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2009 goals recap

December 29th, 2009

I did a 2008 recap with 2009 goals, and I thought it would be good to revisit those from last year, see where I progressed.

Lose more weight.  20 pounds lighter by January 2010.

How’d I do?  I fluctuated a lot, but I’m not down 20 pounds from last year.  I was down 15, but have gone back up in December (bad month for me), so now I’m down 9.  Not my goal of 20, which I’d still like to hit.

Financial stability – I have a number in mind (and written down) as to where I want to be at the end of 2009.  Never written one down before – we’ll see how that goes.

Not where I wanted to be, but 2009 was a much healthier year for me than 2008 was.  I got more than halfway to the written goal in pure raw income (which was a pleasant surprise of its own!), but expenses took a chunk away from that.

GroovyMag and related projects being profitable enough to meet all basic living expenses every month by the middle of 2009.  This is a somewhat modest goal, not over the top.  The over the top stuff comes a bit later.

Check, though it wasn’t by the middle of 2009.

Get in to other information publishing arenas – books, videos, training – either produced by myself, or acting in the publisher role for other talented people.

Didn’t pursue this as much as I’d wanted initially.  I became more cautious, and have held back, with some new plans formulating.

Speak at at least one conference this year (besides Codemash, which I just got back from).

I presented to the SouthEastern Java User Group, spoke at two CodeCamps (Charlotte and Raleigh) and perhaps something else – I can’t remember now!  I attended the GR8 conference in Copenhagen, hit up CodeStock in Knoxville, and attended the ColdFusion in NC conference in October.

I need to take stock of my 2010 goals and will publish them in the next few days or so.

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Posted in Personal

Virtual keyboards encourage weak passwords?

October 1st, 2009

I’ve not seen any studies that indicate this, but I can say as a recent iPhone user, I’ve found myself changing some of my passwords to not include symbols or capitals or anything that isn’t convenient to type on the default virtual keyboard. Does anyone else do this? Has there been any research on this? While the Palm Pre keyboard is a bit tiny (even for my dainty digits) I know it would be easier to access symbols or other non-qwerty characters than it is on the iPhone. I suspect the same issue affects the new myTouch G3 phones as well.

Any thoughts/experiences on this?

3 comments »

Posted in Apple, Personal

Moving to Opera, partially

September 2nd, 2009

I’m planning to move to using Opera as my main webmail client.  I do a lot in gmail, and to a lesser extent in yahoo mail and other webmail clients.  Firefox, as nice as it is, tends to hang quite a lot (not just with gmail – basically, all the time – 3.5 has not been a great update, and feels like a step backwards).

So, I’m going to treat my ‘mail’ as a separate notion, much like my regular mail client, and simply have Opera 10 open all the time on a secondary screen, along with my regular mail client.  I suspect this will be a long-lived setup, but if it turns out there’s something wrong with it, I’ll let you know :)

4 comments »

Posted in Personal, Software, Tools, Web

Traveling for a few days – London and Copenhagen

May 10th, 2009

I’ll be traveling the next 10 days, including time in London May 12-17 and Copenhagen May 18-20.  If any PHP or web people would like to get together for a drink/meal/chat/podcast/whatever, let me know.  I’m planning on attending one of the Dojo dinner activities (I think it’s Thursday May 14) so if you’re already going to that, awesome  :)

Best way to ping me is probably email – mgkimsal@gmail.com, though skyping me at mgkimsal should ring thru to my phone as well while I’m over there.

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Posted in PHP, Personal, Travel, Web

Ways I’ve increased my productivity

January 22nd, 2009

Productivity has been one of those issues for me over the years that always seemed elusive.  This isn’t to say I never get anything done, but I always feel I could be doing better.  As some of my elementary school teachers used to write on my report card “Could do better”.   That always stung, because it’s not that I didn’t know how to do the work – it was just bloody boring.  Fast forward 30+ years and I feel like I’m in the same boat.  I’ve always had this feeling that I could be doing better when it comes to how I get things done.  Couple that with the idea that “productivity” is (in my view) a somewhat hard thing to measure, and you’ve got a recipe for a situation that’s driven me crazy for a long time.

Definition

Dictionary.com includes these for productivity and productive:

Productivity

  1. The quality of being productive or having the power to produce
  2. Economics The rate at which goods or services are produced especially output per unit of labor.

Productive

  1. having the power of producing; generative; creative: a productive effort.
  2. producing readily or abundantly; fertile: a productive vineyard.
  3. causing; bringing about (usually fol. by of): conditions productive of crime and sin.

“Having the power of producing”.  Since I’ve been self-employed, that phrase has taken on new dimensions of meaning, and in ways that I wasn’t aware of during my first round with self-employment from 1999-2003.  I’ve learned many lessons during and since that time, but it seemed many of them were not really *part* of my life yet.  Many of them still aren’t, but they will be.

The “power of producing” also means “the responsibility of producing” in an work situation, and possibly doubly so in a self-employment situation.  In its basest sense, whatever you “produce” must have “value” to someone else.  If you “produce” things of no value, but do so rapidly, you’re “productive” by the book definition, but you’re out of a job in the real world.

What am I producing?

So I’ve had to be more aware of *what* specifically am I producing for people that bring them value?  Currently I deliver three products to various customers: custom web applications, training services, and PDF magazines.  Each one of them is a separate concern – there’s not much overlap between my customer base.  And each one involves separate skills: development, teaching, editing.  But I realized that in each case, the person buying the product is buying value, and that value to them is time.

Web applications

When someone contracts me for web work, they’re wanting one of two things:  either an application that will streamline some aspect of their business, or an application to get more sales in the door.  The second one is more of a marketing type of thing, and I don’t usually involve myself in those project.  I tend to focus on the quantifiable projects – “process X used to take 8 hours, and using this software it takes 27 minutes”.  In those cases, I’m saving the customer’s time from doing automatable work to focus on tasks that have higher value to them.

Training

When people buy training services, they’re learning how to save time by doing something they didn’t know how to do before.  They’re saving time both by having someone experience (me) show them how to do what they want rather than learning on their own (savings 1) and by utilizing the knowledge they learn to automate or eliminate things they currently do with their time (savings 2).  I know this is a rather abstract way to talk about it, but training/education services all seem to have this in common.

PDF magazines

I launched GroovyMag a few months back as a way of bringing together information about the Groovy and Grails ecosystems to people in a consistent, regular fashion.  The value provided here is education under a different delivery vehicle.  People buying GroovyMag are hoping to get information which will make their Java and Groovy development processes faster, saving them time to do more important things (more complex Java work, disc golf, time with the family, whatever).

So while I’m not producing time directly, I’m producing things which have a direct impact on people’s time, and ideally let them keep more of their time for higher value tasks.

Keeping more of my own time

Given that the things I’m producing all end up with time as a key factor, it follows that I would also be looking for ways to save my own time to spend on producing things of value, right?  Here is a list of a few steps I’ve taken which have been beneficial to me so far:

Read Getting Things Done (GTD)

I succumbed to the hype around this book and bought it many moons ago.  It’s staring at me from my bookshelf as we speak.  I was not quite able to implement all the physicality of the book’s ideas yet, but one suggestion from it is already paying some dividends.

Keep folders for everything

I have dozens of folders labelled now, each with only a few bits of paper in them.  Years ago I would have *never* done that, but the GTD book suggested it, and it’s helped me be able to quickly find things I need when I need them.  I need to reorient my office so that all of that is closer to hand, and I’ll use that technique even more in 2009.

Dual monitors

I’m split on whether this has actually *helped*.  During my training sessions it has, because I’m using WebEx for training, and I can keep chat windows open in one window and the ‘shared applications’ open in another.

I tend to use a laptop a lot (as in, I only own laptops right now), and I like to sit leaning back in a chair with my feet up quite a lot.  I swivel.  I move.  Keeping a second monitor plugged under those conditions doesn’t work very well.  I already ruined one VGA cable because of so much twisting.  I’m really waiting for wireless video (bluetooth video?!).  So, despite the hype of “dual monitors make you more productive!” I can’t say it’s been a total time saver for me, except in training situations.

Macbook

I picked up a used Macbook in October, and it’s become my primary laptop.  It directly saves me time because of the fast suspend/resume and intelligent wireless behaviour.  It’s not a perfect laptop, but using previous laptops (both with XP and Linux) I realized I was always spending way too much time for the laptop to resume to a workable state, and for wireless functionality to come back up.  I’m normally able to use my macbook within 4 seconds of opening the lid.  Under my XP and Linux laptops, it was more like 10-15 seconds.

This doesn’t sound like much, I agree, but usually in those extra 6-11 seconds I’d get mentally miffed about the delay, my mind would start to wander, and I’d end up thinking about something else for a bit, or walking off to do something else for those ‘few seconds’ and end up wasting a minute or more.  So, while I could have tried adjusting my concentration habits to remain “focused” on my initial reason for opening the laptop, trying out Mac hardware was an easier step which has ultimately saved me time every day.  This isn’t saying my Mac saves me hours per day over another system, but little bits add up over time.  And my frustration level has gone down some because of it.

Delegation

This might have fit under the GTD heading above, as its recommended in that book, but its something that tends to be recommended by many personal development systems.  And it works.  In a corporate setting, delegation might be a situation where you ask a team mate to do something for you that better matches their skill set.  I’ve not recently been in corporate situations where I had direct authority to delegate to other people, so this one always a difficult one for me to grasp.  Being self-employed now, its easier to grasp and implement.  The downside is that ‘delegation’ means ‘paying someone to do something’, but the upside is that, once you find the right people, it works wonders.

I was initially going to try to produce the GroovyMag PDF magazine on my own.  I got a trial of InDesign, tried Apple’s Pages, and messed around with Scribus.  After a few days I realized that there was *no* way I could handle this on my own.  It would take me weeks or months to become proficient enough with any one of those tools to save myself any time at all.  I ended up finding a good design person who charges reasonable rates, and I delegate the production of the magazine to her.  We discuss layout options, design ideas, etc., so I have some input, but she’s able to do things in 15-20 hours that might take me 15-20 days of solid work.  The delegation principle has worked wonders for that project, and I’ve tested out the concept on a smaller scale in other projects with similar, smaller scale results.

Turn off the phone

My cat knocked over a glass over water over night and my cell phone sat in a pool for about 7 hours.  It doesn’t hold much of a charge, and flakes out now and then.  I was initially miffed, and was suddenly thinking of all the expense and hassle a new phone brings.  Considered an iPhone (but held off for now) and decided to see what things would be like without having the phone on all the time.

It’s great.

I check voicemail once every day or so, but people who need to get ahold of me know to email me, get me on IM, or Skype me.  It may seem counterintuitive that I have the phone off, but keep IM on and still check email.  Other productivity people will say “don’t check email”.  I agree, and *usually* don’t check email but once every few hours.  There are times, however, when I fall back in to old habits and check email every 5 minutes.  When I notice myself doing this I need to figure out why.  It’s *usually* because I’m working on something I’m having a huge mental block on, which I’ve not readily acknowledged.  Once I recognize this, I stop the email fidgeting, get up, walk around, perhaps get on the treadmill for a few minute, or even go watch some television for 5 minutes.  What I do isn’t as important as breaking that cycle and clearing my mind of that block.

Small notebook

I picked up a pocket-sized moleskine notebook a few weeks ago and carry it around with me.  I find it easier to jot down notes in there any time of the day or night, laptop resume time notwithstanding.  I sort of wish I’d gotten the ‘calendar’ one instead of the free-form ‘ruled’ paper one, but when I went back to the store, they didn’t seem to have the smaller sized calendar ones around.  Maybe I just imagined they had them?

Another lesson learned – a good pen makes a difference.  Or, put another way, a bad pen makes it really hard to write.  My penmanship isn’t very good to start with.  Couple that with a pen that makes me work too hard and it’s a recipe for chicken scratchings.

Things to try or master

There are still many things I’ve not tried or not incorporated in to my daily routine yet.

Virtual assistant

Having a virtual assistant has been one of those things I’d like to try.  I always feel like I don’t have ‘enough’ to pass off to someone else, but I think I’m getting to that point.

iPhone/smartphone

At some point I’ll get a smartphone to see if the portability of having certain apps around with me outweighs the potential timewasting of having games like BubbleWrap 2 seconds away at all times.

“Refactoring your Wetware”

This book by local publisher Andy Hunt looks good.  I saw him give a presentation on it at our local JUG, and the presentation has been an inspiration to me as I look for ways to be more productive in my day to day life.

“Getting Things Done” software

I’ve tried out a few GTD-inspired pieces of software, but nothing has stuck with me yet.  I think I’m more tactile, and while I love computers, I’m just not yet able to organize my whole life there.  I think expanding the ‘everything in folders’ concept may yield more short term benefits for me, but I’ll keep trying out software.

Am I more productive today?

Thinking about it today, I think I’m able to produce more value than I was a year ago.  Whether this value is worth as much in the marketplace as I think it *should* be is a different story  :)   As is the case with most introspective journeys, the more you become aware of your situation, the more you realize there’s room for improvement.  As I identify and make those improvements, I’ll document those here, or perhaps in another blog.  This type of post isn’t keeping with the style of what this blog has been up to now, and I might want to start keeping these ‘introspective/improvement’ posts someplace dedicate to them.

8 comments »

Posted in Business, Development, Personal

2008 goals recap and 2009

January 13th, 2009

Last year, I wrote a post about things I wanted to do in 2008.

  • Lose 30 pounds (I’d be fine with losing 10 this year, but close enough!)

I lost 10, then gained back 5.  :(

  • One blog post per week – I tend to do more than that, but occasionally slip for more than 7 days without, so I’ll likely keep on top of that more.  And keep them more focused.  I may end up splitting in to two blogs.  OR migrate WebDevRadio to WordPress and use that as a combined ‘tech’ blog and podcast.

Didn’t hit this.

  • Write one new article per month – I’d like to write more in-depth how-tos than I do (which right now is almost 0).  Focus will probably be grails or groovy, but I’ve got some PHP ideas I’m working on.  Documenting those would be a good start.

Didn’t hit this.

  • Another book in 2008.  Funny enough, I did a book in 2007 – well, 2/3rds of one after the publisher reviewed it.  It *may* come out this year, which would be nice.  I have two other ideas I’m putting together, and I have interest from publishers on them.  The issue is time to write, and I’ll work on making that happen.

Didn’t hit this.

  • A picture a day in 2008.  I don’t think I’ll be doing this one.

Didn’t try!

  • Learn a new language.  I was inspired to try to learn Chinese this year.  I have a tiny bit of the spoken down, but the writing is what I’ll need to concentrate on if I do this.  When I was in China, I couldn’t *read* anything, so trying to look it up in a dictionary was pointless.

Had been inspired to get into Chinese because of my 2007 trip, but ultimately didn’t do this either.

What the heck?  Well, early last year I had an abrupt shift in the employment situation, which took some scrambling and readjusting to bring in to balance.  I’m trying to take a more ‘ownership’ stance over my work and time this year.  I made it through 2008 being entirely self-employed, and intend to do so in 2009, unless some great opportunity presents itself (basically, never say never to things).

So – 2009.  What are the goals this time around?

  • Lose more weight.  20 pounds lighter by January 2010.
  • Financial stability – I have a number in mind (and written down) as to where I want to be at the end of 2009.  Never written one down before – we’ll see how that goes.
  • GroovyMag and related projects being profitable enough to meet all basic living expenses every month by the middle of 2009.  This is a somewhat modest goal, not over the top.  The over the top stuff comes a bit later.
  • Get in to other information publishing arenas – books, videos, training – either produced by myself, or acting in the publisher role for other talented people.
  • Speak at at least one conference this year (besides Codemash, which I just got back from).

What are your goals for 2009?

1 comment »

Posted in Friends, General, Personal

Seven things about me (reply to Ben’s post)

January 13th, 2009

I got ‘pinged’ by Ben Ramsey on this topic, so here goes:

  1. First computer was Sinclair ZX81 – 1K of RAM – soldered together from a kit ordered from UK.
  2. Played bass in a number of bands, including a blues band when I was 18 and next youngest guy was 37.  Played for several years with some friends from HS – ‘modern rock / alternapop’ stuff. I may even have a CD somewhere.
  3. Worked at a Kroger during a strike – had to cross the picket line and got shouted/spat at.  Fun times to make $6.50/hour.
  4. Played Paul McCartney in a Beatlefest band competition (yep, played left-handed).
  5. I despise the taste of beer, beer related drinks, and cooked vegetables (I don’t mean combined, I mean as three separate things).
  6. Had a small article published in “Compute!’s Gazette” in the mid ’80s dealing with ’80 column mode’ on the C128.
  7. Got an email reply from Warren Robinett for my fanboy email.
  8. Have never done one of these ‘things about me’ blog meme things before.
  9. Have a hard time stopping at 7 when making lists.

I don’t have anyone in mind to ‘tag’ who hasn’t been tagged (and who has a blog that I know of) but if I think of anyone, I’ll ping them.  :)

1 comment »

Posted in PHP, Personal

Christmas alone (mostly)

December 24th, 2008

This Christmas is a little strange. My wife left me… to visit family in Australia, so I’m on my own. I don’t have any family around, so my prospects were going to be pretty solitary. I ended up making the decision to drive down to Florida to visit with my grandparents for a couple days. It’ll make a nice change of pace, but a heck of a drive (9+ hours). The majority of the day will be spent in the car, probably making some phone calls to family that’s spread around (michigan, kentucky, new york, california, new mexico). That might eat up a couple hours of the drive at least :)

I’m just getting a bit reflective here. This is the first holiday season I’ve been sort of ‘naturally’ on my own for many years. I’m having to make a big effort to go visit family this year. Not complaining, just realizing that it’s like this for some people all the time, and I’m a bit more grateful for how my ‘regular’ life is these days (outside of this holiday season!)

1 comment »

Posted in Family, Personal

Public, protected and private

October 14th, 2008

I just finished reading iWoz, Steve Wozniak’s autobiography. Great read, and it got me to rethinking about many things in my life – this blog being one of them. Actually, it was more some other events that got me initially rethinking, and the book helped shape the thinking process.

Woz is very open about most aspects of his life, or at least claims to be. Since I don’t know him, there could be many things he hides away from others. I presume this not to be the case, however, as I think we’d have heard about some of these over the past 30 years or so (some dirt would have been dug up on him by now!). There was a statement in the book along the lines of “I try to have as few secrets as possible, to avoid having things to hide”. I know that wasn’t it, but that seemed to be the gist of it (I read it on the plane late Sunday night, so it’s slightly garbled in my memory!)

This blog is public (obviously) but I have more than tech stuff in here. Occasionally I have family stuff, and sometimes personal views on non-tech things. Over the last year I’ve been an independant consultant, and given my name, I know that some clients and prospective clients may come read the blog. That right there has already had a small ‘chilling’ effect on what I write. The bigger chilling effect is just time – I rarely have time to get my thoughts down in the blog, so many ideas are lost to the ages already. But I do find myself occasionally holding back, as it were, when writing, because I’m afraid I may offend someone’s sensibilities.

I don’t hold back completely simply because these are my thoughts, and, to quote Popeye, I yam what I yam. If someone vehemently disagrees with my worldview on multiple topics, and that is such a dealbreaker that they wouldn’t hire me, I’m better off not starting a relationship in the first place, surely. No?

However, short of creating completely separate blogs, and hiding my name somehow, or simply avoiding non-tech entries, I’m not sure how I can avoid such a thing. I have such a unique name that (AFAIK) there’s only 2 of me in the world. To really hide away, I’d need to adopt a fake name (Titus Yoder, perhaps). And host on a general service or completely untraceable IP. So, I had decided long ago that wasn’t worth it (too much effort for just the chance avoidance of loss of work).

Another thing I don’t do much is blog about specific client problems (technical ones) because I think that it’s too easy to trace back my issues to the specific companies involved, and that might upset them. If I need to blog about something in that arena, I’ll try to generify things (unless a client has given me the OK to be public with their name about it). I already know a friend of mine who was told to remove any entries about his day to day work because they felt it was making the company look bad. He’d never mentioned the company he worked for by name at all. And in reality, he was making the company look good, in my view, because he was talking about some of the problems he’d solved. But I guess any way to attach the fact that company X even *had* a problem in the first place, or any concrete examples of what technologies they employed to solve that problem might be construed as weakness somehow, or might contradict something some higher-up exec either believes (wrongly) or tells their customers, which would be BAD (wouldn’t it?)

Are there other strategies y’all use to keep things honest but separate? I think I’m still leaning towards just ‘being me’ in public, and relying on an ‘honesty is the best policy’ approach.

1 comment »

Posted in Personal

International terrorism (slight) scare

July 7th, 2008

My wife recently recieved an email which, while poorly written, had enough information in it to potentially cause someone monitoring emails (if that really happens) to look twice and read on.

Long story short, my wife is originally from the UK.

OK – maybe not *that* short.

One of her friends there is having a fight with her uncle over the care of her grandmother (the uncle’s mother).  Following me so far?  He’s been harrassing my wife’s friend for several months, and had told her he would start to involve my wife.  Today he did that.

She received an email asking if she could “put Semtex (sic) in her mini foods”.  Implying that might wife could (or might) smuggling explosives on an international flight would be enough, but he went further, suggesting he was going to prevent her friend from coming to America by alleging Bin Laden and Muslim sympathies.  He then suggested that he wished they would all die in a car crash, and that they (my wife’s friend and family) “should be wiped off the face of the earth”.

The email also said “I will be sending you more emails with trigger words in them to make sure they are picked up by the CIA…” and various other agencies.   The man in question is being investigated by the UK police for earlier harrassment, and now it’s extended to my wife.  So I called the local FBI office.

fbi.gov showed the closest office was Charlotte, which is strange, because Raleigh is the state capitol.  Why not have a Raleigh office?  Anyway, I called, and after explaining, was put through to an agent who said I should talk to the Raleigh office.  He transferred me.  Great!  The operator there put me through to a field agent, but suggested I also email in the offending email.  “Send it to raleighfbi@bellsouth.net”.  What the heck!!?  Our gov’t is too poor to set up email for a field office with a .gov domain?  Or does this just make it easier to filter and track all emails?  Or to perhaps nab *all* bellsouth.net email data whenever they need something?

The FBI agent I spoke with suggested I just write back to the original author and tell him to stop all contact.  Really, at this point, because he’s in England, and it appears to be a domestic dispute, there’s little that the FBI can do right now.

I can have a level head about this all I want, and dismiss it as the ravings of a nut.  *My* levelheadedness, though, is not what concerns me.  It’s the PATRIOT act, TSA, FBI and other agencies’ attitudes towards something they might pick up scanning communications (Echelon, anyone?).  Perhaps normal emails aren’t routinely scanned, but given that he’s already under investigation, and it’s an international email, and the often general incompetence of low-level government workers, I rather feared the worst.  My wife and I both travel internationally, so I wanted to nip this in the bud.  Having spoken to someone last year who was under investigation under the PATRIOT act, he had about 9 months of pure limbo (travel, work, personal life all affected) for an absolute goose chase.

I feel like we’re in an arms race of paranoia, and no matter how rational I can be about things, very little may be under my control when it comes down to it.  Perhaps I overreacted slightly, but given the state of the nation these days, I’m not sure this was an overreaction.

5 comments »

Posted in Personal