Wassim

In the past, I started working out four and even five times a week (read My New Workout Routing blog post). But since a couple of weeks I’ve been aborting my workout sessions more frequently. Last week I had chest pain around my right lung. The other day I had pain around the heart area during a workout session. Today I have constant knee pain on the leg where I got injured in my childhood Tae Kwon Do training. I am not sure if my body does not sustain my workout schedule, or is it fatigue, or whatever. I am going to make it a bit easy on my body and train for at max three times a week this week. You would probably say I am softening. Or I am procrastinating once again, and disguising it in an excuse. Call it what you like. Alhamdulillah I reached a point where I do not need to work out more than what I do now. I am not sweating to impress people, nor do I prepare to participate in a competition. In fact, one of the reasons I still fight my ass off and often temporarily losing ...

I wanted to see which courses on edX I’ve enrolled in in the past, and maybe resume one of them or enroll in a new one. I had a dozen of courses in my waiting list. Yeah I am still a fucking lazy ass . But maybe a course made by a reputable university could help me in some way. I tried the first one. Not that interesting. Then I tried a second one. Sounded too theoretical. I was skeptic the whole time. I could not withstand learning from an instructor who has no success track of records except his academic title. It’s like a filter I have in my brain. I am not making any prejudices. I simply tried some non-technical courses from edX and the like and was not satisfied with the results. Or maybe my psychological filter got thick and allowed only hardcore stuff to circulate through; stuff from hardcore guys like David Goggins . Here I am watching a recent Goggins clip and confirming for the N th time, that this guy is a good example I could learn from.

“ You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes .” –The Matrix Morpheus said it right. I was carrying on with my life in a mediocre way, and resetting the emotional counter every night. I was taking the blue pill every night before sleep. I thought I was a patient guy. My patience did not last more than a couple of years, until my health got damaged . The blue pill is where everything “should” be fine. Your family, your job, your health. That is at least what it looks like on the surface. The red pill is where you say “fuck this shit. I won’t accept this situation anymore”. blue pill red pill I have from time to time swollen the red pill. I’ve done it on my birthday last year, where I decided to stop believing in personal development . And start doing some real shit instead. It was not easy at all. It ...

I have been on Keto since more than one year now. I enjoyed some benefits if I compared my physical and mental health to the pre-Keto lifestyle. But my wife is telling me that I “looked” less healthy than before. It is not about being in shape or overweight. True I am not overweight anymore. It’s that my face looks tired and gives the impression of malnutrition. Besides that, I am feeling not that great anymore; when I eat my meals off the normal schedules, I feel low on energy. Also when I have some additional physical strain, the effect persists until the next day! I thought I was having a healthy nutrition plan since I switched to keto. But being conscious of my body, I think I need some tweaks. Considering the Mediterranean diet My mother is well versed in the nutrition topics, although she has no formal nutrition study background. She constantly recommends me the Mediterranean diet, with the premise that I get everything my body would need: fiber, minerals, vitami...

I got stomachache since a couple of days. I don’t know what the cause is. Today I decided to go to the doctor. I took an appointment and Alhamdulillah I got one on the afternoon. I interrupted my work and went to the doctor’s office. I described what I was feeling to the doctor on a regular basis, especially the stomachache that is now following me since months. After carefully listening and asking some oriented questions, she told me I had Reizdarmsyndrom, or in English the Irritable Bowel Syndrom IBS . From what I described to her, she added that this situation is a result of another problem I was experiencing recently, the Boreout Syndrom . Although I consider myself to be a sports guy, I think the lack of complexity of the daily job activities is what accelerated the appearance of the Boreout syndrom. In fact, I rarely feel challenged at work since months. The doctor recommended me some probiotics to test for a month, recommended me some rest and optionally to attend psy...

Have you ever got interviewed and asked silly questions? If so, you are not alone. I get them pretty consistently especially in screening conversations and it pisses me off. How (I think) headhunters operate Many of the headhunters out there are junior employees who are either recently recruited or are training to become “regular” headhunters. I easily spot them when they shoot at you with a series of questions in a scripted fashion: What are your areas of expertise? What is your motive of resignation? Why do you want to change your job? They make you feel like you are being interrogated by a police officer. And even, a police officer may hand you a glass of water during interrogations.. After the screening phase, there comes either a more experience headhunter – who will also try to figure out your profile more- or you get redirected to the end customer for a potential interview. The No-Go question In the whole interview process, there is a single question that turns ...

I had early work shift this week. I needed to be 5:45am already at work. My commute time from home to the customer site is around 37 minutes. For three days in a row I woke up at 3:30am and left home at around 4:35am. Back from work I take a power nap of exactly 20mn. I had some drowsiness between 6:30am and 7:15am. Other than that, I was feeling better than on regular days where I sleep between 6,5 and 7 hours. These three days have shown me that a certain lack of sleep is indeed beneficial to my body. I could managed it with less than 6 hours of total sleep time per day. On the days where I exceed the 7 hour sleep mark, I usually hit the snooze button and wake up drowsy. Too much sleep is not healthy and it won’t leave you enough time and energy to work on your daily goals.

Between around 7am and 4pm I did not eat or drink anything. I was busy working, driving from one site to another, lifting stuff, etc. I did not feel hunger, thirst or tiredness. But as soon as I left the office and took the metro, things started to fall down. I could not stand tall in the metro, I needed to lean against a wall, switch feet, try to take a quick nap. Arrived home, I first took a power nap then woke up in sweat. After eating my lunch at around 4:35pm I started feeling weak, had shallow breaths and dragged my body forwards. Those were signs of physical and mental drain, a situation I can confirm by trying to measure how strong my fist is. If my fist is weak, then I’d better sit back and recover. I have a certain level of headache now. Once again I skipped my workout. I had this situation not once in the past, where I struggled during the warm-up phase of Insanity Max 30 sessions. I even got sometimes more breaks during the warm-up that you would think I am just a fat ...

It has been a year since I started listening to David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me audio book. On my birthday, I decided to integrate at least some of his suggestions into my daily life and endure the necessary pain. My accomplishments a year ago So far, and with the Grace of Allah, I’ve accomplished the following things for the duration of a year now: I’ve always stood up in public transportation, even when the whole wagon was empty. My daily commute time is around 40 minutes per direction, five days a week. No matter how light or heavy my bag is, I always stood up. I’ve done five additional prayers each day, as a way to ask Allah to forgive my wasted years between my childhood and early college years. I switched to a keto diet and never got back. Since then I never cheated. No pasta, no fruits, no ice cream in summer, no soda, etc. I’ve worked out at least four days a week, for 15 minutes of HIIT training, except on the days where I was sick or had headac...

I decided to pause tracking my time for a couple of months and see if there are any benefits. Well I had a sense of loss. It is true that I had less anxiety. But at the same time, I felt like I was losing something precious. I guess the fact of tracking my time helped me value my time more than ever before. So I am getting back tracking my time, but not for all projects. The reason why, is that I now know how much time some projects take. For example, it takes me around 45 minutes to do 15 minutes of Insanity Max and take a cold shower right after it. This time, I am going to track the projects where I lack any sense of measurements, or where I need to evaluate my performance, for example study time .

I am a conscious fucking hardcore procrastinator. In my childhood, I started Karate, reached the blue belt, and quit. In my teenage years, I started Tae-Kwon-Do, reached the orange belt, and quit. One of my training colleagues continued to the end. Years later and before my marriage, I subscribed to Tae-Bo workout in my neighborhood. Guess who was the trainer… Palma Gym, Tunis I started swimming in my college years. I trained every other day the whole week before going to classes. Then I quit. I planned to do certification exams and find me sit for the exam years later. The Wireshark exam is the best example. I wanted to start my CCIE journey a decade ago. I still did not even start reading a single CCIE-level book. I wanted to build a multi-vendor home lab. I downloaded a lot of images but still have nothing built at home. Setting my own deadlines does not work for me. I find myself rescheduling them over and over again. As I explained in my previous blog post “ Why I Stopp...

Since a couple of months I am comparing my income to the average IT salary in Germany. I used the following sources for my research: Glassdoor.de, Kununu.de and various web search results. I am not sure if the statistics on Glassdoor are relevant enough. I looked at them with a grain of salt. It says that the average Network Engineer salary is about 58,500€, which is composed of a base salary of 57 500€ and an average bonus of 1000€: Glassdoor: network engineer salary in Munich It felt not bad to know that my salary is not far from the average in the industry. But apparently the Network Engineer job is financially not really rewarding anymore in Germany, according to Computerwoche . They say that the best salaries in IT are made by Consultants earn around 75,500€ yearly, followed by IT Security Experts with 69,900€, then Software Developers with about 68,500€. There was no mention of regular network engineering that do daily support activities like myself. From what I’ve read on...

I started building my skills in wireless networking. Target would be to review the basic theory first. I decided to use the CWT exam syllabus as a blueprint. It looks to have interesting material. I started reading a digital copy of the latest CWT study guide by Sybex. Let’s see if I can get the CWT cert before the end of the year.

Many years ago I have been trying to build a better career, a better health, etc. and sacrificing family time. I used to negotiate with my wife the fact that I needed some time to myself. I needed to work harder, in order to achieve better results. However, I noticed that my relationship with my spouse and children was deteriorating. My wife started telling me that there is a bigger and bigger psychological gap between me and my older son. She also told me I was getting a “bit” more aggressive. She was right. I did not notice all of that. That’s normal, I was living inside my head for a long time. I focused my efforts on two areas, and neglected my family. I was taking my family’s happiness for granted. I was physically there but emotionally absent. Now I decided to change this. I decided to slow gears and focus on my family more than on my career. I even now refuse to change jobs if the new potential job role would not bring me the balance to enjoy family time. ...

I was looking for ways to increase my motivation to learn Anki flashcards. So I was browsing the internet in search of some popular extensions. I found Habitica . I downloaded the extension for Anki, created an account, configured the API in Anki and started using it. I think I am getting to like the tool a lot. I simply love the fact that achieving stuff helps me build an RPG character, which is rewarding in some way. Since I don’t have time to play video games – and while I was a big fan of video games in my teenage days – I feel like I am combining a past hobby with productive activity. The people behind Habitica are simply brilliant! Now, I am to progressively switch my tasks from Google Calendar to Habitica, because I like the fact that I am making my fictional character – the Habitican- earn some gold and experience, which will translate into equipment and magical potions. And I really like the Android app. It is completely ad-free and well designed: explor...

time tracking report April 2021 My sleeping time increase with a whopping 10%. One of the reasons is the two days where I got hypothermia. On each of those days I accounted an additional 3 hours at least, trying to recover my health. Job time (~22% of total tracked time), is almost the same duration as in March (24.7%) A lot more time with family (13% of total tracked time): I decided to involve my son when I go shopping. That way I can spend some quality time with him Since Ramadan started on April 13th, I dine with my family around the same table each night.

The first two weeks I started tracking time as usual with Boosted: Time tracker project duration report first two weeks Mar 2021 Then I was faced with the decision with either continuing using it, buying the full features, or searching something similar that is free and fulfills my requirements. That is how I found aTimeLogger . I customized it and used for the rest of my time tracking activities: Time tracker report mar 2021 When I will get bored I will probably post a tutorial on using it. Sleep time occupied 27.3% of total tracked time. An interesting observation: in March I ate for as much time as I studied for the Wireshark exam :)

Time tracker project duration report feb 2021

first, let us look at the week from 18 to 24 January: Then I decided not to track per week, but for the whole month: Time tracker project duration report Jan 2021

About six months after deciding on my birthday to switch to a keto diet , one of the most difficult diet plans to maintain, I wanted to check my progress. First two weeks Around the first two weeks of the keto diet I was in daily mental torture. I had hunger most of the time. I had very low levels of energy during the day and at the end of it. I felt I could not stand still. Sometimes I lean against the wall of the U-Bahn otherwise I knew I could fall down. The “Gettin’ used to” period More and more I did not feel urge to eat as much as I used to. The temptation period This is where I started to salivate at the sight of people eating a pizza, or a Croissant Au Beurre. The temptation is strong, especially the smell of fresh baked Croissants in the morning as I walk to the U-Bahn. The historian period I call it the historian period, because every time I pass by a bakery or a fast food shop, I silently laugh at the ignorance I was at, and sadly most people still at. It is...