Blog: February Retrospective

2011 Feb 28

I'm feeling kind of "eh" about my accomplishments this month:

• February was my first real budget test. Overall I did alright, with a few items going over a little bit, but enough were under to keep things even. I started making a list of things that I could do to help reduce my spending even more.
• We brought our restaurant spending down, but I think we can do even better next month. I think we gave in to restaurant meals too early in the month.
• I removed/reduced a few features on my cell phone account, so that brings it down by $20. I think next month I will remove texting all together and bring it down another $10. I've switched to using Google Voice for texting.
• I'm going to slow down the savings to a new computer, mainly because Apple might be announcing new iMacs in June. I was planing to buy one in April.
• I'm putting money towards "buying a house" but I also need to start putting some towards an emergency fund. That's something I need to sort out.
• I should look for some ways to bring in a little extra cash to put towards savings.
• I've been working with the desk I have instead of buying a new one, but I really need to get a new chair. I don't have any comfortable desk chairs so it makes my time at the desk limited and uncomfortable.
• Not much in the way of mountain biking this month. The weather has sucked (lots of snow). We did manage to get out a couple of times to ride on the street/sidewalk, though.
• I posted two blog posts on http://buildndeploy.wordpress.com/ and have been working to interact with people on Twitter. Ideally I'd be posting once a week, so perhaps I need to start breaking up the post ideas I'm working on.
• I started work on a "book" and am learning/using Maven to do it. I also have another idea for a "book" and am considering doing a PragProWriMo in March to accomplish it.
• Spent a little bit of time looking at cloud computing. Set up an Amazon EC2 account and also gave http://cloudbees.com/ a try, which I'm digging.
• I put in for attending two conferences at work. One is about DevOps and the other is about Continuous Integration. They're both in the next couple of months.
• Still slacking on the exercise and am starting to feel pretty cruddy about it. Need to find the motivation to step that up.
• Not much progress in the lighter living department this month. Just a few minor trimmings here and there. I'm still considering digitizing my music collection to make my CD collection take up less/no space. I did group my CDs alphabetically by artist the other but now I need to sort each grouping. Very time consuming, but if I'm going to rip them I think it makes sense to do them alphabetically.

For March I need to get back to biking, keep working on my career and watch my budget.