Happy New Year

It's a new year. Welcome! Wishing you the best for 2011! (Ouch, busted: I initially wrote 2010, thank god this is not a type writer).

Any resolutions? Here are mine (beta):
- Launch my company
- Launch the local job website that I am currently working at
- Get some exercises in my daily routine to train my back muscles
- Launch new blogs, for fun and learning

S.M.A.R.T
In my language we have an acronym called SMART. it translates quite reasonably to English, and I always thought that's where it originates, but I'm not sure anymore. Anyways:

SMART = 
Specific
Measurable
Acceptable
Reasonable
Time-bound

Targets are SMART when they follow all of these guidelines. A SMART guideline is more motivating and easier to monitor and evaluate. Even the process trying to make a target SMART is beneficial: it encourages you to really think about your targets and look at them from different angles.

Problems (un-smartness)
My resolutions are not fully SMART. Are they time-bound? Well, perhaps coarsely because of the unwritten law that resolutions apply to the coming year only. But they definitely could improve time-bound wise. 'Launch new blogs': this lacks specificity. In an earlier I wrote I was thinking about 'one blog a month'. But is that reasonable? It makes no sense setting goals if they are not reasonable. This can even be demotivating.

My resolutions revisited
- I'll launch my company and will turnover (excluding VAT) 4k euro in the first year.
- We will launch the local jobsite in February, including 20 jobs, having 1k hits in March.
- Have a daily 15-min exercise routine running by the end of January to train my back muscles
- I will launch a new blog every two months, and post at least 30 posts per blog

Sounds perhaps less inspiring, with all the numbers and stuff, but makes it harder to cheat :-D

Meta
So this my last post in the December blog-month series. This means less posts on this blog, and more focused ones. So no more sandcastle building videos ;)

Motivation and Inspiration

Let's try to post a video! Wow, Blogger makes it freaking easy! Click video, search on Youtube, embed and done! So here's what I like as a replacement for my old Alfa. I can not afford it though :) I was never about cars, but nowadays I sometimes secretly dream about something decent to drive around in. The Alfa Romeo Giulietta keeps me motivated to get my company going. But the Alfa Romeo Giulietta is also inspiring, trying to be good in multiple areas at once (small, safe, affordable, sporty, stylish, etc) without major concessions. 

Specialized or multi-disciplined?

In professional life you can roughly take two roads: specialize in one thing (know a lot about a little) or become less-than-specialized in a broad range of subjects (know a little about a lot). If you take these to extremes, you have on one hand people that know everything about nothing and on the other hand, people that know nothing about everything. Which is better?

I present you, the Alfa Giulietta :-D

Without heart, we would be mere machines

Neck Fkt

Talking about new year resolutions. For the fourth time in a few weeks my neck/back is being a b*tch. I know I am just a bit too long, my posture is bad if not terrible, and I like to sit behind a computer screen a lot (also, I have to). I get through the year with some minor inconveniences, but these few weeks I apparently hit the Jackpot.

I was thinking that maybe this should be the inspiration for my new year resolutions, taking precautions to prevent this from happening again in the future. But how to tackle this incredibly vague set of symptoms?

The Four Hour Body - By Tim Ferris
Tim Ferris, the inspiring guy behind the book 'The Four Hour Workweek', has published a new book, called 'The Four Hour Body'. I haven't read it (yet) but the book is about tweaking your own body. This can sound creepy, and part of the book might actually be so. But then again, there's nothing creepy to changing your breakfast rituals to get rid of your sleeping disorder.

Self experimentation
On a meta-level (remember the meta blog post?), the book also makes a statement for self experimentation. My scientific alarm bells went off, screaming "n = 1". And I still think the translational value (to other individuals) is very low for results obtained from self experiments. However, my science background also learned me how we are all different. There's a lot of momentum now for 'personalized medicine', for instance based on ones genes. Therefore, I think the principles of experimenting (ie trying out certain treatments or therapies and observing the results, consistently) on oneself might be very useful. But where to start?

Cure Together
On the website Cure Together you can enter the 'condition(s)' you have, and fill in surveys about your complaints and the treatments you tried (and how effective they were). Then you can compare your 'profile' to others', see statistics based on the data from all users, and of course get in contact to others. Also, the site enables you to keep track of whatever personal data you want to keep track off. It sounds great, but all together I am not yet convinced it is going to be very useful. But perhaps I have to try and see past the surface!

Countdown

And suddenly it struck. Countdown has started! Almost inaudible at first, hesitating perhaps, afraid to to forget, anxious to let go, nevertheless, slowly but surely growing into a roar of ecstasy, full of excitement and confidence. A new year will start. And it will start soon. Low and behold, it will bring us the date of all dates: 11-11-11.

But first there will be countless of lists. We will look back at the year that lies behind us, the soccer world cup, the Olympics. Haiti earthquake. Crisis. Google Zeitgeist takes you on a tour. And Christmas of course, 2 days of peace, preluding 363 days of needless killing.

And then there will be new year's resolutions. I'm starting to panic. I have none. I like my life.

Nah, do I? Or is it the other way around? Am I making resolutions on a daily basis? One that is still standing is writing a blogpost a day. I admit I missed one, but I made up for it today! And I discovered images. I like photography so maybe I should also post some of my own. An image-post would fit nicely with my plan to try out various types of blogposts. In the meantime my blog's getting some visits every now and then.

And my new year's resolution? Let me sleep on it.

Be thankful

I'm just home after a great night with my friends. There was a lot of food, drinks, presents and most importantly: joy. It is so nice to be around people that accept you the way you are. It is a cliché, I know. But that doesn't make it less true.

Count your Blessings
If good things are in your life, don't take them for granted. Be aware. Be thankful. I was actually just writing this post to write about how good it is to have nice friends. But once you start counting, there's always so much more!

Food
Perhaps you are religious and thank for your food every dinner (in which case I hope you don't forget to feel thankful as well). Otherwise, perhaps you should? Every year 15 million children die of hunger. Fif-teen-mil-lion. Of hunger alone. Think of that! Don't feel guilty with every bite you take, but be aware. And be thankful.

Friends
So we had this discussion today about those that didn't fit in our group and were perhaps left behind a little. Where actually does ones responsibility stop? Respecting others - even those that do not share any interest with you - might be a good start. But then what?

I do think those that are snug and secure in a group have some responsibility towards those who don't. It is the easiest thing to - once you are taken up in a group - lean back and enjoy the ride. Well, enjoy you should. Lean back, to my opinion, you should not.

Getting respect and acknowledgement can often be painstakingly hard and depends on others. Giving it however is easy and something you can do, always, without being dependent on others. The nice (or perhaps idealistic) thing of course is: once when we all give it, getting it comes for free as well!

Now, I'm gonna be thankful for the sleep I will get, for the protection of my house, the warmth of my bed, and for the men and women who are awake during that time to keep everything running. And for you of course. Reading this. Thank. You.

Blog Month

Last month was 'reply' month: I would deliberately respond / reply to mails and stuff faster and more often than I normally would (I sometimes 'choke', especially if it is unclear if a reaction is 'required'). It wasn't perfect, but at least it made me more aware of things.

A Blogpost a Day...Keeps the Doctor Away
This month is blog month (as has been decided by me, myself, and I). I want to write a post everyday, on various subjects, in both English and my native language. I hope this will give me some insights, in what I like to do, what comes naturally and what's a pain. Subsequently, I should be able to make some choices, blog-wise at least. "To Blog", means nothing. To write with joy something at least mildly coherent that adds a little to the world (be it an App Engine tutorial or a life lesson), that's what it's all about!

Really?
"I want to write a post every day". Yes, it sounds ambitious. Well it doesn't only sound like that, it really is.. I am aware of that. It might be just phase. If it's 2015 and this post is still the last one on this blog: sorry, I didn't make it after all.

New design
And while I was at it, I decided to pimp the design a little. Just basic stuff (except for the migration of the Google Analytics and Syntax Highlighter snippets), because my aim for this blog was to make use of existing technology and minimize efforts in designing & coding (trust me, I do my share amount of those during the rest of the week). Rounded corners, transparency, and a handful of fluffy clouds. Me like.

From the couch in my cleaned up living room, candles on the table, Yiruma piano music playing softly in the background, I'm out. For now.

Googlify your life

Although Google is still mainly known as THE search engine of the web, it offers tons of other services as well. For free. Some of them are quite known as well, such as Gmail and Google Calander, although not all of them are a heavily associated to Google and are brands on their own, such as YouTube and Blogger.

Here's the things that Google does for me, besides serving search results, ads and YouTube videos:

Gmail + Gmail Calander + Contacts + Syncing

Recently I found myself switching a lot between my home desktop computer, my laptop and my computer at work, and on each, between Windows and Ubuntu. You know you're doing something wrong if you have to reboot into windows to access this or that email, or when you brought your laptop for holiday but have to copy your friend's email addresses from your phone's address list.

So I switched to Gmail. This is the first time in my life I'm changing my email address, and I'm taking at least a year for the transition. I have a symbian phone (Nokia E71) and although it's crappy compared to the iPhones and Androids on Steroids it does support Google's sync. This allowed me to transfer my contacts and calander to Google and keep them synchronized from now on.

I set up POP-import so Gmail checks my old email account for me and places these mails in a seperate folder, to ease the transition. Next I transfered 13k mails from Outlook to Gmail. I did it the easy way:

1. Set up IMAP access in Google
2. Connect to the IMAP account from Outlook
3. Drag your email folders from local to Gmail (you might have to play a little bit first with folder names and labeling depening on your demands)
4. Wait (> overnight in my case :-D)

So now I have my all my contacts, all my email and all my calander items on every computer that has internet access. And I can search them...fast! Without having to hear the heart-breaking sounds of my harddisk crunching away when indexes are being rebuilt.

Google Docs

It's not Office, it's not even OpenOffice. But as long as you have internet, it's there. I have a few documents / spreadsheets that I have to access from different places, such as technical notes on a system that I have to read and change on location. For this purpose, Google Docs has proven to be very useful to me.

Blogger + Google Analytics

Having a Gmail account, setting up a blog at Blogger is quite easy. A well placed JavaScript script enables me to use Google Analytics to give me statistics. Google Analytics can do a lot more, by the way. It is a powerful tool for any webmaster.

AppEngine

AppEngine is amazing. I have recently started to use it to built web applications. In Java (it also supports Python, which appears to actually be more popular). And they are fully scalable. I admit it hase quite a learning curve, partly because it doesn't use SQL but Google's Bigtable. But I think it's worth it, although I have to see how it holds when going live. It's free as long as you don't exceed your quota's. But unlike your regular php-mysql site hosted at randomcheaphost.com it can handle heavy traffic bursts very well (same holds true long term traffic increases by the way).

Google Apps

I think the naming is confusing, Google AppEngine (appspot.com) vs Google Apps, but once you get the difference it's fine. Google Apps is Google-for-your-company (< 40 accounts is free, so personal use is deffinately an ooption). Google tools such as Docs and Gmail are accessed / addressed with name@yourdomain.com and different tools can be added (or blocked). You can also link an exsiting URL to Google Apps, although you have to change DNS records for that.

If you want to link your own URL to your AppEngine application, you can not go around Google Apps. That's how I use it at the moment, but it won't be long before I will be reading email sent to name@mycompany.nl via Gmail.

There's a lot more that Google offers, but at the moment I don't need it.

Maybe later.