Andrea and I really didn’t get into digital photos until February 2004, and we haven’t scanned many old photos (yet!). As such, I only have two albums processed for 2002 — one from an outing where she went rock climbing and another from a conference later in the year.
July was the rock climbing outing, where Andrea and Amanda went to Vertical Reality on Victoria Island here in Ottawa. If Andrea later said I was making her climb the walls, well, she had experience.
Over the late spring and all through the summer, I was working with a group of students at Carleton University to organize a conference in September at a downtown conference centre. We got some heavy hitters to come out, and produced a fairly solid report on HR challenges for the time. Here’s our organizing committee.
So that’s it for us in the gallery for 2002. A short review of the year.
I’ve built and/or re-built my PandA gallery multiple times over the years. I started a basic version early on in HTML; then a slightly larger ASP-generated query version; another basic one manually in WordPress but wasn’t satisfied; another significant version through SmugMug but integrated into WordPress that gave me some challenges when it got too big; a newer even larger version through a plugin (NGG) in WordPress, etc. that let me host everything on my WordPress site until the system crashed at one point and I was disinclined to try to repeat all of that work to fix it. And then, finally, I said screw it, and built a brand new one through Flickr a few years ago, mostly because it handles my video files so easily with the rest of my photos, and without any relevant limits to what I’m sharing.
But after a website meltdown a few years ago for my website hosting (there’s a class-action lawsuit going from clients, that’s how bad it was), I ignored my photo gallery for a while while I concentrated on other things.
This past month, as I uploaded my photos for the recent trip to New England, I really wanted to start embedding my photos from my Flickr gallery again. I have one gallery from 2002 from a conference I co-organized with other students, but the real “collection” of photos starts in 2005.
February had four galleries — roses at the office, and Andrea’s trip abroad with stops in Bangladesh, Bangkok and London. Of the four galleries, I’ve chosen one of Andrea meeting with partners and clients in Bangladesh.
In March, there wasn’t much going on for photos. I have a single photo in the gallery of our new couch.
For the month of April, Andrea and I took a trip to Quebec City and Montmorency Falls. One of the photos from the trip that stands out for me is a shot of Andrea in front of frozen falls.
May only had one gallery, including the Tulip Festival and a trip to Peterborough and the cottage. I have several great photos from the month — tulips, the Liftlocks, some really clear water shots at the cottage, and sunsets, but I’ve chosen another of Andrea, this time sitting in the tulips by Dow’s Lake.
The month of June collapsed to a single gallery, but it’s a big month with wedding showers, some sunsets and the Blue Panda, our first car. I was tempted to go with the car photo, an obvious choice, but instead, I chose a sunset photo from the Gatineau Hills. After we picked up the car, we went for a drive out to Kanata just tooting around (Richmond Road to Kanata, and some exploring), and then up to the Hills, somewhere we hadn’t been able to go easily without a car. It was a good day.
Now it is time to move on to September, which was a huge month for us after an already busy summer. We decided to do a two-week trip to the East Coast and then scurry back to Ontario so we could attend Cam and Courtney’s wedding at Courtney’s family’s camp. Up until this point, when there has been multiple galleries per month, I settled for a single photo, but September really needs two — one from the trip and one from the wedding.
For October, things were a little simpler with Thanksgiving, a SocAss weekend, and Becky’s bachelorette party (spoiler alert — there’s ANOTHER wedding this year!). There are some amazing sunset photos from near the cottage at Thanksgiving, but come on, how could I NOT go with the photo of a sleeping baby during the Sociology Association reunion weekend?
In the photo below, there are five people — Andrew, a friend I met through another close friend; Mary Ellen, who Andrea met through french training; Paul, who was ME’s relatively fresh new beau and who we were meeting for the first time that night; and Alexandre and Liam, both friends from CIDA and who knew each other from university. Apparently, Mary Ellen had worried that Paul wouldn’t know anyone at the party, since she herself barely knew anyone beyond Andrea. But as we were setting up, the doorbell rang, and I asked someone to answer for us, as we were tied up — and when the door opened, Paul and Andrew came face to face and basically went, “Hey, I know you!”. It turned out that Paul and Andrew knew each other already, having no idea of the connection to Andrea. In addition, Paul also had met my brother at some point in the military. In the end, he knew more people than Mary Ellen!
That story was told with far more panache at their wedding (see future albums) as they considered it a good omen that they didn’t have to blend their friends, they were ALREADY blended. Sure, it’s one- or two-steps removed from a MEET CUTE origin story, but I really find it heart-warming.
For December, we had the standard Christmas-y events like gingerbread, our PandA Christmas in Ottawa, some Christmas pics in Peterborough, and pics from the family cottage in the winter. And just because there hadn’t been enough for the year, one more wedding — Becky and Dean’s. Outside. In December. In Ottawa. Yeah, Andrea told her she was crazy during the Maid of Honour speech. As an aside, while there was really no doubt that I would choose a wedding photo, I was surprised as I was building the gallery for the rest of December as I found some photos I didn’t even realize I had. Just the other day, I was wondering what the first photos were that I ever took on a phone, and at the time, I was thinking, “Okay, so I have my iPhone, and before that I had two Android photos, likely one of those.” For timelines, I would have guessed maybe 2010 or a bit later even. I would NOT have guessed 2005 when I had a Palm Treo and took a bunch of low-res photos (the phone didn’t have much memory). The photos themselves are practically thumbnails, not big enough to enlarge without massive pixelation. But it was interesting. However, I digress. On to the snowy wedding photo!
And that’s it for the year. It was fun wrapping it all together, and I’m happy to have it all embedded in my regular website.
As you can see from the last four posts, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me to handle goal-setting for the year. Unfortunately, now I come to the mother of all categories which is basically all my hobbies on a computer in a digitally-enabled life. The list is so extensive or pervasive that it normally takes up a whole separate whiteboard for me. Let’s parse it into more manageable chunks.
Computers
It likely seems odd that the whole area is about computers, and then I make the first sub-category “computers”, but generally, I’m talking about the setup of a computer — hardware and software. This area isn’t generally big or complicated, it’s a nice manageable chunk of sorts.
First and foremost, I have to do regular backups. This includes my computer, Andrea’s computer and Jacob’s computer. Sometimes those lists are pluralized for Jacob and I, but at the moment, not so much. We generally are only using one desktop each. He has a PC upstairs but never uses it, and I migrated all the components over to his gaming laptop for files. One system, one backup. Andrea has only ever had one, so no issues there. For me, I have usually had a second device, a laptop for streaming, and I’m not running that currently, so it is just my main PC. I am a bit out of date since my last backup, so time to do another. My main fear of things missing from the last backup are photos and ensuring proper storage, a recurring, nagging worry, even once backed up. What if there’s a fire? I want all the photos on off-site cloud storage, but not quite there yet.
Second, I also need to do some basic security upgrades to various devices, including Andrea’s and tweaking of Jacob’s. I’d also like us all to use the same password manager, if possible.
Third, I mentioned I don’t have a streaming PC setup downstairs, and I want to fix that situation to a more powerful setup than my basic laptop. I have an extra old PC, easy enough to upgrade and tweak to make suitable for the need. Equally, I have a few extra monitors I need to configure.
Finally, my desktop PC needs a tweak to the setup for both potentially an extra monitor (which I’m resisting) and a better webcam/microphone setup (that I really need for trivia hosting).
Website
In the same way that I feel odd having a whole section about computers with a subheading for computers again, I have this one for the website when the next few are also about my website. But, as with computers, this is more about the setup while the others are more about content.
For my website, I launched my design for PolyWogg 5.0 this past year, and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. It includes all new Featured Images, restructured layouts for consistency, and everything is in one place. But in the same way that a strength can also be a weakness, the co-location of both PolyWogg (personal) and PolyBlog (writing) content and a single theme for all of it does create some branding challenges.
For example, when I create the layout for my site, I can do pages or posts as my default content. When it is a one-off blog topic, my musings so to speak, it’s a post. If it is more part of some more static content that I’m building, they are pages. But each page, normally, has the same header image and menu as the rest of the site. I like my theme, I’m not looking to change that, it works really well for me, but as I do more writing and building of content in a few areas, the default images and menus are not always the best combo for a page that could have a different message/branding than the default.
My basic menu structure would benefit from four separate options at the present time. For general blogging, I can do my Main Menu easy enough. It’s the one that I have been doing all along — my default menu. But if I look at a second area, my photo gallery, right now it is a single vertical menu item in the horizontal menu with lots of nested pages. It makes the main menu a bit big and unwieldy (plus slows down load time a bit). So, if instead, I had a site that was JUST my photo gallery, I would change the header image of course but I would also make those vertical menu structures more horizontal, spreading the years out differently. Maybe grouped in five year chunks, maybe current year would be separate. For my PolyWogg Guides that I’ll be doing more of in the future, I already am not entirely happy with the menu structure for the HR guide and want a better one for the new Astronomy guide. As I write more in the future, that problem will exacerbate the pressure on the menu structure. And it wouldn’t hurt to have totally different branding for the header. Finally, I have been wanting to get my trivia game going, and that is a totally different look and feel than the rest of the site. I say “finally” but I could group all my reviews together too, or a site for quotes, or a site for humour. Lots of “options” where the overhead wouldn’t be worth the separation, but for the four areas that I have already identified for growth? Absolutely there might be a worthwhile investment to be made in another structure.
So I could reconsider my decision to co-locate them, separate them into multiple sub-sites or run WordPress as a multi-site option, including merging my brother’s site that I host as well as Astropontiac. But the truth is that I really don’t want separate sites though, I want it all together. And my theme is designed to allow that, sort of at least. But when I tried it previously, it was a crapfest. Nothing I did seemed to work the way it was supposed to work.
In theory, I can create four different header images (done) and four different menus (done), and go into a page say for my PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy, tell it to replace the main header image with the Guides image and the main menu with the Guides menu, and voila, I should have a separate branding option like a sub-theme within my site. Except, as I said, when I did it all previously, it didn’t do it. The header didn’t change, the menu didn’t change. Same old, same old.
So I went on the support site for the theme, typed in what I had tried previously both within the existing theme and using other plugins, and asked, “Is there a combo of a good plugin with this theme that will do what I want?”. I pressed submit, aaaaand I broke their support site. Not completely but it somehow corrupted my account with them. Nice. While they were trying to fix that so I could ask my question, I went back to playing with my theme options, doing exactly what I tried six months ago and twelve months ago and even eighteen months ago, same general settings, and BAM! This time it worked. Son of a fudgsicle.
Which means I CAN do it. I can have separate branding for any of the pages I want. Not for posts, that’s a more complicated structure that doesn’t quite make sense with what I’m doing, but pages? No problem. Yay!
Or is it a yay? I had already accepted that it couldn’t be done in my site, I was really just doing due diligence, and considering moving my blog back to ThePolyBlog.ca, and leaving just my PolyWogg guides at PolyWogg.ca. Now I don’t have to do any of THAT change, but the other changes? They’re relatively easy enough, and in fact, I’ve already created the prototype headers and basic menus. I just have to tell those pages which header and menu to display when those pages are shown, as well as include an option to get back to the main menu. I like it, I just haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It’s a significant change to my branding, so I want to be sure that it is the way I want to go before I do it. I think so, but I need to test a few things first.
But assuming it all tests out, I now have three significant sub-designs to figure out:
Main menu (done)
The Panda Family Photo Gallery
PolyWogg Guides to…
PolyWogg Trivia
When I get that done, it will definitely warrant a PolyWogg 6.0 classification.
In addition to all that structural work, I also want to tweak my backup settings, chron setup, and optimization settings with caching. I’m not obsessed about SEO or speedtests, but I’ll do the basics. Really what I want to do though is to uninstall Piwigo sometime soon, my “alternate” gallery setup, but I’m not ready for that big step yet.
Blogging
I call this section blogging, but it goes way beyond simple blogging. Many bloggers have a goal which is to “blog regularly”, basically to deliver regular new content. That’s not my goal. I blog when I have something to say, not say something just to meet a word count. And I have lots to say. I have itches to scratch for:
Book reviews: I have almost 200 on the site, but I need to update some links so they all show in the index page, and add some reviews from the last six months that I haven’t written yet;
Movie reviews: I have about 5-6 six on the site, another 100 or so written but not uploaded yet, and another 10-15 that aren’t even written yet.
TV reviews: I have 10-12 seasons of various shows reviewed and on the site, and probably about another 500 I could do as I’ve already reviewed the individual episodes. It’s just a time issue, and relative priority. I like writing them, but they take time away from more pressing issues in life. More just a “nice to have” at some point.
I have a big giant gaping hole in my plan for recipes. I know generally what I want for them, have a decent layout, can do them generally like my reviews for structure and internal web admin. But I don’t have a great workflow for including pictures of recipes or even getting the recipes up on the site fast enough after we make the dish and decide it’s a “keeper”, so by the time I get around to writing it up, I’ve forgotten which photos go with which recipe, or even WHEN we did it. I have photos of dishes from last February and I have no idea what they are. In an ideal world, I would have taken a picture with it of the recipe title so I’ll remember in future, but I didn’t. Was that the chicken with pasta dish and an unique sauce or was it the special noodle dish with Asian seasoning? Was it one we liked or we thought was only so-so? Eleven months later, I don’t remember. And after mentioning above about branding, I need to decide if I even want this as a blog post with everything else, or I want to make it into a page that I could style like a separate subsite for different types of recipes. Or is it both? A page for the recipe, a blog for the experience of cooking it for the first time? I haven’t figured that out, but I need to at some point. For now, it is just a general “Figure out the plan for recipes”.
I have another sub-area that isn’t quite figured out either: music reviews. Unlike the book / TV / movie reviews, the music reviews have a natural structure to them. For example, if I review the year 1943 (as I already have), should that be on a separate sub-site? Should I have separate pages for discography reviews too, such as all the albums by Elton John? I know I’m going to do the yearly reviews, but beyond that? Are they posts? Is it another PolyWogg Guide? Or is it a PolyWogg Guide of enough uniqueness that it should be a separate site on its own? And if it is, should HR and Astronomy be separated too? Enquiring minds want to know! And it would be far better to decide NOW before I get too far in the initial structure. I just need to decide.
Once I get past various forms of reviews, I have a bunch of other topics itching for me to write about them. Lots of them are one-offs, and I have a folder called Bloggable in my Gmail where I’ve saved articles, etc. Things that excited me. Like the Drake equation for predicting the likelihood of finding sentient life in the universe. Or a comparison of prices at grocery stores. Certainly I have a long list of topics as preparations for retirement. I started to write a series of posts about “Who do I owe in my life“, and I want to get back to that, as well as a series of posts about “What I learned in school” for various academic outings.
I also am way behind in some other topics I started and would like to get back to at some point. My spiritual journey and 12 questions, Being Jacob’s Dad, even a bunch related to photos like different day activities on our honeymoon. Plus finalizing a draft I did of a version of “grace” to say for dinners that is a bit non-denominational.
Writing
The main focus of my writing is usually my HR guide and the need to finish the damn thing. That remains true, of course, but I also mentioned above that I want to play with how it is laid out on the website. Maybe just a stalling tactic, with the perfect being the enemy of good enough.
Early in 2020, I started posting some of my personal writing, including the start of a story about a detective I have in mind for a series of stories. It was a prototype of a series of novels, and while I like the basic structure, I find myself throwing in too much backstory that I intended for prequel novels. It’s a bit of a rookie challenge, more experienced writers know not to do it and only throw it just enough to whet the appetite while letting the reader fill in the blanks. But I realized that in my mind, those are full-fledged stories. And quite frankly, it would be easier to tell them in sequence. So, I’m going to go back and redirect my story to start where it should have began. With the main character in law school. I have several other stories to consider in there too for the same character, and some with his friends. The big ones will likely have to wait until retirement, but I might be able to start working on the first novel this year.
In addition to that “detective universe”, I have an idea for a sci-fi novel, with a bit of an Expanse feeling to it, maybe a bit like Artemis. And I am years away from feeling ready to start my ultimate series combining mythology, Gods, challenges, and quests. But it’s on my list and I could start some of the research, plotting and outlining.
Media
I don’t know what to call this category, honestly. It’s a mish-mash of things. Up first is simply media watching, with Jacob and I working our way through the Marvel Universe, Star Wars (with Andrea), and Lord of the Rings, plus a number of other series as we come to them. Just passive stuff.
More active though is getting our music streaming everywhere in the house for iTunes and/or Amazon Prime. Some of that starts with managing my music collection on my PC and doing uploads, but the goal is streaming everywhere.
And finally there is some organization and purging to be done for VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs.
Photos
Remember back at the beginning that I said the list could be overwhelming? Well part of that was easily just all the website redesign stuff I want to do. And that by itself is daunting. But the over-the-top, drive me crazy and call me anal, item is the photo gallery on my website.
So, the explanation of what I want to do is simple. I want to upload all my photos and videos to my website as a gallery so that I can share them with friends. I don’t want to put it on Facebook, I don’t want the videos on YouTube, I don’t want to pay for SmugMug or Flickr. I want to use my OWN site. In WordPress, not Piwigo.
In theory, that’s not a lot to ask. I have the website, check. I have WordPress, check. I have a site that will let me display photos and videos, and enough space to save them, check. I have the know-how to get them up, check. So what’s the problem? The workflow is detailed and extensive, and if I want them to be consistent across the gallery, I pretty much have to do the same workflow each time properly. Except that a few things have changed since I first started, leaving inconsistencies that I probably could live with, but I don’t want to do all this work to not have it the way I want.
So the first overall step is to develop a single, universal workflow that gets me the first gallery up and running exactly as I want it to be setup. Then I just need to replicate it for an additional ~240 galleries spread across 16 years of pictures.
The tracker for the galleries and sub-galleries is long and detailed. And as I have done a few serious tests and prototypes, just before WordPress changed the way it handles certain media types, I now know that the 240 galleries may in fact grow to be about 400 galleries to make some things way easier to manage. Which means that the first thing I have to do is fully confirm the workflow for each gallery from start to finish. Some of the galleries are already up and running in the site, but I’ll need to tweak them a bit to the new layout and functions. I’m close to the final gallery layout, I just need to ensure a couple of functions work the way they are supposed to in 2-3 different configurations. But the workflow needs to be tweaked on the front end for filenaming for photos from Andrea and from Jacob, as well as scanning sources and/or importing into Mylio, plus for the back end for storage and creation of things like PhotoBooks.
The other thing I need to do is finalize the tracker for “all” the types of galleries. This includes:
standard PandA Family monthly galleries;
special galleries for trips, etc.;
monthly galleries of extra photos for blogs, recipes, etc;
an option for PolySpring sharing of photos;
special content galleries for products like reviews, PolyWogg Guides or PS Transitions; and,
a special layout and tagging option for Astro photos.
If I put the whole workflow and tracker on the whiteboard at once, it takes up a whole whiteboard. For the next round, I think I’ll just put up the area for the workflow and an area for a couple of galleries that I’m working on at any one time. My separate e-tracker can maintain the ongoing tracking.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Better webcam/microphone setup
Web: Branding: Main
Web: Branding: Photo gallery
Photos: Workflow with sub-options for monthlies, specials, blogging, reviews and special products
Photos: Workflow and basic tracker to whiteboard
Photos: Full tracker in e-form.
This is an area that is important to me and I spend a lot of time on it as a result trying to get it where I want it to be. It might be anal but it is part of my choices. I choose to do this work, I choose to share the photos and videos as part of my sense of identity.
And that completes my to do list update for 2021. Now I just need to triage January’s list as I can’t possibly do them all, alas.
As I set my goals for 2021, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me. This grouping is mostly about learning, regardless of the actual sub-headings.
Learning
The first category, learning, is the catch-all when I don’t have something else broken out. Way back when I was in Grade 6, I had a teacher introduce me to origami, and I’ve been fascinated ever since. I have books, instruction sets, links for online stuff, and I never get around to doing it. My goal for the year is to find ten things that I like to fold and can learn to do well. I’m hoping to try 50 or so designs, and there’s even a paper folding penguin I listed earlier under activities with Jacob. But I’ll settle for even being able to easily fold a penguin, a panda and a frog. I just have to be able to remember how to do them for the future when I’m sitting somewhere and bored.
I did a Writers Digest tutorial, and I would be open to doing other writing sessions. Not quite sure what those would be, there’s a set that are offered by two online people that I respect and admire but they run $300 per class. A little rich for what is mostly a hobby for me still. That may shift, as you’ll see in a future blog post, but for now, it’s a hobby.
I completed my Video Games course a few years ago, and a Meta-Literacy one last year. There’s an advanced metaliteracy but I have kind of lost interest. In the end, though, they were mostly tests to see if Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work for me, and they do. There are tons of courses on Coursera that I could do, including perhaps how to program an app. I’d love to make PolyWogg Trivia into a game app. Equally, I could consider a laundry list of “classes” from either Masterclass or The Great Courses.
I even have options in case I want to take an intro course in Psychology.
Photography
This category is both all-inclusive and greatly missing some key features. Let me explain.
If I start first with “image capture”, I do have some ideas for learning more. There is an option (in a non-COVID) world where a local photographer puts together photography shoots for budding photographers where he hires some models who are looking to build their portfolio, pays them in minimum cash and guaranteed professional shots from him, and also offers them any good shots from the amateurs. In exchange, the amateurs get great models, some guidance on the session for learning, and we pay the host. In other words, we pay to learn, he gets paid to teach and partially take photos of the models, and the models get some cash and a whack of free photos. Everybody wins. I want to do it, just for the experience really, even though it is not something that particularly interests me. I’d be willing to do photo shoots for friends for example, if they want some basic shots of their family in a park, whatever, just for free and fun, not something I’m looking to turn into a business. And in return, I get practice taking shots of people so that when I do want something really special, I’m already experienced.
I also have some links for free photography classes, some “tips” cards that I bought and want to put to use and design my own flash cards, a MOOC course to finish (National Geographic), summaries from a paid photography class through Henry’s, and I’m considering a potential new lens for wide-field astrophotography.
If I then move on to “image management”, I have my tool, Mylio, but I haven’t put all my photos into it yet. I’m still slowly integrating them as I process a given month, for example. While I have some 30K photos over 15 years, the extra challenges are old photos that are in photo albums to scan as well as managing photos that belong to my mother’s estate. I even have a few posts to do about past scans, like a birthday card collection. I’m not very good at editing though, and while I understand the basics, I’d love to learn the basics of photoshop techniques with programs like GIMP. I even have two images that I have to work with — one from my friend Roula and one of my wife Andrea on a merry-go-round. Both are great shots except for some stains in the photos that don’t look right. Someone with better expertise than me could process them in an instant…I took a few cracks over the years, but I have never quite nailed the technique.
Lastly, I have a grouping around “what do I do with my photos?”. The biggest thing is put them on my website but that’s something I track under my website commitments. It’s a huge commitment of time and energy, and it is what is “missing” under photography as it is more about the website than it is the photos. Instead, my activities are more around putting a backup copy on Amazon Prime (included in my membership), creating photobooks of special events and years (although Andrea is taking the lead on those), and putting a copy on an e-frame that I’ve never had setup properly. I’m also considering trying to make a video file for each year, the equivalent of a video photobook set to music, but I haven’t seen anything that inspires me for that yet. And I’ve considered but not yet implemented the possibility of uploading some of my pictures for sale on microstock sites. Long-term, I have to find options for storing the hard copies of some of the prints I have and disseminating old estate photo collections, but I also want to work on choosing high-quality shots that I can print on metal and put up around the house.
Astronomy
Sooooo, lots of people who know nothing about astronomy think I’m some expert. I’m not. My astro hobby is a bit of a maelstrom of potential, possibilities, impostor syndrome and failure. I have a lot of information across a spectrum of topics that lets me understand the basics of most astro topics, but not in any great depth. And while I am not entirely sure this is the best way to group this section (hence the impostor syndrome), let’s start with “understanding my own telescope”.
The first five years of ownership taught me a pretty good set of lessons in what not to do and how to avoid it in the future. I am now a regular online advisor for newbies on my type of scopes, including experiences, options, etc. My blog post about my alignment process is one of the most viewed pages on my site, second only to my HR guide. But even with my scope, I don’t have everything tweaked properly. I’ve read an after-market owner’s guide, and there are 14 telescope tweaks that I want to try to my setup to see if it improves operations. Some may do nothing at all; others may give me a slight gain in performance. I just want to try them so I know that I’ve done everything to get every last ounce of performance from my scope.
The next area is not so much about the scope itself as learning more about the history of telescopes and astronomy. I’ve started a project whereby I’m going to read all the back issues of Sky and Telescope all the way back to the 1940s. I have already read one year, and I plan to do the others, just got a little side-tracked with a basement reorg. As I go, I’ll write up reviews for my blog and the local astro newsletter.
In a similar vein to my setup for my scope, I also want to look at setup for binoculars. I bought a pair, and they work well for me, but I want to get used to using them. I want to do a deeper-dive so that I could teach someone else if I had to do so. Which is a major part of the theme for this section that I’ll come back to…the idea of teaching myself so I can teach others.
I have a cheap telescope that I got for free and some parts from binos to make some custom eyepieces. It’s part of my “creative / crafting / maker” heading that appears spread out through my list between stuff I do myself, stuff with Andrea, stuff with Jacob and potentially stuff with outside people. I would like to make a maglite to replace a green laser pen option to see how viable I can make one. I also have two old battery supplies I’d like to repair and upgrade.
But as I said, part of my interest is teaching it to others as part of my volunteering duties below. And while it is a chicken/egg situation of which came first, I realized that one thing I bring to astronomy that a lot of experts don’t is an ability to help newbies understand the basics. I’m pretty good at taking complex subjects, boiling them down to their essentials, explaining them in plain language, and onboarding people to a new subject in a way that gives them a good base for future understanding. In effect, I can frame their entry into the world of astronomy in a positive way. My blog post about alignment proves that, it is highly popular despite there being way better experts out there and I’ve done almost no promotion of the page. I wrote it, I shared the links in a couple of fora, people liked it and continue to share it, while my hit count grows. People regularly email me to say “Finally! An explanation that made sense and that ACTUALLY HELPED me”. And they’re off to the races again.
I have done that for an HR guide about federal government competitions, and now I want to do it for astronomy. I am going to write a PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy. Unlike my HR guide, where there are few natural competitors, it is the height of arrogance to think I’m going to offer something better than some of the giants in astronomy writing for amateurs learning how to work a scope and see the cosmos. And yet. I’ve already written some parts of it, and I’m taking a similar approach to my scope. Testing it out, figuring out what works, coming up with a good workflow, and then finding a way to explain that workflow in a manner that makes sense to people in context. The biggest section that I’m going to work on early, and that will reinforce some of the volunteer work, is a guide to choosing a telescope. There are tons of online resources I can use to help build that guide, some of that not even “bad”, just not the way I would explain it. I have materials from an online virtual astronomy course, and I took a course in astrophotography, I have multiple adapters for connecting a smartphone to a scope. I even have an adapter that will let me attach a point-and-shoot camera to my scope. But I also have materials from RASC itself including target lists, a new yearly Almanac, the 2020 Observer’s Handbook, and a guide to native peoples’ constellations. Plus, for the year? Jacob and I are going to do the Explore the Universe kit from RASC. I might even be able to get Andrea to join in. All grist for the learning and writing mill.
But I have other projects or activities in mind. I started working on an astrolog that can run on my phone, and it will take some time to finish and get in the right format. I’d love to make it a full app, but that’s beyond my abilities so far. For the astrophotography side, I’m hoping to take some photos of the moon, planets, DSOs, and constellations. Maybe even some sets worth sharing. In terms of milestones, people often recommend doing a Messier marathon at least once in your life — every Messier object (110 of them) in one night. At least, all the ones you can see that night. This is often combined with an “all-night session“, and that’s on my list too. It would be nice to hit the astronomy lottery and combine both with an astro-themed trip somewhere like a dark-sky site.
Volunteering
My volunteer work falls into three simple headings: astronomy, computers, and GCWCC.
For astronomy, I am a member of the Ottawa Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and I help out with the club. For the last three years, I’ve been the star party coordinator. Except this past year, I had almost nothing to do. There WAS no star party option. And while I fully intended to give it up for 2021, there’s no one stepping forward to take on the role. Which likely would be the case until we open up again, why would anyone volunteer to do something that can’t happen and if it does, where they may not be comfortable saying yes in advance? Soooo, I’m likely to suggest that I’ll keep the title / role until we get going again. For most of 2021, there won’t be much to do.
In the same vein, I stepped up to take on one of the roles in the Centre as the Ottawa representative to the National Council. Again, it isn’t an onerous role again, attending virtual meetings four times a year and conveying views back and forth, and if / when they hold an annual in-person general meeting somewhere in Canada, probably attending. I can be down with that I guess. Oh, and part of that duty is to feed into manuals, guides, handbooks, etc. for the administration of the club so I’ll likely draft some text regarding two of their publications. I also attend the bi-monthly Ottawa Centre Council meetings as well as the monthly meetings.
And there is a weird role which is they need someone to audit the Centre’s books once a year. Since I’m not an elected member of council, and thus not a voting member for spending decisions, there’s no conflict of interest for me to audit the books for the year. And they don’t need a formal accountant to do it, just someone who can exercise due diligence. Okay, I can do that, I suppose.
However, I have recently inherited a much bigger project. One of our project partners reached out to us and piggybacked / dovetailed with some ideas we already had about teaching people how to use different types of scopes. They want a video on how to use a new scope that they got, and so I’m going to produce it with some other people in the Centre. Yay us. The first one has a bit of a deadline while the others can take all year, if we want.
Continuing the astronomy theme, I am a member of the Board for Astropontiac and I maintain the website. Like RASC, there’s not much happening in a lockdown world, but my role will continue. Pretty low demands, 99% of the time.
Beyond that, I’m wrapping up my involvement last year in the Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign as one of the co-coordinators for our branch of 600 people. I’m running a trivia game on January 21st, working on a report, and other than that, I’m pretty much done.
In checking my to do list, I realized that I still have administrative access to an old website that I was helping with web duties for at one point. I’m not sure they’re even using the site anymore, but I feel like I should make sure SOMEONE has admin access before I delete myself completely. I asked at one point previously and never heard back, so maybe it’s moot. But I need to close that out.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Integrate photos in Mylio
Develop outline for PW Guide to Astronomy
Read and write about one year of Sky and Telescope
Plan year for Explore the Universe, Almanac, and Observer’s Handbook
RASC monthly meeting
RASC Ottawa Council meeting
RASC Ottawa auditor download
RASC Ottawa SPC confirmation
RASC Ottawa video
GCWCC trivia
GCWCC report
Do you have any plans this year for learning or volunteering?
I am setting my goals for 2021, and I’m using already-established headings that work well for me. First up for today’s post? Finances.
Finances
Overall, I would say I feel a bit guilty about our financial situation. Survivor guilt in a way, particularly given where we work and what we see some of the clients having to deal with during the pandemic and how badly certain sectors are decimated. Working for government, we’re probably immune to the cutbacks for some time since it is our groups that are responding to some of the needs, but a few years after, everyone expects the cuts to take effect then to get deficits under control. In the meantime, our finances are in pretty good shape. The down-side of the pandemic is we are not going anywhere or doing anything; the upside is we are not going anywhere or doing anything that costs much money, so we have some extra money saved for when the world does open up again. And overall, it’s not a big category. Things are going relatively well for us on this front, no “big” concerns.
But each year, I tend to do some pretty advanced social planning for attending potential plays and shows around town. Multiple theatres, multiple types of shows, etc. And when COVID hit, I had a lot of shows that were cancelled, leading to refunds and credits. For the credits, once the world opens up again, I can book new shows. Obviously not a short-term priority, but it’s on my list.
I also have some minutiae to handle under a general heading of “clean-up”. This includes a credit from Rogers that didn’t get processed properly. How excited do you think I am to deal with THAT mess, even though it means money for me? There’s also an old health claim where something “bounced” in the claim process, so I have to resubmit, and of course, some new health claims to submit for 2020. I also want to go through and clean up some credit card consolidation. We don’t owe anything on them, it’s just that we use one that gets us grocery store points (PC) but if I never really use them these days, is that really worth it? And why have other cards we never use? Eventually I’ll request an updated credit report and see if there are any gremlins in there. Two other areas for clean-up are updating my will (mainly for catastrophic loss if all three of us are killed at once) and better coordination of various gift cards that I haven’t used yet.
The real “work” to be done in this area though is retirement planning. We have a bunch of RRSPs, we have our big pensions with the government, but we haven’t done much else for sophisticated planning. We did a plan a number of years ago, and it was fine for what it was and for the time we did it. More about cost planning and general revenues than investment vehicles. But I also have a pension buyback to do so that I can retire in 2025. There are a number of ways to process that, including financing it through payroll deduction or transferring it from my RRSPs, but we’ll see which is a better configuration with some other options. We need to do a meeting with a new financial advisor, and while we did some initial reaching out at the start of the pandemic, we stalled back in August.
The reason was pretty silly, in a way. One of the obvious questions for retirement planning is what are we going to do in retirement, and so Andrea and I had a conversation during our vacation in the summer about a whole bunch of places we would like to go and live for a week, 2 weeks, a month, maybe 2-3 months even, during our retirement. Possibly while keeping our house, maybe renting it out, maybe selling it and being homeless while we rent in multiple short-term places. Some of it depends on when Andrea retires, our overall health then, etc. But we made a list. Or rather, I wrote down the list, put it away safe, and promptly forgot WHERE I PUT IT! Kind of hard to submit the forms to our financial advisor if I’m missing the major “abnormal” expense from our plan.
I couldn’t find it. I was convinced I wrote it in a notebook that I had with me at the time, but it wasn’t there. Andrea remembered me writing it on loose paper, so I thought maybe I stuck it in as a bookmark in some books. Nope. Not in 2-3 other notebooks that are frequent companions. Not in my big shoulder bag, not with my laptop, not with my obvious loose planning papers. Not with my financial stuff. WHAT THE **** did I do with it? Well, I put it away somewhere safe. I folded it over, small piece of paper, and put it in my small shoulder bag. The one that use when I go shopping or to a coffee shop. You know, the things I am not doing now. And I put it in a small pocket that I never use. Because that was a safe place to put it where it wouldn’t get lost or destroyed or misfiled. Well, I was right. It didn’t get any of those things. But I was cleaning out the bag the other day for pens or highlighters and things that don’t need to be in there since I’m not using it, and Bam! There it was. Son of a fudgsicle. Okay, back on track.
We can do the retirement planning and fill out the docs. We can have a retirement planning meeting. And I can decide how I’m financing my pension buyback. I even have a great book about types of activities in retirement to help me refine my thinking (The One Thing), with a nice cross-walk to the type of fitness needs that go along with them.
Organizing
So you often see a joke about to do lists that the first thing on the to do list is to make a to do list. And some of this category is simply that…a category for getting organized that lists how I’m getting myself organized. Not competely, but somewhat. In some years, it has literally meant doing this big list for the year. Doing my review of last year, focusing on the future for my goals, communicating my intentions to the universe. But that’s done as soon as I press publish, so hardly worth mentioning.
For those who are friends with me on Facebook, you have likely noticed that I regularly share some of my favourite comics. I get most of them through one specific site, and I never really feel like I’m well-organized for those feeds. I can make it highly personalized, even deleting or adding on a daily basis if I wanted to, or reading online instead of through my email, but I like getting the email feeds. And so I went through and reorganized them recently. It’s done, but officially I guess it was part of this year’s plan. To the extent it is a continuing item, the “to do” portion is that I continue to share them and file the old ones away in my computer. Just cuz I can, not because I need them per se. Although I did get behind at one point in my feed, and so I have a bit of a comics reading backlog sitting there that I can go through at some point too. I may just delete them, haven’t decided yet. Not exactly a priority.
Activities
This is a slightly weird category. It doesn’t particularly fit anywhere else, and it is about various activities that I want to do on a pro-active basic but more almost one-off things than tied to a category. I could count it as a “medium-term bucket list” of sorts, but perhaps more like “superficial bucket list”.
For example, I bought a Raspberry Pi kit awhile back and I am hoping to turn it into a portable gaming system or something cool like that. I bought a bunch of parts, but I never really made time to do it, thought perhaps J might be interested but he isn’t really. Instead, it is just a project for me to do by myself. Part of a new focus on crafting. I also have a robot to assemble, but I’ll do that one with Jacob.
Before COVID hit, I was thinking about taking archery lessons or trying axe-throwing. Not so much right now, obviously. I also want to learn how to play the piano, but I suspect that will be more online stuff with YouTube and books than taking formal lessons. It would be a good activity for the pandemic, just haven’t got around to it yet.
I mentioned above that I have a drone stored in my alcove, and I’m hoping to fly it properly at some point. The main challenge is getting it going without banging into a tree. I’ve tried 3-4 times, and what I really need is a bunch of open space to get the controls properly balanced. I have a friend who apparently flies drones and I’m hoping he’ll take me out some time to show me how to fly it. After that, the world will be open to me. Or at least within the range of the drone. It has a small camera in it, so I’m hoping to use it for practical things like checking out shingles on the roof as well as taking pics of the cottage and lake from the sky, or even some observing sites.
One thing in the list that seems almost silly to have on a list but I added it a long time ago from a list of activities for fun you could do in winter. It’s NOT complicated, requires almost no planning at all, and I hadn’t haven’t done it — make a snow angel. Stay tuned for an update on this one.
So what else is in this category? Plant something and grow it, possibly flowers, possibly vegetables. I’ve never really purposefully planned to plant something and grown it. Not really, little things here and there. More as a lark than a plan.
Way back when I got married, I tried to do indoor go-karts for my bachelor party, but the plan didn’t work out. So it’s been on my list for coming up on 13 years.
Another item is partly for interest and partly for research for writing, but I’d like to do a ride along with police for an evening or two.
A last one to include, and I’m not even sure what I mean exactly, is to run a 3D printer. I have an idea for some astro gear that I’d like to print, the files are available online (some free, some not), and I’d like to play with the files and print them. The reason I am not sure what I mean by doing this is I don’t know if I want my own 3D printer (which would allow me to print a whole bunch of parts for board games for Jacob as well as astro tools, some other crafting things, etc.), or if I just want to go commercial (I’ve printed a focus knob for my scope at a small industrial shop in Nepean, although not likely to be able to tweak it much nor do stuff on the fly), or if I want to get set up at one of the maker spaces. Sure, I would love to have my own 3D printer, and I *know* a guy with a 3D printer, I just don’t know if I would use it enough to make it worthwhile. I’m tempted when everything is all over to call the guy with the printer, go for an afternoon with some design ideas, and see how it all works.
As a small aside, I find the business model for 3D printers somewhat amusing. You can buy them all ready to go, OR, just for fun, you can buy a kit and assemble it yourself. I think this is one of those tests for irony. If you aren’t buying the kit to put it together yourself, maybe you shouldn’t be thinking about buying a 3D printer to make a whole bunch of things to make yourself. And yet, I’d rather buy it preassembled and ready to go than to futz around with leveling and particle nozzles the first few times.
I have a few other projects on the go too, but they fall under other categories I think.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Start filling out the retirement planning docs
Sort out my comics feed
Make a snow angel
Do you have any plans this year for finances, organizing yourself, and/or one-off special activities?
