Today, Kent and I returned from four days in Norfolk, VA, for the annual CALLERLAB convention. Best sleep I've had in weeks.

I moderated a panel discussion on social media, and was a panelist for a discussion on identity theft (but essentially had the floor to myself). Ultimately, those were actually the only sessions I attended: I simply had no interest in any of the other panels over two full days of presentations either because it was outside of my interest, or because I've seen the topic ad nauseum in prior years. I'm mercifully not on any of the standing committees.

If I hadn't been a presenter, I would have blown off that entire conference in favour of catching up on sleep, work and personal projects, all which have been deferred over the past month because of outside commitments.

The conference itself is worthwhile for most square dance callers and I'd definitely encourage new callers to attend, but I'm finding myself overstretched March-April every year, just like I do November-December. I've been whittling back my outside commitments but I clearly need to cut more from my schedule to make room for myself.

Events still upcoming:
- trailer dewinterizing weekend;
- Independence Squares' fly-in weekend;
- John Marshall C2 weekend;
- MidAtlantic Challenage Association weekend;
- Pass the Ocean, Hon! weekend.

Next year, most of these will be re-evaluated. I'm largely attending the IS weekend out of a sense of obligation, habit and to demonstrate local support: I haven't actually danced more than 1-2 tips in total over the past three years. I like John's C2 weekend, but only if I can get enough rest before, during & after. I'm not sure I want to run for MACA VP again when the position comes up: the toughest part of the VP job is coordinating the spring festival which is traditionally scheduled for a time when I am least able to spare time to do it. And PTOH is in the same boat as IS: I attend out of obligation & habit, but almost never dance. I support the local club --I am still one of their club callers-- but the weekend is incredibly draining.

The only options at this point is to continue trimming events to rebalance my time & energy, as well as shedding some titles, positions and volunteer roles. Obligations are set for 2016, but 2017 is now on notice.

I'm currently in Punta Gorda, Florida, here with Michael & Kent for a memorial service for Kent's mother, Zoe Forrester, who passed away last August. Kent's parents and paternal grandparents have wintered here since 1980 and consider it their primary residence (at least for tax and insurance purposes) so it is very fitting that we distribute the last of Zoe's ashes here on what would have been her 80th birthday.

This is my second visit to Florida, the first being the GALA Choruses festival in 1996 in Tampa, just north of here. I didn't see much of Tampa except for the downtown core where the festival was being held, not to mention nothing outside the city. This trip is a bit different.

We always joke about how Florida is God's Waiting Room, a place packed to the rafters with the retired, near-dead and dead. Yup, it's much truer than I knew: In our drives about town, there is a medical clinic or a funeral home on every other block. And the clinics are all hyper-specialized: not just ophthamologists but specialists on cataracts, not just surgeons but specialists in coronary bypass and knee replacements, not just dermatologists but skin cancer treatments, and so on. And huge billboards for no-frills cremations, starting at $650! And I haven't seen a single elementary or secondary school yet.

The senior demographic skews local business in a way I hadn't anticipated: if your customer base doesn't keep/care about office hours, then the routine of the day takes on a new tilt. Meals skew to earlier times: peak dinner hour here seems to be 5-6pm, but DC's is more 7-8pm. We went out for Thai food last night naively thinking we were going to beat the heaviest of the dinner crowd at 6pm but found we were in the trailing edge of a mass of people. Our lunch with family yesterday was 1pm, barely beating a hoard of people arriving after 1:30pm. It's going to take some time to map out other peculiarities of local timing.

One thing very unexpected: cows. As we drove through the rural space between Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, among other places, we passed several open fields of cows. While Florida paid a lot of money to be successfully known as a producer of orange juice, I had no idea it was also a significant player in beef production. Huh.

The past 48 hours have been a bit of a blur, largely because I was fighting off a nasty cold and have been severely medicated to mediate the symptoms enough to let me (barely) function. Today, we're having brunch, picking up some supplies for the memorial service (the cake, some ice cream, flowers, etc.), then heading to the RV park where the family has gathered. I'm hoping for a bit of spare time to lift some weights at their gym and perhaps soak in the pool before the service starts at 4pm.

No one is sure exactly how long the service will run as, well, how to put this delicately... Forresters make god-awful project managers. Seriously. Not a one of them can focus on an agenda item for more than three seconds before willing drifting off onto some unrelated tangent. It's a constant chorus of "Oh, say, that reminds me..." Great for group therapy, lousy for getting things done. Bless their hearts.

I'm usually pretty good about planning ahead and catching details others would totally miss. Today, not so much.

While packing for the gym, I realized that I hadn't removed my protein shake bottle from the backpack from my last workout. Ewww. OK, that's in the dishwasher now but I had to find an alternate bottle. I found out later after much leakage that the bottle and the lid I had located were not a matching set. Oops.

While jeans & shirts have a stated size, there is considerable variation even within a given brand on the actual sizing. I have several pairs of jeans of the same brand which are labelled 32x32: while the leg length is fine, some are very tight in the waist while others have ample space, all despite having the same declared size. Knowing this, I've learned to identify my tight fit jeans from my comfortable fit ones as needed.

This morning, I accidentally grabbed a pair of the tight fit jeans. Not a problem except that today was leg day at the gym. Following my workout, I couldn't fit into those jeans. I had to go home wearing my track pants.

I think some extra sleep is in order to get my brain back into gear.

I'm not very close to much of my extended family. Or my close family. Or anyone for that matter. It's an introvert thing, and it doesn't help that most of my family is mostly crazy or composed of alien replicants. That said, I have almost no contact at all with my father's side of the family: they're complete strangers with whom I happen to share some minor portion of DNA.

Facebook is a boon then, in that I get to see what insanity is happening elsewhere in my geneology around the planet and therefore knowing when not to answer the phone.

Just after xmas, I learned via FB that my cousin, Andy, began suffering from extensive internal bleeding, perhaps related to his Crohn's Disease. After many transfusions, a medically-induced coma and extensive medical intervention, he stabilized a couple of days ago. Indeed, yesterday, I heard he was awake, communicating easily and event got out of bed to stretch a bit, albeit with the help of a walker. All good news.

I also heard yesterday morning that Andy's friends had set up a gofundme.com account in his name since Andy will be recovering for at least another month but there will still be mortgage, food & utilities payments to address. (I believe Andy is married but have no idea if he has kids or the level of his family's means.) I donated some money but I'm happy for Andy that many other people have too: as of this writing, $6,275 has been raised, well above the original $2,000 goal.

All of this gives me some hope for humanity. A person was suffering, but thanks to modern medicine, that same person is recovering. And thanks to Canadian socialized medicine, he's doing it without a mountain of debt compelling personal bankruptcy.

And I think Andy must be doing something right with his life that so many people aren't just sending hopes & prayers, but are also doing practical things to help his family. Sending cash is only a part of that, but it's an exceedingly flexible & useful part. Andy has a network of support.

And it makes me happy that many people are willing to help. It's too easy to look the other way or decide that one's resources are too limited & sparse to be shared, or at least to be shared outside of one's own household.

There's hope for our species after all.

On weekends and holidays, I tend to be at the gym for 8am opening. I like to get my workout done so I can move on with the rest of the day, the boys may not be active at that hour so I get more waking time with them later in the day, and I can beat most of the crowds to the weight floor and not have to interrupt my routine for equipment to be available.

The downside of being there very early is that you are faced with the mess from the night before:

Dumbbells everywhere, not to mention discarded water bottles, tissues, hand towels, etc.. And because it is my role & purpose in life to bring order to a chaotic universe, I put everything back where it should be.

Part of it is to resist the forces of chaos, part of it is for my own safety so I don't trip over someone else's unracked weights. A huge part though is empathy for other gym users: there's nothing more frustrating than knowing there should be plenty of 15lb or 20lb dumbbells around but none of them are in the racks or in obvious use by anyone else. A general walk around the entire floor will find the missing pieces laying about in odd corners of the weight floor, the yoga studio, the spin class, the basketball court, the strairwell, the fire escapes and, interstingly, the elevator. I collect them all and bring them back to the racks where they belong.

The staff are no doubt underpaid --even the trainers are paid a pittance-- but I would think the night crew should be walking through the gym to remove forgotten items from the equipment and clean up the obvious garbage. I don't expect them to heft around 125 lb dumbbells, but there's no excuse for not at least moving the 5 lb ones.

I haven't thought much about new year's resolutions this time around. For the most part, anything I could write as a resolution is already a project in progress.

Here's what I plan for the coming year:

• more rest & recreation, especially reading;
  
• more trailer time. It's paid for, let's use it.
  
• more date nights
  
• more happy hours
  
• more massages. 2015 was OK, 2016 will be better.
  
• more travel. NYC, Europe, Canada, maybe Puerto Rico.
  
• continue saving money. I've been stuffing away $200/paycheque into a savings account, nipping into it on occasion to finance special projects.
  
• ongoing gym workouts, updating my workout plan in January
  
• adding running to my workouts --presuming my left knee stop screaming at me.
  
• revising my diet for reduced sugar, more protein
  
• catching up on many of the online & web-based courses I have bookmarked or stored on my laptop. If nothing else, I need the disk space back.
  
• learn to ride a motorcycle
  

I wish I could say I've made enormous progress at the gym, but I'm uncertain if there was actually any made.

By my measurements, my arms, chest, waist, weight and body fat composition are almost no different today than they were a year ago: I've added a half-inch to my chest, hips, upper arms and neck, but that's it. My percentage body fat was flat, as was my overall weight.

Despite the absence of changes in volume, I am stronger: my weight stack has increased over the year, especially the leg days.

Part of the problem was a shoulder blade injury in early summer which has kept me from doing a lot of back & shoulder exercises until lately. I'm not quite back onto my usual routine, but am not far off. Carpal tunnel issues still come up periodically as nearly everything I do has some component of gripping, lifting or pushing with my hands. That wouldn't be so bad except for the vast amounts of typing I do through the course of my day for work, among other things. Pacing and patience is required.



In December, I began modifying my gym routine: instead of three sets of 12 reps for most exercises, I'm now doing eight sets of eight reps with slightly less weight. The theory is that I'm still working muscles to exhaustion but emphasizing volume for each exercise rather than absolute muscle strain. In theory, this should also build up some muscle volume for visual aesthetics; I gladly admit that I'd like to look as good on the outside as I feel on the inside, and I have received some appreciative comments from time to time, noting that my workouts are making a visible difference.

This morning, I spent $99 for a DEXA scan. It's a head-to-toe pencil x-ray scan: lay down on the scanner bed while the x-ray emitter in an arm suspended over the table zips side-to-side as the arm itself travels the length of the bed. While these scans are most commonly used for measuring bone density --mine is 1.362 g/cm^2, a high level of density-- they are useful for measuring body fat. Indeed, it is the gold standard for measuring fat and can indicate percentages of body fat in various parts of the body.

From the scan, can say that my overall body fat is 25.1%. My goal is to get that into the 18-20% range, although that will take some work: clearly, everything I've been doing thus far isn't getting me anywhere. My current weight is 183.7 lbs: 176.8 lbs of tissue, 44.4 lbs fat, 132.4 lbs lean, 7.0 lbs bone mineral content. 32.6% of that fat is in the abdomen/belly area, 21% in the hips/pelvis --this is a relatively normal distribution, apple-shaped rather than pear-shaped. The arms have about 20.2% fat, legs 19.5%, trunk (chest+abdomen) 29.9%.

My arms and legs are fairly well balanced with nearly equal distributions of fat, bone & muscle in each. My left torso is slightly more developed than my right, probably a result of favouring my left side through the summer while my right shoulder was injured, but the difference isn't statistically huge.

In short, yeah, I have fat to lose. Losing a bit more than 5% of that fat would achieve my 2016 goals, a total of about 10 lbs off my current weight. Alternatively, I could gain 30 lbs of muscle while holding the fat stable, thus reducing the percentage fat to the same 20% level --which seems relatively unlikely although not an unworthy goal.

One of the major points I've come to appreciate is that I don't eat enough protein to get the muscle growth I'd like. In effect, I'm putting in the effort on the weight floor but not supporting my body's attempts to meet my demands. I'm not a professional weightlifter so a moderate goal of 1g per pound of lean body mass (gods, I hate mixed measuring systems, but that's the rule of thumb here) is appropriate. I now have DEXA proof my lean body mass is 139.3 lbs so I should be getting about 140g of protein daily. How hard can that be?

Well, there are six grams of protein in an egg, 38g in a cup of diced chicken, 8g in a cup of milk (interestingly, soy milk is exactly the same: 8g), 23g in a 3oz portion of steak. In short, yes, 140g is achievable but it's gonna take a huge amount of eating. About two dozen eggs or a quarter of diced chicken *daily*. And it would take still more if I really wanted to beef up.

At the moment, I have no idea how I'm going to do this: I've set aside some time this weekend to figure out how I could possible eat this much protein. There's probably going to be a lot of whey protein supplements in my future... any advice on this is welcome.

This weekend, I'm also going to revise my workout regimen, partly to shake up my routine a bit, and partly to stretch myself into areas I haven't ventured. My chest development lately is pretty good, but I want to work the upper chest more aggressively for a more balanced appearance. My legs are plenty strong so I don't feel a compelling need to keep hammering them more than the squats & inverted leg press work I already have, especially since a leg workout gets incorporated into many of my other full-body exercises. I anticipate fewer barbell and more dumbbell workouts in future, pushing for better balance and internal stabilization. And I need to get my neglected back & shoulders back up to par without re-injuring myself. The project never ends.

I hardly know where to start on 2015...

Workwise, it was a see-saw year. Because of management & staffing issues going back to late 2014, I had had enough by March. My team of six was whittled down to a team of two (soon to be one), the powers-that-be were delaying the replacement of our failing storage array, and our product line seemed to be in utter disarray. In short, it was ugly and my work life had become a daily struggle to get out of bed.

I got myself certified for Amazon Web Services to add to & freshen my resume. I interviewed at several places, turned down a couple of offers as they didn't seem a good fit for me for sundry reasons, and talked with a lot of recruiters to see what was going on out in the world. In all, there were many opportunities if I needed a job immediately.

Then I did something which was outside of my normal comfort zone: I telephoned our new CTO directly to tell him precisely how ugly things had become for me and my team, and to ask him to make a case why I shouldn't turn in my resignation in the next few business days. And to my surprise, he listened and we had a good discussion.

The CTO had only been on the job for approximately four weeks at that point so the various problems were not his fault; he asked me for three months so he could prove himself and make improvements. If after 90 days things were still ugly, he'd accept my resignation and wish me well.

And he did exactly what he promised. Some of the easier issues were tackled quickly, some took a few weeks and the hiring of new team members took closer to four months, but he did address everything I brought to him. Even the storage array issue was tackled: a test unit for our non-production systems was purchased within the three month period, and a proper larger unit for Production was purchased later in the year. My team is now up to three bodies. We've tightened our procedures for ticket review & execution. We've invested in automation of trivial matters. We shut down an unprofitable division of the firm, giving my team new hardware to replace the aging & failing components we loathed.

So here I am at the end of 2015, wrapping up my seventh year working for Deem (formerly Rearden Commerce), and I'm content to stay where I am. The pay is good, I feel valued & useful, and there are many learning opportunities for new tech. Life is good.

The past month has required some ridiculous working hours, but all is good. The old storage array went off support at the end of September, and we had been gradually losing hard drives since then. As I write this, there are eight dead drives in that machine. We do have the new storage array however so I had been working weekends & nights to migrate the critical data off the old Fujitsu array onto the new Fujitsu one. There is still a lot of data to move, but the most critical parts are done so I can sleep nights once again.

I haven't spent this much time in storage area networks in years, or in Veritas clustering & volume management. All of these things however are useful for maintaining a marketable skillset.

We've also been stepping up the virtualization of applications in our production & non-production systems. We had used the "vserver" package previously to do virtualization on Linux, but it didn't have memory, disk, or CPU usage restrictions. That package wasn't supported in later versions of Ubuntu Linux so we've migrated to Xen for virtualization. A large part of my summer was spent moving apps over to Xen guests but 230+ apps later, it's nearly done. If we didn't have an end-of-year production freeze, I would have finished up everything this month.

In the coming year, I need to finish migrating data off the old storage array, then figure out how to dispose of three refrigerator-sized cabinets of disks. The old traffic balancers will be phased out in favour of F5 units. I finish our migration off old Ubuntu and older RedHat Linux platforms into Ubuntu 14 and Xen. And there will be many other little things which pop up periodically. It never ends --and that's a good thing for my bank account.

As of today, I have 4,200 days left until retirement. Sweet!

The best advice I received when I started my body improvement/gym adventures began was to take photos at intervals. I keep a spreadsheet of lifting and body measurements stats so I can see my own numeric progress, but photos give me a better sense of what's working and what isn't.

My primary objective at the time was to build up some overall body strenth, not only to help heft 40lb servers over my head for racking as needed for work, but also to reduce my periodic back pains, build up some endurance and, hopefully, stave off the ravages of old age just a few years longer. I was 46 and my natural youthful indestructibility was clearly fading off rapidly. And hey, if I could get some bigger arms & chest for purely cosmetic feel-good reasons, why not? Vanity isn't a bad thing if it simultaneously fuels health goals.

I typically run a three-part schedule: leg & core day, arms & chest day, back & shoulders day. I prefer free weights over machines wherever possible so the core typically gets a workout every time anyway. Leg day used to feel the most productive, but since my legs were already in pretty good shape anyway, it was an easy, low-set bar.

I haven't done bench presses. Since I go to the gym solo, I don't have a spotting partner so a bench press would have some risk should I need assistance. I'm not certain I would need a partner for encouragement anyway as my own determination is enough to get me to the gym three times per week as well as dig deep for the last couple of reps. Several friends have given me the support & encouragement in the longer run and reminding me of the larger goals.

Over time, I've found that the 8:30-10am window at my gym is ideal. The conventionally-employed folks have been & gone in the early morning and many of the classes haven't started yet so there's room in the locker rooms. I get to breeze in and rarely have to wait for my turn at the equipment, and never for the cardio workout following. I have gone in evenings periodically but try to go after 9pm, again to avoid the worst of the crowds.

( Photos below the cut... )

The biggest revelation is that I don't so selfies worth a damn: angles, lighting, etc.. *sigh*

Hefting servers around the data center is so much easier than it used to be. I was seeking a chiropractor in late 2013 for some back issues but those pains have vanished completely. And as I said, I can follow the numbers to see I can squat, press & curl much higher weights than I could at any time earlier in my life.

Regrets? That I didn't start sooner --like when I was 20. That while LA Fitness is all over the greater DC area, there's not a single one in the SF Bay area so I have to pay extra for guest privileges at some other chain when I travel, and that hotel gyms aren't better equipped so I wouldn't have to pay at all.

Oddly, the gym schedule has affected my career activities a bit. I'm not actively job hunting, but if an opportunity arose, I would have to consider seriously how it would impact my gym schedule. Who knew that such a thing would ever be a consideration?

2014 is over already? I really wasn't finished with the nineties yet either, but time marches on.

So, what do we make of this year?

2014 Health

I'm still alive... that has to count for something. In a nod to graceful aging and not dying (yet), I now have bifocal progressive lenses in my glasses. I have to admit they've made my life much easier.

I had two nasty bouts with kidney stones this summer, but that's been resolved and I'm working with my urologist to figure out some sort of long term plan to avoid them for (hopefully) the rest of my life. This was my eighth time at that particular party so I figure I've paid my dues and have earned a stone-free old age.

At some point this spring (I'm still not sure exactly when or how), I hurt my left shoulder. It wasn't incapacitating or required surgery, but it made some gym exercises impossible until mid-fall. Over the past three months, I've been slowly working that area again, trying to strengthen it against future injuries and generally returning to my previous routine. So far, so good.

My membership with LA Fitness expired in July, but I got a good deal on a three year renewal so I'm good until 2017.

The gym progress feels both good and bad these days.

On the good side, the weights I'm using have increased significantly from the beginning of the year. Squat weight has risen from 140lbs to 180lbs, leg press from 360lbs to 400lbs, chest press from 145lbs to 175lbs, dumbbell curls from 45lbs to 70lbs, etc.. Measurements of my chest, upper arm and forearm have all improved too, although not as much as I'd like –call that a 2015 goal.

On the bad side, after some progress on the percentage body fat, dropping from 20.4% in January to a low of 18.2% in November, it rebounded to 18.9% as of today. My BMI was stable at 26 until today's measurement of 26.6. My weight drifted down from 176lbs in January to a low of 172lbs in September, but is now back to approximately 180lbs. I'm less concerned about the weight gain as I believe much of that was muscle, but the percentage body fat is stubbornly high. That said, while I had originally planned to reduce it in 2014, I learned that it would be damn near impossible to make significant progress on that while also trying to add muscle: it's practically contradictory, so I chose muscle growth. Losing much of the summer to my shoulder injury didn't help.

Overall, I'm content with the improvements in my health & body, and hope to see further improvements in 2015.


2014 Home

This year, we had the front steps and front walkway rebuilt as the old mortar and cement were crumbling after 20 years of foot traffic.

We installed solar panels in the spring of 2014. While our solar productivity has nosedived in the fall thanks to cloudy days, lots of rain, shorter days and less intense sunlight, we're still in surplus territory thanks to some very bright & productive summer days. And the income from the solar renewable energy credits hasn't hurt either.

The couch and armchair in the living room were replaced this fall as well. The new ones are incredibly comfortable.

We've also been slowly divesting ourselves of a lot of the junk that has been cluttering the basement rec room and computer bunker. That's still a work in progress.

My 2001 Honda Civic passed away this December. The first clue was the transmission dying, but other expensive repairs were going to be needed to make it fully roadworthy again, an estimated price tag twice that the of the Kelly Blue Book value. In the end, the car was donated to the local county fire & rescue training facility for practice rescues. At this point, I'm not planning to replace the car: we'll see how long we can make do with the remaining two vehicles. I'd be perfectly happy to not have to spend extra money for another car.

One of the less romantic functions accomplished this year was the updating of the wills, medical powers-of-attorney, etc.. Kent and I had the paperwork done 10+ years ago, but we needed an updated set to include & protect Michael, not to mention reflect our own life changes.


2014 Travel

I've been to the San Francisco Bay area a couple of times this year on business, not to mention a couple of runs to our Secaucus, NJ, office. I love the sense of adventure and change of scenery, even if I do have to work extended hours on those visits. It also gives me a sense of purpose, direction and productivity which frequently evades me when I'm just working from home: I return to my hotel room feeling like I've done something useful, rather than just noting that I've worked a reasonable number of hours that day and clocking out.

We visited Cleveland for one daughter's baby shower. And baby Hunter arrived in September in good health. Hunter and his parents visited for xmas... he's a delightful little guy and it was wonderful to spend some time with the extended family.

The three of us went up to Toronto for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary at the end of June. We also went as tourists to Ottawa and Gananoque, enjoying Canada Day in the nation's capital, doing some sight-seeing and going on a 1000 Island boat cruise. We need to do more of that.

Our trailer in West Virginia continues to be our island of tranquility, now it its 10th year. We really need to find out how we can schedule more weekends there.


2014 Work & Geekdom

I'm still with Deem, Inc., my sixth year. I received two raises this year (one from a general organizational restructuring, the other merit) exceeding my income goals by a wide margin. And just before xmas, we finally got the new stock option numbers after being in limbo for over a year in capital restructuring. Now to wait for our IPO so those options might potentially be worth something...

Sadly, my team was severely downsized earlier in the year. In January, we were a team of six (me on th east coast, five in California); now we're just me and one guy in SF. We did have an open position being advertised, but I've recently learned the powers-that-be have trashed that position as well.

We've scaled back the workload and number of projects to match the reduced staffing, but I'm still fielding complaints from other teams: “When we asked for X last year, you guys gave us an instant response. Why do we need to wait three days for the same thing? WTF is wrong with you incompentent idiots?” At which point I explain sweetly we don't have the bandwidth so we're not entertaining last minute requests from people who are incapable of planning their projects or anticipating their own deadlines. I'm nothing if not sweetness & light.

I had some work-related projects suspended this year but some success in others. I had been hoping to rebuild entirely our array of LDAP, DNS and web servers, as well as retire some older RedHat Linux and Ubuntu operating systems, but the powers-that-be froze the requests for new hardware: the existing hardware is typically eight years old so I'm getting increasingly nervous about the hardware failure rates and the inability to get patches for older operating systems.

Speaking of which: Poodle, Heartbleed, Shellshock. A good time was had by none. In each case, I was able to get current patches from the vendors for our newer systems, but had to fetch & compile source code, then deploy fixes for our older ones. I lost too many hours dealing with this stuff in 2014; I want all older systems retired in 2015.

On a separate front, I'm learning R, OpenStack and Hadoop in my spare time, trying to keep my skills semi-relevant just in case I do get downsized or get a job offer so good I can't refuse. I'm not actively job hunting, but fortune favours the prepared.

I've tossed all of my old desktop machines in my home computer bunker. All of that equipment has been replaced with refurbished laptops I've purchased from eBay. For any new experiment or project, I just swap out a hard drive and have an entirely new bare metal sandbox. I could use VirtualBox, Xen or such to do emulation, but I've occasionally had occasional bad luck with those in the past, attempting to resolve an issue in my project only to find an unusual interaction with the container was actually the source of the error. Educational, but it interrupts my flow and my goals.


2014 Square Dancing

I've been cutting back my commitments and dance activities dramatically since the end of 2013. Frankly, I've been over-extended and have run out of fuel. I've left nearly every committee and board position I used to have. I've passed up a few square dance weekends and guest calling gigs in favour of sleeping at home or catching up on personal reading. I haven't attended or organized any caller schools, workshops, conventions or practice sessions this year and don't have any plans to do so in the near future. I'm also reconsidering the expense of my various caller association memberships.

That said, I'm still calling periodically for the DC Lambda Squares, Chesapeake Squares and our Wednesday C2 group, but not much more than that. I had been flirting with learning C3A in 2013, but have since abandoned those plans as it will take a huge amount of dedication to learn, not to mention even more hours of travel & practice to internalize it.

In all, it's still fun, but I have higher priorities which have been otherwise neglected the past few years.


2014 Other Projects, Activities & Surprises

I estimate I've read more books in the past year than I did in the prior five. This is a very, very good thing.

I lost my Samsung tablet in my last business trip to San Francisco: my suspicion was that I left it on the flight, or possibly on BART. Anyway, I contacted the lost & found offices, resigned myself to its loss and bought a low-end (read: disposable) Android-based tablet from Fry's Electronics for $50 which would be my cheap-ass ebook reader in future. And then the kind folks at Virgin Atlantic found my Samsung tablet and shipped it back to me! Yay!

I've reached that point in my life where serious retirement planning is a thing. It's been a theoretical activity over the past number of years, stuffing money away into my RRSP (Canada) and 401k/IRA (US) for a nebulous time in the far future when I might leave the workforce. I'm old enough now to force some clarification on that nebulous time: July 1, 2027, the July 1 after my 60th birthday. As of this writing, I have 4,564 days left to go. That said, I may defer my actual retirement: I just want to re-design my life to allow me the option of retirement at 60 if I chose. We've started some household renovations to make life easier for slower, clumsier, arthritic bodies, as well as reducing our operating costs, and there will be more in future.