Dinosaur

I realised the other day I’ve lost my sense of adventure. It dawned on me in an odd manner too. I’ve been looking at the new Kindle Paper White but finances haven’t allowed for one. A contributor on Ozbargain came to my rescue detailing a way to have one sent from Japan via a forwarding agent that would have been at a considerable saving. Reading the instructions I saw one tiny tricky, not even difficult, bit and immediately thought ‘oh, that could go wrong, won’t bother’.

When did this start? When did I become so risk averse that possibly entering the wrong prefecture stopped me from ordering a cool toy from Japan?

I realised then, as i looked at the project I was working on that I’m still using approaches and technology from five years ago because I know they work. Sure ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ but tech moves at a lightning pace and I’m missing out on some benefits of new ways just to be safe.

To try and stop me turning in to absolute dinosaur I’m going to teach myself a new programming language, from scratch, by June. In the old days, before kids, mortgages and running my own business this would have been a much shorter term project and I’m going to have carve out time from a pretty busy schedule to to do this but in five months time I want to have achieved something new. And if I do I will buy myself that Kindle. From Japan.