Blog? What blog?

Between my Xbox haze, work and scrambling to get moved before the end of November, I've been quite negligent in my blogging duties. 5 months worth! Jeez, my backlog of PotW alone will take forever to get posted. I'll be typing those up for a massive series of catch-up posts sometime in the next week.

To get my through my social media drought, I've been listening to:

CDs
Creaturesque "Throw Me A Statue"
Eli "Paperboy" Reed & The True Loves "Roll With You"
Mt. St. Helen's Vietnam Band "Mt. St. Helen's Vietnam Band"
MC Yogi "Elephant Power"

Songs
Royksopp "The Girl & The Robot"
Apocalyptica "Inquisition Symphony"
Bomba Estereo "Fuego"
Infected Mushroom "Smashing The Opponent"
The Apples In Stereo "Energy"

More (hopefully) sooner than later...

Link to full post.

Dereliction of Blogging Duties

So, I disappeared for a month (and a half). Between work, the holidays and planning for dental surgery (and actual dental surgery), I've been just a teensy bit busy. To make up for it, the next couple of days will b e a posting frenzy including:

1) My holiday pattern discoveries
2) Recent reading
3) My absolutely dismal update on 2008 Personal Enrichment goals
4) My entirely more upbeat 2009 Personal Enrichment goals
5) Whatever else I think of....

Link to full post.

2008 Personal Enrichment Goals

After last year’s trial run, I have high hopes for this year’s list. These build on some of the goals from 2007 but it’s a much more challenging list. Frankly, there’s one or two goals that flat-out terrify me. But, that’s what personal growth is all about, right? *nervous smile*

Full post has list of goals and brief descriptions. Total in list is 21. (Yikes!)
There’s three categories of goals: Work, Study & Self-Improvement

I. Work

1) Attend "Basic PM" Short Course by MPIF: The MPIF has an excellent 3 day course on powdered metal (PM) parts for people who purchase or design them. I’m really excited about this as PM isn’t a material category that was really focused on in my Engineering Material courses.

2) Attend at least 1 class through Company University: It depends on my schedule but there are several classes offered that interest me. I’ll probably do this toward the end of the year.

II. Study

3) Study Command Line And Scripting: While Ubuntu is perfectly functional without command-line knowledge, I think it would be good to learn for several reasons. It would make me less susceptible to someone recommending a malicious command to me. And this type of interface is common to all Linux distributions even if there’s variation in some of the commands. Knowing the CL broadens the places I can apply my knowledge.

4) Take NISD Class “Intro to HTML”: This is to help me get some basic knowledge. I’m really just looking for enough to interpret and possibly tweak my weblog template.

5) Must read 20 Non-fiction Books: This is under study because (I hope) reading more non-fiction will expose me to a variety of topics. My parents were kind enough to get me several books for Christmas so I have enough reading material to get through over half of this requirement.

6) Begin Process of Linux-Professional Certification: This is a maybe. If I can take the first exam ("101") over the web, I definitely will go that far at least. This would be a good way to test the studying I do for Goals 3 and 8. My eventual goal would be for a Junior Level Certification so I'd only need one more test to do that.

7) How do I Set-up A Charitable Endowment?: I have a number of long-term charity goals so I’d like to have a bit more understanding of how to structure my finances for those goals.

8) How do you build an (GUI?) application in Ubuntu?: Not really a goal so much as a question. There’s two or three applications I’d like for Ubuntu and no one appears to be developing them. If I can answer this, perhaps next year I’ll add creating those applications to my PE list.

9) Take a First Aid / Emergency Aid Class: This didn't get done in 2007. It strikes me as a hugely important skill so it stays on the list until it gets done. At the very least, I’d like to get CPR certification.

10) Teach Myself: Controls Engineering: Note how vague this is. Controls was the one engineering course I did incredibly poorly in. No amount of studying helped me very much. So, I bought a different textbook because the old one makes me freeze in terror. I don’t plan to go through the whole thing this year but if I get through about 1/3 of the chapters, I’ll be quite satisfied.

III. Self-Improvement

11) Take First-Level Test for Krav Maga: Must be done before end of the year. This is in service to my longer-term self-defense goals. I’ll have to start attending more classes. But hopefully, I’ll be able to give it a shot.

12) Make At Home & On-the-Go Disaster Kits: Last year in my area, there was an ice storm and record-level rains due to hurricanes disintegrating over San Antonio. While I have some of the expected disaster survival materials, they are scattered throughout my apartment. I’d like to have everything in one, easy-to-locate bag.

13) Update to Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu: Currently I'm at Feisty Fawn. This will likely be the first thing I complete. I’m already reading through update threads in the Ubuntu forums to get see what the typical problems are. Once I feel OK to handle typical problems, I’ll back-up my install and update.

14) Develop Better Financial Tracking: Specifically to track non-salary income (like from interest, etc). I do put it into my budget (somewhere) but I plan to do some financial restructuring this year and I’d like to keep a better eye on things.

15) Get Laser Eye Treatments: Kinda terrifying. Even though not wearing glasses would be great, I have trouble picturing my face without glasses on it. They've been a key feature since I was six. I’m going to have to spend a couple months talking myself into this.

16) New Plants for Patio Garden: I tend to plant the same seven or eight plants every spring. So, this year I’m going to mix it up a bit. Try some new things. I need to go browsing in Home Depot to get some ideas.

17) Maintain Weblog: And not just maintain. I have a tentative list of improvements I’d like to make as well as a goal of 20+ posts each month. I think the minimum posting will be straightforward, but the improvements will require some preparation.

18) Go Skydiving: GULP. Exceptionally terrifying. This is my “OMG-Am-I-Crazy?!” goal. A friend did this recently after swearing never to and she had a ball. At some point in my life, I would really like to travel into outer space. This would pretty tame in comparison with that.

19) Be Sociable: Wildly general, isn’t it? But I really do have trouble interacting with people especially those I don’t know very well. Even doing something as simple as commenting on someone else’s blog results in some anxiety. So, I’m hoping I can make more of an effort to engage in activities which require interaction with people outside my circle of friends/coworkers.

20) Support the WGA Strike: Since the strike probably going to be a long-haul, I’m going to do what I can to support it. I’ll maintain my original strike prohibitions AND, if possible, I may additionally support it financially through donations/purchases of Strike Swag. Also, if there’s enough warning, I’d seriously consider attending a Fan Picket Day for either “Bones” or “Supernatural”.

21) Purchase Google OS Phone: This is of course dependent on availability. Due to the horror stories surrounding contracts and phones, I’ve purposely avoided any cell phone beyond the plain old pay-as-you-go kind. My current cell had no camera, music playback or other fancy features. I figure learning a more complicated phone would be good for me and I like the idea of using an Open-Source phone that I can change as I like.

Dear God, this list is intimidating! But if I can have just one or two experiences as fun, educational and fulfilling as my switch to Ubuntu in 2007, I’ll consider it a good year.

Link to full post.

2007 Personal Enrichment Goals

I decided to take a blogging break pretty much the last half of December. Now that 2007 is over and done...How did I do with my personal enrichment goals for the year (listed here)? Here’s the run down.

1) More Charity Work – FAIL. The point of this was to perform charity work in addition to financial donations. While my donations increased this year, I only performed one act of charity and that was the 5K Susan G. Komen Walk back in April.

2) Switch to Ubuntu – DONE. Very successful and a really enjoyable experience. I’ll be building on this further in 2008.

3) Take a Self-Defense Class – DONE (plus bonus). I completed a 6-week Krav-Maga course. Posts on the classes are here, here, here and here. In addition, I joined the gym that provides the classes.

4) UnClutter Apartment – DONE (partial). Most progress has been made in cleaning out my closet, re-organizing my physical/computer files, keeping my desk(s) tidy and cleaning (slightly) more frequently. I even managed at some point to dust (well, vacuum) my baseboards. Unfortunately, I ended the year behind on my cleaning so no full credit.

5) Start a Weblog – DONE. In addition to creating the blog, I’ve actually managed to do a few minor improvements and get pretty consistent at posting. I’m especially proud of the recent reduction in link-posts. I generally do these when I don’t have anything else to write about so a reduction means I’m generating more of my own content.

6) Be More Sociable – FAIL. This was an effort to be more social. Options were either an Astronomy or a shooting club. A visit to the SA area astro-group did not inspire and I’m not really ready for a shooting group. I get some partial credit for joining a gym and commenting more often on other people’s weblogs.

7) Take 1-2 Classes – FAIL. I signed up for a First Aid class. Unfortunately, it got postponed and rescheduled to conflict with my self-defense class. This will be on the 2008 list.

8) Re-plant Patio Garden – DONE. After months of neglect, I replanted last Spring. The garden is currently in extreme under-watering mode to avoid frost damage. I found that skipping watering or doing it very little helps protect some plants during a freeze. But I just did a litte bit of pulling and rearranging the patio.

9) Digital Photo Improvement – DONE. This was my sole add-on goal (added after writing the list). I’ve been taking a great deal more pictures (evidence in my PhotoBucket page). Also, they’re getting better. Still room for improvement.

The 2007 list was about half-completed (some items I didn’t list on this blog). Some of the incomplete items were due to too general/specific or discovered they weren't feasible (for instance – I had “teach myself Matlab” until I learned how friggin expensive a Matlab license was). Honestly, I consider 2007 a practice year. Part of this year’s list was convincing myself that a list of personal enrichment goals was feasible and something I would do. Both points are well-proven. The 2008 goals will be much more ambitious and (hopefully) with less flaws than the 2007 list.

Sometime in the next couple days, I'll post my (much more ambitious and kinda scary) 2008 Personal Enrichment Goals.

Link to full post.

Tuesday Miscellaneous

1) NBC is making ridiculous claims to the FCC in order to stifle P2P technologies. I find it so amazing big entertainment companies make such colossal PR blunders. If they want to know why revenue and sales are down, it’s because people don’t want to be hassled with poorly-functioning copyright control software. If NBC succeeds they will be nailing their own coffin shut for when Internet-distributed TV serials hit the big time.

And lists like this one make it easier for users to generate their own content instead of being dependent on big media. There's over 400 tools for multi-media blogging there. I just flipped through them but really cool. I have a feeling I will be spending some time here in the near future.

2) Two weblogs of Interest:
Ars Technica creates Open-Ended, a web journal on Open-Source software. Looks promising.
Life Hacker: Weblog provides a variety of tips on everything from time management to computing to how to slice a watermelon. So book-marking this one.

3) Possible liquid water in the Kuiper Belt. The more I read about our Outer Solar System, the more excited I get about the upcoming New Horizons Mission.

Link to full post.

This is a test. Not to be taken seriously....

Link to full post.