Goals

• Relationships: I managed to spend more time with friends and family over the past few weeks than I have in a while, which has been nice. I travelled one weekend, hosted another, and squeezed some drinks in during some weeknights.
• Career: Not a whole lot of wins here over the past few weeks. I missed a couple deadlines for personal projects and had to cancel this March's JVM User Group for lack of content, though. Feels bad, man.
• Health and Longevity: I suspect that I might have injured my knee years ago, that it never healed properly, and that compensation for that injury may have screwed up my back. I should see a medical professional about this.
• Financial Independence: We have a better understanding of our finances now and are in decent shape. Spending's been reigned in a bit, and our debts are being paid down.

Habits

Leave Work on Time

Mixed results again. This has gone okay maybe... 50-60% of the time? The phone alarm trigger works around 50% of the time as well. There have been a lot of little emergencies at work due to system instability, though.

Updated Habit

• Trigger(s): Computer and phone reminders at 3:30pm, computer and phone reminders at 4:00pm, computer and phone reminders and auto-close computer communication apps at 4:30pm, auto-logout at 5:00pm.
• Action(s): Stop current task. Close email and chat applications. Fill out work log. GTFO.

Personal Goals Reviews

"Leave Work on Time" struck again. I had another silly emergency come up on the afternoon I meant to write this post, so I left work late in a terrible mood and decided to write it the next morning. But my next morning got consumed by trying to work on time-sensitive personal technology projects. When I ran out of time for all of it I got depressed and just decided to take a week off to recollect. I'm going to try releasing these reviews every other Monday rather than every other Friday in order to insulate this habit from work.

Updated Habit

• Trigger(s): Every other weekend
• Actions: Open my goals and habits document and my project management software. Write a blog post summarizing what progress I have made toward my goals, habits, and projects, and whether any of them need revision.

Tech Blagging

I've been writing a technical blog post on a weekly basis since the start of the year now, but I haven't mentioned it here for reasons that are beyond me. As stated above, the project I had lined up for the latest post was too large in scope. In order to accomodate more complex and interesting projects I'm going to scale back posting to once every other Monday, on the weeks I don't do Personal Goal Reviews. I'm also going to allow myself to write progress posts when a project isn't neatly finished on time.

Habit

• Trigger(s): Every other weekend
• Actions: Open my project management software. Work on an interesting personal tech project. Blag about it.

Bedtime Routine

I've been enjoying a chamomile, vanilla, and honey tea and slowly working through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The wizard book isn't exactly light reading, but I find it fairly well written and very engaging. I'm especially intrigued because it is written around a Lisp dialect called Scheme, and I am concurrently learning a Lisp dialect called Clojure and it's pretty neat to see all the parallels and to work through the examples in Clojure.

Financial Reviews

This has gone well so far. We've done a couple reviews now and I feel I have a better sense of our financial outlook. We've gotten our debt back under control and have started working on our spending habits again.

Projects

Hardware Bitclock

This is the project I meant to have ready by Pi Day, but totally failed to execute. I got stuck selecting my hardware and software, then I ran out of time re-learning some basic electronics before pushing it off and spending time with friends. I was sort of hoping to use my existing BitClock TypeScript library and Node.js to drive the thing with a Raspberry Pi, mostly because it would be thematically appropriate for a local event. But when I started work on it I quickly realized I was lacking additional hardware and software and that the Raspberry Pi's 3.3V GPIO was going to force me to complicate the circuit design even more than I was prepared for. I think I'm going to implement the project on an Ardiono Uno, but that may involve a rewrite in C? That's not the worst thing in the world, and I'm not afraid to dive back into C, but it's an open question. This may also be an opportunity to check out software platforms which allow you to run JS on Arduino-compatible boards such as Johnny-Five.

Easier Blog Publication

Since I no longer intend to publish blog posts right after work my requirements have changed and the priority of this project has plummeted. I've also run out of my IntelliJ Ultimate license and am trying to do away with it in my personal life, so my needs are a little different as well. I do still want to streamline my publicatin process, and I do still want to enable content scheduling, but this is way less urgent.