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An inconveniently full life
It is increasingly pressing upon me the degree to which I am relying on knowledge and skills that I learned years ago rather than continuing to learn at my previous rate. For OSU I developed everything from distributed design optimization to a flexible equation solver. At EMBL-EBI I was mostly working on functional genome annotation in Common Lisp. With Aetion I was having to learn about a range of application domains, from sonar to drug design to counterterrorism, interfacing with others' models and data where possible, using a range of tools from PostScript to Amazon EC2. At Vecna I needed to know the standard enterprise application stack from Oracle, PostgreSQL up through Hibernate, Spring, J2EE to jQuery, with anything from git to BioPerl to TikZ on the side. I don't really have to learn much biology or image analysis for my present work at Dundee; in terms of extending my skills the main thing has really been just a bit of Python which I can largely work out with the help of the online docs and past experience in languages like Perl and Haskell. In fairness, I am positively encouraged to learn things, which is why it is fine for me to go to these seminars and symposia, but the set of reusable skills that much benefit our funded work is generally a comfortable subset of what I already knew when I started and what I am not using I am forgetting.
I do try to continue learning at home; through putting aside music and mathematics I have especially made efforts with Erlang and OpenBSD. I also spend time on other activities like exercise. But, with getting home after 17h and needing to be in bed by 22h, by the time I have helped with dinner, children's homework, etc., caught up with household bills (e.g., I've still to do insurance renewals), watched a couple of television shows or read a bit to wind down before bed, that's pretty much the evening gone. Saturdays are busy lately too: last weekend Miranda had an orthodontist appointment at 9h, a chemistry class at 10h, and both children were attending a club at the library over the afternoon. I find that if I want to try to be productive with interesting new things then it is very hard for me to fit that in around a life that already includes full-time work and otherwise supporting my family.
I do try to continue learning at home; through putting aside music and mathematics I have especially made efforts with Erlang and OpenBSD. I also spend time on other activities like exercise. But, with getting home after 17h and needing to be in bed by 22h, by the time I have helped with dinner, children's homework, etc., caught up with household bills (e.g., I've still to do insurance renewals), watched a couple of television shows or read a bit to wind down before bed, that's pretty much the evening gone. Saturdays are busy lately too: last weekend Miranda had an orthodontist appointment at 9h, a chemistry class at 10h, and both children were attending a club at the library over the afternoon. I find that if I want to try to be productive with interesting new things then it is very hard for me to fit that in around a life that already includes full-time work and otherwise supporting my family.