HELL WEEK UPDATE:
Hey guys, here's the main things I learned throughout my hell week challenge:
- I can handle WAY MORE than what I've been doing on an average day (both physically, and in my online work)
- My mind is scary-good at tricking and sabotaging me into stopping my progress
- For the first time in years I felt what its like to fall asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow
- Visualizations right before bed are quite powerful and useful
- I may have some kind of blood sugar issues after intense work outs
- I can drop the majority of my bad habits easily all it takes it a big shift in perspective
- Waking up early and feeling alert is easy when I have a mission I take seriously
- Listening to motivational audio is very powerful to break through sticking points and build momentum (it overrides negative self-talk)
- It's not possible to stick 100% to any rigid schedule, allow for a bit of flexibility and prepare to adapt when SHTF
- It's ok to fail but don't sit around feeling like shit, make a pivot (shift in your planning) then jump right back into the game
To give a quick summary of hell week: the physical exercise was extremely brutal but it didn't feel as bad as I anticipated, I could have endured more. Cold exposure helped me recover quickly so I felt somewhat fresh for each new workout. I ate tons of high quality food to recovery from the workouts, but that also made me feel a bit bloated and sluggish once it came to doing my work on the computer.
I made it to the end of day 3 then I self-sabotaged myself. I was trying to decide if I should add a 30 minute nap to my daily routine so I'd be fresher for work and I slept through it and fk'd up my whole schedule. I was good for the first 2 days, but on day 3 my mind was trying to manipulate my will to continue. "Do you really want to do a 15KM run today?", "Just start doing shorter runs", "Take a nap it will improve your productivity", "Skip the cold swim today" etc. Self-talk is incredibly important. I've learned that my personal issue is I never quit outright and think "I can't do it", instead my mind will trick and manipulate me into quitting :/
I plan to revisit the hell week challenge in the spring time, I'll be much more well prepared for the pitfalls.
FORUM BOT / PYTHON UPDATE:
I made some really good progress on the forum posting bot and my Python skills have improved quite a bit! I think I understand how to work with APIs enough to do just about anything. That will come in handy because I plan on playing around with some text spinning APIs in the future.
Learning new programming skills takes me A LOT OF TIME. A couple of times I was stuck on a problem for 6-8 hours and just kept researching and testing, and eventually I'd overcome it.
So far this is the list of code snippets I have:
I'll eventually organize the code snippets nicely and share em with you guys.
My latest progress has been re-writing the anti-captcha script I had. It was designed to work for recaptcha v2 and the vbulletin forum I'm targeting uses a simple image captcha like this:
I have the new anti-captcha script 95% finished.
I needed to learn a whole new range of things to be able to get it to work:
- Disable javascript
- Scrape a URL
- Take screenshot of captcha
- Resize (crop) the image
- Send image through POST method
- etc
More updates coming soon.
