Aura's 2021 Goals
Posted 01 January 2021Happy New Year! We've finally gotten out of the hellhole that was 2020. Unfortunately, since the arbitary incrementing of a human-designed calendar is unable to fix problems by itself, we're now in the likely hellhole that will be 2021. Honestly, we've found ourselves going, "Thank god the old year is over," so many times over the past 5 years that my expectations are dead. I'm coming into this year expecting it to be even worse than the last, so if it's not, I can at least be happy about that.
Like, none of the problems of last year have been solved. Some have even gotten worse! Brexit's finally happened, so much love for my friends in the UK who are going to have to suffer through that. Trump may be gone, but Biden's not much better, and just because we replaced the bad orange man doesn't mean the underlying issues are gone. (Of course, we haven't even gotten rid of him yet. We'll see what happens later this month...) COVID-19 is still a large problem, and while there are vaccines, the questions remain of how effective it will be, if enough people will actually get it, and how "flu-like" the underlying SARS-CoV-2 will be, in so far as how likely it is to end up generating a new strain every year. And this is just scratching the surface of the many, many issues happening all over this gods-forsaken planet.
Anyways, pessimism about the new year isn't why we're here! We're here to enumerate some of my goals! So, let's do that, shall we?
Stay alive
Okay, pessimism's back. But surviving the year is always a good goal. It's an even better goal when you're a trans woman living in a shitty rural Texan town. So, that's my primary goal. Don't die.
Get a job
Following my partial success with trying to get a job with Texas Health Alliance, I'm feeling somewhat confident here. I might not need to bother with trying to get shitty retail or fast food jobs. I might actually be able to get a decent job that gets me a foot in the door in healthcare. But, we'll see. At the very least, I'd like to get a job in order to...
Get back to Arlington
I hate living in this shitty lilttle hellhole. I wanna get back to the Metroplex. It doesn't need to be Arlington specifically. But, I'm going to school in Arlington, so it'd be nice to live on or near the UTA campus.
Get back into the swing of uni
Speaking of UTA, I'm (hopefully) going back next semester as a pre-nursing student! My last few semesters have been rough. I had to take a medical withdrawal in fall 2019 to go into partial hospitalization. The next semester, I massively overestimated my ability to get back into things, taking on nuclear physics and partial differential equations alongside a few lower level, though still not trivial classes. I clearly was not ready for that much of a course load just yet. Add on the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, well, it's a recipe for failing all my classes. I didn't even attend this past semester, instead opting to take the semester off for my own mental health (among other things). But, I'm going back next semester, taking only a few, lower-level courses. Nothing that should be too terribly difficult. Statistics, which should be trivial, given that the last math classes I've taken are linalg, ODEs and PDEs. Bio for nurses, which I'm honestly not sure what to expect, but it shouldn't be too awful. Intro to Psychology, which'll be fun. And Intro to Nursing, which gets into what I'm going back for. Nothing that should be too terribly difficult, hopefully.
Get my many medical issues sorted out
I'm including psychiatric issues here as well. I've got a lot of things that need to get worked out. The first is the hypothyroidism. Thankfully, that's something I have an appointment about next tuesday. Might need to see an endocrinologist afterwards, but I've at least got a start. I need to figure out what's going on with my whole migraine situation, and talk to my doctor about that and maybe getting on a prophylactic. I need to get in to a sleep specialist about my horribly fucky sleep schedule and the possibility of having a non-24 hour circadian rhythm. I need to talk to my psychiatrist about the almost certain ADHD. I also need to get some anxiety problems worked out, whether with my psychiatrist or my therapist. And confirm that the lithium and stuff is working well and make any changes that I need to there. So, quite a bit to get worked out.
Make good progress on, if not finish, Kitsune Fight!
And subgoal maybe try to think of a better name ;)
Yeah, so if you've look at the code projects, you may have noticed this as a mostly-empty git repo. It's not got no progress. I do have the neutral sprite for the kitsune. But, that's it. The assets shouldn't even be too hard. I could probably get those finished within a few months. From there, I just have to figure out how to make it all work. But, I think I can make good progress by the end of the year.
Get to (a basic) userland on FENIX
Ah, the big one. FENIX. Progress so far has been kinda split across a few
areas. The FENIX C library is coming along well. The utilities package has
a good few programs in it, including a very tentative sh. And the
kernel can not only boot and call C library functions, but it's also got
the GDT set up as well as the ability to get the time from the RTC. I
think my goal for the year though is to focus in a little. I want a
userland. It's not gonna be easy. I've got to finish getting the processor
set up, get memory stuff set up (including mapping and an allocator), get
a scheduler working, get interrupts and interrupt handlers going, start
getting keyboard input, get hard drive I/O going, as well as the FENIX
file system driver, and get an init system going (even if basic), along
with a way to load programs. Then, finally, I can get to a shell. Well,
properly get to a shell, anyways. I guess I could get a shell going
after getting keyboard input working, but that's not what I want here.
Additionally, I wanna rewrite vsh, our sh implementation. When I started,
I was following a very simple tutorial meant to demonstrate stuff like
fork, execvp, and waitpid. It
wasn't meant to be an example of how to structure your code or write a
proper shell. But, I kept building off it and now I'm at a point where I
can either continue taping a shell together until it collapses under its
own weighter or just restart now. I'm taking the latter route. I now know
how a shell works under the hood, with those functions and all that. Now,
to build a proper command parser. Use lex and yacc as I should have been
doing from the start. So I want to try to get that working. Basically,
by the end of the year, I want something I can put out an ISO of and y'all
can go, "Wow. It's a very basic UNIX-like. Way to go." (Or, less
sarcastically, "Wow! It's a basic UNIX-like! Way to go!") I don't know if
I'll be able to get that that by the end of the year, but I'd like to try.
So, yeah. That's my goals for the year. Did you need to know about most of these? Not really. But, I feel like there's a certain accountability that comes from putting these out there, especially if I can come back to these at the end of the year and say, "Cool. Here's what I did do. Here's what I didn't," and figure out what went wrong on what I didn't and what I can do next year to do better (whether defining goals better, putting stuff in place to help me accomplish my goals, or setting smaller goals that aren't as difficult to reach in so far as I'm actually capable of reaching them within a year). So, yeah. There ya go. My new years resolutions, I guess.
Keywords: Personal