todo for 2006
I sort of meant to do this before the year started, but I’m not going to feel bad about that. None of my resolutions are so urgent that they couldn’t be disregarded for a few days worth of vacation time, anyway.
- waste less time
This is my restatement of 2005’s goal, “only watch TV if I planned to see what’s on.” I think it’s a bit more reasonable, even if it’s more broad in scope. Watching a TV show I didn’t plan to watch is OK if it’s something really interesting. Watching “whatever is on right now” is horrible, and I must not do it. “whatever is on right now” applies to “whatever TiVo recorded overnight,” too. I mean, watching an episode of South Park while I wake up before the early bus in the morning might be alright, but watching all four South Parks because there is nothing else on TiVo must stop. If there’s nothing on TiVo, it’s a sign that I’ve got better things to do. Like:
- read more
This is my restatement of 2005’s goal, “keep a record of every book I read (and read more of them).” Well, I’m now keeping a record of all the books I read, and I’m doing pretty well with that, I think. It’s helping me notice that I’m not reading enough books! While I’m reading fewer books than I’d like to, I am reading a lot of interesting articles, especially from Arts and Letters Daily (thanks, Sean M. Burke!). The volume of news I read is starting to get large enough that I need to spend a bit of time optimizing my NetNewsWire setup – or possibly finding a new way to gather and read RSS-based news.
- learn more (computer) languages
Rather than “learn more Objective-C,” which was a (failed) goal for 2005, I’d just like to keep learning new languages, at least enough to play around in them. I’ve already started work on this; I finished reading The Little Schemer, today. OK, so I already knew Scheme, but I certainly have a firmer grasp on it. If I can learn the fundamentals of one new language every month, or at least always be in the process of learning a new language, I’ll feel pretty good about that. Maybe I need to add a “current new language: X” indidcator to my home page.
- use more (human) languages more often
In theory, I speak three languages well enough for very simple conversations: English (which I speak well enough for complex conversations), German, and Spanish (which I learned as a goal I’d made for 2005). I hardly ever use either of the latter, which is a shame. I’d like to do more reading and conversing in these languages, which means I need to find apropriate reading material and conversation partners. Maybe I can finally get my parents to speak those languages with me – but I’ll have to force myself to do it, which is difficult.
I think a first step to use more Spanish will be to translate the Wikipedia article on one of my namesakes (Julián Besteiro) into English.
- learn to drive a car
I meant to do this last year, the year before, in 1996, and possibly in several other years between 1996 and the year before last. Oops.
- buy a house
We’ve been in our current apartment for just over five years now. It’s a nice apartment, but it’s not a great one, largely because we haven’t gone out of our way to make it a great one. We’re not allowed to make a number of changes we’d like to, and we don’t want to invest much in a place that we can’t make our own. Gloria and I are both eager to get out of our apartment and into a house that we can smash up to our hearts’ desire.
I think these cover it. I could carry over “cook and bake more often,” but I think I’ll leave that as something I’d sort of like to do, rather than a strong imperative to myself. Wish me luck!