First post, 2013, more or less

Well, I set a goal to blog more often in 2013, and so far I’m off to a sucky start.  Writer’s block, I guess, or more specifically: at best only a vague idea of what I wanted to write about, leading to paralysis by analysis.

So I’ll run off for a while, get the First Blog Entry Of The Year out of the way, and maybe that’ll uncork me.

2013 has been an interesting year, so far.  I set some other goals (not blog related :)) and have actually kept to many of them.

I set a goal to weigh 175 by about end of April, and I’m on track to be there closer to end of March.  I started at ~192.

I set a goal to achieve and maintain “inbox zero”.  I had to “declare bankruptcy” on two fronts, at home and at work, but since then I’ve done it.  To expand: I moved everything in my inboxes at home and at work to some other folder, and I “unstarred” all my Google mail.  (I read several months’ worth of the latest starred emails, and most of them were moot, and the ones that weren’t I transferred to my shiny new Toodledo account.)  So having achieved “inbox zero” by force, I’ve been able to keep it up: my work and home inboxes are both still clean, three weeks in.

I set a goal to get and stay more organized.  So I dusted off my Toodledo account, deleted all the old crap in it, and have been dutifully adding stuff, and checking stuff off, since 1/1.  A couple things sparked this: the new year, a general desire for a less hectic life and better sleep (I hate bolting awake at night thinking OMG what about X!?), and reading thesecretweapon.org really lit a fire under me, too.  TheSecretWeapon actually deals with Evernote, not Toodledo, but I decided to stick with TD.

On the minus side, I got the flu a week ago and it’s been a rough road back.  Still somewhat sniffly and congested.  Ick.

Here are some things I’d like to write about in the coming months.  I’m pretty sure I’ve written an entry like this before, so time will tell how well I stick to my guns.  🙂

  • the trials and tribulations of being a BHS Chapter President.  My pie-in-the sky idea is that my little “so you wanna be the president” section would become a popular reference for BHS Chapter Presidents throughout the Society.  First, of course, I have to write a bit, and then we’ll see if any of my ideas don’t suck.  🙂
  • I enjoyed and was impressed by Deacon Duncan‘s series critiquing a popular Christian Apologetics book, and think it’d be cool to do the same.  (See also the Created To Be His Help Meet series over at Love, Joy, Feminism.)  Something that’s interested me for years is morality and the basis thereof.  Or lack of a basis, as the case may be.  Long ago, before I was quite so atheistic in my own mind, I read a book about situational ethics relativism called Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly In Midair.  [Edit: title & link to book.]  I re-read some of it more recently, and what seemed to make a lot of sense the first time around, just didn’t any more.  So I thought it might be fun and interesting to write a chapter-by-chapter critique of that book.
  • Go, the computer language, continues to fascinate.  I learned about it more or less by chance, about last August, when a friend on FB got me interested.  (Thanks, Jonathan!)  I have a couple of small-to-medium projects in mind that I’d like to write about: 1) duplicate my most common use of Perl in Go, to wit, write a module, template, or framework that reads a text file, cuts it up into fields, and does stuff with the fields.  2) write a Go interface to Toodledo, Evernote, or both.  3) Write a Toodledo front end, that more accurately realizes my ideas about my perfect todo list.

Well, the plane’s about to land.  Gonna save now.  See you next time!