Mid-Year Check-In

We're already halfway through 2024! This year has been the most productive for me since before I had kids -- those halcyon years where I could just decide to code an open-source library on an esoteric subject for no good reason and then abandon the effort months later.

Here's what I've been up to:

• Health: Still exercising daily and only eating steaks at restaurants. Doing, at a minimum, 20 minutes of Beat Saber or 1.5 miles jogging on the treadmill every day. Sometimes as much as 45 minutes of Beat Saber or 3 miles of jogging. Unfortunately, my blood pressure remains consistent.
• Language: Still maintaining my Spanish on DuoLingo although I've gotten to the lessons that are less useful for just conversing with neighbours. Tried some other languages with non-Latin alphabets but it's often very hard to identify the differences in pronunciation. DuoLingo as a whole feels like it has declined slightly for learning since they fired the linguists to rely on AI.
• House: Doing minor projects to make the house more livable or efficient. Planning to paint my driveway grey this summer so it's less of a car oven.

Here are the projects I committed to back in January:

"Ongoing Projects"

• Caring for this family: We're down 1 cat so it's just a family of 4 right now. I'm greatly enjoying not starting every day cleaning up cat messes but we may look into adopting kittens later in the summer.
• Working 30 hours per week: Made it to 20 (non-consecutive) years at my company without getting fired for gross negligence, failing to adhere to the dress code, or backtalk.
• Being the webmaster for Janny Wurts and Don Maitz: Just got the whole infrastructure through a global book launch and a Denial of Service attack.
• Keeping the URI! Zone alive: It's still breathing, barely, like a dying phoenix.
• Being on the HOA: I still pick up trash a couple times per week and trim back the ravaging invasive plants along the sidewalk. Missed 2 meetings, one for being sick and one for our Lake Anna vacation.

"Projects that will probably happen"

• Tune my 8 year old cloud empire: Solved this in January 2024.
• Earn another Amazon Web Services cloud certification: Got this in January 2024.
• Buy a new couch: Failed so far, but may get to it later in the year.
• Overhaul and upgrade the Maitz and Wurts Studio Shop: Finished this in March 2024.
• Add the final book from the Wars of Light and Shadow to the Paravia Wiki: Started this in May and am about 13% done. Will probably finish by the end of the year.
• Do Advent of Code 2024: Still planned for December even though I'm getting too old to be up so late.

"Projects that will probably slip to 2025"

• Give the URI! Zone a much needed makeover: I actually moved this up to June 2024 and started learning all of the technologies, but then a Diablo 4 patch came out that made the game better and I deemed it time for a nice break. I plan to resume this work in August.
• Rip all of my old CDs onto a house-accessible NAS: I would still love to do this some day. I finally broke down in May and purchased Pandora, not because I ever heard ads on my computer, but because I heard them all the time playing through the Echo and the ads are atrocious and repetitive.
• Play the trumpet occasionally / Compose new music: I have been feeling more musical urges this year and still want to dip my toes back in next year. Maybe try switching from score-based composition to sequencer-based composition the way all of the cool kids in the 2020s do.