Another year has flown away and we’ve moved cities again. I don’t think Delhi has ever felt as much at home as it does right now. I somehow missed living in Delhi quite a lot. It has a lot of problems, but it still remains my favorite city.
Studies: This year, I’m going to aim to finish my BSc coursework. I really really want to finish the coursework by Dec 2018. This is going to take priority over everything else. I’ll be doing less racing and less traveling this year.
Accounting: Last year, I paid for YNAB and that’s been the best decision ever. I’ve managed to set apart more money for real expenses and save more money. It’s worth every penny I paid for the software.
Speaking: I spoke at even more conferences this year. Looking back I spoke at 4 conferences this year. I’m unhappy with all but one. I’m traveling less this year, so I’ll be aiming for writing talks for local events.
Learn C and Javascript: I’m better at C than I used to be. I can now debug some simpler pieces of code. I haven’t yet written anything that I expect to be in production. I’m contemplating playing with GTK to produce something for fun. I’m needing JS less these days. Golang and Groovy look like things I’ll use on a more regular basis.
Cutting Down Servers: I’m down to killing my oldest two servers. They both run Ubuntu 12.04 so it’s about time I changed them. They run a few apps in production, so it’s going to take me some time to get there. This time I’ve got a migration plan like I would for a work server migration 🙂
I’ve been writing 750 words every day of this month. Today, I’ve finished 23,684 words. I’ve been wanting to do this for 3 years. FINALLY.
— nigelb (@nigelbabu) December 31, 2017
Writing: I’ve been trying to write 750 words for the last year on and off. If I miss out a day, then I tend to lapse into laziness and not continue for the rest of the month. This month, I finally finished an entire month. I wrote 750 words every day in December, totaling to 23,684 words this month. It’s helped me rant about frustrating topics and write a few blog posts in advance. I often use my daily writing as a rough drafts for future blog posts.
Reading: I wanted to read more books this year, but that hasn’t happened, because I keep looking at it as a big goal. This year, I learned to look at it as reading about 20 to 30 pages every day. That means I finish at least one book every 2 weeks.
Fitness: This year has been pretty bad for my running. I’m currently at my worst fitness levels since I started running. It’s going to be a slow and painful few months of training. I’ve discovered the joys of afternoon runs for winter months. I work from home, it makes sense to run in the afternoon. Most public parks are closed at that time, so I’m stuck running inside the gated area where we live.
I ran 404 km this year. My running habit is basically NOT FOUND for 2017.
— nigelb (@nigelbabu) December 30, 2017
I got my cycle serviced the other day. It now runs pretty smoothly and I’ve been riding a bit. I want to be riding about 100 km to 200 km a month. It’s a trivial amount of distance for most people. But for me, that means taking a weekend out to do long rides and a few mid-week rides too. I plan to cross train along with running.
I want to get fit enough for hiking and go on at least one hike this year. I want to do one hike that’s a few hours long and then a longer few-days worth hike. Those both should give me more kickstart into getting into a better shape.
I’m using my shopping instinct to control my habits. I’m only going to get a new shoe for long-distance running if I hit 500 km on my regular ones by 1st May 2018. I’ll give it a margin of error of about 10 km. That’s actually not a big goal. I need to be consistent at my training. I’m only going to buy any sort of cycling equipment if I manage to cycle 500 km in 2018. I’m not going to buy new books until I finish the short list I’ve made for the next year. I can read any of them in any order though. As soon as that’s done, the flood gates are open for new books.
