Scott Yang's Playground

Earlier this year I blogged about my brief experience with 43 Things, a social network that track goals and achievements. I have since abandoned the site due to procrastination, which was one of the few things that I was trying to overcome in 43 Things! But then I somehow remembered it today, dug out my account, and checked what my goals were from February this year, and how much I have done…

These were some of my top goals:

1. Blog regularly
   There has been so far 267 entries on this site, with May as the month with the most posts. That does not fair well with 522 posts from last year. Especially with December this year, the posting gets really sparse. Way too busy, which makes blogging like a burden to me :(

2. Play more tennis
   The original motivation was that I got beaten by Josh in long termers’ weekend away. The sad fact is, I will probably get beaten again if we go next year, as I haven’t practised tennis for at least 6 months. Good thing is, I probably won’t be going to the long termers’ next year (got other family committments) so that leaves me another year to get myself back on track.

3. Learn Mono
   I read a book on C#, and that’s about it. We don’t use it at work, and sadly I don’t have any “spare time” to learn .NET, so this goal pretty much stops here. I still would like to pick it up one day, but I guess unles work requires it, it will never be a priority. 2005 is dominated by buzzworks like “Web 2.0″ and web RAD platform like RoR anyway, and that leads to my next point.

4. Learn Ruby on Rails
   I actually “gave up” on this one. Had a look on Ruby and its Perl’ish syntax, and wondered why I would ever get back to all these curly brackets when I am so comfortable here with Python. Instead, I have “Learn Django” as one of my goal for 2006.

5. Learn Greasemonkey
   Again, I have read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Greasemonkey, but failed to write any user scripts. So should I claim that this goal has been achieved? I just don’t have enough itches to scratch yet, that’s all.

6. Read more Bible
   One thing I found is, more vague your goal is, more difficult it is to achieve. What is “read more Bible”? Anyway, I don’t think I have read enough this year — most my readings are ad hoc than planned, which I need to fix. Vivian and I will be writing studies for 2 Corinthians later next year, so I will start work on that first.

7. Read more books
   Again, another vague description. Worse, there was little I could remember that I have read this year (bad memory!!!) I guess that’s what blogging comes useful, and I need to remember to blog what I have read.

8. Build a fence for the front yard
   It’s also long overdue, but the fact I procrastinated, nothing has been done.

9. Stop procrastinating
   Hmm. Not much needs to be said here, except that I’m expecting this to be on my next year’s list as well.

10. Get a MP3 player
    Oh! This one I have achieved. Bought a MSC S8 solid state player/recorder from Hong Kong in Feb this year, and that gotta be one of the most useful gadget I have bought this year. It has been used Monday to Friday on my bus trips, and Sundays to record church sermons. As of Sunday church sermon recording, many people have asked about it but somehow we still haven’t worked out a way to distributed that is satisfying everyone (err, mainly Josh). So I still procrastinate…

As you can see, my 2005 failed miserably, if judging by my 43 Things goals. There are, of course, other highlights this year which I think I’ll leave that to another blog post (procrastination!!!)

PS. I have also noticed that I have been promising follow up posts this year but many of them never eventuate. Have to fix that next year…