A 40’s guy in the UK, who’s at a transition point due to being unhappy in life, both personally and professionally. What I am doing to change things!
New Year’s Eve 2022, not doing the same stuff…
New job at a new company. Fuel Cells, not gas turbines. Coding in Matlab. 100% working at home, except for 2 days a month.
The rest is the same…
So in 3 years, I will be earning an income which is entirely passive and have completed a part-time distance learning masters degree…
Fuck!
Top Gun: Maverick
That is all!
So, the last week has showed me the enormity of the task that lays ahead if me if I’m to achieve my life goal. I’ve managed to put in about 4 full days studying and all I can say is that it’s like walking through treacle, as the pace of progress is slow. It feels like I’m going to have to devote every single minute of my free time if I’m to succeed. Sleep discipline is going to be of paramount importance, the more tired I am the slower I’ll work. And knowing how much effort this is going to take just makes me want to capture that effort by some means even more. I think many people simply do not know how much effort is needed to become a professional scientist and it would be good to show how effort it takes. And if I can bring others along with me, then all the better.
This last week, has also showed me just how hard I worked when doing my a-levels and degree, something that perhaps I didn’t realise at the time. However, evidently, I should have worked harder, and I wouldn’t be in the situation I am today!
This could be a significant date. As I’m on holiday, I starting doing some studying, pure maths. 47 pages over the course of the day, and I’m still in chapter 1 of the book I plan to work through, namely, Pure Mathematics 1 by Bostock and Chandler.
All I can say is that I have a long way to go to get to where I want to be.
…and a month has slipped by since my last post, time goes by.
Debt free, right now!
I’ve finally managed to get my hands on a functioning SPARC box at a reasonable price. A sun ultra 10 which has Debian Slink installed on it. An apparently non-functioning CDROM drive is hindering any effort to upgrade, however a replacement is on its way, a genuine sun unit. I’ve also managed to acquire a sun ultra 80 and a sun blade 1000, however, I’ve not looked at either of these, so I dont know whether either are functioning.
I also have an nvidia quadro k5200 in my life. Now, I was under the impression that one of these cards had half reasonable FP64 capabilities. However I only found out that it’s brain dead, after I paid for it, hardly any FP64 capability of note. So will have to hold out for the k6000. Still I have two tesla cards to pair with k5200, and these combined will make a reasonable CUDA workstation, as long as I can get all the required software working.
Work wise, I’m heading in to a two week holiday, as I’ve no work to do right now. With what’s happen over the last two months or so, I’ve not really been able to commit much time to work. So all of my existing work has been handed over to other colleagues, and this has left me in a bit of limbo, until a suitable task for me is found. I’m also looking into moving to a different roll, as I’m sick of the work we seem to be provided. However, there may be some work in the pipe line which would tempt me to stay where I am, and also perhaps there will be work from another company not in the civil aerospace industry, but I cant talk about that in any detail. However, I must remember that doing what I’m doing right now is not in my bucket list.
Talking about a bucket list, the list itself will eventually be move to its own page, so I can extend it if I want to, and I’ll continue to post here what efforts I’m making to be able to remove items, when they’re done.
12655 is the number
Debt free living is merely weeks away…
For obvious reasons, I’m creating a bucket list. So in no particular order
That’s it for now.
A good question to ask during an interview to gauge what a company is like is to ask how much bereavement leave is typically given when a close relative, parent or child, passes. If it’s anything less than a week, steer clear.
Tomorrow, I will begin the very long journey to finish what I started way back in October 1994, no ifs, no buts. I’ve got to get back to doing what I love to do.
Lost Mum!
I’m done with it. No more. I can not stand my job any more. It just doesn’t fulfil me. I need more, I need to do more technical things. And I’m finding that the more I work at home (which is something I want to continue doing) the less I want to work as part of a team. I just want to work on my own, on my own things. So I’m thinking that I should spend some time away from work, i.e. perhaps take a sabbatical and perhaps not return afterwards. I need time to explore whether I can earn money working for myself and I need to work my butt off relearning physics. I was so happy when at uni, studying physics. I miss it desperately. But, the big question is, can I earn money studying it? Probably, if I live stream myself studying on twitch. But probably not much, definitely not enough. So I’ll need to do something else too. What that will be I don’t know - print-on-demand, low content books (think diaries, notebooks etc.), books (think novel or short stories), textbooks (selling and maybe authoring) courses, digital products, websites, this blog, vlog, crypto - are all ideas I need to explore. Some I’m doing already, but without any real success. But then, I’ve not put that much work in on these. But now, the time is right to start. I need a way to escape this life I have.
My only paternal Aunt died today.
Just doing it for a couple of weeks, let it evolve naturally, and not over think it. That’s the best way to work out how I’ll study. Once a process has evolved, I’ll start again from the beginning.
Now I just need time. Or is there time, and I just think I have none! It’s most likely the latter. So just do it. Do some of it each day, even if its just half an hour. Need to stop effing about, manage my time better and get on with it.
5147 is the number, freedom is getting closer.
One more day to work before I have a week off over Easter, and I also have a 4 day weekend at the end of the month. This will be good, as I hope to use the time to make a start studying. I’ll still only be able to study in the evenings, due to family commitments. But, at least it will be a start, and an opportunity to build some momentum. Albeit, I can’t decide what my approach is going to be, how I’m going to study. My instinct right now is paper notes. It would be good to have a full set of well presented hand written notes. However, I’ve always wanted exactly that in a digital format also, that is searchable and always available no matter where I might be. For paper notes to be useful, one always needs to be in the same place as the notes are stored. Furthermore, a full set of notes in markdown would also be advantageous, and would offer the most flexibility. Markdown in combination with pandoc would make rendering my notes in may different formats, a single command. Much of my efforts recently have been geared towards having my notes in such a format.
Whatever I do, the notes will also have an accompanying live stream/youtube video where I talk through exactly what I’m doing. This perhaps doesn’t lend itself too well to doing hand written notes, without some form of top down camera capturing exactly what I’m writing. The hand written notes could then be digitised and made available everywhere, however, without decent handwriting recognition they would not be searchable, only indexed. With a digital text based format I could easily create a font based on my handwriting and cheat.
I can’t decide what to do. So perhaps I’ll do all three. On the other hand, I may be overthinking things, and perhaps I should just start with handwritten notes, and let a system naturally evolve as I work.
Had a good couple of days, sleep wise. I felt wide awake and much better than I have done over the last couple of months. That was, until this weekend, where I’ve felt quite shitty. What brought about the change? Well, two things. I’ve started drinking more water, and, instead of sleeping with two pillow, I slept with one. Will keep doing both of these for the next week or two and see how things go. Will also not be going to bed too late. Will not say up later than 12am, so no more late night posts. With these three changes then perhaps things will start to improve. If not, then I’ll be make an appointment with my doctor, as I simply can’t go on like this. The tiredness I’m feeling in the evenings and weekends is just debilitating. If I’m to achieve my goals, I have to be functional outside of work hours.
In saying that, I am making progress, albeit very slowly. I’ve been working on how, when I eventually start studying in earnest, I will create figures and diagrams quickly. I’m basing what I’m putting together on https://castel.dev/, who seems to have put together a tool-set which allows him to quickly put together quite complicated figures and diagrams while taking notes during lectures. I won’t been using latex as the basis for my notes nor will I use python as the language to implement things, but rather markdown and bash. However, inkscape does seem to be a good choice for me, as I wish for all of my diagrams and figure etc. to be in svg format, as this format scales well. I’ve created a script which I call inkscape-shell, which I can use to draw pre-drawn shapes etc. For example if, within inkscape-shell I issue the command ‘uarrow’, and upward pointing arrow will be generated in inkscape. All of the ‘pre-drawn’ objects are in an svg format, which is simply text, XML to be precise. Thus the pre-drawn objects can be customised by altering the underlying XML. This I do from another tool I’ve developed/implemented that is a ‘snippets tool’. However, I won’t talk about this now as it’s getting late and I need to head to bed, I save this for a future post.
I’ve still no suitable method to soundproof my ‘office’. Hence, I’m not yet streaming. However, I think the best method will be a few coats of sound proof paint, on both sides of the thin wall, and hanging a couple of moving blankets behind a couple of book cases. If this doesn’t work, tough. There will just have to be noise
In terms of a schedule, well, getting up at 5 is a no. I’m also struggling in the evenings. It seems recently, I need way more sleep than I used to. I find that I’m falling asleep for an hour or two at around 9pm, right at the time I actually want to be getting on with things. Not good, and this explains the apparent lack of progress over the last two to three months. Maybe the lighter evenings will help. Or perhaps having less stress in my life would actually make the sleep that I do get more effective. See last post! However, one thing is for sure, time is slipping by, and I feel I’m no closer to achieving my goals that I was when I first set them. So I really need to get my sleep issues sorted out. If I don’t start studying soon, and actually start earning some passive income, I’ll never get to where I want.
Divorce.
Wife wants a divorce. OK. Freedom! This also means I no longer work for her
58
Is the number of pounds that, at the start of this month, once wages had been paid etc, I/we had above what I/we owe on my/our mortgage. So soon that burden will be gone. More freedom.
More freedom to choose what I WANT to do with my life…
New Year’s Eve 2021
What a shit year it has been…
If I’m doing the same thing this time next year, I will have failed massively. I need to take control, knuckle down, and do what I’ve set out to do.
But for now, I have Grolsch, and here’s to Mulder and Scully!
Happy New Year?
I’ve finished work for the year. Which means it’s been just about 1 year since I started this blog, and I though it would be a good idea to review what I’ve been doing over the last 12 months, apart from the obvious, working.
So, as I said in my previous post. I have largely failed in my aims. However, that does not mean that I have not achieved anything. I have been busy. So here goes. This is what I’ve achieved.
rwxrob and lastmiles have certainly influenced what I want to do and how I’m going to do it. Both are old school and use primarily the command line to do their stuff, and one can easily get a very good education in IT by watching both of their streams. With lastmiles, he will belch, fart, swear, snort and drink his way through his streams, but the guy is a genius in what he does. He has largely got me wanting to write code that will run anywhere, hence the acquisition of SPARC and Powermac workstations. Rob’s boosts are definitely worth following to get a good grounding in tech. I for one intent next year to follow his html/CSS and C programming boosts.
What have I not achieved, and why!
This is because I want to capture all of the studying that I do, to create a complete body of work which is written up into a comprehensive set of notes along with index videos. However, this will cause noise. Given I can really only stream/record in the evening, this, without more sound proofing in my office, will disturb others with whom I live. However, I soon hope to be able to remedy this situation soon with the re-arrangement of my office and the addition of a couple of more bookcases. Apparently books, and I have plenty to fill the new bookcases, are quite an effective soundproofing solution. However even if I had good sound proofing in place, I’m not sure whether I would have got that much studying done. I could have been more productive if I had not been feeling so god damn tired in the evenings. This probably results from an inconsistent sleeping pattern. So I must be more disciplined in following a schedule and got to bed at a regular time. Getting up at a regular time has not been the problem.
So a busy year, but I feel I’ve not moved significantly toward my first goal. This means I’ve now only got 4 years to complete it. So in 4 years, I will be earning an income which is entirely passive and have completed a part-time distance learning masters degree. In thinking I’ll probably need to study for about 2 years before starting to study for a masters degree over 2 years, I’d better get on with things.
I am failing!
The problem with selling your time for money is that its doesn’t leave one with much time to transition away from it. Especially with all of the other things that need to be done during waking hours. But I’m going to have to find the time to do it. Work, right now sucks ass. And things are being made so much more difficult. I won’t mention now what’s happening, but may do in the future. So right now I’m just simply going to have to stick to a schedule, based on 6 to 7 hours sleep, and 8 hours work a day. The 9 to 10 hours left over are now just becoming so important and so valuable, I’ll just have to make sure I use them effectively, especially if I want to use around 4 to 5 or them studying. SO tomorrow I will spend some of my left over hours planning exactly how I’m going to use them. The next post will be a new schedule.
Quick update on where I am…
My workstation now sports 48GB of RAM, as enough sticks of the correct specification became available on e-bay, so I nabbed them.
With regard to my streaming channels, from a software point of view everything is ready to go. The only this stopping me launching now is sound proofing. I need a reliable yet cheap way to soundproof as much as possible one wall in my office to save others in the house from being disturbed while a I stream.
I’ve bought a laptop, an open source laptop, nonetheless. I found a reasonable deal, again on e-bay, for an Pinebook Pro. So I took the plunge. This is something I’ve been considering doing for a while, however, given the global shortage of electronic components the people at PINE64 are not currently manufacturing these, so availability has been limited. So, if I setup VPN server on my network, I’ll no longer have to be in my office to work and/or stream, and I have a consistent tool set.
I’m also considering building a NAS server. I have an empty PC case that will be suitable for such a server. I’m thinking of obtaining 4 in 3 hdd drive enclosures which will allow hot swapping of the drives. 3 of these would do which would convert the 9 bays I have available in the empty case to 12. If each bay is filled with a 4TB disc hdd I could put together 6 4TB raid 1 arrays, making a total of 24TB of storage available. However, this would be a bit pricey, so will have to wait a while and I have no immediate need for it. Yet once I launch my steaming channels, I will potentially need a lot more storage space as I’m going to keep local copies of all my streams. I want to document and index the whole of my journey.
I’ve been busy. Amongst other things, I’ve built my workstation.
Right now, I do not have all of the components I want, but having cleaned as much as I could to get rid the smell, (did I say that the system I acquired within which was the motherboard I wanted stunk to high heaven and must have previously been owned by a smoker, yuk!) I have built it up into a Corsair Obsidian 750D case (with 9 PCIE expansion slots) using a PSU which can only power two GPUs and with only 24GB of planned 48GB of RAM. This will be sufficient for now, whilst I learn how to get the most out of such a system, and the right components become available at the right price.
I need to learn about CUDA…
I’ve also been installing games, on linux. Retail versions of games nonetheless, which I’ve acquired over the years. I’m using Lutris/Wine extensively, which are quite a useful tools for such things.
So things are starting to come together, and apart from needing to shave, I’m ready to record channel intros for both my gaming and studying channels, and actually launch both for real. Yes, I missed my mini goal. So I’ll reframe it, I must be studying and streaming regularly, on both channels, a couple of times a week before, at the latest, the end of the 2nd week of October, which is the 15th!
With everything that has happened over the last couple of weeks, I’ve now no more excuses…
The known world is beautiful. I dare say that the unknowns of this world are also just as beautiful. I will find out. I will study to make the unknowns known and reveal what beauty there is to be revealed.
With all that has happened over the last few weeks I have made a decision. Its time to think of myself, I will do the Liverpool course.
Now to prepare, and apply…
Just developed a little script and called it hnow. This simply adds the heading of a post entry, as above, if combined with a “!!” in vim. Nice!
Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Six months ago, in the second post I made to this blog, I set out my plans for the next 20 years. So, I thought I’d put a post together about how I doing relative to my goals. Well, all I can say is “not very well”. I’ve yet to start studying, which is fundamental in reaching my aims . In terms of setting up all the tools I need to be able to start live streaming while studying, I’ve been ready for nearly a month, see my last post. Albeit I still don’t really know how I’m actually going to do things. Diagrams and figures etc, which I will need to be able to put together, will be a problem as without them, it will just be impossible to put notes together. I just don’t know what the best method is to draw textbook standard diagrams and the line. However, in this past month work has just simply taken over. The task I’ve been doing has simply gone to shit, twice. The inputs for it have just been so bad, that it has been near impossible to make good progress up until the last week or so. However, there are still problems. Serious, fundamental problems with models that are just simply not representative and yet, they’re the only thing we have to use as predictive tools. I think that perhaps the people I’m working for don’t really know what they are doing. This has meant I’ve had to work extra hours to sort things out and this drained a lot of my energy. Still, soon enough I will have moved on from the chaos.
What I think I need to do, is to set a mini goal or two. This will hopefully get me back heading in the correct direction. So, the first goal is by the end of next month, 31st of July, I will be reqularly livestreaming on my studying channel, and regularly recording gaming videos. Even if this is only once to twice a week!
The second goal is by the end of next month, 31st of July’ have a workstation computer up and running.
Why a workstation computer you might ask. Well, most theoretical physics work involves computers and coding. And simply put, a desktop pc just doesn’t cut the mustard with the sorts of things I have in mind as most computation physics work is done using FP64, 64bit, double-precision floating-point numbers. And to really speed this up, CUDA/GPGPU hardware will is needed. So I’ve put some effort in researching how to put a system like that together at an affordable price. What I’ve come up with is a workstation that is built around an ASUS P6T7 Supercomputer motherboard. This particular motherboard has an ATX form factor, yet it has 7 x16 PCI-E slots. It supports older intel xeon processors, the best of which has 6 cores, 12 threads, clocked at a whopping 3.46GHz. The board unofficially supports 48GB of ram, if the correct ram form factor is used. It also has six SATA and two SAS connectors. I plan to eventually use 4 of the 7 PCI-E slots to accommodate an NVIDIA Quadro K5200 or K6000, and three NVIDIA Tesla K20C, for which I will need a case which has a minimum of 8 PCI-E expansion slots. This will give me a system that will be theoretically capable of between 4.709 and 5.257 TFLOPS. Currently, I have the motherboard and one Tesla K20c card. I have some ram which will work initially, however, ECC ram will need to be acquired. Non-ECC ram is a no-no for scientific computing. The CPU is in the post. For Graphics, storage, case and power supply, I can use what I already have to get the system up and running, albeit, I think I will acquire an SSD or two for the root partition, to allow for the option of using a RAID array. I’ve yet to decided on the exact configuration of the storage, especially how to employ those SAS connectors. However, whatever I do, a RAID 1 array will be a minimum. I will need data redundancy, as running such a power hungry computer will be costly, and I don’t what to have to re-run things in case of data loss.
Another aim will be to post here more often, maybe once or twice a week, as this will lend itself to shorter post which will consume less time to put together.
Boy have I been busy, I’ve not had time to record any gaming videos for youtube, even though I’m ready to do. What have I been doing? Well, something far more important. I’ve been preparing all the things I need to live stream. Not just for my gaming live stream, but for my studying live stream too. My studying live stream is the main initial thrust of this whole process, which I hope will open doors (new job, further degrees etc), and may lead to bigger and better things - courses. I plan to put together physics courses and sell them on-line, and of course, off the back on live streaming, I’ll be able to launch the stream’s you-tube channel. Thus soon, I will have four new potential income streams, two twitch channels and two youtube channels.
The coding I’ve done, bash scripting, now means I can now do most of the things I need to do on twitch right from the command line. There’s still a few more things I need, but these are not essential to start things off. I can say things in (text) chat, right from the command line. If I need to ban someone from chat, I can, right from the command line. I’ve also learn a fair bit about tmux. I’m using tmux to create a layout, right within my terminal window, that has areas to display details of what I’ll be studying, chat, my ugly face, twitch notifications (followers for now, subs, bits raid etc to follow), and a main area where all the learning action will take place.
Work wise, as I said a few posts ago, I’m thoroughly fed up in my job. So, I’m changing it. But only slightly, for now. I’ll be moving to a slightly different area over the next couple of months with a view to move further away in the medium term. I’ll still be working for the same company, but I hope things will be a little better. After what has now been 18 years working in more or less the same roll, I’m so glad that I’ll get the chance to do something a bit different. There’s no way I can stay where I am, it’s driving me potty. I’m also hoping it will help with in my goals, as I’ve made it clear that I wish to do something that is coding based. Any experience with coding is worth it. As now getting better at coding is now an additional goal I have for the next five years. Most theoretical physics work relies substantially on computers and hence coding. Furthermore, having high level coding skill can open many door in many areas.
Speaking of goals I may have also changed my mind about the astrophysics masters course at Liverpool John Moores University. I get the feeling that the course is more geared to observational astrophysics rather than theoretical. As such, I’m considering the PGDip in Astronomy offered by the University of York. This course is a two year distance learning offering which has substantial theoretical modules, two of which are described as Relativistic Astrophysics and Particles and Cosmology. I’ve not enquired about the actual course contents and how maths heavy they are. However, I would hope that they would be a little bit beyond what I studied at undergraduate level. The University of York also offer a research based masters degree that, with justification, can also be taken as a distance learning course. However, I’ve yet to make up my mind on which direction to take. More research into the exact nature of the courses is needed.
Ok, so I’ve got to the point where the scripts I’ve been developing to manage my youtube gaming channel are good enough to use for real. So, now there’s only a few things I have to sort out, making sure that the channel branding and the video intros and outtros match, etc and I’ll be able to properly launch it, maybe as early as this weekend.
Then I will start developing some scripts which will help things when I start to live stream to Twitch. I’m hoping that I will be able to develop a rudimentary overlay which will be able to display the live chat, new followers and subs etc over top of my game. This will be based on the linux tool aosd_cat. I plan to pipe live chat to aosd_cat from the weechat irc client, having connected weechat to twitch chat. Yes, twitch chat is just irc, and weechat has a fifo pipe facility which can be ready by any utility which can read linux standard input. I may or may not be able to get such to work, however, it seems pointless streaming to twitch if, with my single monitor setup, I have no way of interacting with whoever may be watching.
Earnings from the Brave browser now stands at £11.23. This is not bad considering I only have to occasionally click a notification to view an advert. However, I hope that this will accelerate once my internet footprint gets bigger.
The sooner I achieve my goals, the better! I feel my current job is just driving me down, and the more I think about it, the more I realise it’s time to move on. The work I’m doing just isn’t worth the bureaucracy I have to put up with, nor the un-helpful or obviously incompetent people. Only today I had questions from one ‘Engineer’ who is supposed to be approving work being carried out for aircraft/engine certification who asked such a dumb-ass question the answer to which was so obvious, the very asking of the question showed that the engineer failed to completely understand the process of the work that there is no way in hell that that person should have been signing the work off.
Defiantly time to move on, however, until I’ve found alternative/additional income, I’m stuck in the mortgage trap!
Been a bit of a while since my last update. So here goes.
A couple of posts ago I set out a daily work schedule. I’ve actually found this quite difficult to keep. The problem is that I often find myself not going to bed at 11pm and therefore I’m unable to get up at 5am. I think I’ve managed it once, and then, I think I was only up at around 5:30. So I must try harder to stick to it, as this work schedule is key to being able to achieve what I want.
However, even though I’ve not been able to stick to my schedule I have been making progress. I’ve not been doing much studying, which in fact should be the primary aim, rather I have been concentrating on launching my gaming youtube channel/live stream. My vision is that I will spend maybe 6 to 8 hours a week gaming, mainly on the weekends, and I plan to stream live and post videos to youtube. However, I can see that the process of video editing will be quite time consuming, time I simply do not have. So I’ve been busy writing a collection of bash scripts which will do most of the bulk video editing. The scripts are based on using ffmpeg to split larger videos up into smaller one and add an intro and extro to each, and to handle the upload to youtube and all that goes with this through youtube’s API. These are actual a re-write of some previous scripts I produced, however, I was never happy with those, as I had written them in such away that it would have been difficult to use them in other projects, as they weren’t function based, they were purely procedural. Having my scripts based on exported ash functions means that I will be able to use them to manage more than one youtube channel. This will obviously save me further time after I’ve launched my studying channel/livestream.
I’ve just check my brave browser earnings, and these are now worth a whopping £5.45. Yes, yes, yes, this is not much, however, this is what they are worth in pounds right now, but who knows what BAT will be worth in the future, just look at bitcoin’s price history. Other than that, I’ve not earned anything, however, what I hope is that the effort I’ve been putting in to create the scripts I’ve written will save a huge amount of time, and hopefully this will payout in the future.
So, once I’ve developed the scripts to a good enough level, I will start recording and uploading gaming videos to youtube. My plan will be to play through all of the Grand Theft Auto games starting from the first title to be in 3D, GTA III. I’ve played GTA San Andreas before, however, this was a long time ago, so I will essentially be going blind walk-through. Now I have to decided which game to livestream. Not quite sure which yet, but again I will be doing blind walk-through of older type games, as I’m not sure my current PC hardware will be able to handle anything more modern. I also have to realise that my main motivation for creating a gaming channel/livestream is actually discovery. I’m hoping that building up an audience by gaming will also help me build an audience for my studying channel/stream, and vice versa, by cross plugging both. Whether this approach will work, I don’t know, However it will be fun trying, and I’m hoping that playing games will also help me improve my computer/keyboard skills. So even if gaming doesn’t in building my studying audience, it will at least benefit me in other ways.
I’ve earned passive income for the first time. I’m £1.74 to the good. How’ve you done that, you might ask. Well it’s earnings I’ve made from using the Brave web browser. The Brave web browser blocks traditional advertisements that you’d normally see from the likes of facebook and google, and serves its own. You’re rewarded a small amount of BAT, which is a cryptocurrency token, for each ad viewed. These appear as an operating system alerts, rather than in-line ads within your web browser.
I started using Brave about a month before Christmas on all of my devices, and to date I’ve accumulated the BAT equivalent of the amount above at today’s prices. It’s not much, but I haven’t had to do too much to earn it, other than making a mouse clicks when prompted. Also, you’ll never know how much a single BAT will be worth in the future.
The Brave browser not only allows someone to accumulate BAT by viewing ads, but it also allows someone to automatically reward content creators just by viewing their websites within the Browser. If the owner of the website has signed up to be a Brave creator. I have, and if you choose you can automatically support me by simply viewing anyone of my sites using the Brave browser. If fact the Brave browser also allows you to support content creators on youtube and twitch, just by viewing their channels. It does this by automatically redistributing all or a proportion of your accumulated BAT as a reward to the creator, according to how much attention you give to them. The longer you view, the more they’ll get
The Brave browser can be downloaded from https://brave.com/download/ and you can sign up to be a Brave content creator here.
Note, I am not affiliated or connected in anyway with the Brave browser other than being a user of it and having signed up to be a Brave creator.
So I need to set out exactly how I’ll achieve my goals as I’ve set out in my post from the 21/12/2020, particularly my goal for the next five years, which is to be earning an income that is entirely passive and to have completed a part time distance learning masters degree, Astrophysics which is offered by Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
Part of my strategy will be to earn while studying.
At present I’m not in a position to be able to start studying for a masters degree. I will need to spend a period of time studying to bring myself back up to a level at which I would feel comfortable to start studying for a higher degree. As such I plan to start studying at a UK A-level level first and the move on to undergraduate level. This will be private study which I will live stream via twitch. I’ll using a couple of books which I used when taking my A-Levels back in the 1990’s, and two comprehensive undergraduate text books, one in physics, the other in astrophysics. I’ll use some more recent open-source material, which will be more safe from copyright infringement when live streaming. I also plan to offer some digital products related to my studies that will hopefully help others who are study physics at both A-Level/High School and at university level. These will be in the form of ‘cheat-sheets’ around a particular topic right through to full blown video courses offered via the various platforms which currently exist, for instance udemy.
I’ll also post all of my unedited live streams for free youtube with aim of being able to capture the entire journey in getting myself ready to study for a higher degree.
Further to actually studying, I will also need to improve computer skills. I indent to learn to touch type correctly, using all 10 fingers, rather than just the few I use now. This will allow me to make better use of the Linux command line and its non-graphical based tools, vim, tmux and lynx etc, to name a few.. This is something that I have recently started to do and I’m finding that it to be a very efficient interface. When I have too many ‘windows’ open I simply get lost and lose track of where everything is, which I simply do not experience when using the Linux command line exclusively. So I will also live stream this also.
Given the above, I’ve put together a separate site from this blog, where details of all my studying activities and plan can be found, www.studywithtony.com
Studying will not be the only thing I do. I’ll also be starting a Linux gaming channel on twitch. For this check out www.fortiesgamer.com.
Oh how things change.
With the announcements tonight that the UK will be entering a full lockdown with schools closing until around the end of February, then I can afford to amend my workday schedule somewhat as the school runs will now longer be required, hence my new schedule will be
| 05:00 - 07:00 | Goals | 2 |
| 07:00 - 07:30 | Breakfast/Family Time/ | 0.5 |
| 07:30 - 09:00 | Goals | 1.5 |
| 09:00 - 12:30 | Morning work period | 3.5 |
| 12:30 - 13:30 | Goals | 1 |
| 13:30 - 16:00 | Afternoon work period 1 | 2.5 |
| 16:00 - 18:00 | Afternoon work period 2 | 2 |
| 18:00 - 21:00 | Dinner/Family Time | 3 |
| 21:00 - 23:00 | Goals | 2 |
| 23:00 - 05:00 | Sleep | 6 |
This works out as 40 hours per week for my full time job, so none of my weekend will have to be given making up hours for this, and 32.5 hours plus what ever I do at the weekends working towards my goals. So good for me, but bad for my school aged kid.
Now time for bed. Early start tomorrow!
Welcome to 2021, which I hope will be a year of self imposed change rather than a year where change is imposed by things outside of my control.
Today is my first working day to the new year, having just finished the Christmas holidays. I did have plans to do some work on my plans over this time but quite frankly, with the hectic end of year I had work wise, I felt very tired, and simply needed a break. So that’s what I did, and I now feel the better for it. The only thing I did do over the holidays to progress towards my goals was to upgrade my computer, better organise my desk and to work out a time budget/schedule, which will give me time to work towards my goals and to allow me to meet my commitments with regard to my full-time job.
My pc is now contained within a modern and larger case, an NZXT 510. This has allowed me to add an ssd, a second graphics card and an additional two USB 3.0 sockets. The new case will also allow me to also add an hdmi capture card, once I have obtained a suitable device which will work under Linux. The ssd card will allow my pc to boot up faster. However, I’ve not connected it to the motherboard as yet as I do not have a sata cable which is flat at both ends. A faster booting machine will allow me to swap faster between my day job and working towards my goals, as currently my pc is booting off an hdd drive and takes ages. A second graphics card will I hope allow for a better Linux gaming experience and will allow me to render video faster. Additional USB 3.0 socket will allow me to connect additional peripheral. And the hdmi capture card will allow me to capture video from my ipad pro. All of which will allow me to become more productive and move me towards my goals faster.
All that is on/around my desk can now be powered from the single socket which is available to me in the room in which my desk is located. As a Christmas present, I received a Brennenstuhl Premium-Multi-Line 12-way extension lead. This means I can have my two work laptops, my macbook pro, my ipad pro, my phone and my two pcs powered from the single socket (not all at once I hasten to add). Now I just need to sort out the bird nest of cables.
As I have alluded, to be able to reach my goals, I will have to work on them and fulfil my full time job requirements in parallel. Hence over the holidays I came up with a rough time budget/schedule for a weekday during school term which will allow this.
| 05:00 - 07:00 | Goals | 2 |
| 07:00 - 09:30 | Breakfast/Family Time/School run | 2.5 |
| 09:30 - 12:30 | Work | 3 |
| 12:30 - 13:30 | Lunch Goals/take a nap | 1 |
| 13:30 - 14:45 | Work | 1.25 |
| 14:45 - 15:15 | School Run | 0.5 |
| 15:15 - 18:15 | Work | 3 |
| 18:15 - 21:00 | Dinner/Family Time | 2.75 |
| 21:00 - 23:00 | Goals | 2 |
| 23:00 - 05:00 | Sleep | 6 |
I have learned over the years that I function quite well with around 6/7 hours sleep per day, and the above gives me around 7.25 hours per day working or 36.25 per week on my full time job and 5 hours per day or 25 hours per week studying. This will leave me owing 3.75 hours to work over a weekend to meet my full time job commitment, which isn’t too much of a sacrifice, especially if I split it over the two days.
A 5am rise will be a big change for me so, I’ll start adapting to that over the next couple of days/weeks and I will also get up at the same time on the weekends, and do further work towards my goals, So with the above workday term-time schedule and the work I plan to do at weekend I hope this will set me in good stead to be able to achieve the goals I’ve set out. I will try the schedule above for the whole of January and see how things pan out.
More on my future plans.
Today is the winter solstice. It also happens to have been my last working day of 2020. What a year it has been! Who’d have thought this time last year that I would have spend most of it working at home. We had also just found out that we we’re expecting our second child. So, to say the least, this year has been eventful. Today also saw the occasion of a grand conjunction. For those who don’t know what that is, it is when the two largest planets in the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, are in an alignment with Earth. Unfortunately, the weather today meant that it was not visible from where we live. However, I managed a quick view of it yesterday from our back garden before it disappeared below the roof lines of our street.
Grand conjunctions do not occur often, once every 20 years. However, it will not be until 2080 that both planets will appear as close at they did, or should have, today. So given the events of today, I thought I would set out what I want to achieve before next grand conjunction in 2040, my 20 year plan. Obviously 4 fives are 20, so I’ll break the plan down into 4 five year plans. However, rather setting out details these will be objectives, the ‘what’ I plan to achieve, not the ‘how’. The hows can wait for future posts
As I previously said it is my ambition to become a theoretical physicist. This is a lofty ambition and may note be achievable. However, I would settle for being a half decent astrophysicist. However, with either aim, a PhD is a must, and given my 2:2 undergraduate degree, a masters degree may also be required. At a push, a distance learning masters degree can be done part time while working full time. A PhD is also at least a part time endeavour. However, I’ll be 45 years old in January, so I don’t think a part time, 6-7 year, PhD and a part time, 2 year masters degree is an option. Hence with a family to support and a mortgage to pay, I must find an alternative source of income to selling my time for an hourly rate.
So my first objective, is that within the next 5 years I will be earning an income which is entirely passive and have completed a part-time distance learning masters degree. This will allow me to meet my second objective - within the next 10 years, I will have completed a PhD and will be ready to move into post doctorial rolls. With a PhD under my belt, this will allow me to meet my third objective - within the next 15 years, I will have completed 2 to 3 post doctorial positions. And having completed those, my final objective is that - within the next 20 years I will be firmly established in an academic position.
So, there you go. My outline plan for the next 20 years.
How I will achieve these objectives will be set out in future posts, however, it is plain to see I have a lot of work to do, and there’s no time to lose. So I’m off to bed, to get in a good night’s sleep ahead of tomorrow, as tomorrow, I start my Christmas holidays. And given that this year it will be a COVID Christmas and unlike a normal Christmas, I have zero travel plans. So I’ll have plenty of time to work on meeting my first objective and I need to be fresh and rearing to go.
What is this place?
This place is my personal blog. What more can be said?
Here will be found the things which are going around in my head, the efforts I’ll be making to change careers, from aerospace engineer to theoretical physicist, general rants and raves etc… anything goes
So first and fore most, a career change - I am currently an aerospace engineer. I’ve been for 17 years and before I decay into old age, I wish to do something else. So, I’m going to try to become a theoretical physicist. My undergraduate degree is in physics however, I graduated in 1997, and have forgotten most of what I learnt. However, to become a theoretical physicist, one needs a PhD, which, for most, is taken immediately after completing an undergraduate degree.
A PhD takes at least three years of study to complete and I/we cannot afford for me to take three plus years out of my life to study for a PhD with no real income (other than a graduate stipend, which will not go very far), as my current job doesn’t;t just support me, but my family also. I have a mortgage to play. So I have to find ways of making money without selling my time for a fixed rate which will give me time to study and also support us financially. I’m talking passive income.
This additional income will have be at least what I’m earning now, so I can comfortably quit my job and study. This will take time to build up, and I’m right starting from zero.
My current passive income earnings are £0