Where Now?

As I write this, we still don’t have an election result—although I imagine that will change some time today. I have no idea where the country will go once the result is settled, but today I’m thinking of my own immediate future.

I’m about to have a few days off with my sweetie, partly to do some family duties, but chiefly to have a break from our routine. Most of the vague big ideas that I had for 2010 have borne only minimal fruit, so I’m hoping that this time of recharging my batteries will allow me to see what I really want to do in the last third of this year.

Public Goals

That title has nothing to do with football, just to get that out of the way. I have seen many people in the business of helping the rest of us to sort our lives out who advocate setting goals and committing to them in public as a way of focussing attention on the pursuit of those goals.

I've avoided that for most of my life, but today I'm going to dip a toe in the water and declare a goal of shedding some weight. Forty years ago, I weighed a little under 60 kg. Now I weigh a little under 80 kg. I have added the weight in teensy increments over the whole forty years, at the rate of about half a kilogram per year, and have hardly noticed it happening. But that's heavier than seems healthy for a boy of my build and height, so I have a plan to reduce it.

I have no illusions of getting back to the trim 58 kg of twenty-year-old me. But it seems feasible to aim for 70 kg. To make this concrete, my goal is to lose 10 kg in the next 100 days. If anybody wants to hold my feet to the fire over this, make a note in your diary and we'll see how I go.

I plan to announce some other goals here over the next few weeks, but I also have plans to talk about software before long, so maybe I can combine the two.

Tea Parties and Unicorns

Not so long ago, I overheard somebody say that life is not all tea parties and unicorns. That's probably true, but it seems a bleak view. My plan here is to make sure that there will be enough of both to go around.

I started my first blog, on the edge, six years ago as an experiment to see if I wanted to get into the blogging thing. It was built on simple software and was always intended to have a short life. My habitual farting about in search of the perfect blogging software platform once I decided to continue has resulted in the temporary thing living for so long.

I've decided to tackle some of my imperfections head-on and so, rather than find the perfect software (which seems not to exist, surprise!) or (even worse) write my own blogging platform, I decided to just adopt something that's already out there and at least partly functional so that I can go ahead and write rather than do the teenage angst thing.

I also decided to stop fretting about the exact niche for my blog. This will continue to be a place where I write about the things that interest me. That probably means there will be quite a bit about software—the writing of software and the languages and tools associated with that. If I manage to make a few more of the decisions like the one I made to start this new blog, the software articles will probably make up a fair bit of the content. Failing that, there are always the tea parties and unicorns.