Monthly review: June 2010

Posted on July 8th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

June was a great month for building. I built my first piece of furniture, a folding Adirondack chair I built from Lee Valley’s plans. The community newsletter tool I built for work turned out to be wildly popular, and it’s inspiring how people from different parts of IBM are helping me make it even better. I re-built my website to work on PHP+FastCGI+Nginx instead of PHP+mod_php+Apache, and it should be faster now. I built friendships, too, adopting a newcomer to Toronto and helping her find her way around. =)

If my family gets their visas sorted out, W- and I will get married in less than two months. Exciting times indeed!

Last month, I said:

So, what does June look like? More adjustments at work, a flurry of wedding preparations for August, lots of woodworking while it’s fun to work outdoors, lots of writing, a bit of gardening and sewing, and some more conscious attention to people’s lives. It’ll be awesome.

Work is terrific. I’m interested in exploring this sales opportunity that looks tailor-made for the kinds of skills I want to learn, but I’m also very much enjoying the work I currently do and the other projects that my new manager has lined up. It’s hard to decide! I’m looking forward to discussing my options with my mentors and old friends at a tea party I’m hosting this Saturday.

It’s been great woodworking weather. This weekend I’ll be busy with social events, but next weekend, I can start working on a storage bench and a kitty litter box hideaway. The two projects should come together pretty quickly. After all, they’re just big boxes. ;)

New interests like woodworking and playing the ukulele tend to be incompatible with writing, but I’ll see if videoblogging can help me get more stories down. At least there will be raw material to work with. I feel self-conscious watching myself on video – do I giggle too much? stutter too frequently? – but as I realized in my post about the ukulele, you can’t get to excellence if you won’t risk mediocrity. Besides, it’s good to show people that it’s okay to learn. ;)

What will July be like? I want to polish my community toolkit and share it with more people. I want to explore sales and see what I can learn even in my current role. I want to invest more time into developing relationships. I want to build a few projects. I want to learn how to play at least one song on my ukulele. It’ll be busy and fun and amazing.

Here are the blog posts from June:

Risks, personal brands, and findability – in which I get on my soapbox about being people instead of brands
Book: Making Peace with Your Office Life – surprisingly great guide to debugging your office environment
Keeping my name – just so you know, I’m going to stay Sacha Chua forever. ;)
Growing up – yay for my sister growing up!
Editing audio and embedding it into a MS Powerpoint file – I didn’t know that before
Thank you, David Singer – friends are awesome
Using supervisord for Nginx+FastCGI+PHP – useful for geek bloggers
Seven Tips for Short Talks – quick tips
The fruits and chairs of our labour – look, my chair!
Say the steps out loud – share what you’re learning
Planning ahead – I like it
Notes about business communication – More tips
Happiness – for my mom’s memory book
I want to learn how to draw better – Practice!
On libraries at school – I heart libraries
Braindump: Automating repetitive tasks using AutoHotkey – yay automation
Thinking out loud: happiness – for my mom’s memory book
LotusScript: Checking another database for categories that do not contain a document of a particular type – geek stuff
The work of self-understanding
Passion – for my mom’s memory book
Personal finance – for my mom’s memory book
Goals – for my mom’s memory book
Some of my favourite quotes – for my mom’s memory book
Influence map; introspection – filling in stories

Weekly review:

Last month: May 2010

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