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a number of interesting and important variables

2025-02-27

3 minute read

I found a nice library to work in. It's full of mostly portuguese students.

I'm feeling good.

I need to figure out what I'm doing next. It's still hard to put down a real plan, but I'm getting closer to it.

I've thought before how the order of things can make a huge difference. Doing two years of portuguese study before arriving in Portugal means I'm going to have a very different experience to doing 2 years of portuguese study after spending a year in portugal. I've chosen a deliberately obvious example to make my next point: Doing an intensive portuguese course at the start of my time here will make a bigger difference than doing one after.

Learning portuguese is the cake of my time here. It's the raison raison d'être of this trip. An intensive course would help kick this off.

I have to get a NIFF to do get a job here. I've got an appointment on the 12th of March. I'm thinking of seeing if I can one before then by travelling to a small town and doing a walk-in at their finance office.

I'm not even dying to get a job, it's more just wanting to tick the NIFF off. It helps for a variety of things here. I'm very interested in doing some WWOOF work, putting off the amount of time before I have to get a job.

It could be a good time to learn to surf? I'm not crazy about surfing, but it would be a good thing to know how to do.

I've been thinking about what tradeoffs I'm willing to make or should consider for my goals, eg:

I'll look for those decision making tools I read about last time I was unemployed, I'll make some lists of pros and cons. I guess my point is: With some smart tradeoffs, I could get a lot more mileage out of some things.

A lot of people on my visa, or similar visas, stay in bigger cities because they need english to get by. I don't necessarily have that problem, so I can open up my options a bit.

This could be a really good opportunity to do a similar self funded residency as my "Heart of Hobart" one.

This could be so many things, but what will it actually be? What's the dream?

I can't know what it will be, I can't plan what it will be. I can prepare the soil and plant the seeds.

As usual, I'm having a hard time focussing, and seeing the bigger picture.

enough negative self talk

It is difficult to focus on a number of interesting and important variables. I'm working on and exploring ways to externalise and reason about them.

There is, especially at this point, a very low risk of making a bad decision. All my options are good. I must simply choose one, and do it well.

what else

I went to a great free-form jazz show last night.

I'm using mpd controlled by mpc to listen to music today. It's good. MPD is a server side music player, and supports a client-server paradigm. This makes it good for making custom ui's, and many people do. I'd like to do this too. (Don't worry, I won't yet! Just another idea on the list)

I have bought a number of albums over the last couple of years, and my collection continues to expand.

I'd like to pull down a few DJ sets too and save them. There are a lot of good ones out there.

I finished going through my entire /yeshello directory! This is my project directory, and it was getting a bit unweildy. A lot of things I started and never documented. I wrote a simple script to scrape the file and look for a description.txt file, and in lieu of that, the first line of a README.md

Then it displayed them as a table in html

a list of folders with their one line descriptions

I'd like to adjust this scheme a little to instead use some kind of sign within README.md, like description >>> ... or something. It could be extended to include tags. But for now I'm happy with this.

listening to

questions