Indeed

Today was a good day.

Made progress on the ACPI stuff. I created a battery runlevel that enables power saving features on my Wireless card and harddrive while on battery power. Also added settings to my xorg conf file to turn off the backlight when idle for 10 minutes. Haven't gotten to messing with the cpu governors quite yet, although I did compile them all into my kernel for later fun and joy. I'll accomplish that tomorrow. The thing I really want to figure out is the backlight dimming. The power management guide seems to cover only IBM and Toshiba laptops for this particular point, but I could be wrong. Going to have to investigate that further. Also need to waste a day or so testing Windows vs. Linux once I get this all set up; just to see which one lasts longer.

So basically I mostly accomplished my goal, but I found a lot more I want to do. That seems to be the nature of all computing stuff. Goal for tomorrow is to finish up with the CPU governors and get my MySQL setup finally working correctly for the magic site. I've been putting that off too long.

Haven't read anything too insightful today. Most of it was consumed with watching Stargate Season 9 nonstop. Probably should have done a bit less of that and a bit more playing with linux, but oh well, I am on break (of sorts).

Anyway, 3:18 AM = bedtime!

Un Mes

Sadly, it has been nearly a month since I updated this blog. A lot has happened since then, but sadly I think it will be lost to history, because I don't want to waste this post of one of those silly diary updates that people do when they haven't posted in forever. Instead, I want to use this post to motivate myself to create more posts.

Yep, I have been reading at StevePavlina.com again. Specifically, his six part series on Self-Discipline (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6), which I feel I am sorely lacking.

While I have only just finished Part 3, I wanted to record my thoughts so far before I lose them to new thoughts. I believe I have the Acceptance part of the process down pretty well, although it honestly took a dota game yesterday to fully cement that. I would like to continue enjoying dota and gaming in general, but I realize that I am playing nonstop mainly because I don't create anything else meaningful to do. I play so much because it allows me to escape the fact that I don't do anything productive most days. I realized this yesterday when I was playing a game and realized I didn't even really want to be playing, but that I was because I had nothing else to do. There is always something else to do, I just need to create that something.

The Willpower part of the process got me thinking and scheming. The basic idea is that you can muster the willpower to do anything for a short time, but that willpower is always unsustainable. So, you use your precious short term willpower to create a better environment for you to get things done in... don't waste the willpower on doing the things themselves. For instance, if you want to start working out every day, don't use the willpower everyday to force yourself to go. Use the willpower to sit down and rearrange your schedule so you have a set time to go every day. That way, when the time comes, you will have no alternative activity to offer an excuse to put off or skip that day. You will simply say to yourself, 10am is my scheduled work out time. It still will take some effort to go, but much less than it would to muster the willpower every day to go to the gym in the middle of all your other commitments.

So my first use of Willpower, since I seem to suddenly have a bit of it, is to make a modest goal for myself. The goal, I think, is a good one. I want to post in this blog once a day, right before bed, detailing one productive thing I accomplished that day, AND make a new goal for the next day. This way, I (and anyone reading this) can hold myself accountable for accomplishing the goal each day. Also, the process of reflecting on a goal will help lead me to new goals. Lastly, by setting a new goal daily, I force myself to set small enough goals that they can be achieved in 24 hours. This prevents the insurmountable odds feeling.

Not all of my goals will be lofty. In fact, pretty sure 24 hour goals can't be lofty, but the point is to get in the habit of setting goals, planning their execution, and then actually executing.

My first goal is to go through the Power Management Guide on gentoo.org and set up ACPI correctly on my laptop. Now that my sound drivers work correctly (last night's achievement), I will probably be spending more time in linux and would like the battery to last 7-8 hours (like it does in Windows) versus the current 2-3 hours. I think the main culprit is that linux doesn't actually turn off the backlight when it sleeps, it just blacks the screen. The backlight in a modern laptop uses about 40% of the power, so getting this to work properly would probably add an hour or two of battery life all by itself. Then there are the way more technical things like fixing the broken DSDT written by Compaq.

Anyway, off I go to read the other three parts in the series. If I feel like writing more later, I will. If not, I'll be back tomorrow to let you know how my ACPI work went.