I signed a new consulting contract, so there's going to be web development and social business consulting (analytics, etc.) in my near future. I'm planning to work fewer hours, though, so that should free up more time for writing, cooking, and other forms of improvement. =)

Along those lines, I've been investing time into improving my development tools and workflow. Yay Emacs! I think I'm getting the hang of working with skewer-mode now. expand-region is probably next on my list of things to get used to.

Next week, I'm looking forward to tweaking my workflow further, and sketching out some plans for the kind of functionality that might be good to build over the next year. We have a developer ramping up, so if I spend more time on the design phase for both prototypes and reporting, that should help her get going faster. I'm also looking forward to experimenting with Emacs hangouts and spending some time working on Quantified Awesome.

In other news, it snowed today in Toronto. Very light snow and still bike-able, but officially snow. And I also finished my first pass reading The Art of Slow Writing – plenty of notes to take from this book, I think. Onwards!

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending October 24, 2014
• Upgrading from Rails 3 to Rails 4; thank goodness for Emacs and rspec
• Cupcake challenge: accepted!
• Hacklab Cooking: Thai curry from scratch, and coconut tapioca pudding too
• Emacs hangout notes
• Planning for winter – tweaking my layers
• Publishing WordPress thumbnail images using Emacs and Org2Blog

Sketches

• 2014-10-31 What do I want the rhythm to feel like
• 2014-10-31 What do I want from this phase of my experiment
• 2014-10-31 How do I want to become a better developer

Link round-up

• You Should Take A Codecation: The idea of doing something like this for Emacs has been mentioned.

Focus areas and time review

• Business (57.0h – 33%)
  • Earn (33.8h – 59% of Business)
    • ☑ E1: Update analytics
    • ☑ E1: Wrap up neatly
    • ☐ E1: Brainstorm prototypes I want to propose
    • ☐ Earn: E1: 2.5-3.5 days of consulting
  • Build (19.3h – 33% of Business)
    • Drawing (0.0h)
    • Delegation (0.0h)
      • ☐ Plan business and delegation for this phase
    • Packaging (0.0h)
    • Paperwork (0.0h)
      • ☑ Hire accountant and assemble information
      • ☐ Send trial balance and general ledger to accountant
      • ☐ Sort out invoice/deposit thing
  • Connect (3.8h – 6% of Business)
    • ☑ Attend QS meetup
    • ☑ Prepare for Hacklab open house
    • ☐ Coach Lucas on programming
    • ☐ Organize Emacs Hangout
    • ☐ Process Quantified Self videos
• Relationships (2.4h – 1%)
• Discretionary – Productive (10.5h – 6%)
  • Emacs (7.4h – 4% of all)
    • ☑ Emacs: Evaluating Javascript and CSS in Chrome using Skewer Mode
    • ☑ Emacs: Limiting Magit status to a directory
    • ☑ How we keep (financial) score
    • ☑ Publishing WordPress thumbnail images using Emacs and Org2Blog
  • Quantified Awesome
    • ☑ Fix forms and bootstrap 3
    • ☑ Fix token authentication
    • ☑ I can add an item
    • ☑ I can organize items by aisle/category
    • ☑ Items have a price history
    • ☑ Start working on kitchen organizer
    • ☑ Update to Bootstrap 3
    • ☑ Upgrade Rails 3 to Rails 4
    • ☑ We can cross items off
    • ☐ Update to Rails 4.1
  • ☑ Bike to work
  • ☐ Get passport pictures
  • ☐ Draw a cat
  • ☐ Pick up exercise ladder again for three straight days
  • Writing (2.7h)
    • ☐ Organize a journal section in my notes
• Discretionary – Play (6.6h – 3%)
• Personal routines (21.7h – 12%)
• Unpaid work (12.4h – 7%)
• Sleep (57.4h – 34% – average of 8.2 per day)