Progress

I'm making good progress on my goals so far. I haven't quite finished the first week of the year, but I think that I've built some good momentum. I'll at least be able to finish January strong.

I'm trying to make sure that I have something tangible for my efforts for January. While I am trying to read books (4 fiction, 1 theological, 1 non-fiction) I want to create something. The blogging and the novel writing both give me tangible products.

At the beginning of February I'll have something to look back on. Hopefully that will inspire me to keep up my efforts.

Yesterday I started playing WoW when I first settled down for the evening. Trying to get momentum to work on something "productive" was a lot harder than the days when I just first sit down and get cracking writing or building or researching.

I still haven't settled on what kind of work environment I'm going to program in. I'm thinking of going with Java, but I've been toying with the idea of working in Lisp. I could in theory go work in Small Talk (or a derivative like Squeak), but I'm not sure how practical that would be.

One of my purposes with all of these goals is to sharpen my life skills. The other is to make myself better at my own job. Working with a variety of languages and learning to look at problems more generally will help. Also I'm hoping to sharpen myself on languages I haven't used in a while so I can do some freelancing on the side.

This will probably be my last post for the week. I'll be over the 1000 word goal, so I won't have as much incentive to post. Well, if I post anything else it will probably be more links and less monologue. I really enjoy other sites that have links and commentary. I'll try to have more of that next week. An added bonus will be more articles since each will have less text.