgets would you like back?

I just came across the Anything extension for Emacs. After you load anything.el, you can type M-x anything RET and a substring of, well, anything. Looks like a handy shortcut. It’s like Quicksilver, but for Emacs. Grab anything-config.el for a bunch of useful functions.

Here’s my current configuration:

(require 'anything)
(require 'anything-config)
(setq anything-sources
      (list anything-c-source-buffers
            anything-c-source-file-name-history
            anything-c-source-info-pages
            anything-c-source-man-pages
	    anything-c-source-file-cache
            anything-c-source-emacs-commands))
(global-set-key (kbd "M-X") 'anything)

W- and I unboxed and set up our very own sewing machine yesterday. It’s nothing fancy, just a Singer Simple 16-stitch sewing machine that we picked up from Walmart. After spending an hour trying to figure out how to thread the bobbin so that the bottom thread would get picked up by the top thread, we managed to get it working. (How many geeks does it take?)

The first thing I made was a lopsided bag for random things, because everyone who sews must make a bag at some point. I was particularly proud of the way the pattern was the right way up AND the bag was lined inside with the same pattern (although in the opposite direction). It was an interesting topological exercise. ;)

The second thing I did with the sewing machine was to alter one of my much-too-large conference shirts to fit me. In this case, I turned an Ottawa Linux Symposium shirt (XL, I think) into a fitted tee.

I don’t need another T-shirt and there are plenty of other things I could do with my time, but it’s nice to be able to come up with an idea (even a simple one) and make it happen.

Penelope Trunk’s editor helps her improve her blogging and her tweeting:

In case you didn’t know, I have an editor for my blog. This comes from being a columnist for so long. My editors were incredible—one was from Vanity Fair, one went on to the Harvard Business Review, and they definitely made me a better writer. So I have an editor for my blog, and if you think that’s over the top, consider this: he also edits my Twitters. I mean, you can’t write about sex and investors in the same 140-character phrase and still get funding unless you have an editor to save you from yourself.

What I’ve been doing while I’ve not been posting » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk

Of course, she’s a professional writer and she probably has a gazillion readers. =) But maybe small(er) fry like me might gain a lot from asking an editor what he or she would do to make this blog even awesomer… =) Someday!