Tonight I am heading to karate and then to The Waterloo for a burger, fries, and Meniskus concert.  I’m pretty wiped out after a long day at the office, so I’m going to catch a quick nap before my workout.  That’s all for now!

The combination of getting up early for work, frigid cold, missing lunch, and a busy day at the office adds up to a tired night for me.  I don’t want to take a nap for fear of screwing up my sleep schedule even more, but I’m finding very little interesting on the Internet or TV to keep me entertained.

We’re going to have a fun weekend though… after karate on Friday night we’ll be going to see Meniskus in Louisville. Saturday we’re planning to go see Avatar at the 3D IMAX and follow that with Sherlock Holmes.

Once again, snow descends on Colorado.  Today was an exceedingly busy day at the office, with a large amount of meetings peppered with short breaks to ensure that I didn’t get much done.  I was able to defy the odds and get several tasks completed today despite this limitation and much rejoicing was had by all.

It started to snow here early in the afternoon and by the time I left the office it was an inch or so deep.  Because of the temperature, the snow is clinging to the roads and made the drive home pretty treacherous.  With any luck the plows will be out and things will be ok for the commute tomorrow, but tonight is going to be a “stay indoors, have a fire, and relax” evening.

In other news, Tasha took down the Christmas decorations while I was at work today.  It’s pretty amazing how empty the living room looks with out the garland, lights, and tree drawing your attention.  That’s about the only stuff intereting going on right now!

This week I was alerted to this very funny cartoon that outlines Ten Things You Need To Stop Tweeting About.  At some time or another, I have violated this list but to me there is much less stringent set of approved social norms on Twitter than other social media.  This got me to thinking about some other uses of technology that aggravate me and I was able to come up with a few of them for your reading enjoyment.

Misuse of Facebook Profile Picture

This one is one of my largest peeves.  Your Facebook profile is YOUR Facebook profile, so how about we don’t post picture of your kid, your dog, a group of people that happens to include you, or some abstract photo that shows only the lower 1/8th of your chin fold.  None of these things help me determine whether or not I know who you are after 10 years.  Only mildly less annoying is those of you that dug out a hilarious photo of you at the age of four years old in a cowboy hat or naked in a bathtub.  Again, unless I knew you when you were four this does very little to help me figure out if I know you or not.

Now, for those of you that are in violation of this one (and there are some of you) I’m not mad at you (especially if I’ve had recent contact with you).  However, if you’re adding me and I haven’t seen you since High School these type of photos do not help at all.

Poor Chatting/Texting Etiquette

I know I’m in the old, codgery minority here, but I abhor anyone that uses the common teenage texting habits of massive abbreviations and disemvoweling words to make them fit.  It’s incomprehensible, immature, and stupid.  The stupid multiplier gets higher the older you are.  Spelling is a gift, people.

As far as chatting goes, I’m a lot more forgiving.  It’s immediate feedback, I don’t expect your spelling or grammar to be anywhere near perfect.  The biggest thing that gets on my nerves are people that assume they are bothering me.  If I’m not marked as Away, you’re free to chat as long as you want.  If I’m doing something else, I’ll tell you.  Also, if I’m doing something else or not replying immediately, pinging me with repeated questions about whether or not I’m there is annoying… sometimes a guy has to take a chat break to go to the bathroom or get a soda.

Email Forwarding and Comic Sans

This one is a common offender from many different people… if your mail program has marked something as SPAM don’t forward it to me, no matter how funny you think it is.  Also, anything written in Comic Sans font does not bear repeating no matter how poignant, relevant, or funny.  I would rather it get re-typed in a non-hideous font and sent my way if you think the email is that great.  Comic Sans is one of the biggest abominations plaguing the online and offline world.

Don’t Worry, This Isn’t Aimed At You

That’s right, this post wasn’t aimed at you, gentle reader.  These observations have been collected over recent months and years, and I’m not mad at anyone specifically.  Back in the day, Wired Magazine used to post articles outlining appropriate use of these emerging technologies… I wish the evening news carried THOSE so everyone can learn more.

I’m sure there are other examples, if they come to me I will do a follow up to this post later.

Today marks the official end of my winter break, it’s back to work in the morning!  This should kick off a flurry of work that is likely to last for quite awhile, but I’m rested and prepared to make some magic happen.  The good news: as of January 1st, I’ve got my three weeks of vacation time since I’ve been with the company for 5+ years now… that means as soon as our targets are met this year I will be ripe with vacation time.  I’ve long considered paid vacation time the best possible incentive.  I get paid to NOT BE AT WORK and that is awesome.

All that aside, today is also going to mark the start of one of my 2010 sub-goals.  Tasha and I are going to do the first lesson in Financial Peace University, aiming to reacquaint ourselves with the program and get fired up for our final kick to debt freedom.  We’re looking forward to the refresher!

It’s getting late and I have to get up in the morning, so I suppose I should sign off here and try to get some sleep.  More tomorrow!

Just to follow up on my previous posting, our furnace continued to act up after I deemed it a false alarm a few days ago.  We had the furnace repairman come out, who found a bad flame sensor and we asked him to upgrade our thermostat to a more reliable touchscreen model.  We also signed up for a maintenance program that has them come twice a year to inspect our furance and air conditioner, which is something we’ve felt strongly about since this fiasco.

So our bank account is a bit lighter, but this is one of those areas where I’m happy to spend money for peace of mind.  Plus, there’s a chance I will get a few bucks back in energy savings due to the more reliable, easier to use thermostat.

Several of you have asked about the Man Cave project, part of my 2010 goals.

The motivations for this project are two-fold: first, I enjoyed having a basement space in our old house and second, I wanted to have a place where I can play my guitar on the amp and not bother Tasha.  A few people have sent me links to DIY sites for framing and finishing a basement, and I don’t think I’m prepared to make that type of remodel now.  That directly conflicts with the “get out of debt” goal so that level of Man Cave will just have to wait.

Mostly the goal revolves around clearing out and rearranging the basement space to make the most of it.  I am thinking about potentially building a corner bar using two of these IKEA kitchen peninsula hacks that were recently featured on IKEAHacker.com.  That’ll be later in the year (if at all), the first step is going to be cleaning out the basement and getting the space set up as best as I can.  Tonight I took a few lingering boxes of garbage out of the basement to get the ball rolling, so hopefully this goal will get finished quickly!

After some reflection, I have elected to strip my goals down to just a few this year.  I had too many irons in the fire last year and it led to a lot of partial successes and failures, so this year I’m going to keep the goals lean and mean.

Debt Freedom

At long last, this long-term goal is in sight.  At the time of this writing, we have only one remaining debt aside from our house: my student loan.  The way the debt snowball functions, the last debt that you have is the largest and this is our largest.  In fact, we’ve fought it down to almost halfway paid off in 2009 and this year we finish the job.

1. Refresh financial goals by going through the 13-week Financial Peace Home Study again.  Target for completion: April 2010.
2. Secure debt freedom by paying off my final student loan.  Target for completion: September 2010.
3. Begin on full emergency fund of 3-6 months of expenses, saving at least two months of expenses by year end.  Target for completion: December 2010.
4. Continue keeping grocery budget records.  Target for completion: December 2010.

Personal Development and Recreation

I’m creating one category to house a couple different goals around hobbies, recreation, and self-improvement.

1. Increase karate workouts, averaging twice a week at a minimum. Target for completion: December 2010.
2. Complete TotallyGuitars.com‘s Acoustic Genius series. Target for completion: December 2010.
3. Create a “man cave” for myself in the basement. Target for completion: June 2010.
4. Daily blogging this year, metrics remaining the same as last year. Target for completion: December 2010.

2010 – Opening Remarks and a Call to Action

This is going to be a tough year, as work will remain extremely demanding for the first half of the year.  This will also be a rewarding year, with debt freedom looming on the horizon.  Once this milestone is met the fun begins.

I’ve had several people ask me why I do this every year.  I feel very strongly about goal setting, and it becomes far too easy to get used to the routine that you’re in and not strive for something better.  I’ve said it many times in the past, and will continue to say it: I don’t do average well.  These goals help to keep me motivated so that I won’t look back on 2010 and have nothing to count for it.

The best advice I can give is simply this: take an honest look at your life and TAKE ACTION.  It doesn’t have to be anything grandiose or crazy, but set an actionable goal that you can work on a little at a time so that in the end you’ve got something to count for yourself.  Set yourself a fitness goal.  Set yourself a blogging goal.  If you’re feeling particularly crazy, set a big goal you’ve always wanted to do and DO IT.  Hell, my friend Debra wrote a freaking novel last year in a month.  That’s crazy and awesome.

Figure out a way to be crazy and awesome for yourself.  Then document it somewhere where you have to be accountable for the results.  I use this blog because the threat of friends and family asking me how things are going is enough to keep me plugging away at my goals.  I want to hear about your goals.  I’ll be that friend that asks you randomly throughout the year how its going to keep you motivated.

Here’s to a safe and happy 2010!

Below is the write up that I did at the beginning of January regarding my 2009 goals.  For each item, you will find results (both good and bad):

Debt Repayment and Tracking

1. Attack Remaining Debts -This year we’re going to continue making strides against our three remaining student loans.  At a minimum, I expect to be down to just one remaining debt (aside from my mortgage) by 12/31/2009.

   RESULT
   Success!  On May 5th, we made a major step down the road to debt freedom in paying off Tasha’s student loan.  That brings us down to only my student loan left for our non-house debt, both Tasha and I are excited to have achieved this milestone.

2. Track Food Budget For Entire Year – The reasons for this are twofold: I want to understand what proportion of eating out versus cooking at home we are doing, and I also want to track the amount of savings we get from couponing and using TheGroceryGame.com.  With any luck this will allow us to control our food budget better and should roll up into gains for the debt repayment goal.

   RESULT
   Success!  I kept a spreadsheet all year long that tracked our food budget spending.  Thanks to TheGroceryGame.com, we were able to save 74.93% on our groceries this year.  We averaged under our monthly food budget this year, and only spent 10.55% of our food money on fast food.

Personal Health / Exercise

1. Karate – I intend to get back into the dojo in a major way in 2009.  Since I am unsure how often my monthly dues will entitle me to work out at the Denver dojo, I am going to set this goal at an average of the two workouts a week that I know are covered.  Additional weekend workouts or at-home workouts will be icing on the cake.  Expect karate tagged items to track my progress.

   RESULT
   Epic fail.  I ended up with only 49 workouts this year, not even averaging once per week.  Work was the primary contributing factor, but laziness and travel time to the Denver dojo for the first half of the year also reduced my ability to train at the dojo regularly.  This got better toward the end of the year after I joined the Arvada dojo, but I believe it was too little too late for this goal to succeed.

2. Gym – During 2009, I intend to join several of my coworkers at the Louisville Recreation Center for workouts on my non-karate nights.  I will define a more realistic goal for amount of working out, I suspect it will be around twice a week given my current workload and karate schedule.  I hope to begin this goal sometime in January.

   RESULT
   Another epic fail here.  Things went well in the early part of the year, but I only made 20 visits to the gym.  I wasn’t very diligent about tagging my gym workouts so there might be one or two more that were mixed karate/gym visits, but I wanted to do a bit better than this as well.

Recreation / Blogging

1. Daily Blogging – I intend to blog on average once daily for 2009.  I will track this similarly to how I did for 2008, keeping tabs on complete months, number of days blogged, and total number of blog posts.

   RESULT
   Partial success on this goal.  I blogged a grand total of 363 days this year, missing only one day in August and one day in October.  I made 384 blog posts during this time, crossing a milestone of 2,500 posts since this blog began back in 2003.

2. Guitar – I intend to practice my guitar on average three hours per week in 2009.  This has been an interest of mine for quite awhile, its time that I assert myself toward practice so I improve.

   RESULT
   Partial success here.  I didn’t really begin practicing the guitar in earnest until June, so I was way behind the curve on my three hours per week goal.  I did pretty well in the last half of the year, since this is a hobby I can do in a few hours at the end of the day to relax.  I didn’t really track hours spent playing during this time so I can’t be certain on my success, but I have gotten better since the beginning of the year and I’m willing to count that as a partial success.

3. Multitouch Table – Last year I started acquiring materials for my multitouch table.  The relocation prevented me from completing the table and I never executed on a final build.  I want to have this one completed by 09/30/2009.

   RESULT
   Complete failure to launch here.  It took me until October to even find the materials that I have purchased, and I quickly realized that I lack the tools needed to construct this project and that purchasing said tools and materials conflicted against our debt repayment goal so this one lost out.

Professional / Technical Development

1. Learn C# – This one’s for my job.  I want to self-educate on C# and .NET 3.5, so I purchased a book, C# 3.0 Unleashed by Joe Mayo.  I would like to have the entire book read with code examples complete by 02/28/2009.

   RESULT
   Success!  I have learned C# enough to be dangerous at the office, working on several coding projects this year.  I used the aforementioned book as a reference, however it quickly became apparent that reading a coding reference book wasn’t very conducive to learning.  I did employ this book frequently in my coding projects, so I’m willing to count this one as successful.

2. Learn Adobe Flex – This one is equal parts my job and the multitouch project.  I want to learn Adobe Flex, the action plan is undetermined on this one thus far.  Stay tuned and more details will surface as the year progresses.

   RESULT
   Another failure to launch here.  I still don’t have an Adobe Flex license that I can use productively at work, and the multitouch motivator never materialized.

Final thoughts on the year…

In general, I consider these goals a mixed bag this year.  I think I was far too aggressive and had too many goals, so expect to see next year’s goals streamlined.  I wish I would have succeeded on a few more fronts, specifically my karate and gym related goals.  I am happy that I have figured out a few hobby and relaxation related goals that appear to have stuck, which helped to dissuade the job-related stress that has set in this year.

I’m most proud of the debt repayment, tracking, and blogging goals for this year.  We really focused on these goals this year and it showed, hopefully next year will be no different.  Expect to see my 2010 goals tomorrow!

The furnace just needed reset, the repair guy talked us through it on the phone at no charge.  The house is slowly warming up again and we’re good to go!