Tag Archives: personal

Goals 2011 — Organization — Getting my life together

The PolyBlog
February 14 2011

On my eight-dimensional “wheel”, Intellect was broken into two segments — one for organization and one for learning. While “organization” may not be my highest priority within the wheel, it seemed like a good place to start. As part of my “org” segment, I included four elements from earlier lists:

  • Being organized — this includes things like maintaining my todo list, updating my goals annually, reviewing progress regularly etc. … in short, doing what I’m doing with this blog entry;
  • House — this used to be merged with the “family” segment under relationships, but it isn’t really about relationships, it is more about having things in decent maintenance mode within the home, whether it be the house itself or the yard, and that strikes me now as more about being organized than anything else;
  • Finances — Andrea and I have good jobs with decent incomes, but we haven’t been doing a whole lot in recent years in terms of planning, strategic budgeting, etc., but we’ve been wanting to do it for some time; and,
  • Computers — outside of the “creativity” mode, where I use my computer for a lot of things, there is an infrastructure in behind that really isn’t about creativity at all, it is just plain “getting my crap together” literally and figuratively.

Moving into planning for 2011 isn’t without some momentum from previous years:

  • Started my new tracking system in 2005, with improvements in 2007 and 2009;
  • Bought a house (2007);
  • Replaced roof (2009) and walkways (2010);
  • Installed clothesline for Andrea (2010);
  • Set up the baby’s room (2009);
  • Established RESP for Jacob (2010);
  • Consolidated shared finance options (2006-2010);
  • Made RRSP contributions (2005-2010);
  • Set up photos website (2006);
  • Bought a netbook for writing (2008); and,
  • Tested a server option with Linux (2008), some CMS options for the website (2007-2009).

Those aren’t the only accomplishments, but rather a glimpse of some highlights for the category. And, through prior planning exercises, I added five things in this category to my bucket list:

  1. Own a house — Purchased (2007);
  2. Finish my website — I’ve recently completed my web design, and although I have lots of features still planned to be added, it is essentially complete (2011);
  3. Make a garden — I don’t know why this one appeals to me exactly…I’m interested in the idea of growing something, growing food for our table. Oddly enough, I’ve never had the opportunity to actually do that before. Sure, I’ve picked stuff for the table, but not planted, watered, nurtured, nibbled. Even a planter with some veggies would suffice, doesn’t have to be huge.
  4. Design a house — This is not to be confused with building a house…I don’t want to build it, I just want to play with the parameters of designing one. I have some basic software that will do it, but heck, I’d be happy to do a real design even if the model is just made out of legos;
  5. Have a cottage — I can’t decide if this one should stay on the bucket list or not. With all the other things that Andrea and I put on our financial plan recently, the odds of owning a cottage are pretty slim. Growing up, my parents had a trailer out at Chemong Lake, and most of my family got to experience the enjoyment of it as kids, separation from it as young adults, and then the return to enjoy it with their families. But, for me, the lake was long gone before I got to “return” to it. No fishing in the aluminum boat, putting worms on harnesses and trolling for pickerel. No snowmobiling in the winter. No skiing up through the woods or on the lake. No shovelling the lake to make a rink. No swimming across the bay with rafts and dinghies. And it isn’t about the activities, not really. It is more that it was “our space”. A home away from home, somewhere to get away and relax. No telephone, no worries about what is happening in the city. No friends that you have to visit that weekend. And, now that I have a son, I realize that I really wanted to share that type of experience with him because it is a core part of my upbringing, a core part of who I am and why I regularly choose informal over formal. A little bit of “hick” in my “slick”, to paraphrase a friend. Something that keeps me from feeling like a complete nerd most of the time, tied to his computer. Without the cottage, I’ll have to work harder to create those times and experiences for Jacob, both the activities themselves and the natural feeling of the informal atmosphere. Because I really want him to have them.

But what do I focus on in 2011? It is unlikely that I’ll make a garden, design the house, or own a cottage this year. Fortunately, I have a LONG list of other items that I’m tracking in this category.

  1. First and foremost is organizing myself around the new eight-dimensional visual.
  2. On the “house” front, I really need to figure out a new office option for me. Awhile back, Andrea and I merged our offices in the house, and while it was good for conserving space, it isn’t really functional for me. I like being on the first floor, but I just plain need more space for my stuff around the computer. Which means I’m back to figuring out a revised office solution for the basement (new desk, organizing filing, sorting books, storing supplies, and weeding out some computer components). This also will hopefully lead nicely into a re-org of our storage areas, gearing up to shed some stuff from our lives by the fall (some to Peterborough, some for a garage sale).
  3. Some interior work needs to be done on the house if we decide to stay in it longer-term. For example, we hate our front hall closet. We’ll likely tweak it rather than replace it entirely, but make it more functional and accessible. We have had a longstanding “to do” item to have our ducts cleaned, and we’ll make that happen this year, plus deal with a humidifier attachment. Finally, our kitchen island is a bit less stable than we would like it, particularly as Jacob gets taller and more active. It would just be safer if it was fixed.
  4. We also have some exterior work to take care of this year. Some are simple like the assembly of a porch swing we got as a wedding gift (sigh, really, we want to use it) or setting up a basketball hoop that we bought on sale about the same time. Other items are a bit more complicated — probably resurfacing garage and driveway.
  5. On the financial front, things are starting to come together … no, we didn’t win the lottery, but we are seeing a financial planner and getting some of our financial shhhhhhhtufff together in a decent plan for retirement. It isn’t a straightjacket, but it isn’t as uncoordinated as what we have been doing. And we’ll feel a lot more confident once some other pieces fall into place in the next couple of months.
  6. Now that my design is basically complete, it is time to start populating the website — photos, book reviews, movie reviews and a couple of past writing samples are at the top of my list for 2011.

Let’s see how much gets done this year! After I set goals for the other seven categories…stay tuned!

Goals 2011 — Thinking in eight dimensions?

The PolyBlog
February 3 2011

For those who have had the “pleasure” of working with me anytime in the last 10 years, you know that I’m a bit, umm, obsessed with goal-setting, tracking to-do lists, etc. And I search the cosmos regularly for the Platonic ideal of the perfect paradigm for goal-setting for personal use. Sure, lots of tools exist for the working world, or for subsets of the personal world (finances, for example). But very few of them resonate with me. Because my weakness isn’t about what goals to set, or figuring out plans to get from A to B, or even sticking to the plans. My bigger problem is having too many goals, and having to balance them against each other with finite time available to move forward, leading to a potential to be either unfocused (everything at once) or too myopic (rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic).

About three years ago I started working on a new strategy for goal-setting using large categories to help keep the balance going and it worked — to a certain extent. But what I was missing from the approach was an easy way to remember them, a visual that would reinforce my plan in my mind, a logic that I could not only grasp analytically but also visualize.

So as I’m updating my planning guide, kind of half “2011 resolutions” and half “getting my crap together”,  I thought I would re-jig the categories and, at the same time, create the missing visual. Some of you have done the “colour” wheel of personality traits (based on Jungian psychology’s breakdown of major personality types), and there are a lot of different companies out there offering versions of it (similar to Meyers Briggs). I was introduced to it back in 2004/05, and it really resonated with me. So I wondered — could I merge the two into a “colour and goal-setting” wheel for me?

If you’ve seen it before, there are four main personality types that it works with — the “cool blue analyst”, the “fiery red leader”, the “sunshine yellow socializer”, or the “warm green harmonizer”. And while the primary colour is interesting, it is really only when you map all four together that you start to see useful information. So, for example, a blue analyst whose secondary colour is “red” (for leadership) is a very different personality from an analyst whose secondary colour is green.

Interestingly for me, I would normally have rated myself up until three years ago as Blue / Green / Red / Yellow; at work, though, I’m more Blue / Red / Green / Yellow or even B/R/Y/G. Over time, too, I think my personality at home and work has started to merge a bit more, probably leaving me with strong Blue and Reds, and weaker Greens and Yellows.

The goal though is basically to have all four colours about equal — balance.

(The danger of course is one colour overshadowing the rest — the blue analyst who is so obsessed with numbers and analysis that he can’t see people; the red leader who becomes the dictator and doesn’t listen to anyone else; the yellow social butterfly who flits from party to party, never accomplishing anything; or the overly-sensitive green harmonizer who cries while watching long-distance commercials.).

So, why am I posting anything about this? Because I’m interested in feedback.

For me, I’m still primarly an analytical blue — and I think that maps to a combination of lifelong learning and planning / organizational needs. Not sure “intellect” is the right word, but something “cerebral”, or even perhaps just “curiousity” for a different bent.

Red is the expansionary side for me, how I go beyond who I am today — a combination of leadership (on whatever front) plus career (a specific front, of sufficient import to be listed separately, I think). It also includes expanding my horizons through travel …I toyed with making the two headings simply leadership (including career) and travel, but I don’t think I travel enough for it to be a separate 1/8th of my planning. But overall it is about “role enlargement”…

Green to me is about connections, both through relationships (family and friends) and through connection with my self (spiritual, health, etc.).

Finally, yellow is more about “expression” — a shared expression through social activities, or a more personalized expression through creativity (writing, cooking maybe, etc.)

Here is the diagram…I welcome your thoughts!

goals_2011

Version 2.2 (alpha) of my website…

The PolyBlog
January 17 2009

If anyone hears of a CMS developer or hoster being shot in the not-too-distant future, tell the cops to check my alibi. I’ve been working for just over two months now on my website, and only now feel like I’m even getting close to what I want. DRUPAL proved unable to handle my needs with regard to the photo gallery, so I went with Gallery 2. It’s fantastic, and works like a charm. I wouldn’t say setup was “simple”, but it was relatively straightforward for an open-source solution, and the wife likes the result, so what more could I ask for?

Well, for starters, a blog. And some static content options for my knowledge portal — something that would allow me to post text in an almost wiki-like layout. I had some success with WordPress and after a couple weeks of good solid design testing, I had a blog up and running. Posted a few things to give it a try, but the menu was driving me batty — never did solve that problem. And then the unstoppable force of website creation ran into an immovable object that is my hoster’s policies.

I have no idea which combination of their default settings was screwing up my server setup, but it locked me out of my own configuration — oh sure, it would ask me for my login and password and if I got it wrong, it told me (so I knew the authentication module was working). But if I entered everything correctly, it just went into a loop that took me back to the login page. Apparently this is a problem with persistent sessions and that my hoster’s variables cause previous sessions not to disappear. Of course, Netfirms Support had no idea what I was talking about, and while I can diagnose the problem by searching lots of tech sites, it is beyond my ken how to explain to them how to fix it. So I went looking for an alternate solution for my other web page needs (and now needing a second blog option too!).

So I tried MediaWiki…my host provider supports an older version of it, and it seems okay. I found it really hard though to wrap my head around the approach — things were still not page-like enough, and figuring out even how to change a logo across similar looking sub-sites was a challenge. Admittedly, the program configuration tells you very clearly that this is NOT the tool to use for a typical website, and it will just frustrate you to no end if you do. Guess what? They were right — I still gave the upfront work a try to see if I wanted it for the knowledge portal at least, but I was just increasing my frustration levels.

So I started experimenting with a site called The CMS Matrix…they’re part of a group called the “Compare Stuff Network — Great data, ugly sites!”. Fantastic site, albeit with a few too many self-serving advertisers rating their own products in a few places. But I went with their top performers and tried e107, Joomla, EZ publishing, Mambo, and a couple of others. Joomla and Mambo were pretty solid options (not surprisingly I like them both as they both started as the same program (Mambo) and then forked into two CMS programs, one still called Mambo and one new one called Joomla). Pretty straightforward user interface. Good testing, still needed to wrap my head around another CMS approach. And then Netfirms intruded again with their persistent sessions. Sigh. I can accept that occasionally my server host might have some challenges with their server config that might cause me some grief, but Netfirms really sucks. They sent me spurious info that was completely useless and unrelated to why I was having persistent sessions (even though caches were clearly disabled! and I even tried enabling them for 3 minute durations hoping that would wipe something, but no!).

Of course, most of these problems are related to trying to use an full-bodied open-source Content Management System (CMS) on what is essentially just a personal site. A personal site on steroids or with delusions of grandeur, but still a personal site. So, since it is just a personal site, I tried a simpler solution using some of the “personal site software” that is out there. You know the ones I mean, cuz they all advertise the same way: “No programming knowledge required! Thousands of templates! Millions of colours”. I checked out a few, but they were all pretty limited. Microsoft Frontpage is pretty powerful, so I considered that for a bit since I already have it, and was what I used to try earlier versions of the site. But I upgraded temporarily to try out the new all-powerful Microsoft Expression. Pretty powerful, and way too complicated. I couldn’t even figure out how it related to Frontpage’s approach. Kind of like going from a Paint Program to Adobe Photoshop Professional Edition. So that option was out. Which left me way too close to my original option of coding the design by hand.

Instead, I seem to have come back to Drupal. Can it still count as a new version of my website if I’m back to near to the approach I took for 2.0, just further along? While Drupal is incredibly powerful, and really WAY more power than I need, it does allow me a bit more control over my interface with the host. Not quite to the “2×4 upside their head” level, but almost to the “hah! here’s a small slingshot to shoot paper wads at you” level. Which doesn’t change anything on my gallery, that will stay separate. But I no longer need MediaWiki or my separate blog site. I can basically do everything I want within Drupal except the gallery.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not a paradise. I’ve spent a good portion of the last week trying out some advanced VIEWS and PANELS and TABS options only to decide most of them are way too complicated for the little sub-projects I want to do. I’ll defer those to version 3.0 perhaps, and instead focus on getting the basic structures and initial texts up on the site. One thing that I haven’t quite figured out yet is how to add images to these posts, but that will come. In the meantime, on to Movie Reviews!

Outing to a restaurant called Napo

The PolyBlog
December 31 2008

So, Andrea and I went out to try out a new-to-us restaurant last night here in Ottawa in honour of our friend’s birthday. The company was great, and we made great fun at the friend’s husband’s expense (umm, Pat, that’s mocha ice cream, not “bacon-flavoured”!), but the setup at Napo could use some improvements.

If anyone has noticed the weather recently in Ottawa, you know it’s cold — and the restaurant had virtually no heat. Bearing in mind that this is a higher-end style restaurant, and that we were there close to 3 hours, my toesies were definitely a bit numb by the end of the evening. I was afraid to ask the reason for the simple fact that whatever answer I got was going to drive me batty — I mean, come on, what answer would you accept from a business for why there was no heat and yet they’re still open for business? It wasn’t like they just blew out a furnace, had a wedding party set for the evening, didn’t want to cancel on them, and put emergency heaters everywhere to get them through the night. This was just a business staying open, and as far as any of us could tell, they had made no discernible effort to keep it warm. Who knows, maybe there were Herculean efforts going on somewhere…

I did get the impression they’d been closed for a few days, so perhaps they didn’t know there was no heat, but, umm, not sure that makes me feel any better. So, it’s probably better I don’t know whatever lame excuse they had (*Apparently my wife did get an explanation — they had burned something earlier and they had to open a window???? Yep, not knowing was better.). They did have an organic-flavour to their business, so if they wanted to tell us they were doing it deliberately as part of a “low carbon footprint” option, I could accept it as a valid approach (I’d think they were whackjobs, but at least it would be a valid excuse). But I digress.

The food options however looked amazing. I ordered sea scallops as my appetizer, and they sounded delicious. Three others in our group of 10 agreed. I have no idea if the scallops WERE delicious, because after about 10 minutes, they came back to tell us that they decided the scallops weren’t quite good enough to serve, and they threw them out (or, you could go with the alternate explanation given to another guest, they refused to accept them when they arrived because they were spoiled). Umm, caution is good, but not sure I wanted to know that some of their food was “off”.

The waitress recommended a vegetable soup that was minestrone-like over the onion soup, saying it was amazing. This seemed like a good second choice, as I always like good soup (I still have dreams of a tortellini en brodo I had at a restaurant on Preston Street and some amazing wonton soup at Ben Ben’s on Somerset). The minestrone / vegetable soup had a really strong tomato base to it, and the best I can say about it was that it was okay. Nothing to write home about, and quite frankly I would be hard pressed to swear it wasn’t some form of Campbell’s. Which would have been a lot cheaper than the $11 pricetag.

On to the main course. I like trying new foods, things you don’t see everyday at other restaurants. So the elk ravioli garnered some interest (the bacon ice cream guy ordered some and I begged a bite — decent option, but didn’t wow me). I passed on the “sustainable salmon” (umm, how sustainable was it for the fish itself?) but Andrea liked it “okay”. They were out of lamb shanks, but I probably would have passed anyway. Because I had ordered the sea scallops initially, I thought I would offset the unique flavours with a somewhat simpler pork tenderloin option with spiced red onion. I never saw the red onions, and there was some sort of mega-peppercorn underpinning which was just odd-looking. But the pork itself was really good. I wouldn’t say it was the best I’ve ever had, but it was pretty solid. Definitely a “save” for the experience. The sautèed vegetables with it were good, but the extra beets were unwelcome. About $20 for the dish.

Others liked their dishes, but I didn’t hear anyone suggesting they would recommend it to friends. A semi-vegetarian friend ordered duck, and it arrived pretty rare. She was a little self-conscious, I think, and commented that she should have thought of it like steak and specified “well done”; my reaction, unstated at the time, was that she was pretty generous … if they intended to serve it so rare, it would have been good to flag it for the customer. Personally, I might have sent it back. Instead, her date swapped plates with her and they divvied up some gnocchi which got decent reviews from them and others. Overall, though, I wouldn’t go back.

The friend whose birthday it was suggested she’d like to try it again with a smaller group (they had trouble serving the couple of large tables they had, although the place is only big enough for about 30 or so in total anyway) and definitely in the summer. Might help, but not convinced. I liked my main course, and had a good evening despite the weak appetizers and the cold, but my enjoyment was more about the company than the ambience or food. On the positive side, we heard good reviews from others for (a) a great Italian hole-in-the-wall in Barrhaven called La Casa (?) and (b) the Wellington Gastro Pub which we’re going to on Friday for lunch with another friend.

Overall, I’ll give it two stars out of five.

Version 2.1 of my website…

The PolyBlog
December 27 2008

It’s been an interesting six weeks since I started putting some serious time into the website. I’ve played with a bunch of content management systems, and some desktop software packages that design sites out of the box, etc. I even had DRUPAL working pretty well. But there were a few problems with each, and for DRUPAL, it was getting my photo gallery to work.

I mentioned last time it was the bane of my existence to get it up and running, and I reconfigured that sucker ten ways from Sunday. Nada. Don’t get me wrong, I doubt it’s DRUPAL’s fault. It is more that it is a step above my needs and yet a few of the simpler CMS software bundles didn’t handle a few key features.

So, in the end, I’ve gone with a mish-mash of software that my host provides automatically pre-configured out of the box. For those of you familiar with Photo Gallery 2, I’ve got my pictures site going under that. For the most part, I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve found a general theme that I can tweak enough to live with, upgraded some of the modules and plug-ins, and uploaded a batch of photos.

For my general “blog” area, I’m going to go with WordPress for now. It seems to be fairly robust and not TOO complicated (I hope). For the rest of my “static pages”, I think I’m going to go with MediaWiki.

Wish me luck!