With Blue Monday fast approaching and (at least for us in Preston) a weekend of cold, grey skies and rain (and many other places facing much worse), it feels like a great excuse to curl up in a duvet, stick on the streams and to lay there and just forget the world. I’ll admit, I did it for a few hours yesterday and it felt great, until I realised I’d have to stop and do something useful with myself so I hadn’t totally wasted the day.

That’s the dangerous thing about vegging out – once you’re down on your pad of choice, you’re usually done for the day, which is why many try to get stuff done before they flop out after work or lectures as they know how hard it is to start again afterwards.

If motivation is waning for you, remember the end goal and try to see that flop out as your treat. At the same time though, don’t try to kill yourself with exertion!

I feel proud of the things I’ve managed to achieve so far in my year of doing. After many delays in the vision of making tech support a little bit more remote controlled to benefit both ourselves and the stressed out people we sometimes need to keep waiting whilst we undo the mess another has made or perhaps due to them being a fair distance from where we are at any one time, we’ve finally got a number of rooms functional in the centres (still waiting on the configuration files for our more complex setup we had built for us in a Lecture Space last year though…) and myself and my dear colleague are rapidly trying to learn our way around it all so we can be ready to deploy it.

I’ve also had the opportunity to dabble in alternate realities of both the augmented and mixed variety (VR is still on the bucket list!) with development for mobiles and tablets starting this week in a basic form with our new styled room guides and experiencing, albeit with some tweaking, patience, without any texturing on it and it flying around the room as I tried to get the hang of the transform controls, one of the models I built of our classroom chairs that makes a debut in some of our earlier testing content for Digital Signage, my eLearning package for our AV Training program come to life through the “3D Viewer BETA” app on the Hololens Developer Edition headset

Kind of what it looked like in context

Not bad for someone at a junior level eh? Better yet, I’m also going into next week with half an idea of what the week should look like in the ideal world.Whether it’ll happen or not is another story, but you never know what’s around the corner until you come to it (unless you have a periscope).

Now understandably, I realise it’s easier said than done sometimes. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I know I’ve got to make some pretty big decisions soon for all sorts of reasons. It reminds me a lot of Hoobastank’s song of whom the title of this week’s post is based on. Whilst the actual interpretation of the song itself is yet to be revealed by the band, I interpret it in a similar manner to the ideas I based a song on for a uni assignment named “The Middle of the Day” (still available to listen here). But if we stand still, we’ll never know the outcome and may spend forever cursing the missed opportunity. So take the risk, make your choice and thank yourself that you moved forward a little bit today.

Chin up, we’ll get through tomorrow if we’re prepared to get it all done before we veg out and we’ll be back in the saddle before we know it.

Good Luck!

Mike