Learning to Learn

When talking about curiosity, and learning in general, I've got itchy feet. That's a well known fact.

Unfortunately, it's also a known fact that my perseverance in a field is not very notable. I've only managed to keep the interest for a long time in a handful of things (from 16 y.o. to 18 in reverse engineering, from 20-now optimizing procedures (say bash, vim, zsh, screen, tiling wm...) and since I was 24 on I've been quite fond of perl) .

I get amazed by new technologies, or programming languages too often, and although that makes me a very aware person of the state of art, I'm not an expert in any of theese. I call myself the 'master of hello worlds' .

Examples are:

• Io
• Haskell
• Smalltalk
• Catalyst
• Lisp
• Scheme
• zsh
• factor
  
• emacs
• ...and a looong list...

For some time I've been addicted (among other things) to trying new programming languages, and read a good amount of literature about those (paradigms, implementations, tips 'n tricks)... But lately I've felt the need for something more general. A kind of 'programming best practices', or some patterns book (not the GoF one but one I can read from cover to cover).

I took a look at some smalltalk book, or more generic books (O'Reilly beautiful XYZ) . But I wanted to go more meta. And remembered a thing I wanted to do since I was about 20. Empower and speed up daily tasks.

Some time ago I read 'Mind Performance Hacks', and was good enough, but most hacks weren't appliable to my daily life.

As an example, this weekend, I started to read articles of:

• lisp
• Catalyst
• squeak
• FluidDB
• Perl
  

As you see, I need to focus (or a girlfriend). And organize myself. And Thought that in order to focus, I'll read David Allen's "Getting things done" once for all. It's been in my TODO list for some time and now I feel it's the moment.

So my TODO ReadList, has grown by 2: GTD, and a Speed Reading book. That's not a very good start :) . Meta-procrastinating Rulez!

Bah, I doubt this post can be useful to anybody but me... If you've read until here, sorry ... that's all... at least you can google some of the words I put here, and learn real things.

Byez

PS: Want more titles? ask in comments.