2018 Intentions

New Patterns

  • Write a short story every month (and a poem every week?)
  • Start a regular cardio workout
  • Figure out and implement regular guitar practice regimen
  • Find a new service effort to be involved in

New Singletons

  • Get an app on the macOS App Store
  • Write an iOS app for the office
  • Write an Apple Watch app for myself
  • Learn to play a song on the guitar all the way through without using a chord chart and without looking at my fingering on the fret board.

Improve Existing Patterns

  • Continue weight training routine, increasing granularity and number of days/week
  • Continue improving sleep hygiene with the goal of averaging 7hrs/night
  • Continue to improve eating habits (including losing and keep off another 20 lbs)
  • Continue working on depression issues
  • Take another overseas trip (possibly back to Iceland)
  • Continue improving programming skills
  • Continue improving the profitability of the business (increase by at least another $1k/month)

2017's Brightest Spots

  • The continued patience, grace, kindness, and support of my mother and my wife. Especially when I least deserved it.
  • Traveling to Missouri to experience this year's total solar eclipse with my family. An awe-filling and spiritually profound event.
  • Iceland, my first trip overseas. An enthralling place so much more magical than I could've imagined. I've more than half a mind to go back again in 2018.
  • Finally moving from a neophyte programmer who took weeks to put together the most basic bits of code to an intermediate one capable of providing most of what I'm asked for within days, in no small part due to Treehouse's online courses, Paul Hudson's Hacking with Swift series of books, and, of course, Stack Overflow.
  • Regaining a level of health and strength I had convinced myself lost to age.
  • Seeing the office finally hit its stride and start giving back more than it's taking, thanks mainly to the hard work of my wife, Bertha, and the rest of the staff.
  • Trading in my van and having AC again after seven years without.

Confusing Medium And Messaging

You’ve Got Better Things To Do, Al.

I’m very much in the camp of privacy protection being a default approach, and I believe the pipes and tubes providing access to the information age should be regulated for the benefit of the citizenry, but at which point did citizens and users stop being responsible for their own approach to being informed?

The web is wide and deep and I’ve not found it hard at all to locate information of wildly divergent points of view on any given subject.

If citizens choose to live in an echo chamber, whether that's provided by Facebook or Twitter, that’s hardly new, and should be no more governed than one’s choice of books to be read or plays to be seen. Further, if a citizen chooses to be commoditized in order to benefit in some way they value, I don’t consider that wise, but I definitely consider it a choice they should be allowed to make.

Will this allow shadow players to insert poisoned whispers into those chambers? Certainly! You can explain to the tobacco industry and George W's council for selling the Iraq war how that's new.

Don’t get me wrong, these companies are part of the principalities and powers, and I would encourage distrust as a foundation for dealing with any of them, but if the goal is to protect users from their own biases, I see this kind of finger pointing as a waste of time.