MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

Well, everyone typically has resolutions sometime around the beginning of a new year. As a sidenote, I find it interesting that in our continually more insulated society, we still find newness at the turn of the year. Sure, it marks some changes that are evident in everyday life. Writing 2009 instead of 2008 on your documents. Rolling over taxes, wages, spending to another year. But in all truth, it is just another day. Sure, it’s a day marked out clearly by heavenly events (spring, summer, fall, winter) and we continually adjust our schedules and time-sense to make it clear to us when it’s happened. But we choose to make the day different. We could go on about the day, thinking no difference about it than any other. But I digress…

My resolutions this year will be a bit different than ones in years past. For one, some of them are joined with my wife. And also, I intend to actually accomplish a few of them, rather than pie-in-the-sky ruminations. Some of them, I started the first day of the New Year. 

The holidays can be a time for reflection, among other things. Relatives that you don’t see very often come into town, and you reflect on how wonderful it was to see them, and reflect on how much you wish that it could be more often. Logical constructs appear randomly to remind you of the circumstances dictating the current situations, and defeat is accepted. You speak frankly with those whom you love, barriers of feelings and space broken down by limited time and chosen words, chosen actions. But ultimately, time passes quickly for both parties, and you are separated and left still in a state of reflection.

My goals this year are motivated by many aspects of humanity: the physical, the professional, the emotional. But I will jump straight into the goals and leave you with the details as follows.

Health

1. Immediate and total cessation of soda drinking. My wife will be joining me on this goal. Basically, our soda consumption had reached epic levels, and reflection upon the vast amount of daily liquid calories grossed by soda consumption realized a goal of simply stopping. This cessation will leave us heavily addicted to both major properties of soda: sugar and caffeine. Being that the sugar is the major proponent for change, I will seek out caffeine elsewhere to curb that addiction. But the sugar will lapse with time.
2. Get to a more healthy weight. I typically weigh somewhere between 220 and 225. This translates to a BMI that approaches obesity (28.2-28.9). After the holiday food rush (massive food intake coupled with entire lapsation of exercise) my weight spiked towards 230, dangerously close to obesity. To get within the parameters of a “healthy weight” as dictated by BMI, my goal weight would be 195 (BMI of 25, the very high end of healthiness). That is a 30 pound differential of my average weight. Based upon the amount of pop that I was drinking before (average of about 3 cans per day == 450 calories), if I did nothing else besides ceasing pop consumption and not replacing it with other calories (tea, coffee), I would drop 49 pounds (in a reality unaffected by descending exponential caloric need with weight loss). More realistically, with some caloric replacement by coffee and teas, (still in an unaffected virtual reality) I would still lose 36 pounds! Obviously, this reality is not entirely the case, as already stated. But with proper exercise and improvement in diet in areas other than liquids, it is most certainly possible.

Personal/Professional Skills

1. Implement source control. Utilizing SVN or Git or other methods of source control has proven to be extremely valuable and effective for programmers the world round. I can think of many circumstances within the last year where enforced source control (checking in/out code) would’ve solved problems, especially with our larger sites/projects where multiple persons are developing. This is also a valuable skill when marketing yourself in the future, since source control is such an essential mechanism for production in a team or project environment.
2. Further develop .NET skills (C#/VB.NET). Despite my qualms about transitioning to an entirely different paradigm, it’s prevalence in the marketplace neccesitates my at least minimum proficiency in utilizing it. I have some experience with ASP, which functions in a normal GET/POST environment like most other languages, but ASP.NET functions inside the Windows Forms control mechanism with Viewstates and other specialized controls. As I mentioned before, I am not particularly a fan of this procedure, but it seems to work for others, and I’m always interested in learning a new skill, particulary if it will be useful in the future.

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