use Perl

Today's another birthday for me. It's a relatively large one in that tomorrow I'll be closer to 40 than to 30. I don't get into the "boy does that make me feel old" nostalgiafest but today I feel entitled to mention that all the young people I work with/around do indeed make me feel old. There are valuable trade-offs of course -- technology experience doesn't really expire, it just morphs into something more abstract -- but it's something. (That will be my only mention of this until next year, I promise.)

Since my birthday is so close to the start of the year I tend to put off resolution-type ideas until then, er, now. (Procrastination!) Besides, if you're going to do such a thing it makes more sense to do it at your birthday anyway -- it's a date that means something to you rather than imposed on you. (You could say that a birthday is imposed on you too, but go with me here...) So here we go:

• Stay current on my open source projects. I've done a terrible job in the last six months of keeping up with everything, mostly just from real-life stuff taking more time. This goal might entail giving other folks more or entire responsibility over some of them -- IMO this is a good thing. It worked fine for DBD::Mock -- Stevan has been applying his own vision to it, which is great. We'll see.
• Stay in touch with my family and friends. I am just awful keeping in touch with people. Part of the reason is probably my personality (introvert v. extrovert) but there's really no excuse. Phone calls are cheap, emails are cheap.
• Clean up most of our debt. We were going gangbusters on our bad debt last year and the year before that. Then we bought a house, and a new floor, and a new waterheater, and an old car, and all sorts of crap you need to make the house yours (furniture, painting stuff, cleaning stuff, tools, etc.). That we were able to get the house in a relatively short amount of time is cool, but it put a screeching halt to long-term plans for getting rid of bad debt. Hopefully this year we can finish.
• Learn more house maintenance stuff. I'm quite bad at fixing up stuff around the house such that even simple things take a long time. This just entails practice, but lots of it to overcome my natural clumsiness.
• Pick up a new hobby. (Hopefully a cheap one.) I'm way too single-minded right now so that the answer: "What do you do?" and "What do you like to do?" are pretty much the same. This isn't so bad, but then the follow up: "Yeah, but what else do you like to do?" results in a: "Uhhh..."
• Standard stuff like exercise more, get out more, etc.

Unfortunately I don't have a listing from last year so I can't grade myself on how I did. But I can next year!

Posted from cwinters.com; read original