jamesturk.net

James Turk — 2009/11/22 — 2010plan, personal

I took a full year without writing anything I felt was worth posting here, I even rewrote my site and moved servers twice just so I could continue to neglect writing. I was worried far too much about audience- I knew a few people that read this blog were non-technical and so I didn't want to go to heavy on that side and at the same time most of my (13) readers are developers so I should focus on that.

After taking a year off (ending with a rather appropriate Aaron Sorkin-inspired title) I figure nobody reads this blog anymore and I can write for myself, only making things public in the off chance that fom time to time an article will be interesting to others.

I'm going to just go ahead and say that 2009 was a good year, I am in a comfortable place, I'm enjoying my job and meeting some really great people in DC. With just about a month left in the year it is time to start looking forward to 2010. (I've always sort of internally thought of my birthday as my new year as far as resolutions go)

I drew up a list of goals for 2010 over the last couple days:

A lot of my goals are influenced by realizing that there were some really positive things about being in school that I'm now missing out on.

• write more - write letters to friends, write blog entries, write fiction, whatever. just write more.
• read consistently - I read a lot but I never set realistic goals, I'm going to try 1000 pages per month to see how that goes.
• continue learning new things - Android development, piano, spanish, physics, OpenGL - these are all things I've started and not followed through, my goal is to come up with 'courses' in these things for myself that last a couple months each (and use it as an excuse to write more)

The other category of things is to continue doing new things (which I've been good about since graduation but figured I'd set some goals to see what happens):

• Take a personal trip somewhere new - preferably overseas but if costs don't work out improvise something else interesting
• Give a talk - I haven't done this in a while and I'm probably getting rustier
• Volunteer 100 hours - a lot of plans to volunteer in 2009 fell through, need to be more on top of things here
• Actually do something interesting with an Arduino
• Cook 20 new recipes (I have the kitchen now, it is time to use it regularly)

That's what I've come up with so far, I'm going to try to avoid adding to the list as it is already a ton of things but I imagine there are at least a couple important things I've left off.