Monthly review: September 2011

Posted on October 17th, 2011 by Sacha Chua

As predicted, September was a month of preparation. Work projects winding down and starting up; little things to take care of before our trip to the Philippines; personal projects like my home dashboard… It was a good month, productive but not overwhelming.

October will pass before I know it – and indeed, I’m writing this halfway through. We spent the first half getting ready for or enjoying our trip to the Philippines, where we celebrated my sister’s wedding. The rest of October will involve getting back into the swing of work, focusing on projects – maybe even setting up a new work laptop, if I’m lucky. That will make winter commutes better, because I’ll be able to work with just one laptop and I can leave that one at the office.

Personal projects: My home dashboard is working out quite nicely. Travel provided a great excuse to improve the clothing logs / analysis part. There are lots of little tweaks I can do to make it even smoother, but it’s already quite handy now.

I’d like to add more library functionality this month: showing the number of books that are ready for picking up, tracking the date/time they’re read, and maybe displaying some other statistics: mean time between books? This might make a nifty line graph: number of books going in and out of the house per week.

It would be really nifty to calculate the total volume and/or a bag-packing list, so I know if I can fit everything into two bike bags, if I should bring a backpack, or if I should wait until W- can either accompany me or take the car. (Yes, I have library days like that.) Amazon has product dimensions, so it might not be impossible to build my own tool, although there might be some packing inefficiencies. The next step would probably be to build a tool that automatically deactivates my holds when I get close to full capacity, but that might be way too geeky. Just In Time library checkout management. ;)

Yes, the library is very much worth our taxes and donations.

I’ll save the blog review for November or December, once routines are back to normal. One of the good things about being forgetful is that I learn a lot by going back over old posts. Maybe I can hack an “On This Day” feed into my home dashboard or my iGoogle page, so that I can see slices of days. You can see “On This Day” lists when you view single blog posts on my blog, and they’re interesting slices of life through the years. I also want to review my old blog posts, add more notes, and format them for the Kindle so that I can go through my notes in an easier-to-flip-through format.

Life is great!

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