Categories
personal

My resolutions for 2010

Xmas time

This 2009 has been a good and busy year. Lots of things have happened: I switched to a new job, I got a DSLR camera I’ve been wanting for a long time, I visited San Francisco and the Sillicon Valley, I went to LibrePlanet and met Richard Stallman and many others I look up to, became GNU.org webmaster and I got a dog.

But looking back to my 2009 resolutions post, I’m very sad to see that I barely did any of those items in the list. From that list, I’ve only been able to fix that bug from Emacs Identica-mode and have continued to improve it. And also released one personal project which is Sabesquemecaga.com(spanish version only) a humor website to shout out what pisses you off in a short and anonymous way.

So, for this year’s resolutions I’m going to continue with last year’s list with some updates. So here are my goals for this 2010 year:

  • Exercise 3 times a week and keep it up at least 3 months.

    I haven’t been able to keep this one up for the past two years. I’m not good at disciplined routines and specially not at exercising, but for health conditions this must be done. Now two years later without reaching this goal it is logical that my health and my weight are worse than before, so now it is a high priority project. Last year I added a goal of 3 times a week to make it more accurate than just say “do more exercise”, but since I couldn’t reach it last year, I’m adding an additional clause to make it even more measurable: keep it up for at least 3 months. This way I’ll know for sure that I’ve reached my year’s goal and hopefully will motivate me more.

  • Start private lessons to learn to play the piano.

    Last year I wanted to learn to play the piano but learning by myself has been hard. What’s been harder is finding the time to sit down and practice. So getting private lessons will force me to sit down with the teacher and have full concentration on the task. What stopped me from learning to play the piano was that I never got the private lessons teacher. So to be more specific, I’ll start by finding my private lessons teacher and start those lessons. Lets see what stems from that at the end of the year.

  • Improve Emacs identica-mode.

    Its been a very good year for identica-mode. I’ve recieved a lot of contributions and also added nice features. I’m very happy with the progress so far. But still there’s a lot of room for improvement. I’d like to add asynchronous http connections so that it won’t hang Emacs on crappy connections.

  • Deploy and improve personal projects.

    There are several things I’d like to do with sabesquemecaga.com like adding comments, user login with option of remaining anonymous and voting. Also I’m planning to release the code with an AGPL license. There are other projects that I need to get out to the world. I’ll just set the goal to one more project release this year.

  • Finally start to podcast.

    I’ve been wanting to start producing a podcast for about 2 years. I’ve been procrastinating on that project for a very long time. I don’t have much planned, its just a thing I want to explore and experiment. It will feature tech and music, that’s all I have planned.

  • Learn to groom my dog and train her more tricks.

    This year I got a miniature schnauzer. She’s a very good and smart dog. I’ve trained her a couple of tricks but she’s still not the best obedience dog ever. I’d like to train her more tricks and make her more obedient. And also I’d like to start grooming her myself this year. I don’t like how local vets have trimmed her hair, and have basically ruined her color and texture. By grooming her myself I’ll keep the quality I want on the looks and texture of her fur.

As last year I couldn’t even get my bonus point of riding an ostrich, I’ll set this year’s bonus point as:

  • Go back to rappeling or kayaking at least once this year

By Gabriel Saldaña

Gabriel Saldaña is a web developer, photographer and free software advocate. Connect with him on and Twitter