I have a lot of ideas I want to proceed with, but when it comes time to approach them, there’s some sort of bottleneck in the way of them.
It’s usually not money that is the bottleneck, but time.
Take for example, I wanted to make my combination, GPS, Internet Browsing, Gaming, Media playing, 15″ screen ‘personal navigation device’ some time ago. Thus far I’ve got the GPS device, and I’ve tested it’s ability to get the data – and it works.
The slow down? Time to prepare the system for that, fit the car with something to mount the 15″ laptop onto and fit a car charger. Sure, 15″ in a car is overkill for a GPS, but hardly a 42″ LCD when it comes to playing media.
I have other stuff I’d like to progress on too, like the OzVoIPStatus website updates – it’s still sitting there on the home server with code from 2007 and before. Hmm. I was going to do something with Perl for it too – haven’t done it.
Oh, and I was going to have OzVoIPstatus monitoring from two locations, with database updates to both sites, and traffic routed at each. Still not done.
I also want to get my PC moved over to Fedora, after Ubuntu’s latest releases still continue to cause my PC issues with random spikes in CPU load.
The enemy, is time. The enemy is work. It’s the biggest consumer of my time – 40 hours a week. But there’s 168 hours in a week you say? Yep. I spend about 50 of those sleeping, 30 hours with the kids, or out doing other miscellaneous things – food, etc. The remainder is pretty much spent with me (where I break that into writing my blog, investigating my Ubuntu issue, thinking about the future, or twiddling my thumbs).
So, there needs to be more time, for me to get what I want to do done. From the above, I can’t get rid of the enemy – it’s funding is vital. Sleep? Can probably get rid of that, but that would affect the performance the enemy gets, and therefore cause the enemy to launch an offensive, which could only be retaliated against. Not worth it. Kids need the other time they get, because the full-time babysitter will cease providing food, etc. Plus, I get to watch some TV – shows like Timmy Time and Special Agent Oso, top rated TV! Now, where did I put that South Park DVD…
That leaves my time – which is pretty much spent.
If I could turn what I want to do – that is, web application development / systems administration, or similar into a full time job, and be paid for it, that removes the enemy.
I’m putting 40 hours a week into something that I don’t really enjoy, aside from monetary reward, I get little other benefit from it, and those 40 hours, finish with me wanting to launch a few surface to air missiles at a certain set of co-ordinates.