Well, work isn’t exactly lighting my fire at the moment, but with the economy and job market as it is at the moment, I’ll take stability over interesting. So it’s time to do a bit of personal development to stop me going insane.

I have a number of projects I’d like to make some progress on, so I thought I’d list them here to give me a bit of incentive. First off we have:

Scanner Camera

I need to finish this off so that it’s in a usable state then go out and take some pictures with it. As a side line there’s also lens development. And I suppose there’s a much more general project of “photography” here. I’ve been letting it slip lately and I have a stack of old films in storage that need processing and some half finished photography projects to complete.

C4mbodia.com

This is a website I developed for a group of friends as a replacement for 4rthur.com which was a spin-off from b3ta.com. I re-wrote it in python and django a while back to replace the clunky php version. However I’ve not finished that rewrite - it’s stalled with just the most basic functionality there. I need to finish off the links section, the calendar, the personal messaging and the other ancillary “social networking” features. First off, I’ll plan it out, get the milestones and tickets into trac and take it from there.

Organise my life

I don’t mean this in any great sense, jsut that I need to get a new filing cabinet and get all the tedious household and financial stuff organised better. Currently everything is spread out in numerous drawers and folders around the hosue and I should really get it together. This started when I reorganised the furniture in my lounge so I need to finish it off.

Update this blog more

Why? Why not. I find that when I’m busy I tend to have more desire to do things, so if I keep this place ticking over then hopefully it’ll keep my enthusiasm for the other projects going too. Plus, if I’m ever to be world famous, I need to keep as many avenues open as possible ;-)

Write a book.

On a whim, I’ve decided to take part in this years NaNoWriMo. I’m no great writer, in fact I hardly ever write anything these days, but I used to. And I’ve always wanted to write something substantial, so I thought this would be a good start. I’ll keep you up to date with my word count as I go, and I’ll probably post the results up here. I’ll state upfront that I’m not expecting to complete the 50k words, but then I never expected to complete my Birmingham to Oxford bike ride on my single speed, but I did so who knows… Also, my “novel” will be rubbish.

That’s it for now. If you feel I’m not updating this place neough or just want a progress report, drop me a line to chivvy me along. I’ve felt for a long time that I’m wasting my free time and I’m bursting with ideas for things, but rarely follow them up, so I’ve decided to do something about it. Hopefully this post won’t just be an embarrassing reminder of my crapness in months to come.