Tag Archives: goals

New Year's Resolutions 2010

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Last year I succeeded at 50% of my resolutions. I successfully uploaded all my old photos to flickr, but I wasn’t able to entirely give up soda at my desk. It went great for about six months, and then we had a big deadline, and I started up again. I felt pretty good about lasting six months, though.

This year, I have only one resolution: I signed up for Project 52 over on spaceninja.com. The idea is to post fresh content at least once a week, all year long. I’m aiming to make the content worthwhile, with no fluff. I want to write a lot of good content about web development, to start advancing my ultimate goal of becoming a name in the industry.

The flip side of that resolution is to post more worthwhile stuff over here. I’ve been reading through my archives, and I used to write a lot more. In the last few years, however, I basically only write about Zoe and my work. I miss that “here’s what’s happening with me right now” kinda vibe that blogging used to have. Since I’ve split my professional life into its own blog, there’s no reason to hold back anymore, so I’m going to try to be more personal on here again.

New Year's Resolutions 2009

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Every year, I pick a bunch of stupid resolutions, and I never manage to stick with them. So this year, I’m keeping it simple:

No Soda at my Desk: I typically drink two or three cans of soda every day. Water in the morning, but then I’ll have a soda with lunch, and I’ll keep drinking soda until I leave the office. In the past, I’ve tried giving up caffeine or soda entirely, and failed. Instead, I’m just going to say that I’m not allowed to have soda at my desk. If I want one with lunch, that’s no problem, but when I leave the breakroom, I’m done with the soda, and I’m only drinking water at my desk.

Upload all Photos to Flickr: I’ve got about five years’ worth of digital photos on my computer, and for the last couple years, I’ve been uploading the good ones to Flickr. The problem is that I’ve been doing it a little bit at a time, and I’m taking photos faster than I’ve been uploading them. So I’ve got all my photos from 2003 and 2004 uploaded, and everything since Zoe was born, but nothing between there. So my goal is to finish the job this year so that going forward, I only have to deal with new photos. Plus, then Annie and I can print up photo books of our old photos!

Wish me luck!

New Year's Resolutions 2007

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I just realized that I never posted any New Year’s resolutions this year. That’s probably because I never chose any – which is probably because I’ve done such a lousy job of keeping them up in the past. In 2004, I achieved 2 out of 5 resolutions (eat breakfast every day, and do more design). In 2005, I accomplished 3 out of 5 resolutions (get up at a regular time every day, do more web design, and post more frequently, with more images). And finally, in 2006, I dropped down to 1 out of 4 (attend more web conferences), which is particularly humiliating, since I went out of my way to choose goals that I would be more motivated to accomplish.

The getting up at a regular time and eating breakfast every day probably sound pathetic, but remember that when I wrote those goals, I was working from home or unemployed, and it was actually becoming a problem. I managed to achieve them, though, which I still feel proud of myself for, though now that I have a regular job, it’s less of an accomplishment.

As for this year, it’s already July, so it’s too late for New Year’s resolutions, but I do still have some goals. I want to finish posting my photo archives on flickr, I want to keep posting a newsletter about Zoe every month. Not exactly earth-shattering, I know, but hopefully more realistic than the last few years.

Dude, I Rule

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“I’m a strong believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.”
– Randall in Clerks

That about sums up how I feel right now. When I set up KillingMachines.org, it was the first time I had ever put up a website with a clear goal in mind. And not just a goal, but a list of them. I wanted nothing less than to write the best weblog site available. I had been to livejournal and blogger and was unimpressed. FCS could do most of what they did, and what it couldn’t do was made up for by the fact that it didn’t suck like they did. Who wants to pay to use a weblog site? And haven’t these people ever heard of databases? Why on earth are they ftp’ing the blog entries?

And so I wrote my manifesto. KillingMachines would become, with Steve’s help, and building on the base of FCS, the site I imagined. Users would be able to completely skin their journals. They could set their account to be either a personal journal, or a forum where everyone could post. They would automatically receive a subdomain for their journal. They could turn replies on and off. Most of these features were just pipe dreams at the time, but Steve helped me out a lot, and we got the site up and running, and eventually, only two major features were missing: User-defined skins for journals, and the ability to set an account to be either forum or journal.

I’m pleased to announce that I have finally gotten these features working, and KillingMachines is now FEATURE COMPLETE. I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, but basically the site has everything it needs to be the best weblog site ever. I’m extremely proud of it, and I genuinely believe that given time, word of mouth will turn KMorg into a weblog powerhouse on the web!

And as if that wasn’t cool enough, something else is going my way! Recently, I got the idea in my head that it might be nice to have a Macintosh. The germ behind this idea is osX. This fine operating system is really fun to play with, and the fact that it’s built on a base of BSD makes it hard for me to resist. However, I’m not about to ditch my PC for a mac. I just like the idea of having one around to play with. As a result, I couldn’t justify spending $700 for a new one. Just today, I was mentioning to Annie that if I could find an iMac for around $300, I would probably buy it.

Well, today I may have found one. I’ve been talking with the owner, and she’s been looking to offload her old blueberry G3 iMac 333Mhz. I offered her $250, and things are looking good. Pretty soon, I might have a nice little mac sitting on my desk, waiting for me to grab a copy of osX!