the Peter Raven Self Improvement Project....

it occurred to me about six months ago that apart from learning new skills for work and wandering around Europe i hadn't actually picked up any new skills since... um... shit, you know, i can't remember the last new skill i learned, you know? riding a motorcycle? what was fucking forever ago!

a while, anyway.

now, i work in the tumultuous world of Information Technology, where a new product is released onto the market on average once every five minutes globally, where Sun and Adobe insist on updating their Java and Flash platforms any time one of the developers farts (if the number of notifications i get to update is any indication), Apple release yet another piece of unreasonably popular bling every 12 months and Moore's Law has continued to hold true since 1965. it's a good world to live in - i get paid a frankly mind-boggling sum to play with gadgets and boss electrons around, but the amount of reading you need to do - reviews, manuals, whitepapers, etc - is pretty daunting. you're not going to keep up with it all unless you put the effort in. on top of that, there's the constant upgrade path - Windows 3.11 led to 95 led to 98 led to (the living abortion that was) Me led to 2000 to XP to (Me's spiritual successor) Vista and now on to 7. meanwhile, Windows in the server and corporate-space, NT grew up to 4.0 before converging with 2000, then on to 2003 and the stunningly originally-named 2008. on any given Tuesday i'm likely to need to know whether or not i can install Windows 2000 Server on this particular piece of kit, or whether i'll need to use Windows 2000 Advanced Server instead. can i install this app on the Windows 2003 Standard R2 x64 server, or will we want to deploy a VM running the x86 version instead? it's a lot to keep track of, memorise and use, and so by the time i head home i tend to want to do Something Completely Fucking Different like video games, drinking and having sex with women - you know, those good, wholesome pursuits of any lad in their mid-to-late 20's.

then i bogged off overseas and had several months of bumming around with less of the work and and a whole lot of fuck-all to do and i realised that playing video games got a bit old after a while, drinking was expensive and having sex with women... let's just not go there (because i hardly did). hell - apart from this little body of wordage i was a consumer - recipient of a torrent of input, and outputting little more than photos and the occasional whine of "woe is me, i can't get a job and beer is expensive".

getting back i had a number of grand designs, and one of these was that in 2010 i going to learn stuff again, namely another language and a musical instrument. i'd enjoyed French and German while i was travelling, and after digging through my fileserver again i realised i had a whole series of German lessons on it so that sorted that. Shadow's brother is a mad guitar fanatic and was overjoyed to take on the task of helping me learn, so that too was sorted. since then i've managed to get through the first 6 (of 30) German lessons (they're listen-and-repeat and go for half an hour. i do them when i have the opportunity) and i'm Making Progress with the acoustic Mal lent me to practice on.

it's been good fun - especially since i take almost any opportunity to use the German i've been learning on people, and the first time i cranked out a vaguely recognisable version of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd... damn it was a satisfying feeling. it's also reminded me of the joy of learning - for the last few years all the new stuff i was filling my head with was either a) work-related or b) history of the places i was visiting. half of my down-time over the years has been spent doing techie stuff anyway - it's not unusual for me to work 9 hours, then go home and spend another 3 stripping down laptops, refurbishing and rebuilding them. having something unrelated is helping to bend my brain in new directions. sure, sometimes i have to force myself to flick to the next lesson on my Personal Sanity Device when i'm on a decently-long drive (which now lives in my car rather than in my pocket, but that's how live works sometimes) or pulling up some Tab on my file server and actually pick up the damn guitar but... i'm having fun, and having fun being an active participant rather than a passive one like i would be if i were reading a book or watching a movie.

i'd like to think that i'll managed to have a decent grounding in German and be able to play a few tunes decently well by years'-end, but fuck it - i'll not be disappointed if i can't as long as i keep having fun in the meantime... and if this gets me back in the habit of learning new things... well, all the better, really!