I almost forgot to commit the day to blog!
Three good things, that are not a repeat of yesterday:
1. I have two books I’m fairly certain I’ll enjoy: Stross’s The Apocalypse Codex and Scalzi’s Redshirts. I can think of them as rewards for work. Ah, work.
2. I got some difficult testing done at work. I’m paranoid about testing software before unleashing it on the world. I also learned a bit about cryptography. That’s pretty neat. And some more about Rails.
3. I’m thankful for my friends, blog commenters, Twitter followers, and the Overherd. I couldn’t survive without them.
A thing I like about myself: I like to learn technical things and I learn them fast.
Life thingies: I wish the screaming in my head would stop more often. This is supposed to be a good month for me. Oh well. A lot has changed, including climate patterns. I’m not settled and apparently the first 90 days in a new position/job are hard.
Spontaneous ∂erivation 
If you’re really serious about improving yourself, may I suggest that you prove it?
How? By giving yourself a treat BEFORE you do work, just because you’re WORTH it. Read one of those books you are looking forward to. Do it deliberately.
Your old model – no play before work – is a punishment model, a scarcity model. I’m not suggesting you flip to hedonism (you probably couldn’t manage it long-term, anyway – LOL). Just that occasionally, especially when you need it, you give yourself what Karen Pryor (Don’t Shoot the Dog – all about behaviorism and positive reinforcement) calls a jackpot: a huge reward when you don’t actually deserve it (according to you).
It is easier for someone else to administer the jackpot (so I give you permission, if you need it). And jackpots are not effective if used too often. But – and other than gaming, where you can get lost for aeons – a book makes a nice jackpot. Finite.
Just a suggestion.
The first 90 days in a new job are hard like adamant. About six weeks into my most recent new job, I was going to bed at 2 am every day from trying so hard to have everything ready, and then getting up at 7, and around six weeks in I woke up at the alarm and though “I hate this, it’s not worth it, I feel sick.” Then I woke up a little more and remembered it would not be that bad forever.
Indeed, it’s much better now. But even with being in a new position at the same employer, you are dealing with lots of new things. They all will take extra attention and energy until you settle in.
Seems like that’s why I’m having general issues right now. >.< oh those 90 days. Did it suddenly get better, or was it more a gradual thing?
It was pretty much a gradual thing. There were transition points — things like ‘can now identify some tasks as routine’, ‘can carry out routine tasks independently’, ‘can remember and repeat the fix we used the last time we had this problem’ — but mostly it was smoother.
The short description is that the first 90 days I was expecting to be fired almost every day, and the next 90 days I was still frantic, and after that I could feel fairly calm and confident. Even when I had to bring problems to my boss, I could tell these problems justified Boss Intervention and were not merely examples of me not knowing how to do my job.