Chris Cooke

Good thing I started thinking about this now – the first available weekend in our family schedule is not until June 21!

I think I’ll pencil this in for the night of May 10, weather permitting.

So I spent a little time familiarizing myself with Python, and found it doesn’t really jump out at me like Ruby did. Until I have a real need for Python, I think I’ll pass and put my time into other things.

I’ve been doing a pretty good job getting consistently to Zumba and Hip Hop, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. My wife has been working with a personal trainer one day a week and working on her own two more days, and is getting great results, so I may look at doing that, too.

Even with the transition to the new job. I really haven’t been focusing on this at all, though.

I just went to a three-day training seminar. I made an effort to meet some of the other attendees, instead of just going off solo on breaks and lunch. I’m still not at the point of working the room, but I’m getting a bit better.

I think I’ve about got this goal taken care of. There are a few activities that I know I need to do a little of everyday, but I’m having a hard time fitting them into the rhythm of life in my house. Once I can reliably make those happen regularly, I’ll call this one done.

I just compared estimate to actual on the first release of a project I’m working on, and found that in terms of development time and cost I came pretty close to the middle of my original estimated range. I was way off in calendar time, though, since holidays disrupted the efforts somewhat. (We’ve taken steps to prevent this in the future.) One caveat, though—we did slip a feature to the next release, since the customer wanted to start using the product immediately. So if that feature were put in, I would probably have been slightly over the midpoint, but probably not by much.

I went through yesterday and did some cleanup in the move of my first movement from Garageband to Logic. In the version of GB I was using at the time, I had no tempo automation, so I just played rubato to get a ritardando when I wanted one.

Now that I have tempo automation, I needed to go through and fix all those events to be correct at tempo, so I can go through next and use tempo automation for my ritard.

I spent three days last week at an Advanced Rails Studio put on by Pragmatic Studio. I spent the days in the studio, then the evenings coding away.

For my level of proficiency (I was probably at the lower end of what was appropriate for their material) I found it to be extremely useful.

One step closer to what I would consider “mastery”.

My new job location is near a couple other friends of mine, so we’re starting to get together for lunch once a month. These are friends, but not among my closest friends, so it will be good to build a better relationship with them.

About a year ago my wife and I sat down over a weekend and did this whole 31 Days to Fix Your Finances in a weekend. Then baby #2 came along on Tuesday, and it all fell by the wayside.

Now we’re getting back to it, but actually going about it in 31 days. So we just did day 2 tonight. I think we’re going to go through it once a year, just to touch up.

Now that I’m done with RPM ‘08, I’m going to get back to my symphony. The good news is I learned a lot about balancing, mixing, and tweaking Garritan Personal Orchestra when I wrote “Odd Quartet” during RPM, so I should better be able to tackle this one.

I thumbed through the 2007 catalog for the dance school my daughter attends. (They have adult classes, too.) I may revisit this when the 2008 calendar comes out, and possibly do a dance class that is NOT an exercise class.

I think it’s just not in me to have too much routine, especially in the morning. I started out with something elaborate, but abandoned it quickly. At least now I’m taking time to eat breakfast and read the paper, so that’s something.

because I have maxed out the amount of time I can put into my business at the moment. I will put the goal back in when I’m ready to grow again.

I’ve been doing better with this. I started out contacting one person from my list each day, but would then get a lot of replies back in a short period of time. I don’t want to be superficial, so I scaled back the amount of reaching out so I could let each connection’s conversation develop to a natural conclusion.

I think I hit upon a trick of fusing GTD and DIT in a way that makes sense for me. I shift my DIT daily “will-do” list to a weekly “will-do” list, but keep daily lists. As part of the GTD weekly review, I identify which projects I will work on in the upcoming week, and slot the next actions into the daily list for a day based on what I “think” my schedule is going to be. As the week gets dynamic, I might not finish everything on a daily list, but each morning I reschedule everything that is not yet done, based on how my week is looking now.

I realize this has the potential for getting back into a situation where things always slip and never get done, but they’re still all captured in GTD. It’s really adding a bit of the DIT strategy to whittle down the next actions. It HIGHLY depends on making a good assessment during the weekly review of how much work can be taken on over the next week.

I sent my CD out directly from the post office this afternoon, so I’m done as far as deadlines go.

There’s still some overhead with getting the final digital versions up at macidol.com, finishing up my album info here, compiling all my YouTube videos into a DVD, etc., but the core challenge is DONE!

Two songs down, eight to go. Or if I go by time instead of song count (unlikely) I need another 30 minutes of music.