A New Year, A New Resolve
06 Jan 2008 {View Comments}
Usually, I don’t indulge myself with the idea that I should change something about my life just because the calendar has flipped over another year. This year however is different, it’s not that I want to make New Year’s Resolutions per se, it’s just that so much inspiration has come to me in the past weeks and months that I really want to make something of. The downtime over Christmas has provided the perfect opportunity to get some of my thoughts together but I’m still reeling from things like Paddy’s Valley (and that new year’s day hangover) so my personal plan for self betterment is a work in progress.
Just like Andy and Phil I too made resolutions, a couple of which are in the same vein which I guess is hard not to as these things tend to be quite universally applicable. Unlike them however I was pretty slow on blogging mine. So slow in fact, I’ve already managed to complete two huzzah!
Just do it: One of the main take-aways from Paddy’s Valley was the pure energy I had, the urge to create, to connect, to capture my ideas and inspiration when they are just a fleeting thought and run with them. Not just about work, this is something I want to apply to every aspect of my life. This year I just want to freakin do it. No procrastinating, no worrying, just do it. (This new years resolution sponsored by nike)
Cut the clutter: If you’re like me (and you probably are) you also have a large pile of supposedly important paper that continuously gets added to until one day it is so unbearable that you sit down and deal with everything at once, realising half way through that there’s bills to pay, I’ve missed the date by a week and it’s no longer relevant, damn. So, to defeat the pile I am purchasing one of these badboys, the ScanSnap S510M.
Spread my wings: (done!) For about a year now I’ve been working away at the smallest desk in the world it was a lot better than couch-coding but it still sucked. My concurrency was so poor, unable to have a book open while I’m working is like heresy to me as I love to make little notes and scribbles to get ideas down, now I can since my new office arrived a couple of days ago and it ROCKS!
A Real Syllabus: Now that I no-longer have to do completely ridiculous things like learn the entire Java 2 Micro Edition API off by heart or code HTML and CSS by hand with a pen & paper (seriously Queen’s?). I enjoy the creative freedom of having my own syllabus, which I have constructed in the form of a gargantuan list of books to read and code to try out. Perhaps I will share it at some point.
Fiscal Responsibility: (done!) In the past I haven’t exactly been idiotic with money, but I haven’t been that smart with it either and this year I want to change that. Ever since I could get online statements from the Halifax, I opted in thinking that someday these will be handy I even started to write a web application to collate this information and give me purty graphs. That was sidelined for a while and when I picked it back up someone had already done the work for me yay, thanks Wesabe! In a couple of hours on one of those lazy Christmas days I imported all those years of bank statements, did a wee bit of tagging and was able to see some really cool & slightly scary graphs.
Mr motivator: In the past two years my fitness level and general healthiness quotient has looked somewhat like a graph of Sine. Now that I no-longer have to suffer in the enterprise & have finished the massive waste of time that was the Computer Science course at Queen’s (I actually can’t believe their website has gotten worse since I last looked, wtf is up with the picture of the iPod, the squashed aspect ratio graphics, those uber crap buttons, I thought it might just be safari but it looks just as shit in firefox. Woah, end rant). Anyway now that I’m self employed I’m making a concerted effort to spend more time away from the computer, the clincher will be in keeping this up when I am back at my pre-christmas level of work.