Blog: March Retrospective
2011 Apr 03
At the end of February I mentioned the idea of trying to write a book about Maven. I got about 12 days of writing into it but then lost steam. I learned a lot about Maven while doing it but was bummed that I wasn't getting any feedback or interest from anybody on Twitter. If you're curious, you can check out the PDF of my incomplete Maven book
An upgrade issue left me unable to attend DevOps Days Boston, which bummed me out a little bit, but I at least ended up selling my ticket to somebody else.
At work somebody introduced me to Sinatra, which is a Ruby DSL for building simply dynamic web sites and Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby web apps.. I put this together with Markdown (which I discovered doing the Maven book) and created http://notes.buildndeploy.com/, which I'm using to write up and share notes I make about various languages, technologies and tools.
I ended up registering www.buildndeploy.com and moving that site from WordPress to Posterous since they don't charge you for custom domain names. I've also been getting rid of domain names I no longer need and moving the ones I'm keeping to keep to DNSimple, a cheaper and infinitely better alternative to GoDaddy. Between the notes site and the main site I've gotten a decent amount done with this effort.
My mountain bike map of Graham Hills Park was finally signed off on and is now availale: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf
I've been steadily saving for a new iMac but slowed down my savings just a little bit when rumors started popping up about them coming out with new models in June or July. I had originally targetted forgetting one in April. Lately the buzz has been saying late April/early May. Either way, I should have enough put aside to get a nice iMac.
In the middle of March Kim and I attended PAX East with her sister, brother-in-law and my friend Dan and his girlfriend (also named Kim). The highlight of the show was seeing Jonathan Coulton play which really got me thinking about writing music again. I've started noodling around on my guitar more and recording some ideas in the back room of the apartment, which I've been doing a lot of clean up on.
JoCo's lyrics got me thinking about opening myself up to writing about what I know more. I also realized that while I've treated programming as something I should always try and read and learn more about, I've never treated music that way - I always felt like songs should come from some inherent, untrained magical ability. I realized this was a stupid notion and picked up the book Writing Better Lyrics, as well as a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. The thesaurus has been pretty neat and interesting to flip through. I've been making an effort to do Object Writing every morning as suggested by the lyrics book. I'm about 12 days in with a couple of missed days here and there. I've also been working on "worksheets" for my songs to try and cultivate more lyrics and ideas for them.
Just today I dropped off my electric guitar and bass at the new guitar shop in Tarrytown called Rock Island Sound to get them set up and have their electronics checked out. I also put two other guitars on consignment since I never use them. That helps clear out the back room some more and hopefully bring in a little extra cash. I might use that to get one of the pretty guitars they have there though...
Yesterday I put a lot of time into rearranging our bedroom. I moved the bed to the back of the room by the windows instead of off to the side. This makes the room and space for each of us symmetrical. I also got rid of the big computer desk I've had for probably 10 years. I want something simpler and easier to move. The big desk had to be taken completely apart just to move it to another room. I'm not interested in dealing with it anymore.
I'm still using Google Voice for texting but am pretty disappointed in the iPhone App for it. It's always hanging and crashing and the UI can be quite flakey fairly often. I also ended up going over my new data limit this month for the iPhone so it almost negated the savings on the cheaper text and data plan. This month should be better.
Another daily (workday) habit I've been doing is reading a card from the Agile in a Flash card deck and reflecting on it via Twitter. I've even engaged with the author himself, Tim Ottinger, on Twitter, asking questions, getting feedback and generally being challenged to think more and do them each day.
In the money/budget category... well, my budget was a little shaky towards the end of the month, but overall I think it was okay. One of the smarter buying choices I made this month was passing on getting an AirPort Extreme and just buying a NetGear WAP using the Best Buy gift certificate my brother got me for Christmas. (Update: The day after this post I saw this article which some might be interested in: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/04/is-the-airport-extreme-worth-the-price/)
I only managed to get out on my mountain bike twice this month, and that was two days in the same weekend. The weather was less than agreeable in the beginning of the month but there were a few days here and there I should've gotten out on my bike but just didn't. I need to step that up in April. Getting my gear in order and ready to go (especially for evenings) would be a big help. I've been considering thinking about getting an actually single speed mountain bike and a couple of friends have suggested getting a 29er, so I've been looking at bikes likes the Trek/Fisher Marlin Single Speed. No solid plans yet on that front though.
The lack of riding this month also means a lack of losing any weight :-/
The game designing and mapping have taken a back seat lately, so I ended up removing those categories from my Google Reader account. It was becoming a burden to keep up with them so I decided it was best to just remove them. Another small amount of simplification I've made in my online life is shutting off email notifications from Facebook. I've found this helps make it less distracting and results in less email to clean up after.
I was thinking this was another dud month as far as progress and accomplishments are concerned, but after seeing all I've written about above I feel pretty good about it.