Stuff During the Holidays

I'm on my end-of-academic-year break at the moment. It's three months long, and I'm planning to use it to learn a couple of new things. I've been back in Kuching for 3 weeks: my days have been filled with programming for my startup, and teaching debate, and running. Quiet, productive days.

What I haven't been doing lately, however, is writing. It's been a good 4 weeks since I last wrote anything of length, and I feel my writing muscles already fraying and rotting in my head. (Not that - you know - there are muscles in my head ... but yeah you do get what I'm talking about now, don't you?)

I've got a couple of things I want to talk about, and they're all in higgly-piggly rows in my head. Some of these topics interest me a lot, because I've been thinking about them for some time now, and while I'm not sure if the ideas are right, I suspect that the only way to find out is to hash them out, on paper. What I do know is that I need to get writing now, before the new semester begins. It's the only free time that I really have.

Things I'd like to do, before the holidays are over:

• Learn recursion (i.e.: work through The Little Schemer)
• Learn proper algorithm analysis
• Revise relations and set theory (I'll probably need this for database work, and soon)
• Learn Vim (mostly done)
• Learn Python and Django (covered basic syntax for Python, still at the learning curve for Django)
• Revise graphs and trees

Loosely coupled to that is a light reading-list that I'm nearly finished with, and probably a writing schedule that I'll need to adhere to.

This feels weird - writing again. I'll need to get used to it as soon as I can.

[Update]: Somebody commented on how foreign and odd-sounding my todo list reads, and so - an explanation:

Vim is a code editor packaged with most linux/unix systems, and programmers swear by it because it allows you to do code editing on a cramped keyboard, without using a mouse. (I've already used it while lying on a couch in my grandparent's place - it works, by gum, it works!

Python is a programming language. You know Google? Well, they run on Python. (I also like how it sounds like a snake. And that allows me to make up all sorts of pun-jokes, e.g.: Python is very pretty. As a programming language! Not, you know, as a snake. Though it is a pretty snake ...)

Django is a framework for building web applications (like blogs, or Twitter, or Facebook) and I'm currently using it to build some writing software. More on that in a bit.

And ... well, the rest (recursion, graph, trees, set theory) are math stuff - and I'm not going to talk about them now because I've yet to learn anything apart from recursion (and I don't think they make for polite dinner conversation). Don't you just love polite geeks?