Happy 2017… er 2018. I’ll have that down in about 6 months time. Thank god we don’t write checks any more, so many months of messed up dates on checks.
There’s a lot that’s changed this past year (new job) and lots changing this year (getting married). However that’s less important to this blog. What is important? New Year’s Resolutions. To be technical, I’m not terribly big on a New Years Resolutions since if one needs a “New Year” as an excuse to make a change, then it probably won’t stick. That’s just how the logic sits for me and how it works/doesn’t work for me. If you feel strongly about New Year’s Resolutions, then please feel free to continue. On my side, I made a resolution to myself a few weeks ago that I was going to focus more on being productive in my free time. That starts with more writing.
This blog has been running more than a decade, in several different names and during that time we’ve had some ups and downs. Starting about 5 years ago when I worked at Okta it slid downhill a lot and I fell out of the habit of writing. Two quick examples that came to mind were my 3D Printing series which is only a total of 5 posts (and only 1 on my “HEVO Build Log“) and my Mexico Cruise series of which I only finished 4 entries (even though I had notes written on the cruise for at least 12 entries). Not great for someone who used to post as frequently as 5 times a week. So my first piece of productivity will be more writing. It might be a fight to force myself to sit down and find a topic, but I will write something.
Second on the list, which will assist the first, was to actually work on the many project ideas I’ve either brainstormed or started working on. Most of which sit not much further than the “parts in a bin” stage. Some samples from my “Projects” Trello board are as follows: LED Sconce light with Wifi control, Raspberry Pi photo frame (originally for a Christmas gift…), Environmental Monitors for (3D printer) filament storage, DIY Weather Station, and Serverless URL Shortener. Oh and don’t forget the HEVO 3D Printer I started in June is still sitting half-assembled. Yea, I really need to work on project completion.
Last item on my “I should be better about” list is the ‘creative side’. A fun fact that most don’t know about me is that I have an honest-to-god Art Degree. Painting, Print Making, Photography. The real deal artsy type stuff. It’s a long story that I’ll explain some other day. So in an earlier era I used to take my Nikon with me everywhere and take an obscene number of pictures while I was at it (thank god for digital). The photography posts also dried up years ago. While it’s the lowest priority on my list, I would like to start carrying the Nikon again (camera phones only go so far) and trying to do something more with the photos. I’ve already started posting a few edits from a recent beach trip on my instagram. If I get lucky, I might try to do some more videos on YouTube but so far that’s been harder than I thought.
So what’s the “cost” of these resolutions? I need to give up most of my video game time. There are a number of games I enjoy spending my time on, like Overwatch and Battlefield but they tend to suck up a lot of time. Beyond the time invested in the games I find myself in a certain distracted/fast paced mind set. After playing a few rounds of Overwatch my brain has wired itself into a mode that is the total antithesis of focusing on something like writing. I’m not swearing off gaming totally but my free time is limited (real life, work, yada yada) so if it’s games or projects — I need keep picking projects.