grantmichaels'blog

Late last night I decided I would have to have a two-pronged New Year’s Resolution this year, something which didn’t settle well because 1) I have never done this, and/or 2) that seriously affects the odds of outright success. I’m pretty serious about achieving my New Year’s Resolutions though, and perhaps even somewhat irrational in this regard. Earlier I decided that it’s probably another shadow cast from the deceptive face of perfectionism, and in recognition, I’ve DRY’d up the Patron Silver version from last night. I will be making an effort to double my productivity in the time I have left after work. The one thing that remained constant throughout 2008 was that the best code written by myself was the sysadmin type scripts that I wrote slowly and consistently to save time and try to help keep my life organized. When I was learning open source Flash/AS3, I was writing scripts in Ruby to control Ant. When I was was trying to find the fastest server for streaming, I wrote Ruby scripts to wrap ab and httperf. No matter what language or framework I was working with, I was solving problems with Ruby. In the same light that I’ve given in and switched to OSX, I’m also kind of deciding to focus on Ruby this year – hundreds of people weren’t wrong about changing to Mac, so I’d be foolish to bet against them and not choose Ruby for my “80%.” Originally I thought I would limit myself to Erlang for the remaining percentage, however, I’m not going to commit myself further than doubling my productivity and spending 80% of my time in Ruby – that in and of itself should prove to be very fruitful, and I like to achieve my New Year’s Resolution as I said.

But the second prong was also really important, and so in becoming twice as productive, every minute of the time recouped will be dedicated to non-computer-related activity, with a strong preference towards exercise. I have a set of wonderfully useful PowerBlocks and a room of my house dedicated to them, I can only see a good circular reinforcement in becoming more productive and lifting in a similarly dedicated fashion. The cardio will come and go, and wax and wane with the climate and tourist season and changes in diet and income and really everything – but the weight-lifting can be rock solid and unwavering, and I plan to make it so. I see this as a really interesting twist on things, since I don’t have to project numerical or percentage goals to accomplish my mission, I just have to make sure that the time that is gained from focusing on Ruby and coding more seriously is used to lift weights – which should be straight-forward as the weights and bench are just beyond arm’s reach from Command-Com here.

Lastly, in etching the proverbial stone, I’m going to kind of set out the agenda publicly and work towards using the GitHub account I’ve been paying to have – yet never used – in an effort to keep some pressure on myself. I have to remember that nobody is really observing my productivity, and that I have to either become wholly more objective in my own regard, or begin to use tools to track myself, the latter of which is probably the win. So, I’m going to make the static site for my day job (angelinagranite.com) in Webby with some Google Maps functionality and nice photo gallery of our installations either in jQuery or perhaps Flex. I’m going to re-launch my named domain (grantmichaels.com) with all of my mixes plus two new hour-long dance mixes which round out 40 hours of grantmichaels in the mix. You could listen to my mixes for an entire work week, without getting bored in style, as long as you could normally enjoy a week without live music – which I know many of you do. I’m going to launch my CouchDB site (plumbingholes.com) where CAD/CAM engineers like myself can upload/tag/share .DXF Autocad files for sink cutouts. I have one definite and perhaps a second online store to make, both of which I’ll administer and receive a percentage of the final sale amount. Lastly, and most importantly, if whatever Beatport has been pimping as a groundbreaking new version doesn’t rock my world, I’m going to build my own lightweight and considerably more user-friendly wrapper over Beatport including searching, playing, tagging, sharing, and buying their tracks. It pains me and almost feels sacrilegious that the site I like to spend the most time using has the poorest usability of them all. Oh, and – if there is time remaining – I want a Twitter app in something with object persistence so I can filter and tune my feed and also a solution that ends the time suck that is emailing myself http links from open browser tabs to print on the laser printer at work.

Happy New Year’s everybody!

grantmichaels