Today was my first full real day tutoring at work. The work is fairly easy and straightforward and each child works as their own pace. Right now I’m tutoring in English in the morning and math in the evening. I teach about 5 hours a day, with some breaks throughout. For free housing and good pay, I couldn’t ask for more.

Outside of work, I might start tutoring a local man in exchange for Arabic lessons in the evening. While this could turn out to be excellent, he isn’t a teacher by profession and I don’t do well in individual classes… We’ll see.

I’ll leave you with the view from my apartment. Yes, that is the Persian Gulf about a kilometer away!

I’ve cleaned out my cabinet, my cubby hole and I’ve moved again.  Everything is coming to an end or new beginning.  I’d like to stay longer, but only if  I didn’t have to work here.  Here are the current countdowns:

• Birthday in 2 days
• last day of class in 4 days
• Kuwait in 1 week
• Elementary school in the fall.

I suddenly got productive today and organized all of my space at work, and am attempting to make sure I can get everything I need to my next home.  I’m taking photos of cards and documents and tossing them because the memory isn’t the paper itself, it is the image and thoughts around it.  This will save space and let me digitally organize my travels (that is, if I ever get around to actually organizing all of the hundreds of files that are my travels).

Right now, I’m typing up e-mails of all my students, looking for pictures to send them, and blogging.  It has been so long since I’ve played D&D, Diablo, NWN, EQ, City of heroes, or Guild Wars that I’m feeling RPG withdrawal.  Maybe I can get some good games going in Kuwait, in which I don’t have to DM all the time.  I also need to buy souviners, return character sheets and hangout with everyone one last time before I go.

Starting July 1st I will be tutoring for Oxford Learning this summer in Kuwait before starting in September as an elementary English teacher for the American Bilingual School of Kuwait.  The school is located not far from the Zoo and it took some digging and visual cross referencing to find the school in Google maps.  unfortunately the map is too old, so the school isn’t visible.

some interesting facts:

• My weekends will be Thursday and Friday.
• I’ll still be in Moscow’s +3 GMT timezone.
• The average temperature is from 8C to 45+C (46 to 115+).
• The majority of  residents are foreigners 2 to 1
• Kuwait is about the size of New Jersey
• 1 dollar is only .3 Kuwati Dinari
• CIA World Factbook entry on Kuwait

I will soon be finishing my time here at the American home and with that in mind I’ve been looking at what I will do with my life in general in Kuwait. I’ve been looking at ways to start fresh with how I organize and motivate myself. I spend a large part of my free time here looking up ways to make money online, start a business from the comfort of my laptop, hack life, and cool and new things I can try in my life.

One thing I have found over and over again is GTD. Getting things done (or Getting to Done) is a book with a cult following about how to organize your life. The main idea is to put your tasks down on paper, post-it notes, computers, parchment, slabs of rock so that your mind isn’t worried about scheduling and can focus on working. It is just a hyped up in and outbox system that worked for some guy and might work for you. The system has weird aspects like 43 folders for each calendar day and month, and wikis with tons of GTD info.

I do want a nice clean system for deciding what I’ll do, and when how I’ll do it, but developing a system is actually a lot of work. I want my great work in life to be something that isn’t how to organize your life to do great things. Lots of people have had systems to organize every aspect, but they take lots of work. I’ve only recently adopted To-Do lists on my computer, not because I can’t remember, but to visualize what I do.

How do you organize your life? Would you start again with something new and organized down to the details, or do you like having everything uncertain in your life. What do you think I should do to organize me in Kuwait?

I said I had enough cool stuff to post here almost daily for the rest of the month, and I wasn’t lying.  While I wanted to post everyday, I have rethought the focus of my website.  Instead of looking for articles all the time that I find interesting enough to share, I’m going the way of the personal blog.  I’m never going to monetize bobg.net unless I have something content-based to bring to Internet denizens.  Most of my friends, students and family read this, and not many other people.  From now on, my posts will focus on me and what is happening in my life.  If I find something really interesting to share, I’ll share it, but I won’t spend my time looking for nifty articles.

Speaking of me, I have a large class load this semester.  I’m the only teacher at the American Home who is working 5 days a week.  Three days a week I teach 2 really long classes that are grammar heavy and crucial to understanding English.  They take a lot out of a teacher and at the end of the day, I just want to go home and sleep.  Twice a week I teach conversation classes with advanced English speakers and it’s just wonderful!  They hardly ever need correcting, they are all adults and willingly contribute to class, and they are interested in the same things I am.  We will actually try to play Dungeons and Dragons in our class!

I’ve also created a wiki portion for Bobg.net called LifeWikified.  It is mostly just a wishlist of things that I want, and gift ideas for people I know.  If you have a birthday, anniversary, bar-mitzvah, or it’s Christmas time, then leave your name and a gift idea and I might get it for you.  You’ll find that you need an account to edit the page.  Leave a comment with your e-mail address here and I’ll make you an account!

Yes, the only 2 things you can count on in your life.  Except that Taxes imply work.  So, if you want to avoid paying any taxes next year, (This year is a bit too late as they are due in less than a month) you should stop working.  If you don’t stop working, here is a nifty poster to show you where your federal income taxes go.  You can look at the poster if you stop working too, but you won’t have any money to buy it (for me)!

My presentation went fairly well.  I didn’t have an enormous audience like the presentation on ‘Chicago’ had, but I had enough people.  After I spoke for some time about games, we played them!  I introduced many students to D&D.  Now that I’m done with my presentation, I can return to my normal daily posting schedule and get some work done on gateway games, where all the simplified D&D materials I used in my presentation will be available to you!

I know lots of my friends are graduating from college this year and are now frantically looking for something to do.  I’d like to remind you all of a great way to make some money this summer.  Here is a hint: Did you know that Google is one of the best companies to work for in the world?  Their corporate saying is ‘Do no evil’ (unlike some companies).  While they are supposed to do good and great things, an axis of corporatevil (7 major companies) have recently allied against Google and YouTube.

Not scared in the least, this summer Google is hosting its 3rd Summer of Code.  Over 100 companies are offering summer jobs working in high tech fields all over the country.  Your work will land you $4,500 and a primo reference/resume boost.  If I were coming back to the US, I’d be all over this job opportunity!

Get your applications in now, closing day is March 26th!

in more recent news, Valleywag is reporting that all is not well inside of Google, with new second-class employees.  This might cost Google their best company status.

Each teacher at the American Home must give a presentation on any aspect of American culture sometime during their employment.  My presentation is this weekend and will be on Gaming and American Culture.  This is my public cry for information and input.  Anything you think I should mention about table-top games, RPGs or computer/Internet gaming is potential presentation material.

I’m really looking for a vast source or two of gaming related information that people from mainstream culture would find interesting.  Especially links that are power point adaptable.  My audience will be English speaking Russians between 13 and 50 years old.  Example games that I will be mentioning are: Risk, Life, Clue, DnD, WoW, Counter-Strike, Monopoly, Scrabble, The Sims, Civilization, etc…

So without further ado, I await your comments!

Ever wanted to study at an extremely prestigious, expensive, cutting edge university?  By the end of this year, MIT will have all its courses available online for free.  Every class that some of the smartest and luckiest people in the world take is at your fingertips.

What you don’t get is contact with a professor.  Or even his lectures, only his lecture notes.  On top of that, there isn’t anyone to grade your assignments and when you’re all done you’ll have no degree to show for it.  I kinda wish there was someone to grade the work (pass/fail) so I could put it on my resume “Oh, you know, I take some OpenCourseWare classes through MIT online in my free time.”

Why am I not ’studying’ there right now?  Well, there are 3 major expenses during college.  Food, entertainment and books.  The courses don’t come with free copies of the reading material and textbooks are probably the biggest unopposed monopoly I know of.  Mostly because college students don’t vote and old people don’t mind gouging them for all they can.

There are 3 main types of jobs: hourly, salary and contract. I’ve worked hourly jobs since my sophomore year in high school. My experience there has taught me to avoid hourly jobs. Most of them try and squeeze every productive morsel from your body each and every hour you are at work. lunch is 30 minutes, not 30 minutes and 15 seconds. Your pay will vary from week to week and your supervisor is looking to keep you away from overtime.

Salary jobs are great. Thats why in Japan many people aspire to be a ‘salaryman‘ (free from wage slavery). You have a guaranteed income, more flexible hours and job security. These jobs are mostly careers. Something you have to do for the rest of your working life.

The rest of your life, a cog in the machine. I can’t handle that. There’s gotta be some middle ground.

Contract work allows you to choose when you’ll come and when you’ll go. It often comes with a set salary and flexible hours. It’s a great experience and no one is sad when you leave. In fact, if you do find your career in any particular field, many employers are happy to have a good employee on salary. This is perfect for someone like me, who doesn’t want to do the same thing, at least not in the same setting all his life.

With that in mind, I’m looking to ace any upcoming interviews I going to have. And I found this gem of an article on the vast wastelands of the interweb. It is a list of the top 50 questions asked by interviewers, the reason they ask them and how to answer best. I’d like to post it right here, but its from a book and I don’t have the means or time to ask the publisher to copy the excerpt.

Also look to your right for my new, work related poll. Are you a fan of sit down talk and run meetings, or do you like the sit down, brainstorm, order pizza all nighter meetings?