On the theory that stating a goal publicly will act as a goad to spur me to action, here is a list of things I'd like to accomplish in 2010:
- Take more pictures: Christina is the de facto photographer for all family occasions, but this also means that she's hardly ever in a picture. That's at least partially because I don't like using her camera -- I find it too bulky, and it takes too long to get all the settings just right. So, my plan is to get a small point-and-shoot camera that I can carry along to lots of places, and start contributing to our digital treasure-trove of memories. This leads right into the next goal:
- Organize the pictures we have: we've got thousands of pictures scattered over various hard drives and as prints strewn through our [thoroughly disorganized] closets. I want to send off all the prints to get scanned, and, together with the already-digital ones, consolidate and tag them in some coherent fashion.
- Get a reasonable music setup: our "stereo system" currently consists of a set of $30 computer speakers hooked up to a laptop sitting on a kitchen counter streaming Pandora -- as you can imagine, the sound quality is stellar. And if you want to listen to music, you have to be in the kitchen. I've gotten as far as getting most of our ripped CDs accessible via our Windows Home Server, but it's probably time to consider something like Windows Media Center and/or Sonos.
- Get decent sets of basic household items: Christina and I are the queen and king of hand-me-downs. We didn't buy a real couch until last year [a white leather couch, which the dog promptly got on with red paint on its paws ...], and the breakthrough kitchen gift from me to Christina this year was a set of Henckel knives [which she's cut herself with a lot, because she's not used to knives actually being sharp]. Our linen situation is a disaster -- we have one set of sheets that fits our bed properly and another set that fits if you stretch it really, really tight [it's sort of like sleeping on a drum] and then a bunch of sheets that must all be at least 10 years old, and fit nothing we have. Our cutlery and dishes are a hodge-podge of one-off Ikea purchases, dishes we got when we were married, some stuff we got from Christina's mum and stuff that we acquired from the neighborhoood equivalent of Craiglist. It's high time to get past this bit of the college student lifestyle.
- Make some progress on home improvement: before, and for a few months after we moved into our house, we had a lot renovations done. However, since then we haven't done anything to the house, and there's still oodles of stuff to do, as you'd expect from a house built in 1905 whose previous owner didn't let the fact that he was a crappy handyman stop him from being, well, handy. [Exhibit A: the attic extension that he built, a structure that still makes Christina angry every time she looks at it.] There's some stuff that I'll let professionals do [like putting down carpet in our attic] and some stuff that I want to do myself, or at least help out on, namely all the stuff that involves destruction: taking off the decks, and taking off the siding on the south side of the house.
- Be hosts more often: we go through spurts of hospitality [ie inviting people over for dinner] interspersed with long periods when dinner consists of just Christina and me trying to trick persuade Xander into eating his food. The goal for this year: have somebody over for dinner once a month.
- Do more cross-country mountain bike races: last year I only did 3 Indie series races; this year, I'd like to do 6. And instead of finishing at the back of the pack, I'd like to finish in the middle. This will presumably require working on my endurance, something I've always hated. Time to try moving past hate to strong dislike, I suppose.
- Go on an "epic" ride: Per the ever-informative Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance site, "Debate has raged for years on what rides qualify as epic rides. Criteria mentioned include being far from civilization, high mileage (e.g. over 20 miles), high percentage of single track trail, substantial amounts of elevation gain, taking most or all of a day to complete, great views, beautiful nature." So far, the longest ride I've been on was about 3 hours, and I'd love to do an all-day one.
- Write some code just for fun: I'd like to expand my horizons and get some hands-on familiarity with non-MS languages, environments and/or systems for a personal project. In particular, becoming fluent in Python would be nice, and Hadoop, Lucene, and Mahout all look pretty interesting in terms of learning more about data processing/mining/analysis [but are all implemented in Java, unfortunately, so I may end up learning Java instead of Python ...].
- Blog more: self-explanatory.
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