• I’m very finicky when it comes to organizing. None of the popular
  organizing forms quite fit the weekly schedule + TODO list that I
  want to use. Custom letter-size forms are easy to make. I’m not sure
  how well I can translate to a smaller size; maybe if I do one week
  per page and then have the TODO list on the next page…
• Last week was find-a-group week. I tried Toast IT, Zero Gravity
  Circus and JCSA. Toast IT was the best in terms of social
  interaction, self-improvement and networking. That’s something
  that’s earned a fixed place on my calendar. I can join the other two
  groups maybe once a month.
• I’m pretty good at impromptu speeches and networking, but not really
  social small talk. I work best when the context is well-established
  and I feel I have something to offer people. That’s why Toast I.T.
  works very well for me, but social chats like JCSA language
  exchanges don’t really do the trick.
• Keeping track of my expenses is a breeze with Gnucash, a free and
  open source program that makes record-keeping fun and easy. I just
  sent my mom a summary of my credit card transactions and a detailed
  transaction report for everything involving a credit card. Whee!
• Working out my finances is scarily fun. I’ve just finished drawing
  up yearly and monthly spending plans based on a general guide for
  international students and my expenses for the past two weeks. I
  used OpenOffice.org Calc to recalculate remaining monthly
  budget automatically as I put in my initial estimates and then
  adjusted them based on my spending goal. I’ve decided to allocate
  more money to groceries and books than I had previously spent, and
  I’ve built in a small splurge allowance for little things I want.
  I’ll test that spending plan this month and post additional
  reflections in September.
• The calendar I’m using right now really works for me. I should look
  into making an electronic version of it so that people reading my
  website can get a better feel of how I like to plan my day. I also
  need to work on a good contact management system to keep track of
  all the people I meet (and it turns out that I meet quite a number
  of new people each week)…