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2013 goals: Q2 check-in

by Rob Friesel

Second quarter of 2013 is wrapping up. How’d I do on my goals? ^^First Quarter results are here: /2013/03/2013-goals-q1-check-in^^^ 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.
    2013Q2 reading
    Title Author Finished
    JavaScript Enlightenment Cody Lindley 1/1
    Cloud Atlas David Mitchell 1/7
    Pocket Genius: Space ^^What? Don’t look at me like that.^^^ 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 ^^With Holden.^^^ J.K. Rowling 2/5
    The Unbearable Lightness of Being ^^See also: Dating Without Kundera.^^^ Milan Kundera 2/20
    Doom Days Arlene Blakely 2/28
    R in a Nutshell ^^”Done enough.”^^^ Joseph Adler 3/9
    Ethan Frome Edith Wharton 3/15
    Beginning Java 7 ^^”Done enough.”^^^ Jeff Friesen 3/16
    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ^^With Holden.^^^ J.K. Rowling 3/19
    Functional JavaScript ^^Pre-release. As a reviewer.^^^ 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 ^^With Holden.^^^, 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…
    2013Q2 running
    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). ^^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.^^^ 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.

About Rob Friesel

Software engineer by day. Science fiction writer by night. Weekend homebrewer, beer educator at Black Flannel, and Certified Cicerone. Author of The PhantomJS Cookbook and a short story in Please Do Not Remove. View all posts by Rob Friesel →

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