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.

An upgrade issue left me unable to attend DevOps Days Boston, which bummed me out a little bit, but I at least ended up selling my ticket to somebody else.

At work somebody introduced me to Sinatra, which is a Ruby DSL for building simply dynamic web sites and Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby web apps.. I put this together with Markdown (which I discovered doing the Maven book) and created http://notes.buildndeploy.com/, which I’m using to write up and share notes I make about various languages, technologies and tools.

I ended up registering www.buildndeploy.com and moving that site from WordPress to Posterous since they don’t charge you for custom domain names. I’ve also been getting rid of domain names I no longer need and moving the ones I’m keeping to keep to DNSimple, a cheaper and infinitely better alternative to GoDaddy. Between the notes site and the main site I’ve gotten a decent amount done with this effort.

My mountain bike map of Graham Hills Park was finally signed off on and is now availale: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf

I’ve been steadily saving for a new iMac but slowed down my savings just a little bit when rumors started popping up about them coming out with new models in June or July. I had originally targetted forgetting one in April. Lately the buzz has been saying late April/early May. Either way, I should have enough put aside to get a nice iMac.

In the middle of March Kim and I attended PAX East with her sister, brother-in-law and my friend Dan and his girlfriend (also named Kim). The highlight of the show was seeing Jonathan Coulton play which really got me thinking about writing music again. I’ve started noodling around on my guitar more and recording some ideas in the back room of the apartment, which I’ve been doing a lot of clean up on.

JoCo’s lyrics got me thinking about opening myself up to writing about what I know more. I also realized that while I’ve treated programming as something I should always try and read and learn more about, I’ve never treated music that way – I always felt like songs should come from some inherent, untrained magical ability. I realized this was a stupid notion and picked up the book Writing Better Lyrics, as well as a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. The thesaurus has been pretty neat and interesting to flip through. I’ve been making an effort to do Object Writing every morning as suggested by the lyrics book. I’m about 12 days in with a couple of missed days here and there. I’ve also been working on “worksheets” for my songs to try and cultivate more lyrics and ideas for them.

Just today I dropped off my electric guitar and bass at the new guitar shop in Tarrytown called Rock Island Sound to get them set up and have their electronics checked out. I also put two other guitars on consignment since I never use them. That helps clear out the back room some more and hopefully bring in a little extra cash. I might use that to get one of the pretty guitars they have there though…

Yesterday I put a lot of time into rearranging our bedroom. I moved the bed to the back of the room by the windows instead of off to the side. This makes the room and space for each of us symmetrical. I also got rid of the big computer desk I’ve had for probably 10 years. I want something simpler and easier to move. The big desk had to be taken completely apart just to move it to another room. I’m not interested in dealing with it anymore.

I’m still using Google Voice for texting but am pretty disappointed in the iPhone App for it. It’s always hanging and crashing and the UI can be quite flakey fairly often. I also ended up going over my new data limit this month for the iPhone so it almost negated the savings on the cheaper text and data plan. This month should be better.

Another daily (workday) habit I’ve been doing is reading a card from the Agile in a Flash card deck and reflecting on it via Twitter. I’ve even engaged with the author himself, Tim Ottinger, on Twitter, asking questions, getting feedback and generally being challenged to think more and do them each day.

In the money/budget category… well, my budget was a little shaky towards the end of the month, but overall I think it was okay. One of the smarter buying choices I made this month was passing on getting an AirPort Extreme and just buying a NetGear WAP using the Best Buy gift certificate my brother got me for Christmas. (Update: The day after this post I saw this article which some might be interested in: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/04/is-the-airport-extreme-worth-the-price/)

I only managed to get out on my mountain bike twice this month, and that was two days in the same weekend. The weather was less than agreeable in the beginning of the month but there were a few days here and there I should’ve gotten out on my bike but just didn’t. I need to step that up in April. Getting my gear in order and ready to go (especially for evenings) would be a big help. I’ve been considering thinking about getting an actually single speed mountain bike and a couple of friends have suggested getting a 29er, so I’ve been looking at bikes likes the Trek/Fisher Marlin Single Speed. No solid plans yet on that front though.

The lack of riding this month also means a lack of losing any weight :-/

The game designing and mapping have taken a back seat lately, so I ended up removing those categories from my Google Reader account. It was becoming a burden to keep up with them so I decided it was best to just remove them. Another small amount of simplification I’ve made in my online life is shutting off email notifications from Facebook. I’ve found this helps make it less distracting and results in less email to clean up after.

I was thinking this was another dud month as far as progress and accomplishments are concerned, but after seeing all I’ve written about above I feel pretty good about it.

• 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.

• I set up a budget for myself that will have its first real run in February.
• I increased my 401k contribution.
• I started saving for a new computer.
• I’ve gotten rid of several speakers that were taking up a lot of space.
• I’ve gotten rid of some old electronics like a TV, my original Xbox and some other things.
• I shredded a ton of old papers, bills, etc.
• I’ve avoided buying  any new music, movies, TV shows, apps and books, mostly due to budget and having things to finish already.
• I haven’t gotten a new desk (due to the budget) but I cleaned up the big one I have and have been good at keeping it clean and ready to use.
• We’ve been buying groceries to make dinner (with Kim) more and eating out much less.
• I’ve been buying and eating just oatmeal for breakfast.
• I put together a compilation mountain biking video for my friend Bert for this birthday.
• I’m continuing to work on maps for a new set of hiking and mountain biking trails in the Yorktown area.
• I started a blog for my career endeavors and made a few posts already: http://buildndeploy.wordpress.com/
• I started a Twitter account for my career endeavors: http://twitter.com/#!/buildndeploy

In the exercise department, I’ve only gone running once so far and haven’t been biking yet this year. It’s been pretty cold and we’ve gotten a lot of snow this month, so I’m okay with how much I exercised in 2011.

The only thing I haven’t made any progress on yet is Game Development. Not unless you count playing the Xbox 360 as “research”.

I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve gotten done so far and looking forward to seeing what else I can accomplish in February. I’m almost excited to see how my budget works out and then will review at the end of the month and make additional adjustments.

Lighter Living

Although I do need to lose weight again (see next goal) this is about reducing the clutter and physical objects in my life. I’m not entirely sure where the drive is coming from, but I feel like I need to reduce the amount of stuff I have. I’ve already started making some progress by getting rid of a few things and putting side things I want to sell or donate.

There’s a pretty big list of things to get rid of, but summarized they are:

• get rid of unused game/RPGS
• get rid of aging, unused musical equipment
• get rid of unused electronics
• get rid of outdated/irrelevant computer books
• consider digitizing my entire CD/DVD collection and getting rid of the cases
• prefer digital copies of music, movies and books over physical copies
• switch to a simpler, lighter, cleaner work desk

Losing Weight

At some point last year I managed to get myself down to around 190. But due to less biking, less exercise and probably some bad eating habits, I’m back up to around 215. So I need to make a stronger effort to get my weight back down. My ultimate goal is 180 but I’m first going to shoot for 195 by the middle of the year. To accomplish this I need to:

• watch/limit my calorie intake (using Lose It! On the iPhone)
• avoid snacking on bad foods, like cookies…
• more mountain biking (see below)
• some other form of exercise when I can’t bike (most likely running)
• maybe getting back to yoga

Mountain Biking

I feel like I had an okay year of mountain biking this year. I don’t think it was quite as good as my first year perhaps. I want to step it up again.

My mountain biking goals for this year will be:

• get out to ride more, at more locations and more diverse trails
• work on my mountain biking skills
• lead more rides via Meetup.com, including evening rides
• volunteering for more trail maintenance
• creating quality maps for trails in my area
• maintain or improve my bike repair skills
• make more/better mountain biking videos
• demo lots of different bikers

Game Development

Last year I got back into game development a little bit. The release of the Unreal Development Kit had me exploring bringing an old Marble Madness inspired project back to life. Frustration with UnrealScript and the UDK development cycle got me looking at the Unity engine instead. I made an investment in books about Unity, Blender and Game Design/Development in general. It’s always been an interest of mine and I’d like to finally develop something to fruition. The goal here is to release a playable, finished, quality game.

Career Development / Involvement

My IT career has gone through several different areas: technical support, building computers and networks, system administration, graphic design, web design, web development, technical lead and software architecture. I am now the Build & Deploy Architect in the Infrastructure team at my company and it’s a good fit for me. I work at automating and improving processes, removing human error, creating standards and generally trying to improve things. This feels like a good place for me and I want to start working at some real goals for it. A long term goal is writing a book that guides developers through a number of practices such as version control, scripted builds, continuous integration, scripted deployments, unit testing and source code analysis. But before that I think I need to get some real experience under my belt. So some goals to get me there include:

• creating a build monitor at work and making it publicly visible
• going to more conferences
• communicating with the different groups I work with more (developers, qa, operations, infrastructure, support, managers)
• create and maintain a blog with articles and examples

So there are my goals for 2011. Reading it over makes it seem like a lot but there are 12 months in the year and I’ve already taken steps towards a number of my goals, so I feel like they’re doable.

On Saturday I finally had my first real spill while mountain biking. I went to Graham Hill Park by myself to try and learn the trails there a bit better. On my way out of the park I was trying get over a tricky (for me) little area of rocks and ended falling backwards off my bike and onto some rocks and a log, landing on my butt, back and arm. I tried my best to stay loose and “roll” with it a bit rather than tighten up like I normally would. I bruised my butt and scratched up my right arm a little bit but it was really nothing terrible. I got up slowly and made sure nothing was broken or painful, then got back on my back and continued to the parking lot.

The next day I had planned to go for another ride on the Bronx River Pathway but upon arriving was greeted with traffic and full parking lots due to an Italian/Irish festival at the Kensico Dam. I decided to go for a ride on the North County Trailway instead. I got up to Route 117 and decided to ride over to Graham Hill Park again for a little ride. By the time I got there I was pretty tired from the riding I had done already that I just did a quick 10-15 minute ride around the park. I’m starting to figure out a route I like to ride in Graham now and just have a few intimidating areas that I need to work up the courage to get over – mostly some downhill sections with chunky rocks and/or drops. On the way out I managed to get over the set of rocks that kicked my butt the previous day, so I was proud of that.

I wanted to go to Graham again tonight (Wednesday) but I was not feeling well all day. I called in sick for work but due to some problems with the project I’m heading up I ended up working all day long anyways. By the end of the day I still wasn’t feel so hot so I just decided to take it easy and watch some Eureka, my new favorite show, via Netflix.

I went out to move my car in the late afternoon today and was expecting to find a parking ticket as I forgot to move my car in the morning. Instead I discovered a pink post-it note with “i Love you!” written on it with a little heart. I honestly have no idea who would’ve left that on my car and can only assume it’s either 1) a prank or 2) some random act of kindness. Either way, it was nice to find.

There’s a mountain biking trip next weekend that I’m debating going to up. It’s up to Vermont and sounds pretty funny, but I am a pretty shy person so I don’t want to end up hanging out by myself the whole time, especially if people are bombing huge downhills. Though I suppose I could also may a quick (2 hour) stop at the Fun Spot in New Hampshire on the way back and check out the Classic Arcade Museum which is something I’ve wanted to do since I saw King Of Kong: Fistful of Quarters. Plus I took the following week off for vacation. Hrmmm…

It started on Thursday when Stu and Kate picked me up from Physical Therapy and took me to Wasabi in Sleepy Hollow. They got me some very thoughtful presents: a book on “cloud computing”, a book on mountain biking and trails in the NY metro area, and a book on yoga. The yoga book came with an offer from Kate to “go to yoga with me where there are lots of petite limber chicks”. She knew how to sell it! The owner of Wasabi put together an ice cream platter for me and everybody there sang me happy birthday. Yum.

On Friday night my brother took me to James Joyce in White Plains. Dave, Will and Darlene came out for that dinner. The place was a little loud with a Yankee game playing, but the food was good. Afterwards my brother, Dave and I went back to my place to watch Zardoz, which was pretty entertaining. Not necessarily good but wacky and entertaining. My brother got me the graphic novel Ex Machina, Dreamscape on DVD and an album by Arcade Fire.

On Saturday I went to Stu and Kate’s baby shower that John and Jeannie had at their place. It was a Hawaiian themed baby shower with good food and lots of “onesies”. The weather was nice so part of the party was indoors and part of it was outdoors. I couldn’t stop eating the swedish meatballs and some pastries that somebody brought. Fortunately I didn’t have to do any grass skirt dancing in my crutches.

After the shower my friend Andrew picked me up and we went for some Chinese food for yet another birthday dinner. Afterwards we went to Gamestop where I picked up a play and charge kit for my bedroom’s Xbox 360 and Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition.

Today, Sunday, I took it easy. Slept late, did a little cleaning up, played some Oblivion, watched some MythBusters and then cleaned up a little more. The toughest part of the day was bringing the revolving fan up from the basement.

This week will be another relatively busy week: physical therapy twice this week, the first meeting of the New York City Agile Developer Book Club I started with my friend Seth, and another trip back to the ankle doctor for a check up.

Dispel the less than positive, take care of yourself and do the best you can for other people. We’re all linked together and when you recognize that, it makes you a better person.

A good article.  Maybe he’ll start a blog next?  I don’t remember ever having Saltines and water for dinner though…

The new Health.com launched on Monday, May 19th. It was a very smooth launch and we accomplished a lot in the 3 months of development that we had.

On Tuesday, my Uncle John, who had been suffering from Leukemia and other health conditions, passed away. I was on my way into work when my mother called. I wet to the office, let my boss know what was up and headed back up. We spent the afternoon at the funeral home. Wednesday was the wake and Thursday was the Funeral. Thursday was very rainy but the skies cleared up just as we got to the cemetery. That made my mom VERY hapy.

It definitely caught us all by surprise but we’re all happy that he’s not suffering anymore. I’m just glad that my mom was able to see him one last time that weekend.

A lot of the weekend was spent cleaning out his apartment.

The following week I went back to work and it was thankfully a short week. The Tuesday of that week would’ve been my Uncle’s 69th birthday. I think he would’ve been humored to reach that age.

That Friday we headed into the city to see The Raconteurs. Christine had gotten us tickets for my birthday off of eBay. When we got to the ticket people, we gave them our tickets, they canned them and we were informed that the tickets had been used already! It turns out that the girl that sold us tickets accidentally sold the same pair twice. Christine was upset, so I decided to buy scalped tickets which ended up costing us less than the eBay ones. The show was really great and reminded how great a band The Raconteurs are. I ended up lifting Christine up several times during the show so she could see her man Jack White rocking out on the guitar. Brendan Benson was also fantastic and has a great voice, even during live performances.

The Saturday of that following week was Christine’s first official Roller Derby Bout. I was not feeling well at the time but knew she would be upset if I missed her official debut bout (though she’s done others already). I brought our video cameras and taped the whole thing but skipped out on the after party. I was not up for it. You can see all the action shots from the Suburbia Roller Derby “Down & Derby” event on YouTube.

I need to learn how to encode YouTube videos better. They always look like crap once uploaded.

The week after that I was sick and was out for the entire week. Unfortunately that meant I missed out on a meeting with the new Rails team we have at TII. Hopefully that will be rescheduled soon.

I ended up leaving a little bit early today because I’m still feeling a bit bleh.

Christine is off dogsitting this week, so I’m by my lonesome. I need to finish this post and go do some food shopping or I won’t have anything to eat for the rest of the week!

I would’ve been really freaked out if I had seen a giant rabbit though…