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Warren Shea

Archive for February, 2014

How things have changed…

Wednesday, February 19th, 2014 at 1:02 am

I came to a realization recently in that – I don’t blog as often anymore partly because I need peace and quiet to blog. That’s pretty much the only time I blog, when it’s silent…
And I haven’t had peace and quiet to myself in a while because I’ve been sleeping earlier than usual.

Yes, gone are the days of sleeping at 5am, waking up at 3pm (on the weekend), sleeping at 1-3am and waking up at 9:15am (on the weekday). Nowadays, you’ll find me sleeping between 12 and 1 and waking up between 7:45 and 8:30. And on weekends, sleeping between 12-2 and waking up around 10am.

My schedule has normalized to that of an average person…and it’s different.

I find that I’m more productive in the errands, in the menial tasks accomplished during the day – and that my loss of time in the middle of the night is correlated to a loss of critical thinking. Hence, my lack of blogging, my lack of development (coding), even my lack of ‘productivity’ – ‘Warren productivity’ that is. I have less time to focus and concentrate and the time I do have alone, I tend to squander. You need time to really get into something, after all.

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I took a 3-day course on management last week. Specifically, a “leadership development course”. Followed by a 1-day course on “Fundamentals of Customer Experience”. Both were incredibly enlightening and I feel that I learned more in 4 days in some aspects than I’ve learned in 5 years of experience. I learned more about bigger picture and how everything ties together. Maybe I’ll blog about it…later. There was also a substantial amount of self-discovery in these days.

It’s interesting – I find that I’m growing at a fast rate – on all the things I didn’t deem important earlier in my career. All the things I thought trivial due to my development experience and nature, is now my focus. It’s definitely taking some getting used to but it’s great that, overall, I’ll be a much stronger, well-rounded professional.

I found that this blog helped incredibly with my self discovery of things like my mantra (or “brand”) – “Reliable to Succeed. Passionate to Excel. Adaptable to Endure.” and that, without realizing, I’d already started the foundation to my “brand”. Even though I don’t write in my blog as much anymore (Q_Q), I definitely value the skills and realizations that’s come with writing in it. The writing skill/ability increase, the self-reflection and self-discovery, the change in mentality on things, and the transparency. I’m vastly different than I was, 4 years ago. And I’m pleased that this blog has helped chronicle the change. Sure, it may be only useful to me…but that’s someone.

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One thing that’s been running through my mind lately is “If I knew then, what I know now”. I really feel that the 4-day course I took helped me in leaps and bounds on the obvious, the common sense – of which I didn’t know. I’m sure there’s less of a “If I knew then, what I know now” due to that course and I can’t measure how important that is. Experience is not easy to obtain and it takes time to learn from experience. But I feel like I’d been given a helping handful of free experience in a short amount of time. And that’s priceless.

Sure, I didn’t figure anything out for myself, but I’d been handed well thought out conclusions. Not trying to reinvent the wheel here – best to learn from the knowledge out there than start fresh.

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In the last 6 months I’d been in my manager role, I honestly felt that I’d go back to dev after this role as this manager thing isn’t for me. But after this course, I realize that this manager thing isn’t for me…cuz I’m not great at it…yet. And I love being great at something over failing something. That’s so personally motivating/satisfying – and I take a lot of pride in my work. But I find with my new knowledge, I have the ability to be much better, dare I say – great – at my job. And that challenge is really laying the foundation for this possibly new career. I still love development though…but it’s nice stepping out of my comfort zone, being uncomfortable, but gaining new skills to be comfortable again. That’s a difficult journey and I’m proud to say I’m on it, as opposed to being complacent. Complacent is good…but not long term. “Adaptable to endure” and all that…

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That’s it. Going to sleep now. Was nice to write a bit again :)

Pokemon Y Update

Monday, February 3rd, 2014 at 1:24 am

I’ve been playing Pokemon a lot lately, doing wonder trades and deciding to do my best at ‘collecting them all’.

So far, I only have 272 of the 718 Pokemon but I have 314 Pokemon in my Pokedex. This is because I’m trying to get each stage of a character, ex 3 “Char” characters – ex. Charmander, Charmeleon, Charizard, as opposed to just 1.

Sadly, I still have many, many to collect :(

Not really playing any other 3DS games at the moment….

Frozen

Saturday, February 1st, 2014 at 1:04 am

Just saw Disney’s Frozen due to two of my Facebook friends constantly talking about it – and man, it was SO. GOOD. I’m shocked how high the quality of this movie was…if this is a sign of the quality in Disney’s future, I an SO ON BOARD. WOW!

This song was clearly the best song of the movie – but they were all quite good!

Here’s “Let It Go” by Idina Menzel.

Idina Menzel also did other songs like “Defying Gravity” with Kristen Chenoweth.

Unfortunately, both songs above require context to fully appreciate. While seeing Frozen is pretty likely, seeing Wicked is less likely :( Oh wellz.

Also – I knew Kristen Bell could sing but I didn’t know she could sing so well, she totally surprised me!

That is all.