Second Quarter Report

At the beginning of the year I did a brief post about what seemed like good goals for 2010. This is something lots of people do. I am doing New Year's Resolutions wrong, though, because I followed up 3 months later, and am back to do it again 6 months later. This is turning into the 7up of self-absorbed blogging. Here we go now...

1) Get out of the I.T. ghetto

As mentioned in our last entry, this has been revised a bit. Inspired by actors who take on really shitty movies and TV shows to finance their theater projects, I was motivated to go out and find fun and interesting things to do around town, stuffing my day job into the 'get paid so you can do fun things that don't pay' box . One fun thing has been being part of Bloomington's new hackerspace. We're just about to decide on an official name, which means great t-shirts are not far behind, and we're doing a series of workshops all through July. So essentially, I'm working to live, not living to work, and that's OK.

Additionally, my least favorite person at work quit a few weeks ago, so that's one of those little gifts life gives you sometimes.

2) Write more

This is a big failure. I don't think I've ever written less in my life than I have this year. I do post on Twitter several hundred times a day, and have started a PLOG (personal log - something that's electronic but locked away and private) that I write in every morning. Usually, though, these are one or two sentence blurbs.

3) Find someplace other than Soma to hang out

Actually I think the hangout of choice now is going to be the hackerspace. Since I don't spend much time writing or pretending to do so, I am not spending much time at coffee shops.

4) Go to Disney World

As before, we did this one in March.

5) Learn more about electronics

The hackerspace thing went a long way toward helping me out here. I have learned about OpAmps recently, which are very useful since a lot of times with sensors and such you have a weak signal that you need to boost.

6) Call in to The Best Show on WFMU.

I did actually achieve this goal, although my debut was not what I hoped it might be. A couple weeks ago I called while Paul F. Tompkins and Wally Wackiman were on, which was probably not the best time to make a first call. I made it past call screener Mike, then waited on hold for a couple of minutes.

I noticed while on hold I could barely make out what people were saying. I'm not sure if this was due to nerves, or my phone, or the line. When I got on I did the 'is this me?' rookie mistake. After getting my bearings I suggested Wally (a puppet) make corporate training movies like the Muppets did for IBM before they got famous. Tom and Wally started riffing on that, but again, I couldn't really hear what they were saying, so then eventually I got an opening to talk again and said 'hey you can do this, I bet you get a call from Jiffy Lube tomorrow', or something similarly lame, and Tom said 'I'm not going on this guy's flight of fancy' and hung up.

Actually it was kind of funny, getting hung up on, but the whole thing was very nerve wracking and essentially I turfed out. I may try it again, but will try to actually focus on what's being said, which will probably help a lot.

7) learn to 'hover' on the unicycle.

I don't know about this one. I think I just felt like I had to add more to the list.