found drama

First quarter of 2013 is wrapping up. How’d I do on my goals? Let’s take a look…

• Reading: 48+ books in 2013. 14 finished so far. (Not too bad.) Looks a bit like this:
  
  

  Title	Author	Finished
  JavaScript Enlightenment	Cody Lindley	1/1
  Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	1/7
  Pocket Genius: Space 1	DK Publishing	1/10
  Blindsight	Peter Watts	1/22
  Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom	Cory Doctorow	1/27
  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 2	J.K. Rowling	2/5
  The Unbearable Lightness of Being 3	Milan Kundera	2/20
  Doom Days	Arlene Blakely	2/28
  R in a Nutshell 4	Joseph Adler	3/9
  Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	3/15
  Beginning Java 7 4	Jeff Friesen	3/16
  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 2	J.K. Rowling	3/19
  Functional JavaScript 5	Mike Fogus	3/23
  A Wizard of Earthsea	Ursula K. Le Guin	3/23

• Reading: these 12 specific books. I’ve set a goal like this before, and this year I intend to do it.
  • The Rings of Saturn
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • The Third Man
  • Ethan Frome
  • Revelation Space (reading this now)
  • Cat’s Cradle
  • A Wizard of Earthsea
  • Midnight’s Children
  • The French Lieutenant’s Woman
  • The Pragmatic Programmer
  • The Blind Assassin
  • The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
• Exercise: Average 25 miles or more per month. Well… I started off strong. There have been… complications. It’s easy to count out the vacation week. But that’s just a week. The real trouble is with the broken treadmill. But warm weather is in the process of arriving…
  
• “Re-learn” statistics. Did I mention that I felt like I’d forgotten everything I’d learned in college? ⁶ But I’m feeling the motivation to reason about problems with a more… empirical edge. So, I took Jeff Leek’s “Data Analysis” Coursera course in February and March. It was a little grueling ⁷ but I made it. (And “with distinction”, no less.) I’m also working my way through some readings that A. assigned to me.
• Learn some R. Vide supra. There was no getting through that Coursera class without picking up a bit of R. (Practically the whole class was in R.) Plus I made it through most of Adler’s R in a Nutshell. (Next up: R in Action.)
• Learn some Python. I started taking a stab at some of the Python exercises on Code Academy. But so far I haven’t learned anything that I wouldn’t have picked up just by guessing. No real time investment here. Not yet. And/but: knowing what I know now about R, I can see why people try to use the two of them together. (And I can make some guesses about why someone might want to stay all in one or the other.)
• “Ship” one trivial “novelty” app. I’ll get back to you on this one…

1. What? Don’t look at me like that.[↩]
2. With Holden.[↩][↩]
3. See also: Dating Without Kundera.[↩]
4. ”Done enough.”[↩][↩]
5. Pre-release. As a reviewer.[↩]
6. If you’re reading this: sorry Dr. Lasane![↩]
7. 3-5 hours/week my ass… (Also: wrap-up post forth-coming…)[↩]

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