Improving myself
Sometimes I feel like I need to improve myself. Improve what I know into fields unknown to me, improve my life, something. Here’s some recent things on this topic.
Cooking
As friends can tell, I love to bake and make desserts. Nothing fancy, only easy cakes, tiramisu-like things. After we often cooked quite easy things with little ingredients (and thus little money) in Iceland which were often better than convenience food, I decided to learn to cook. There are only two days in the week on which I need to prepare my own meal (four days parents, one day university cafeteria), but it’s a start: Today it’ll be some meat, a leftover Swabian pockets soup and a self-made salad. Maybe I’ll make a pepper-sauce for the meat… that would be cool.
Touch-typing
In some digg article about writing good articles (oh the irony…!) I remembered that I really should improve my typing. I do use about 6 to 8 fingers, but they mostly roam around the keyboard in a non-organized fashion; So I installed “tipptrainer” (sudo apt-get install tipptrainer) and I’m currently doing one lesson a day (usually just repeating the same lesson though, because my error rate is still too high). Some day, I will master this. 
Job skills
I always have the impression that university doesn’t really prepare me for my dream job, even though I learn the basics like programming languages, computer architecture, software architecture, software engineering, databases, and so on. Yesterday, I saw an offer for an Ubuntu Linux desktop developer (for Canonical) over on Planet Ubuntu. It could be a dream job… working from home (and I’m disciplined enough to do this), working with interesting people and open source software. I would really love to do something like this later. The problem: I’d need to know C/C++, the Gnome desktop inside out (GTK+) and Ubuntu packaging. Isn’t it the perfect opportunity? I can’t get this job now, but these are all skills that I’ve always wanted to learn. So, after my next exam (friday) I’ll start going into this stuff, at least an hour daily. Next time something like this comes around, I’ll be prepared. 
How do You improve yourself? Any tipps on what one can do?
September 11th, 2007 at 20:00
very interesting posting
regarding touch typing i can only share my experiences, i learned touch typing when i was 15 with a computer program only, it took me about a week, practicing daily for 2-3 hours, if you’re determined you can learn it pretty fast actually, the best thing is to never take a look at the keyboard but type blind from the beginning when you start learning touch typing
regarding the job thing, i’m not sure how how long you’re still going to be a student, but the google summer of code is a great opportunity to get in contact with the open source community and get actually paid for it, it’s also a great way to get into companies which do open source work, many participants get job offers after the successful completion of their summer of code project
personally i try to improve my skills constantly, both physically (lifting weigths
and mentally, usually by simply doing things or reading papers on research topcics,
i even sometimes spend time learning how to use a linux console application by reading through the man pages and info pages, usually the time spent learning how to use it pays off quickly in daily usage, taking things apart, e.g. looking at the src of programs to find out how certain features are implemented can be very interesting too