One of my goals for 2009 is to become more financially stable. To help me get this off of the ground, one of the things I’ve done is that I’ve added the blog The Simple Dollar to my reader. I try not to clutter up my feeds with topic unrelated to my focus or other things that clutter, and so far this one has been on target for my goal; so it’s here to stay, for now.
As you probably know if you are reading this. I have set up rubyyot.com as a site to help me to get Getting Things Done (GTD) off the ground. This has served two purposes, the first is just that, implementing GTD. The second is that I needed a project to get me back into working with Ruby on Rails and Ruby in general. It has served the latter more that the former so far, but I’m working on that.
Today while reading through my feeds I came across a review of Making it All Work which is a new book by David Allen, author of GTD. While this review gave me ideas for a number of improvements to my site, it also got me thinking about the concept of perspective; specifically the Purpose and Principles portion.
The new year has me already thinking about where I’m at and where I want to be, but this idea got me to take a step back and start intropecting.
What has initially become of it is that I decided to get things going on this blog with a post about where I am at the moment, or rather what has led up to this point. I will follow up with another post on where I see myself going in 2009 and what thing I would like to achieve.
2008
Most people I’ve talked to have said that 2008 was a rough year and I tend to agree with them. In the larger scale of things we have the US financial system crumbling as well as the US ecomomy in general. This is having a great effect on people, myself more directly than some others. The war is Iraq is dragging on without end in sight, though this seems to have been out of the news (or at least what little news I read) lately.
Personally, my family has been plauged by a number of health issues in the past year. The year (2008) started out with plans for separation and possibly divorce. Work was chaos, finishing the year with my company going bankrupt and subsequently bought out and restructured. Getting financially stable was a goal of mine in 2008 at which I failed miserably. It seems that every time things are looking up on that front, some major expense or emergency would come up and set me back to square one.
Now I am a pessimist by nature and so more often that not I will see only the bad and ignore that good. Looking that the bad (above) is pretty daunting and it’s hard to believe that we came through it all in one piece. However there are some good things that happened in 2008 as well.
- We overcame difficult times- This one is obvious, but is a positve way to look at it all. 2008 brought a lot of change, but with it are opportunities.
- My family is still intact – I am really happy about this one.
- I still have a job - My company may have bit the dust, but I am not unemployed.
- C# - I may have previously used C#, but now I’m comfortable saying that I know C#.
- Rubyyot.com – I’ve owned the domain for years, but I finally got the domain off the ground.
- Ruby and Rails – I found them years ago, but while I loved Ruby, I stopped using it. Now I’m using them again.
- FOSS, TDD, ALT.NET, Agile – I am pro open source software, I use Linux exclusively at home, but my job is strictly .NET. This year I’ve been bringing FOSS goodness into the workplace with NUnit, Monorail and Ninject.
Once I get started, the good list makes 2008 look like a good year. This brings me back around to perspective. Interesting.