2011 Goal Review and 2012 Goals

In January I published five goals:

Learn and practice SEO techniques.
Explore website revenue and analysis.
Reinvigorate K-SLUG student participation.
Impress folks by being great at my new job.
Write down tasks to improve productivity and quality of life.

Arguably I accomplished 4 of them. Obviously this isn't 5 for 5, and the main reason is that I spent more time really analyzing my personal finances. I've been keeping personal books since 2007, but this year I had some unexpected family oblications as motivation to really bring it up a notch. I dug into the local library collection on personal finance in August, and I've basically reached the point where books just repeat themselves. The mundane stuff has been automated for quite a while, so I can just focus on planning, analyzing and tweaking. I've used 2011's last paycheck to work up tax returns and found a bug in my annual budget spreadsheet's tax calculations.

To put the knowledge to the test, I started asking and answering questions on reddit and StackExchange's money subsite, where I found a couple of neat options university employees that I should write a full post on. The bad news is there's so many small tricks to consider, it can soak up as much time as you let it. But I did actually make some changes, so it's not a total analysis paralysis. I opened and funded a savings account, and tuned my health insurance policies during open enrollment. I came up with a conservative estimate for FSA allocation to save on taxes. I moved away from the semi-luxury apartments for a cheaper yet comparable place, with garage parking to boot. I researched how to sell used video games and moved half of my video game collection.

Goals for 2012

Be awesome at my new role.
Finish catching up on my backlog of games and podcasts.
Book diet; no more than 12 books this year.
Establish a retirement savings goal and act on it.
Twelve informative blog posts; no mindless link propagation or blogging about blogging!

Some of this is lessons from last year; I started coming back from the library with more books than I really have time to read, so #3 is an attempt to rate limit myself, because I found out that Microsoft Research has like two thousand video lectures online, so I'll never actually catch up to that, but I can catch up on the podcasts from the past few months. And finish selling off video games to roll them back into the budget.

Goal #4 is really about finding a balance between saving and spending. I think I have the unusual problem of saving too much. While it's been crucial for helping out sick parents, my basic retirement strategy is "don't buy anything and save everything you can," because I haven't really figured out how much I can spend and still retire comfortably.

And #5 is about commiting to putting the polishing touches on a few posts that have been brewing. And cutting back on blogging about goals--this shall be the last until 2013!

Other articles

Never Ask For Passwords

Tue 25 October 2011

Once again, it's demonstrated that sitting around a table drafting policy fails the common sense test. Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Sam Houson State University decided to ask all members of their social media portal for username and passwords. Their published policy still does. My favorite part:

Do ...
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Solving the Sunday Puzzle with coreutils & grep

Sun 14 August 2011

Not too long ago, a puzzler admitted to solving the NPR Sunday Puzzle with a computer. Since I hate word puzzles quite a bit, I'd taken similar steps in the past. For example, this recent challenge:

Fill in the 4x4 square crossword with common uncapitalized words, using no letter ...
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Mid 2011 Update

Sun 31 July 2011

Over halfway through 2011, so it's time to revisit my goals again. I really should post more often.

Personal Website

pwnguin.net consistently gets more than a thousand hits a month. That's enough that I can start adding A/B experiments on the most popular pages. I've ...
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May Goals Update

Tue 31 May 2011

Been a few months since I've set my goals for 2011, and the holiday's a good time to reflect on progress and life.

Goals for 2011

The website's still doing okay. I did waste a bit of time drafting an (unpublished) guide on using grep to solve ...
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Reducing Interruptions

Fri 13 May 2011

Been pondering lately how I'd design a desktop environment to improve productivity. Many of the ideas are non-trivial changes, but there's a few papercut sized tweaks I thought I'd document and share. These all revolve around the notion of flow, a state of concentration. The aim is ...
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Java Symposium 2011 Recap

Sun 20 March 2011

Went out to Vegas to attend The Java Symposium 2011. Not really fond of the location, but you have to pick your battles. It's a three day conference, but travel really knocks out at least a day.

The most interesting talks, I thought, were less about specific technology releases ...
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Good as new!

Thu 10 March 2011

So much for pristine brand new car condition. Bumped into a car in a parking lot last week. The other car barely had any damage, just some paint that will probably buff right out.

Apparently modern bumpers are made of plastic, and can be repaired with a heat gun. Witness:

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New Homepage Design

Sun 06 March 2011

New year, new website. The old design worked okay, but Google's recent pagerank tweak punished my RSS aggregation trick. So I've accelerated plans to move the blog to self-hosting, which gives me more stuff to analyze and might one day cover the cost of hosting. Tight deadline though ...
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64-bit Really Does Matter

Fri 04 February 2011

In a stunning display of confidence, Paul Tagliamonte stops just short of calling for dropping 64bit Ubuntu desktops. Because PAE will save the day, naturally.

By day, I am a Java developer. This means I know the pains of memory constraints all too well. I recently upgraded my desktop, as ...
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Other articles

Personal Website

Goals for 2011