I haven’t heard much about “Resolutions” this year from friends or family, or even in the media. Perhaps after years of failed ideas, people have toned down their expectations. Ever optimistic, though, I’ve decided to make a few resolutions of my own. I still think it’s a good excuse to do some life-refactoring and try to make some concrete improvements.

And without further ado, here are my 2013 New Year’s Resolutions:

This blog!

Since I just finished applying to PhD programs (for Computer Science/Robotics), I figured it’s a good time to start working on my writing. I’ve always enjoyed it, but felt I should do more. Enter, teh intrawebs. I’m going to start by posting every other week, probably on Sunday, and go from there. My hope is that I can find enough inspiration to write consistently. Programming, travel, CrossFit and camping will feature here frequently.

I’ll be writing the blog in Emacs (my editor of choice) in Markdown, storing the posts in Git and publishing them here for the time being. I tried in vain to set up Jekyll on a free Heroku dyno but ran into too many issues for it to be worth my while. So Wordpress it is!

Finish SeparatePlease

I started writing an Android receipt splitting application maybe 6 months ago and would like to finish it. It’s progressed (slowly) in fits and starts as different focuses have come and gone, but I’m still committed to producing the application.

At this point, I am committed to producing a manual receipt splitting application. If I finish the manual application and am still enjoying the process/have more time and drive, I may try to improve the application with some OCR and image processing to create a more automatic app. Stay tuned.

210#

Here’s my classic “I’m going to lose weight this year” resolution. I’ve lost 15# since July but I’d like to lean out some more. I’m currently weighing in at 220#, so I’m shooting to accomplish this by the end of March. I’ll accomplish this by continuing my (fairly) Paleo lifestyle and keeping up with my workouts at CrossFit Boston.

10 strict pull-ups

Being able to do the three (maybe four?) that I can do now is an improvement for me, so 10 is a lofty goal, but I think I can get there. Thanks go to CFB for the progress so far. I’ve got a great pull-up progression from Coach Tapply that’s helped me improve this far. Repetition will be key to this goal. I plan to add some pull-up work to my personal post-WOD work at CFB.

Record data about myself

The Quantified Self movement has become increasingly popular over the last few years and garnered lots of media coverage. I’ve dabbled with nutrition and sleep tracking, but without any consistency and I’ve never logged enough data to enable me to do any sort of self-analysis.

I’ve added a “Record today’s data” todo item to Todoist with a reminder set every night at 9:30pm, slightly before my bedtime, in the hopes that I’ll listen to it.

I’ll be using the following apps to record my own information:

Anyone reading this (if you exist) have any other good suggestions? I was thinking about mood tracking or perhaps fine-grained activity time-tracking. Fitbit anyone?


© Jack Morrison 2018

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