January 1,

2014 Year in Review and 2015 Goals

By many measures, 2014 was a horrible year for the world. Dave Barry wrote a fairly amusing (and somewhat depressing) year in review article for the Washington Post. And Charlie Booker wrote a similar article, from a UK perspective, for the Guardian. Bill Gates has a fairly upbeat take on 2014 though. All three of those articles are worth reading, if you want to get some perspective on the past year.

Personally, I think I had a pretty good year, though things were pretty static, and I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked on some fronts. But I did a really good job with my weight loss goals, and with some other stuff.

I wrote a relatively short year in review post last year. This year’s post is going to be pretty long. I’ve had a lot of this stuff banging around in my head for the last few weeks, and I really want to get it down in writing, partly so I have it to refer back to in a year, and partly just so I can organize my thoughts and move forward.

Weight & Health
I started a diet in September 2013, at 230 pounds. I got down to 200 lbs as of January 1, 2014. I hit 165 about a month ago, and have been hovering around there, +/- 3 lbs, since then. So I think I’ve done a generally good job on this front.

For 2015, I’m not sure if I want to just maintain at 165 or set a new goal for 160. I don’t see much point in trying to go any lower than 160. I should probably switch gears in 2015 and try to work a bit harder on fitness. Through most of 2014, until it got cold, I was going out for walks almost every day. I think that really helped get the pounds off. I definitely want to pick up on that, when the weather gets warmer. Until then, I’m not sure what I want to do. But I know I should be doing something. My neck and shoulders have been bothering me a bit recently, so maybe I need to do something about that before I try to do anything new on the exercise front. I tried using my exercise bike a bit in 2014, but I’ve found that my back starts bothering me after about five minutes on the bike. So I probably need to figure that out before I can get any further with the exercise.

Education / Programming
I made an attempt to get through Algorithms I and II on Coursera in 2013. I got most of the way through part one, and never started part two. In 2014, I took another shot at part one, but gave up when I got sick not long after the course started. I never got back to it. I’m still interested in doing something with Coursera and/or EdX in 2015, but I don’t have any particular plans.

On a couple of other fronts, I did manage to learn a bit about WordPress and F# in 2014. I read two books on WordPress, one general and one on plugin development, and I successfully moved my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress install. So that was an accomplishment. I didn’t actually do any meaningful WordPress development, though, aside from tweaking a few things in my template, and working through some of the examples in the plugin dev book.

On F#, I started reading a few books on the subject, but didn’t finish any of them. I learned enough to solve a few Project Euler problems with F#, but not enough to do anything really useful with the language.

Speaking of Project Euler, I had solved through to problem 25 at the end of 2013, and I’ve now solved through to # 65, so that’s 40 problems solved in 2014. I used C# for all of the problems I solved, and reworked a handful of them with F#. For 2015, I’d like to continue working on Euler problems, using a combination of C# and F#.

I’m not sure if I want to try to learn any new languages in 2015. I think I want to concentrate on C# and F# for now. It might be nice to learn Swift, and get back to doing some Mac and/or iOS development, but I don’t have any particular plans to do so. If possible, I’d like to get back to doing some web development using some of the new stuff around ASP.NET that I really didn’t get a chance to play with in 2014.

Work
I started my job at SHI in January 2013, so I’m now just about to hit the two-year mark. Things were pretty static with SHI in 2014. I worked almost exclusively on Dynamics AX projects, using X++. I did a smattering of C# work, but only to support stuff I was doing in X++. The one big thing that changed, early in 2014, was a reorganization, so I’m now under a different boss than I was in 2013. But the new boss was already my project manager, so there wasn’t really much of a change there.

During my year-end review for 2013, there was some talk about the possibility that I might be getting involved in a SharePoint project, but nothing ever came of that. I did read an introductory SharePoint development book, but I never got as far as even setting up a local environment to play around with. If I learned anything about SharePoint, it was mostly that it’s a mess, and trying to learn it, in a general way, on your own, probably isn’t a great idea. If the SharePoint project resurfaces in 2015, I’ll definitely jump back in, but I’m not going to mess around with SharePoint any more without some specific direction.

I haven’t had my 2014 review yet, so I’m not sure what will come out of that. The boss has talked, in general, about some upcoming changes, but hasn’t gotten into specifics. I’m cautiously optimistic about things at SHI, but we’ll see what comes out of my review, and what kind of changes occur this year.
One specific thing she did mention was that we’ll have a training budget this year, so that might be good. She didn’t mention how much the budget was, or what it might be spent on, so I’m not getting my hopes up about going to any tech conferences on the company dime, but hopefully it’s not just a $500 budget that gets spent some CBT software or something like that.

Consulting and/or Volunteering
I haven’t done any consulting work at all in 2014. I’m OK with that, though it would have been nice to have done at least one independent project.

I signed up for Catchafire in 2014, in the hope of finding a good volunteer programming project to work on. But I never did find anything there that I thought would be a good match for my skills and my interests. I’ll keep an eye on it in 2015, but maybe I should look around for other opportunities.

I also applied for volunteer positions at a few museums in NYC, including the Met, The Morgan, and the Museum of Natural History. The only one I heard back from was the Morgan, but they needed someone who was available on weekdays, so that was out. I’ll keep an eye out for volunteer opportunities in 2015, but I’m not hopeful that I’ll find anything interesting that would actually fit into my schedule.

Reading
According to Goodreads, I finished 30 books in 2014, but most of them were comics. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) I read The Strain trilogy at the beginning of the year, then spent the rest of the year slowly working my way through Kate Elliot’s Spirit Gate. So I can’t really say I read any fiction over the past year that wasn’t just escapist fantasy. (Again, not that there’s anything wrong with that!) For non-fiction, I read through two books on WordPress, started (but didn’t finish) a couple of F# books, and recently started David Allen’s Making It All Work. I’ll likely finish the David Allen book this month.

I don’t have any specific reading goals for 2015, though I’d like to read more non-fiction, and I definitely have a lot of comics I’d like to read, when I can find the time. But I’m not setting any real goals.

Blogging
I moved this blog to WordPress in May, and I’ve been pretty happy about that. I think it worked out well, and I learned a lot about WordPress in the process.

I wrote a little over 100 posts in 2014, including a few that were actually useful enough to attract a few page views, so that’s good. I only had 33 posts in 2013. (I’m still not making any money on AdSense though. I might just remove ads entirely this year, since they don’t seem to be doing me any good.)

I think I want to keep going with WordPress, and I’m happy enough with 1&1 that I think I’ll stick with them as a host. I might mess with the template a bit in 2015, but I don’t think I need to.

Travel
I didn’t really do any travel in 2014, aside from several trips into NYC, and one trip to Georgia for a funeral. Most of the trips into NYC were day trips, but I did go to WordCamp NYC over the summer, and stayed in the city for that. I made several visits to the Met and MoMA over the past year, so I’m pretty happy about that. The trip to Georgia was not a happy one; my brother’s best friend passed away.

I didn’t make it to even a single comics convention in 2014, so I’d like to try and get to either San Diego or NYCC this year. Or maybe I should consider WonderCon in Anaheim. I know the chance of getting SDCC tickets is low, but I’ll give it a shot, when they go on sale. And I’m sure I can get NYCC tickets, if I don’t wait until the last minute like I did last year.

Hardware
I recently swapped out the hard drives in my ThinkPad and MacBook with SSDs. I re-installed Windows 8.1 on the ThinkPad several months ago, and wiped & reinstalled OS X on the MacBook as part of the SSD switch. So both of those machines are clean, speedy, and up to date. I think I’ll keep both of them through 2015.

I am currently in the middle of doing a clean install of Windows 8 on my desktop machine. I’m hoping that works out, but I have some doubts. I don’t really want to have to replace that machine this year, but I might have to. I’ll think about that some more once I’ve got it all set up.

I got a new iPhone 5s in October 2013, so I’m going to stick with that through most of 2015. I might replace it at the end of the year, or I might wait until 2016. And I only just recently picked up an iPad Air, so I shouldn’t need to replace that until 2016, I hope.

Apartment and Car
I think I’m going to renew the lease on my current apartment again this year. I keep thinking about moving, but I can never quite talk myself into it. I’ll need to review my thinking on that this month, since I’ll need to make a decision on the lease in February. I do have a lot of stuff that I want to get cleaned up and/or fixed in the apartment this year, assuming I stay in it. Some of that will require some action from the landlord, which I’m not optimistic about, but I’ll make an effort, and see how far I can get.

And I’m hoping to keep my car through 2015. It’s got about 65,0000 miles on it and it’s running well. I just need to keep up with maintenance on it, and I think I’ll be fine.

Personal Organization
I made a number of changes in my systems for personal organization in 2014, and I’m pretty happy with the direction I’m going in on that. I got all of my passwords moved from KeePass to 1Password. And I consolidated all of my personal notes into Evernote, and canceled my old Backpack account. I’ve been making a concerted effort to reapply myself to following the general principles of GTD, and have managed to get a lot of random stuff done in the last few months.

Summary
Well, that was a pretty long post. Probably longer than it needed to be, but I feel like I’ve worked some stuff out and cleared some stuff out of my head. Happy New Year!

Happy New Year

I thought I would write up a quick New Year’s post today, with a few status updates. I mostly write this kind of post for my own future reference, just to see where I’ve been, and what progress (if any) I’ve made in certain areas.

First, I’m happy to say that I stepped on the scale this morning, and it read 200 pounds. I started my diet around Sept 1, at 230 lbs, with the goal of losing a pound a week, until I hit 200. So I hit my goal, and I hit it earlier than expected. I guess my next goal will be to get down to 180, again at one pound per week. We’ll see if I can manage that. I’m still logging all my calories with the Lose It app on my phone. I think that’s really been the key factor in being successful. I’m not sure when I was last under 200 lbs. Maybe back in college?

On another front, I haven’t done quite so good. I blogged, back in November, about Coursera. I had enrolled in two courses, Algorithms, Parts I and II. Part I was technically done before I enrolled, and Part II was just starting up. My plan was to breeze through the first part, then catch up with the second. I was doing OK up through the end of November, and gotten through about 80% of the material in Part I, but then I got busy with other stuff in December, and never went back to it. Meanwhile, Part II wrapped up, so here it is, 2014, and I haven’t done anything on Coursera in a month. It looks like I can still watch the lectures, and even submit the programming assignments for auto-grading, so I may just pick it up again this month, and finish Part I. Or I may wait until it “officially” starts up again, on January 30, and try to take it in “real-time”. Then, I can take Part II in real-time, when it’s next offered in March. Or maybe I’ll just try something different this year, either from Coursera or EdX.

Professionally, I started my job at SHI in January 2013, so I’m at just about the one year mark there. I had my performance review with my boss yesterday, and it went pretty well. I’ll likely stick with SHI for another year. Given that I’m doing almost 100% Dynamics AX work though, I want to see about doing more web stuff on the side this year. Last year, I did a project for my former employer, Electric Vine, that allowed me to exercise my ASP.NET and JavaScript skills a bit, but I don’t have any consulting work planned for 2014. I should really find some, or maybe get involved in an open source project, or something like that.

Drupal 7

This is one of the books I bought in ebook format from Packt last week. It’s a beginner/intermediate level book on Drupal 7, covering installation, configuration, and administration. It covers all of the basics (as far as I can tell) along with some of the more interesting parts. I’m about halfway through it. I find that I’m skimming over parts of it, since some aspects of Drupal are pretty obvious, if you’ve ever used a CMS before.
The formatting of the epub file, which I’m reading on my iPad, leaves a bit to be desired. I’m pretty sure that some special characters were lost in translation somewhere. There are a lot of places where there should probably have been an em-dash, and there is no em-dash, for instance. And I just came across a table that got screwed up so the text that should have been in the second column is instead just superimposed over the text that should have been in the first column. (The PDF file for the book looks fine though.)
I think I’ve been spoiled by O’Reilly’s ebooks. They generally have accurate and reasonable formatting for their PDF, epub, and mobi files.

messing around with the blog a bit

I just spent a little time cleaning up the files on my 1&1 account, moving anything that I think might be referenced by the blog into a ./blogfiles folder, then changing my files.andrewhuey.com address to point there, instead of at the root. I think it worked out OK.
I now have nothing pointing at the root, which frees me up a bit to experiment with setting up different sites in different subdirectories, and not having to worry about them being accessible in unexpected ways. For instance, I’m probably going to be setting up a test Drupal site soon.  I can put it in a ./drupal folder, and set drupal.andrewhuey.com to point there.

Happy New Year

I went to bed at 11pm last night, and got up at 6:30 today, so I can’t say I had a wild & crazy New Year’s Eve. That’s OK though.
Early in the year, I often find a few things that I’ve been putting off for too long, and try to take care of them. This morning’s project has been getting redirects in place on this web site, so that links to my old blog entries, from back when I was using Blogger’s old FTP publishing, to andrewhuey.org, will do 301 redirects to the appropriate pages at blog.andrewhuey.com, where the pages are now dynamically generated by Blogger.
I switched from FTP to “custom domain” back in Feb 2010, so I’ve put off the redirect stuff for long enough that it probably doesn’t matter anymore. But it seems like a good idea anyway.
I don’t know that much about .htaccess files and ModRewrite, but I know just enough to be dangerous. I picked up some hints on what I need to do here and here.
The part of my .htaccess file that handles redirection now looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^files.andrewhuey.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://blog.andrewhuey.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I use files.andrewhuey.com to reference various files on my web server. Everything else should just get redirected to blog.andrewhuey.com. So, pretty simple.

random 2008 lists

Here are a few random lists, of books & comics I read, and movies I saw, in 2008. I don’t suppose I have any good reason for posting these. I was just kind of bored with the Rose Bowl, so I started making lists. I’m not bothering to list anything I read or saw, but didn’t really enjoy, so you can assume that all these books/comics/movies are recommended to anyone who might have tastes similar to my own.

books I read in 2008:
1. Well of Lost Plots – Jasper Fforde
2. The Millionaires – Brad Meltzer
3. Zero Game – Meltzer
4. Areas of my Expertise – John Hodgman
5. Something Rotten – Fforde
6. Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
7. Interesting Times – Terry Pratchett
8. The Last Lecture – Randy Pausch
9. Idea Mapping – Jamie Nast
10. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon
11. Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
12. Death Masks – Jim Butcher
13. Bood Rites – Butcher
14. With No One as Witness – Elizabeth George
15. Certain Justice – P. D. James
16. A Taste for Death – James
17. Spirit House – Christopher G. Moore
18. Tales of Beedle the Bard – J K Rowling

some comics I read:
1. Coraline – Neil Gaiman / P Craig Russell
2. 21 Down – Gray / Palmiotti / Saiz
3. Teen Titans: Titans Around the World
4. Shadowpact
5. Fell – Warren Ellis / Ben Templesmith
6. a bunch of Hellboy and BPRD comics
7. Invincible (Vol 1-4, I think)
8. Kid Eternity – Grant Morrison / Duncan Fegredo
9. Challengers of the Unknown – Loeb / Sale

movies i remember seeing:
1. There Will Be Blood
2. Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
3. Stargate: Ark of Truth
4. Stargate: Continuum
5. Battlestar Galactica: Razor
6. Dark Knight
7. Hellboy 2
8. Iron Man
9. X-Files: I Want to Believe
10. Batman: Gotham Knight
11. Wall-E
12. Gone Baby Gone
13. No Country for Old Men

WSJ.com – Bush Is a Book Lover

According to this article by Karl Rove, President Bush read 40 books in 2008, 51 in 2007, and 95 in 2006. Pretty impressive, assuming these numbers are correct, and that Bush actually understood what he was reading. There are a couple of reactions (here and here) to this article on the Huffington Post site that express a certain amount of doubt as to Rove’s motivies in writing this piece, and the likelihood that Bush actually did read and understand all of these books. As for myself, I’ve been keeping a list of all the books I’ve read this year. I finished 17 books in 2008, mostly novels.

read more | digg story

Microsoft’s Official Fix for Failing Zunes

Happy New Year! I’ve been hearing some good things about the Zune over the last year or so, but now, Microsoft reminds everyone why they shouldn’t be trusted with making consumer electronics devices. Guys, it’s not like leap year logic is difficult to figure out or anything! Did they just think the product wouldn’t last until 1/1/09, so they didn’t bother with it?

read more | digg story

Happy New Year

I didn’t do much today, aside from watching football. I’m not making any major resolutions this year either. I did make all the arrangements to go to WonderCon today though. As usual, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go this year, but a few things convinced me to go again. Basically, a good guest lineup, plus a general desire to get out of New Jersey for a few days. And a chance to see the Chinese New Year Parade again!

I haven’t really done much reflection on 2007. Normally, I would get kind of reflective on New Year’s Day, but I haven’t really been in that frame of mind. Well, just for the heck of it, here are some things I’ve done in 2007:

Books and comics I’ve read and liked:

  • Absolute Watchmen
  • Nextwave
  • David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything (though I haven’t finished RFA yet)
  • the first two Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” novels
  • a couple of Jim Butcher “Harry Dresden” novels

Movies & TV shows I’ve enjoyed:

  • Paprika (my favorite movie of the year, for whatever that’s worth)
  • Once
  • Ratatouille
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Rise: Blood Hunter (okay, not exactly high-brow, but fun)
  • Torchwood
  • Life on Mars
  • Heroes

Music I’ve liked:

  • Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
  • Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
  • Paul McCartney – Memory Almost Full
  • Pizzicato Five – Made in USA (from 1994, but I’d never heard it until this year)
  • Derek and the Dominoes – Layla (I only just got around to buying this CD in 2007)

Pointless stuff I’ve spent money on:

  • new couch
  • iPod Touch
  • TomTom One LE GPS
  • Dell Inspiron laptop
  • MacBook
  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Motorola SLVR
  • 19″ widescreen LG monitor
  • Toshiba HD-DVD player

Things I didn’t get around to doing:

  • buying a new car (the old one’s still working, but maybe not for much longer)
  • checking out the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met
  • visiting the new Morimoto restaurant in NYC

Well, that’s just a bunch of random lists off the top of my head. I guess the two big things that happened in 2007 for me were the office move my company did (from Edison to Somerset), and my mostly successful implementation of GTD.