Nyr

It's that time of the year, when everyone makes empty promises to themselves. And I don't want to skip this important tradition. The last one I did was in 2012, which seems like a long time ago. Usually these are along the lines of sporty stuff or loosing weight. I have already stopped drinking alcohol and coffee end of last year and I am doing two hours of activity (as tracked by google fit) already. And nobody will stop me cycling too much anyway. There are also some things I promise I won't do this year: going vegan, stop gluten intake or low-carb. Still, some of these might be unexpected. ...

It is that time of the year again where I make up stuff to ignore for the following twelve months. Last year I didn’t do it, but this year I will give it another try. I has been pointed out that these kind of resolutions doesn’t really fit into the agile way of making decisions that I do subscribe to in my professional life. I will again try to make follow up posts to check how I am doing during the year and possibly adjust the goals. So here we go. No Screen Day – don’t spend any time in front of a screen or phone for one day a week. This can’t be avoided for work, but everything else is forbidden. I am going to start with a low use day, like Tuesdays and then increase it to a day with more free time like Fridays or possibly two weekdays. Sort out Fedora – I am behind with my work on Fedora packages. This has to do with a lack of time, but also with the direction Fedora is taking, which has killed my motivation a bit. First I will catch up with all the work and then decide if I give up on maintaining the packages and switch to CentOS and let other people do the work. If I give up on Fedora there are other open source project where I could invest more time. Cook new stuff – I love cooking, but often I just rehash old recipes or do one of these “whatever is in the fridge” meals. So plan for this year: pick a new recipe every week and cook it on the weekend. Now you are probably wondering where the usual stuff is. You know, the bits about weight and sports. I see those as a given anyway. I will continue to do more mountain biking and running and eat well enough to not end on the very lardy side. I will hopefully also progress on my career without having to do major changes. As these are pretty easy goals I might add harder ones or follow Cutts example in his quest to do a new thing every month and stay with it if it turns out to be nice. btw: I shouldn’t have told you this. 

This year I am doing the updates every four months and April is nearly over, so here it goes. 1. Loose weight: going very well. I dropped from an average weight of 79 to 74.7kg and moved from “overweight” to “normal weight” BMI category. I didn’t my lifestyle too much, I just eat and snack a bit less. One big helper has been the physics diet website, which keeps a nice average graph and helps me to stay motivated. I just have to go another 1.7kg to reach my goal for the year. 2. Reduce time spend watching TV, reading e-mails, blogs, facebook and twitter. I reduced the number of RSS feeds from 600 to 479 and the posts I read per day from 365 to 240 (including tweets). And I spend less time on each post, as I use readitlater to mark interesting posts and read them when I have time for it. I also stopped watching a few TV shows and stopped using facebook. Overall I notice that I have more time and I am sure I can do a bit more in the next eight months. Using GTD more also helped with my time management. 3. Do something about my so called “career”. This could mean doing something more fun, working less and/or earning more money. As mentioned in the previous post, I have decided to go for something more fun with a job at softonic. I will judge how it turned out in the coming months. For some reason I seem to have too many choices at the moment. Maybe I should have chosen more goals, but the success so far seems to be an indicator that it is good to concentrate on a few. Next update will be at the end of August. Some left overs from last year, which I worked on this year too: ...

by boite-en-valiseA new year means new resolutions. But first a quick look back at the ones from last year. On the fail side: I didn't loose weight, neither did I use my motorcycle more or took a lot more advantage of Barcelona. Success on: sorting out my music collection, travelling somewhere new, doing more programming and blogging a bit more. Now to the next year. I read a bit about these kind of resolutions and how to be better in succeeding. I probably took too much on in the last year and it is better to have some way of quantifying success or failure. So this year I am just taking on three resolutions. I still keep the failed ones from last year in the back of my mind though. 1. Loose weight (again), but this time with a plan. I will try to loose 0.5 kg a month. On the one hand it doesn't seem a lot on the other hand loosing 6 kg in a year seems too much. I will keep track of this and also keep track about my sport activities. To achieve the goal I will have to reduce my lunches with the opus5 guys and increase my sport activities. I will swap my gym for one nearer to my flat. I also will stop eating sweets and snacks. 2. Reduce time spend watching TV, reading e-mails, blogs, facebook and twitter. I will unsubscribe from as many services as possible. Instead I will spend the time programming, cooking, reading, socializing and doing sports. Not sure how I will put that in numbers, as I don't have them for the past, but I will make something up. 3. Do something about my so called "career". This could mean doing something more fun, working less and/or earning more money. Either at opus5, new projects in my free time or something completely new. I will have to see what comes up, but I have twelve months to decide.

Another look at my New Year resolutions. I decided to do them every four months now, every three was a bit much. loose weight fail - I am doing more mountain biking and eat sensible, but I gave up on the gym. Working out with my N79 Active turned out to be a lot of fun. use my motorcycle more a little bit more use, small trips and some usage in town. Now I need to get a new ITV. sort out my music collection all done. Tapes and CDs are digitized and I got rid of most of the duplicates. Music from podcasts is still a mess, but that can wait for another day. travel somewhere new Success - We went to Cadiz for the summer holiday and also checked out Tarifa, Tangier and Gibraltar. I would like to do another weekend trip somewhere, either with the bike or a weekend plane trip. do more programming not much happening at work. I started the twitter / tractor top10 website, which was fun. I also took over some packages for Fedora and have two more on review. I also did some programming for the digitization of the tapes and little things on older projects. I would count that as a success. take more advantage of Barcelona Saw some arty film stuff, went to the beach more and took full advantage of Tibidabo. Also two trips to the cinema so far: Watchmen and District 9, which are both great. This week is Merce and soon the Air Show and the Red Bull Air Race. blog more a little bit better. I think once every two weeks is probably my rhythm :-)