.7 - Biting off more than one can chew
2025-03-27
"Biting off more than one can chew" is an idiom that roughly means "try to do more than one is capable of", it is also a sentence that I have stumbled upon a few times already but this time it was different from the previous ones, this time I was able to see and understand that perhaps it was not the best time to undertake such a big task, so instead of giving up and trying to forget it I'm actively taking a step back to reorder my priorities and hopefully waste as little time as possible.
The task I am talking about is something that I briefly mentioned on my post .3, learning Japanese is something that I've wanted to do for a really long time, and like so many other things, projects and ideas it had been indefinitely put on hold since I "had no time". Well, as I talked about previously it turns out that I had a lot of time, time that I was wasting on YouTube instead of doing something actually beneficial, and by the end of January that had become very clear, so I actually started learning Japanese, and have stuck to it pretty regularly so far and made a lot more progress than I was expecting.
And why is this an issue then? The last time I actively studied a language was just over 8 years ago, and I had entirely forgotten (or perhaps not even realized) how much of a time-sink it is to learn a language, I'm not talking about just learning the translations of words, I actually mean learning the structure of a language, how their sentences are formed, what do words mean, and from my fairly limited experience with language learning in school I firmly believe that one cannot simply grasp all of that through classes alone. About 8 years ago I moved to France, I was a student who didn't speak a lick of French, so I had no option but to learn it, and so I did, sure I did have special classes to learn French but none of the teachers spoke either Portuguese or English so I was mostly on my own to figure out at least the basics, and if I didn't surround myself almost full time with French media, games, movies and literally everything else I don't think I would have been able to learn French to a decent level, there were even a couple of times that native speakers didn't believe that I wasn't French.
As much as I want to learn Japanese (and seem to have found a lot of great resources on doing so) I simply don't have the need to learn it, I would like to enjoy anime and manga in their original forms and would like to visit Japan sometime but I don't have any plans to live there. And as much as I have been enjoying the leaning process of a language that is unlike any other that I have ever learnt I have a lot of other things that I want to do too, while the days where short, dark and mostly rainy I did not mind spending multiple hours straight studying grammar of vocabulary, but getting home and still having some time to enjoy the sun and the outside in general really gets me in a good mood, a mood that makes me want to tackle my ever-growing to-do list.
So I am not giving up on Japanese, I'm merely slowing it down to be able to work on my other projects, and I fully understand that what was already going to take multiple years will take much longer, but that doesn't really matter for the two things that I find the most joy in are learning and making, not having learnt or made, it's about the process not the destination.
Quite a lot actually,
Firstly, as you might have noticed, I finally did that website rebuild that I talked about last post, it was fairly straight forward to replace the multiple iframes and their individual HTML files with the new CSS border-image windows. But it could have been much easier and straight forward if I didn't decide that I wanted the website to look nice on mobile devices as well (I now understand why so many indie web websites decide to only support desktop), I could go into more detail (if that is something that interests you feel free to send me an e-mail) but I'll just leave a tip here for anyone that is interested in making websites that look good on different screen sizes, do NOT use absolute units like px in CSS, instead use relative units like em or % (there are more, W3Schools as a really good reference page, I recommend you give a read to at least the "references" section)
Last post I also mentioned that I bought a bunch of music CDs, what I didn't mention is that I had also bough a brand new vinyl of Linkin Park's latest album "From Zero". Little issue, I did not own a record player, nor know much about vinyl at all, I just bought that vinyl because I loved the album and it was a good collectible, I wasn't expecting to be thrown down a rabbit hole looking for a way to play it, I ended up buying an old second-hand audio system, with a turntable, radio, compact cassette, CD player, amplifier and speakers for a really good price, and after getting the important bits temporarily setup and working I went looking for a replacement stylus for the turntable. Turns out that the stylus/cartridge on the turntable that I got is probably one of the worst in terms of record wear and audio quality (even though it sounded fine to me lol), and since the turntable is also very simple and cheap it doesn't have any adjustments so I can't install a better cartridge and stylus. So I ended up getting a brand new turntable (you can see a picture of it on mastodon).
A while back I said that I wanted to make a bookshelf and some wall decoration for my bedroom, well, when I got that audio system I wanted to put it in my bedroom as well, but for that I also need to make a cabinet of sorts to keep it in, so it looks nice and my cats don't fill every little grove with cat hair. So those two projects merged and evolved, I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to do it and it's going to be the first big project that I will share here with a full blog post once it's done, and I am starting it this weekend so in like maybe a month (or maybe two) it should be mostly done.
And lastly for now I've also been doing a lot of research on servers and hosting, and I probably won't be hosting my own mastodon instance like I mentioned that I wanted to, since if I want to share large resolution images more permanently I can do it here on my website, but I still want to move my website from Cloudflare Pages into some service that I have more control over, along with the git repo that it is stored in.
Little to no progress was made on other projects since during the week I was mostly focused on drumming and Japanese and during the weekend spent quite a bit of time with my family. Last post I said that I was probably going to skip a week and ended up skipping two, I know that this posts are of little meaning and any semblance of a schedule of when I do them is just an illusion, but they are actually pretty good for me to keep track of what I've done (or more often not done) and look back at what went well and improve on what didn't, kinda like writing a daily diary or journal entry, but since 9 out of the about 15 hours that I am awake are spent at work doing mostly the same things I can just focus on the 6 hours that I actually do things that I want to do when I am writing here about once a week. So for the foreseeable future I will keep on writing and posting them.
That is about it for now, until next time,
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