Goals for 2008 | January 2nd, 2008
Another year passes by and I’m thinking about things I’d like to achieve. I left text file open and brain dumped throughout the day to capture some of those things.
In no particular order.
Release something useful under the MIT License. I write code and sometimes its useful. I should be sharing more of it.
Figure out what cloud computing (rest, ws-*, etc) means to Libre Software. I chose these words carefully. This is an emerging area of interest and importance in the technology space. What does cloud computing mean to free/open source? I don’t know yet, but I have some ideas, and I hope to explore these with a cloud dependent free/open source release. One idea I have is author a personal music player optionally backed by S3. Probably use ThruDB for this purpose.
Use my fucking $50 a month gym membership twice a week, at least. I go to an awesome gym, or should anyhow. I am by no means out of shape but I certainly could be in better shape.
Go out and take at least 26 hikes. Vancouver is beautiful and there are literally hundreds, probably thousands, of incredible hiking opportunities within half an hour of downtown. I hike quite a bit (in the good weather) and I’d really like to explore more of the north shore.
Get the hell off Telus and get an iPhone. The mobile web is going to be huge and right now the iPhone is the best device. As a technologist I am ashamed to not own one.
Get a Myth TV installation at home and cancel all cable services. Traditional TV is dead to me.
Play around with some dramatic hacker tools. Learn enough to be dangerous. I’m talking Metasploit, Wireshark and TOR. Security, especially wireless security, is an area I feel a need to understand better. UPDATE: Joe, Nitobi resident wireless hacker, has recommended that I also look into Kismac for wireless packet analysis and Aircrack-NG for breaking WEP keys. Muahahaha!
Use GIT for all local development and release on a central SVN. It makes more sense to have fully versioned source in offline scenarios.
Author a better wiki, cancel my Backpack subscription, and release. I’m wasting money here for something I essentially only use to take very basic notes.
See that we have at least 6 ‘Ajax and Beer’ meetups. The last ‘Ajax and Beer’ meet was super fun.
Go to Belize with Joni! We have a kickass plan for rawking out central american style and a tropical vacation is something I have yet to do in life. (No shit!)
Get my house sorted out. I’ve been living in between a home in the suburbs and downtown vancouver for four years and its stupid. The house is nearly renoed and good enough to do something with. Sell. Rent. Something.
Write for a big magazine about something cool (get published). More personal brand building if you will.
Paint again: water color and oils. I used to be fairly good at acrylics and oil pastels. I’m fairly bad at watercolors. I’d like to (re)discover traditional mediums and do more things outside of the software space like this.
Get ahead. Living paycheque to paycheque sucks. I need to change things which I should be able to do with better long term planning, sorting out my house, etc.
Go to RubyConf. Incredibly inspired conference. No question I’ll be there again.
Possibly go to RailsConf. Was somewhat disappointed with the technical depth last year but I’m keeping an open mind about 2008’s potential for speakers. And besides, Portland is awesome.
Burn. Bringing an art car and even larger dome to Burning Man. My Uncle Wayne and I had a blast this past year and I’m looking forward to creating even more dangerous mayhem with him again.
Change my mind. I do this all the time. Its healthy to continue the learning cycle and drawing new conclusions about old ideas.
Calendar these things. Colleague, client, friend and generally inspirational character Michael Fergusson always says that goals without dates are useless. I agree. So I’m doing a little experiment and calendaring these ideas. Not everything is in there yet — I think planning out beyond a few months is a waste of time — I’ll revisit this blog post and calendar stuff often.
Lets see if I can do this!!!