What are you working on?
plinkplonk: I am doing something slightly weird. (I can talk about this on HN, but I am keeping it quiet otherwise).I read  an article  on Slashdot about John Carmack where he  said, (emphasis mine)" After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then. "The phrase "doubling my programming knowledge in 6 months" caught my eye and I thought I'd take a crack at it. I've set aside 6 months to do this. Given my smaller "quantum" of knowledge as a compared to Carmack it should be easier :-P.So anyway, I've set a fairly ambitious(for me) agenda(1)work completely through Algorithms by Cormen et al and Randomized Algorithms by Prabhakar and Raghavan, doing every exercise in each book,(2)become really good at lisp and Forth - write about 10,000 "lines of code" in each language, versions of the HRL library (see below)(3)  release an Open Source java  library of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms (something extracted  from a consulting project I recently completed.).I've taken a 6 month sabbatical from my consulting work. It was kind of weird explaining to my clients that I am completely unavailable for the next 6 months, but I think it is worth a try. The bank account looks healthy enough (touch wood). I've been working on this for the last 10 days, averaging 12 hours a day and loving it. .