Chaosplay

• Run
• Wake up before 6….. AM (Seems useless now)

1. Quit smoking
2. Learned a little Spanish
3. Learned a little Arabic
4. Read at least 9 books in six months (all Affiliate links):
   1. Outliers: The Story of Success
   2. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage)
   3. Head First Ajax
   4. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.
   5. PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition) (Developer’s Library)
   6. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
   7. Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter)
   8. The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2
   9. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
5. Started running and being more active
6. Updated my old websites
7. Started new project, iGree.nu
8. Started new project with Patrick
9. Started working on a project with Blake

I am ending monthly goals as I haven’t been able to keep up with my goals in May and June. Instead I have just one goal for the rest of year that is to start my business.

I was reading Blake Ross’s interview in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap). He said something about giving an impression as if you are ahead of where you really are. If your project is done only 50%, you say that it is done 75%. The reason is not to mislead but to increase pressure on you to make your lie a reality. Its an interesting concept. Perhaps I will use it .

Blake Ross

I have been slacking but its okay.  I am glad that I choose to do mini goals for every month instead of one major resolution for whole year. I am able to tune my goals based on new information as I learn it.

Here is how I did in February, so far:

• continue going to dojo but  only twice a week – I have been going there regularly.However, I learned, MMA is not really what I was looking for. I am canceling my membership in March.
• finish SCJD project – I made some progress but soon realized that it is not going to benefit me immediately. There is something else I can do which should have more immidiate benefits.
  
• submit photos Alaskan Airline’s contest - This was easy.
• Weekend trip to Austin and stay in hostel there – Done it.
• read Weblogic book – Again it is not very important, there is something else I have been doing which should be more productive for me.

I still plan to do SCJD project but not now. So you are wondering what is that “something else” that is more beneficial for me right now. For now I can tell you it is an idea for startup. As my idea get more refined, I will let you know.

And now my goals for March are:

• Startup – phase 1 (honestly I am not sure what it means right now.)
• Workout regularly at my dojo until my account is canceled. Then at 24 hour Fitness.
• Spend less than $400 on food, entertainment and other non-essential stuff. This month I was way above my set budget, so next month I plan to spend way under my set budget.

Here are links to my previous goals:

• Goals 2009.1
• Goals 2009.2

Yup you read it right. Instead of having one or few major goals for whole 2009, I am going to have several smaller goals through out 2009. Year is very long period of time, and it is easy to sdtart slacking off. For example, in 2008, I had planned to quit smoking. I did it but not until 11:59PM on December 31st, 2008.

Plus I have seen that my life changes quite often. Something that is important now may not be so important six months later.

So I got this idea of mini goals from Tynan. He is not really doing monthly goals but more like 6 month long goals.

So here are my 2009.1 goals:

• Join ToastMasters
• Go to my dojo 3 times a week
• Re-organize my blog

Feeling so empty, and hallow inside

Cannot believe I am writing a poem to a cigarette

but I feel so unsatisfied, unfullfilled

like this poem, half-finished.

So since gym bored me extremely, I quit gym long time ago and started looking at other form of exercises.

I did rock climbing regularly for several months, it was exciting until I got semi good then it became just boring. Then i tried, swimming, running, working out with a video game, just push ups, steppers while playing video games, and hiking.  I got bored with all of these excersices.

I  see a pattern here. All these excerices are solo or semi-solo activities and non-competitive.

So I am thinking of picking up some sport for my new years resolution. My goal is to get regular cardiovascular exercise, at least one hour every week. I am reading about various sports  that are very cardio, like soccer, basketball, taek won do (and other martial arts), and tennis. Right now, I am leaning towards taek won do but its not really a team sport or competitive. However, it does seem like most active sport. Also since the instructor and other people will watching me, I will be motivated to finish the whole session.

So I was wondering if you have any suggestions or ideas. What do you think is the easiest sport to get started in? And which sport you think has most cardiovascular activity?
Please let me know what you think.

Everyone have a great holidays, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanuka!

Weekend is almost over. How did I do on my goals?

First the good, I played with facebook api. I figured out a few key things. I setup repository to store code.

Then the bad, I didn’t run at all this week. I did rock climbed twice. I also used stepper but just for ten minutes.

Lastly, the ugly, I could not work on SCJD project. Only thing I did was setup repository.

So the goals for this week are:

• to run at least once
• setup contractor class for SCJD
• display all your friends photos

Well actually it took much longer than 10 minutes because I got into some issues. First check out my app. It doesn’t do much but its the beginning. The end goal being the dating website.

So here is what I ran into. I followed this tutorial. My webserver uses php4 but the tutorial I got from facebook was for php5. PHP4 does not support try… catch blocks. (I didn’t know that). I had to modify the appinclude.php like this:

//catch the exception that gets thrown if the cookie has an invalid session_key in it
if (!$facebook->api_client->users_isAppAdded()) {
$facebook->redirect($facebook->get_add_url());
}

/*Commented out this section, not sure how to deal with this just yet.

{
//this will clear cookies for your application and redirect them to a login prompt
$facebook->set_user(null, null);
$facebook->redirect($appcallbackurl);
}*/

Then like many other’s I had to upload simplexml44-0_4_4 in php4client directory.

After that it worked like a charm.

So that was the first step towards one of my 2008’s objectives.

I know its a bit late for new year’s resolutions. I actually made these resolutions at the beginning of the year but I haven’t made much progress on these. One of my favorite blog write, recommends that if you are unable to keep your resolutions, then make those resolutions public. Let everyone see your resolutions. Then make yourself accountable by reporting your progress to those who you know about your resolutions.

So I plan to announce my resolutions for this year, and I will report at least weekly progress on these resolutions. Here are my resolutions:

• Get my SCJD Certification
• Run for an hour (I can run and walk for an hour)
• Learn Arabic (I am going to weekly classes)
  

I am also adding my big project of making $1,000,000 to this list. I was talking to Karl and he told me why don’t you make dating website. After some thought I figure why not make this dating website for facebook. A lot of my developer friends are into facebook apps. And I like my friend, Jordan’s saying that in order to get rich you don’t need an original idea. You can use any idea or business and just execute it better. So I think I can make a better dating app for facebook. (although there are already tens of such apps). I don’t think this dating app will make me money but it will be sort of proof of concept.

So I have 4 tasks to report on every week and hopefully more often.