April Challenge: Watch 1 Tech Video Every Day

I was recently thinking about my junkfood media consumption. My thesis was that one could apply the same discipline that one uses for discerning the food they eat to media consumption, ideally with the intention of self improvement.

If one must consume to relax (as opposed to drinking gin), then why not impose discipline to avoid the fast food of consumption (reading online news, twitter, American TV shows, etc.) and consume with intent.

The April challenge is self imposed (unlike the March Challenge) and is as follows:

Watch one free online technical video for each day of April. For each day missed, you (I) must donate $20 to .NET open source projects. 

I'm experimenting with a "loss" as a motivating facto, rather than the "gain" of the March challenge. I'm really starting to get into this public challenge approach to self improvement :) Also, I recently sold our family media solution, so there is far less opportunity for general lazy consumption.

Seriously, why would one write open source using the .NET framework? It has oxymoron written all over it. Donating to open source is good, and $20 is not too much pain if I miss a day. It quickly starts adding up though, 5 days is a $100 and I'd much rather give that $100 to some noble device driver hacker working on Linux than some .NET hacker playing around in Visual Studio, or whatever it is they do.

This challenge does not preclude my normal media consumption, although it imposes constraint on at least one hour of that dedicated time, typically in the evenings. If I have a busy night, I guess I'll need to make time in the morning or during my lunch hour. I intend to maintain a spreadsheet of what I watch, it's duration, and its URL. I'm sure I'll think of ways to slice and dice this collected data.

Some sources of media may include:

• TED talks
• Google Tech Talks
• iTunes U
• Khan Academy

I am passionate about technical topics, specifically Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, so this directed form of media consumption does align with my interests. I have to focus and concentrate for tech talk, take notes, think, quite different from what I need to do when I consume acquired TV shows. It will be interesting if I can/should switch to more passive consumption for interesting subject matter (what if I forget something amazing!?!). Alternatively, the penalty for remaining active in "relax time" may be worse, irritability, increased tiredness, etc. It will be an interesting experiment.

I'm looking forward to this challenge!

Image copyright by schmilblick.