I travelled to Roanoke Virginia this week for work. I read The Monk and the Riddle while waiting in the airport and during the flights. I enjoyed this book and it challenged me to think about work / life issues. The central theme is the issue of the Deferred Life Plan versus the Full Life Plan. In the form of a question, the central theme would be: are you doing what you truly want to do? Or, are you defering what you truly want to be doing?
Many people defer what they truly want to do and assume they will have time to complete those items in the future. Unfortunately, we can't assume we will ever have the time to accomplish them later. The morale of the story is, don't let life pass you by, do what you truly want to and enjoy the journey.
This book is framed in terms of Randy Komisar's experiences in Silicon Valley. Therefore, it is even easier to recommend it to my friends that work in the technology sector.
Other insightful comments about "The Monk and The Riddle".
Mandy and I had a wonderful valentine's day. She made me the best mint brownies and filled my weekend with happiness. Hopefully, you had someone special to share valentine's day with. It makes all the difference. ;-)
I have been tweaking my blog's templates and style sheet. I have added a blogroll (which is basically a section to organize links) towards the bottom of the left pane. My blogroll is merely another RSS feed included within my main template. Items within my blogroll are sorted by category. For implementation details see the Movable Type Blogroll entry over at the tweney report.
We played our third basketball game last night against "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids." We were winning at half time just like each of our previous games. I got a lot of wide open shots since they were double teaming Dishong. However, I failed to capitalize on most of them. Early in the 2nd half I got into foul trouble. We got behind early in the second half by quite a margin.
Hammer was subbing for us and hit 3 NBA length 3-pointers in a row to bring us back into the contest. We did a lot in the last nine seconds. I missed a free throw which would have been a great help. We were down by three with one second left. The ball was baseball passed into Dishong who shot a long 3-pointer. He was "brilliantly" fouled by the opposing team. The clock expired and Dishong went to the foul line. We needed him to make all three foul shots to survive. Unfortunately, he missed the first of the three. (However, he did make the next two.)
I came back from a terrible start to win for the night: 4-3. Gille played tough and it was hard coming back. Our overall total is now 38-34 in my favor. At this rate, it is going to take awhile before either of us wins a 100 games.
I have been very busy and finally have some 2003 holiday pictures:
Thanksgiving 2003, Christmas 2003.
We played the "Prime Time Players" last night. I put in 6 points, had a couple of rebounds, and brought my defense up a level. However, it wasn't enough. They used a box and one which effectively shut down Mike Dishong offensively. We lost 79-69.
I went with the waterski club snow skiing this past weekend at Blue Mountain up in Ontario. The last two years the ski club has went to Crystal Mountain in Michigan. We decided to try Blue Mountain for a change of pace. Blue Mountain is huge, with plenty of lengthy runs. Blue Mountain's hills are considerably more challenging than Crystal at the same level of skill color. The only thing we found lacking about Blue Mountain is the number of easy hills for our beginning level skiers. However, most of them seemed to enjoy the "Happy Valley" run over and over again.
I will be posting pictures from the trip in the near future. A big thanks goes out to Rob Reckley for planning and organizing the ski trip. Everyone had a blast and looks forward to next year's excursion. One final advantage of the Blue Mountain trip was the ability to duty free on the way back.