found drama

Second quarter of 2013 is wrapping up. How’d I do on my goals? ¹ Shall we take a look?

1. Reading: 48+ books in 2013. I’m up to about 20 so far. Which tells me that I’m not racing ahead of pace, but I’m not lagging too far behind either. I figure I’ll still finish around 48 — but probably just barely.
   
   

   Title	Author	Finished
   JavaScript Enlightenment	Cody Lindley	1/1
   Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	1/7
   Pocket Genius: Space 2	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 3	J.K. Rowling	2/5
   The Unbearable Lightness of Being 4	Milan Kundera	2/20
   Doom Days	Arlene Blakely	2/28
   R in a Nutshell 5	Joseph Adler	3/9
   Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	3/15
   Beginning Java 7 5	Jeff Friesen	3/16
   Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 3	J.K. Rowling	3/19
   Functional JavaScript 6	Mike Fogus	3/23
   A Wizard of Earthsea	Ursula K. Le Guin	3/23
   Revelation Space	Alastair Reynolds	4/28
   Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	J.K. Rowling	4/29
   JavaScript Testing with Jasmine: JavaScript Behavior-Driven Development	Evan Hahn	5/3
   Programming Grails	Burt Beckwith	5/12
   The Two Towers	J.R.R. Tolkien	5/14
   Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card	6/6
   Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	6/12

   Plus a bunch that are in-flight: Statistics in the Behavioral Sciences, The Neverending Story ³, and Understanding Computation. An interesting dilemma this year… I got a Kindle as a gift a few months ago and I’ve been reading a lot more short stories on it. So… I’ve probably read a novel-or-two’s worth of short stories, but I can’t think of how to easily track them here. So… so…

2. Reading: these 12 specific books. This always seems like a much better goal when I set it. And inevitably I always looks at this “short list” and think But now I don’t want to read this…
   • The Rings of Saturn
   • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
   • The Third Man
   • Ethan Frome
   • Revelation Space
   • 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
3. Exercise: Average 25 miles or more per month. Hmm… I’m exercising pretty consistently and/but…
   
   Twenty-five-plus miles per month is proving to be a bit more of a stretch goal than I thought.
4. “Re-learn” statistics. I earned by “with Distinction” badge from that Coursera course; and I’m making some slow and sporadic progress through my stats reading… But am I bored with this? Frustrated? It’s like I don’t have the time nor the mental energy to take the deep-dive into this that I really want. There’s a latent desire there, but when I get home in the evening, I just can bring myself to read about z-scores and t-tests.
5. Learn some R. I would say I learned enough. “For now.”
6. Learn some Python. As we march into July, I ask myself: “Why did you want to learn Python?” There must have been some reason. There it was:
   

   Apparently, if I’m studying data analysis, I also need to learn some “applied Python”.

   Hmm… Well, I’ve worked through a bunch of the Python Tracks at Code Academy but it’s also been months since I’ve been back to finish any more. Meanwhile I finished the Ruby Koans and a little more than halfway through the Clojure Koans. Perhaps I should change up this particular goal?

7. “Ship” one trivial “novelty” app. Boom. Project Management Dev Dice. Done.

What other achievements have I unlocked this year? I got my name on the back of someone’s book. I got solicited to help edit another book (this time by complete strangers). ⁷ I co-authored a 4-hour Grails training course that’s being used at work to train new hires. My oldest has graduated from pre-school and is about to enter kindergarten. Uh… half of my Stack Overflow answers are the accepted answers?

So it’s shaping up to be a pretty decent year for goals.

1. First Quarter results are here: /2013/03/2013-goals-q1-check-in[↩]
2. What? Don’t look at me like that.[↩]
3. With Holden.[↩][↩][↩]
4. See also: Dating Without Kundera.[↩]
5. ”Done enough.”[↩][↩]
6. Pre-release. As a reviewer.[↩]
7. Although, as a bummer of a side note, that one fell through because my “hells yes I’ll help with that” reply got flagged as spam in the editor’s inbox. Oh well. Next time.[↩]

About Rob Friesel