thesoulless

Originally published at Not Quite Rational. Please leave any comments there.

That’s right, I graduated from high school in 2000. It doesn’t seem like a lot of time when I look at the number of years, but when I think about everything that happened in these last ten years, it feels like a long time.

I spent much of the decade at university, first at RIT and then at St. Bonaventure University. All in all, it took about 6 years to get my degree (Bachelor of Science, Computer Science – I started as a Computer Science major at RIT, transferred to Information Technology my second year, and transferred back to Computer Science at St. Bonaventure). Mostly it took that long because I lacked the motivation to do my best work, so I struggled through any of the classes that I didn’t like. Part of my issues at RIT was that my professors were all research-type people, and just teaching theory, mostly. I loved the rest of my experience there, however. Some of my best friends in the world came from my time at RIT, though I’ve been dropping the ball lately in my duties as a friend. Once I transferred to St. Bonaventure, I got the opportunity to take classes from people that worked in the field since some time in the 70’s. That was a great change, and once I worked through my issues I finished there (though the liberal arts courses at Bonas were not very much fun either).

As far as employment went, the summer after I graduated high school I worked at the Olean Times Herald in the mail room. At RIT, I worked at Gracie’s (one of the cafeterias on campus) for a couple trimesters, and met a ton of people, including my friend Kevin. Oddly enough, we lived next door to each other in our freshman dorm, but didn’t really become friends until we worked together at Gracie’s. The summer after my first year at RIT, I worked at Dal-Tile in Olean in the factory. There wasn’t anything special about it, but it was a good experience, anyway. Then, in 2002, I worked as a summer contractor in the IT department in Dresser-Rand. It was the best job that I had so far, not coincidentally because it was the first one I had in my own field. In 2003, I fell apart and withdrew from RIT. I needed to pick up a job to fill the time between then and the fall when I started at St. Bonaventure. I picked up a job at Alcas doing data entry, and met someone who was very important to me for a few years. From 2003 to 2005 I worked there, and went back to Dresser-Rand at the same time during the summer of 2004. In 2006, I graduated from school and started all the fun of a job search. It took until that fall, when I worked for a company called Mellon Technology for a couple of months, until I was hired by Dresser-Rand full time, and that’s where I’ve been since.

Throughout the decade I ran a handful of different sites, none of which had any content, really. I built a few computers, started playing World of Warcraft in 2008, and that brings us up to date. It was an all right decade, but as I don’t really have any other comparison than the two that I lived through before I graduated from high school, I’ll have to wait until next decade to really get a good perspective.

thesoulless

Originally published at Not Quite Rational. Please leave any comments there.

I’m making bold predictions for this year. I don’t think I’ll be actually kicking some ass, since that’s never really been an issue in my adult life.  No, what I’m referring to is the fact that I think I’ve come up with actual achievable goals for the year. These goals aren’t just really easy to complete, either; they are things that will improve my life and further my goals in the future.  Somewhat like a stepping stone, as it were.

With that in mind, here is the list of what I intend to do this year.

• Walk at least one mile per day.
  This is one of the habits that I dropped over the last year and a half. I need to get back into walking every night, and I figure at least a mile is a good easy number that I can meet. I also have a neat little program called CardioTrainer that can track me with GPS on my Droid.
• Record all my calorie intake.
  This is the first step I want to take toward a healthier diet. Recording everything I eat gives me a better idea of what I’m doing right and/or wrong. The Droid is also helpful in this case, with an app called Calorie Counter.
• Plan meals at least one week at a time.
  Meal planning is a good way to save money by budgeting for groceries and it also will allow me to eat healthier by actually cooking. It also lets me avoid eating randomly, which I know from experience just leads to junk food.
• Set up automatic savings deductions from my paycheck.
  In theory, I should get at least a cost of living raise this year. What I plan to do is take most of that and set it up as an automatic deposit into my savings. It will force me to have some money set aside and not immediately wasted.
• Schedule cleanup for the apartment.
  As a rather unorganized person, I need to set up a schedule for cleaning my apartment, doing my laundry and other such chores. I tend to let things get out of hand and then spend a lot of time catching up.
• Write something every day.
  This doesn’t mean that I have to post something every day. In order to be productive and actually improve my writing, I need to actually write. To that end, I will be writing at least something every day.
• Take a picture every day.
  I have a nice digital camera; it’s high time that I put it to use other than on vacations. I want to take a picture of something every day that I can post to Flickr. This probably means that I need to take my camera places that I normally wouldn’t, but that’s probably good for me as well.

There are a couple of other things I have planned, but I don’t think I’ll start them until later this year when I’ve managed to get in the swing of the ones I’ve listed above. I’ve managed to pull off all my goals for the first two days of the year, but it’s not like that means anything.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting my thoughts on the first decade of the 2000’s.

thesoulless

Originally published at Not Quite Rational. Please leave any comments there.

Last year was a pretty mediocre year event-wise, and a really poor year as far as personal goals went.

From 2007 into most of 2008, I was doing really well as far as exercise and eating right.  However, at the end of 2008 I started to fall into bad habits, and 2009 was just bad.  I was completely out of control. This led directly to me dropping my writing productivity. In fact, I think I only posted a handful of things all year. As for other things, I purchased a bunch of wood and hardware to build a bar, worked on it once, and never touched it after that (I worked on it today, though!). I didn’t finish any video games of note, though I did accomplish a lot in WoW – my brother and I started running instances, helped a bunch by the new Dungeon Finder.

Work was all right…I didn’t accomplish much of anything special. I did travel to Missouri and Oklahoma to set up some new offices, so that was pretty fun. I did a lot of programming, but I don’t think I did anything special or learned all that much, which is always my entire objective.

All in all, it wasn’t a great year.  I don’t think it was much of a terrible year, though I hated it for some unknown reason.  Tomorrow I’m going to post a little rundown of my goals for 2010.  I plan on kicking this year’s ass from here to next year, and I’ve tried to actually set up measurable and attainable goals (not flimsy vague resolutions).