spilth.org Blog Archive

I tried selling some iron shelves I have from The Container Store on Craigslist, but I haven’t gotten a single contact about them. If you’re interested in an iron bookshelf, iron CD shelf or iron DVD shelf well… then click those links!

I’ve been bringing some of my older, less relevant computer books in to work. I figured somebody might be able to make use of them and some of them are worth lending out to people.

I did a decent amount of mountain biking this month, though I haven’t checked my weight in a while. There were a lot of good season opening rides this month that had a lot of people riding.

It started with a ride at Stewart Airport on the way up visiting Kim’s family in Albany. One of the guys on the Stewart ride suggested we check out a trail in Albany which we ended up doing and having a lot of fun riding and exploring. We even brought Kim’s brother-in-law Paul along for the ride and he seemed to like it a lot.

Unfortunately by the time we got back home I discovered a tick on my leg. We removed it and my doctor put me on antibiotics in case it was a deer tick. I seem to be fine and don’t show any signs of lyme’s disease but those antibiotics were not enjoyable. They were not kind to my guts or my energy level.

I went up for a small amount of trail work in Yorktown, which consisted of putting in a kiosk at one of the trail heads. You can see a sped up version of it here:

Another fun and popular ride was at Cunningham Park in Queens. I brought my camera and got a few good shots of people having fun.

I’m finally also getting back to my first park, Graham Hills Park. I’ve been there about 4 times in just the last week.

The IMBA Trail Care Crew was in the area (hosted by NYCMTB) running some classes on Land Management, Mountain Biking Benefits and Trail Building. I video taped two of the presentations and got some time lapse footage of the work we did in Highbridge Park. Those will be up eventually, as they are all pretty large movie files. Working in Highbridge makes me definitely want to ride there soon. It’s a bit intimidating!

My friend Bert let me try out his 29er at one of the Graham rides. It certainly made some sections easier to roll through but I’m still up in the air about what kind of bike I want to get next.

One of the things my Uncle left me was a Gibson Corvus electric guitar. It was something he was always having me check eBay for cause he thought he might get a decent amount of money for it. Well he’d be happy to know I got a decent chunk of change for it finally. I ended up bringing it to the new guitar shop in town called Rock Island Sound and they managed to fix it up and sell it on ebay. I’ll be using that money to help get a new iMac that I’ll be using for recording songs.

The rumor is that the new iMacs will be coming out tomorrow, so hopefully that means I can do some new, fresh recording this weekend. I’m glad I took the time to save up for it because I’ll have the newer model and be able to bump up the specs on it a little bit.

I’ve also decided to drop Game Development as a goal for this year and focus on song writing and recording. It’s a much more rewarding way to spend my time.

Except for a single minor post (Sharing Code across Velocity Templates in Anthill Pro), I haven’t done much with my new blog.

I’m still working my way though Agile in a Flash and the interaction of now both authors have made it a fun and insightful experience.

I recently discovered an option in the Pomodoro App I use that let’s you add your Pomodoros to iCal. These allows me to easily review just what I was working on during the week.

My birthday was this month and Kim got me the book Personal Kanban which I’m trying to pair with The Pomodoro Technique. I’ve only done it for a few days, so it’s hard to tell how/if it fits at work right now.

Kim and I also gave it a try at home to get through a bunch of tasks we needed to accomplish in anticipation of my parents staying with us for a bit. It worked out pretty darn well though, somewhat ironically, my parents didn’t end up staying with us. They will in another couple weeks though, so perhaps will put our home Kanban board to use once again.

Another tool I’m giving a try is the iPad app Awesome Note. I got this for Kim a while back but never really used it myself. I decided to give it a try for the various projects and hobbies I’m involved with. It’s a little nicer than Things in the sense that it makes things feel a little more organic and energetic. May should help show if it’s useful for helping me get things done and figuring out new goals and passions.

I’m feeling kind of “eh” about my accomplishments this month:

• February was my first real budget test. Overall I did alright, with a few items going over a little bit, but enough were under to keep things even. I started making a list of things that I could do to help reduce my spending even more.
• We brought our restaurant spending down, but I think we can do even better next month. I think we gave in to restaurant meals too early in the month.
• I removed/reduced a few features on my cell phone account, so that brings it down by $20. I think next month I will remove texting all together and bring it down another $10. I’ve switched to using Google Voice for texting.
• I’m going to slow down the savings to a new computer, mainly because Apple might be announcing new iMacs in June. I was planing to buy one in April.
• I’m putting money towards “buying a house” but I also need to start putting some towards an emergency fund. That’s something I need to sort out.
• I should look for some ways to bring in a little extra cash to put towards savings.
• I’ve been working with the desk I have instead of buying a new one, but I really need to get a new chair. I don’t have any comfortable desk chairs so it makes my time at the desk limited and uncomfortable.
• Not much in the way of mountain biking this month. The weather has sucked (lots of snow). We did manage to get out a couple of times to ride on the street/sidewalk, though.
• I posted two blog posts on http://buildndeploy.wordpress.com/ and have been working to interact with people on Twitter. Ideally I’d be posting once a week, so perhaps I need to start breaking up the post ideas I’m working on.
• I started work on a “book” and am learning/using Maven to do it. I also have another idea for a “book” and am considering doing a PragProWriMo in March to accomplish it.
• Spent a little bit of time looking at cloud computing. Set up an Amazon EC2 account and also gave http://cloudbees.com/ a try, which I’m digging.
• I put in for attending two conferences at work. One is about DevOps and the other is about Continuous Integration. They’re both in the next couple of months.
• Still slacking on the exercise and am starting to feel pretty cruddy about it. Need to find the motivation to step that up.
• Not much progress in the lighter living department this month. Just a few minor trimmings here and there. I’m still considering digitizing my music collection to make my CD collection take up less/no space. I did group my CDs alphabetically by artist the other but now I need to sort each grouping. Very time consuming, but if I’m going to rip them I think it makes sense to do them alphabetically.

For March I need to get back to biking, keep working on my career and watch my budget.