My To Do List

So I'm starting this blog to (hopefully) help me stay on top of the many projects I have planned for the upcoming year. Last year was pretty productive, and I'm hoping to get more big projects off the ground this year, and this blog, along with being one of the projects, is meant to help me keep track of what I'm planning to do and also to document the work I will have done. 

Before I present my list of project plans for this year, here is the list of projects I completed (more or less) last year:

• Got married. This was the biggest project I had last year, and honestly, most of the hard work was done by Kat, but I did handle a lot of things. 
• Brought www.travellerbook.com online. This has been in the work for a couple of years, and it was good to get things out onto the Internet. 
• Gave out the first Traveller books. This is really the best way for people to find out about Travellerbook.com, so I started giving out books. I'll need to give out many more though, so that's on this year's list.

So as you can see, it's a pretty short list. I've left out a lot of the little things that were important at the time but were small compared to the rest. Now on for this year's plans.

• Start a blog. Really I have a blog already, but I never post to it and it doesn't have any focus. This blog will serve as my main blog for now. We'll see how things work out if I keep up with the writing.
• Transcribe my journal. I started keeping a journal sometime in 2000, and I wrote in it almost every night for at least 3 years. There are several hundred pages at least in it, and I'm sure there are some interesting tidbits I wouldn't mind reading again, and maybe expanding on. 
• Fix up www.travellerbook.com. Getting the site up and running was a big project, and this year I want to get the site looking better and running faster. To do this I'll be adding several features and enhancements: OpenID logins, YUI CSS layouts, better authentication and email, along with other enhancements. I'm sure I'll be keeping track of the changes here.
• Give out more traveller books. This should be easy. I just need to buy books, tag them and give them away. Email me if you'd like one. 
• Bring www.alexandriasociety.com online. This is my next big web project. It's still in the early stages, but the idea is to be a social networking site that uses your existing social networks and data. There will definitely be more about this later in the year as this project gets more complete. 
• Write an iPhone/iPod touch app for TravellerBook.com and AlexandriaSociety.com. This obviously needs to be done after the web sites are finished or at least more finished.
• Write a desktop app for AlexandriaSociety.com. I'm still deciding how important this should be to the site, and the more I think about the site, the less important the desktop app seems to be. There will probably still need to be at least a sync client or something. 
• Organize my digital media. This has been on my to do list for 3 years running, so we'll see how far I get with this this year. I want to get my iTunes music, digital photos and videos into some kind of useful state that is accessible from all of the computers in my house as well as from the Internet. 
• Learn a new language. Spoken language for sure, maybe a programming language too, you never know. I've got a good amount of commute time on a bus that I can use to listen to language podcasts and recordings, so I should try to be as productive with that time as possible. 
• Increase my productivity. I read Getting Things Done a couple of years ago, but am easily distracted. I read recently that having more projects can allow oneself to be distracted by other projects rather than trivialities, so I'm hoping by writing all of these down, I can have a go to list of things to do when I get bored of working on one thing for a long time. At the very least it will help me not feel guilty about not working on what I should (or feel I should be) working on at the time, since I'll be doing something on my To Do list.
• Get a remote backup system working. Currently I just have a RAID-1 setup on my home server, but no real backups. I have a script using Duplicity that sends encrypted backups to an Amazon S3 bucket, but it's causing kernel panics on my server for some reason, so I will need to track that down or find an alternate solution.
• Export my Mac OS X address book to LDAP. Because I have so many contact sync and management programs/sites in use, it causes frequent problems. I currently use Plaxo, MobileMe and Zimbra (via Vorari.com) and when they all get going, it causes problems from time to time. An LDAP address book would help keep data loss to a minimum. I have one set up currently using eGroupware, I just need to get my contacts imported into it.
• Gain some weight. Muscle weight, not fat. Kat has talked about joining a climbing gym, and we have friends that have been trying to get us to go, so we might do that. I also have been paying for the gym at work and not going, so it's time to start going or cut costs. We also got a Wii Fit for Christmas, so that should help too. So there are no excuses this year.
• Set up load balancing on my server's internet connection. 
• Write more. This blog counts toward that, but I've also been meaning to restart my journaling and eventually to publish something. I used to write ideas for stories in my journal, so I'm hoping that by transcribing it I'll rediscover those ideas and decide if I want to try fleshing out those stories. 

I think that's a pretty good start. There are plenty of other little projects I want to get done, especially revolving around my home server and Alexandria Society. Not to mention the projects I will be working on at Apple. Looking at this list, I keeping thinking I need more hours in the day. Hopefully keeping this blog up to date will keep me on track and on task so we'll see how things go as the year progresses. 

Of course, there will be distractions this year. Kat's friend Joe is getting married in the summer in Italy (which will be a great opportunity to get more Traveller books out into the wild.) Also scheduled for this year is the release of Guitar Rising (http://www.guitarrising.com) and of course, Snow Leopard. (http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/) I also try to read a lot of blogs dealing with computer programming, personal finance and economics, and of course, lifehacker. So navigating these releases and distractions, we'll see how far I get on checking things off from this list. There's probably more than a full year's work here, so I'm not expecting to get it all done. Time to get to work!