Staying sharp

A couple years back I had asked my boss to help me with learning the UNIX file system running my wonderful Mac OS X. More or less, it's the "under the hood" for Apple's operating system as well as other UNIX distributions like Ubuntu. He soon realized he wouldn't have time and instead bought me a book, "A practical guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users" found here at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-UNIX-Mac-Users/dp/0131863339

It's a good book and I've decided I'm going to do at least a chapter a week, answer the end of the chapter questions and turn them in to the boss or one of our other system administrators as "homework" and allow them to keep me accountable.

Of course this seems fairly manageable... however... One of the Borders bookstores near us is closing and my wife and I stopped by to see if there were any decently discounted books. I was disappointed, all the books I was interested in were still cheaper on Amazon. (Oh how much money my iPhone has saved me being able to check prices while in a store!) I was standing in the technology section and had a stack of books I was still interested in and it was feeling rather depressed. So much of the information on those pages I just wanted to absorb so I could use the knowledge and practice as tools in my day to day work as a web designer (JavaScript Joomla, Flash, etc), help desk technician, Mac OS X guru etc.

Needless to say, I'll work my way through my current text book (approximately 2 inches thick) before starting my next one. Luckily enough, we've been talking about some training time for work so I'm excited about that when the time comes.

I challenge you to take an hour a week to study something in your field and don't skip the questions at the end of the chapters!