Weekly review: Week ending June 1, 2012
Many small improvements this week! I installed a drip irrigation system in the garden to help with watering. I think I may need to replace some of the hoses or tweak the configuration a bit, but it’s a good start, and it’ll mean that the tomatoes, peas, and bitter melon plants will get watered reliably. The garden is starting to do interesting things. The bok choy plants we bought and planted are now enormous, the first strawberries are reddening, the tomato plants are flowering, the peas are climbing away, and the bitter melon is flourishing. We’ve been cheering on some birds-eye pepper seedlings, too – let’s see how far they get!
I upgraded my laptop to a solid-state drive (SSD) last night, and I’m looking forward to enjoying much snappier performance. It’s almost like having a new laptop.
It’s been wonderful having so many different types of desserts in the house. Brownies, lemon squares, polvoron… Hooray for freezable goodies that can be spread out over weeks.
Business-wise, this week was another sprint – 45.7 hours spent consulting. It’s been okay so far, although I was glad to take Friday to learn Quickbooks and upgrade my drive. I want to learn Quickbooks because even if I outsource bookkeeping and accounting, I want to know what’s going on, and I want to be able to have better conversations about it. It’s a bit expensive, but I’d rather do that kind of tracking throughout the year instead of waiting until tax-filing time or leaving it entirely in someone else’s hands. I might look for a bookkeeper on Odesk to help me review my setup and keep the files up to date.
I’ve got a lot of data to analyze. My virtual assistant has typed in all the details from our grocery receipts, so I can crunch the numbers in time for the Quantified Self Toronto meetup on Thursday. I’ve reviewed the three notebooks I scanned in, and am looking forward to scanning in more. I’m most of the way through my blog archive – now looking at 2009 and moving forward – and I’ve been rating posts from 1 to 5. I’ve hired a WordPress developer to make a plugin for filtering the rated posts so that it’s easy to see highlights. Tapping other people’s time and skills turns out to be lots of fun.
Table of Contents
From last week’s plans
- Business
[X]Earn: E1: Mon-Thu: More training, get ready for conference[X]Earn: R1: I18n, invoice[-]Connect: Practise pinging people[X]Build: Set up my local development environment for Quantified Awesome[-]Build: Coach my mom on delegating to virtual assistants[X]Build: Learn more about Dragon NaturallySpeaking[-]Build: Write about first-quarter experience- Build: Upgraded to SSD, yay!
- Earn: R1: Production deployment slightly stressful, but should improve going forward
- Earn: R1: Learned a little about Sencha Touch
- Relationships
[-]Help with study group – no study group, PA day[X]Clear my inbox[-]Plant front garden[X]Install irrigation system- Watched Going Postal, which was lots of fun; also, a few other movies
- Made polvoron
- Life
[X]Balance books and update accounts[X]Review past notebooks[-]Finish rating my past blog posts[-]Relax
Plans for next week
- Business
[ ]Earn: E1: Conference[ ]Earn: E1: Community prototyping[ ]Earn: R1: Support, i18n[ ]Connect: Set up meetings with people[ ]Build: Write some blog posts on Emacs[ ]Build: Investigate pictures in org2blog[ ]Build: Write about first-quarter experience[ ]Build: Post a job on ODesk for a bookkeeper[ ]Build: Braindump lots of blog posts
- Relationships
[ ]Have M- and C- over for lunch[ ]Plant front garden[ ]Help with study group
- Life
[ ]Finish rating my past blog posts
Time notes
- Business: 62:31 (E1 30:52, R1 13:47, connect 1:05)
- Discretionary: 18:35 (gardening 3:23, writing 1:02, social 0:47)
- Personal: 28:20 (biking 7:03, routines 13:50)
- Sleep: 50:58 (average 7.3 hours per day)
- Unpaid work: 7:34
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Carl Bolduc
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