I Love A Good Bandwagon

Well, Courtney and a few others I know have done this requisite beginning of the year blog post, and I love a good bandwagon, so here I go. Just so you all know, I’m stealing many of these from other people, as original thought and blogging don’t seem to go hand-in-hand for me.

2009 Goals / Resolutions

Sort and tag my music collection. This acutally started about two weeks ago now. I have around 5,000 songs on my computer that comprises my music collection, which isn’t really a lot. Unfortunately, the files have become woefully neglected. My preference for file names is the format %artist% – %album% – %track number% – %song name% and I want that data to be in the ID3 tag accurately as well. Most of my files have the artist name and song name accurately, but most do not have the remaining data. The task at hand can be broken down into these subtasks:

• Get rid of songs I no longer like. It’s normal that tastes change over time, and mine certainly have.
• Ensure file names are as complete as possible. Wikipedia is really good at telling me what albums my songs come from.
• Ensure ID3 tags have the correct artist, album, track number and song name. Extra data [genre, year, etc] is good as well, but not required.
• Maintain a good directory structure.

Because I’m a Linux nerd, I use rhythmbox for my media player. For this project, however, I have been using mplayer from the command line, because I love the command line. Maybe I’ll write a super boring post about my sorting procedures. Maybe I’ll draw a flowchart for it. I like flowcharts.

Blog more. Because I’m pretty sure you all need to know about the minutiae of my life, like my music sorting procedures or how I make a super awesome lasagna or what I think about The Doctor this week [still love him]. I have a wedding to plan. I’m sure you’re interested in that, right? No? Too bad. But seriously, I don’t do a lot of writing that isn’t comma-delimited in my day to day life, and it’s an important skill to craft. A couple of weeks ago I sat down to write a couple of paragraphs about an event I had attended, and it was like pulling teeth. Seems like writing is one of those ‘use it or lose it’ sort of entities.

Finish that damn quilt. In the summer of 2007, I started a quilt. An easy beginner quilt. By September, I had the four big pieces that made up most of the quilt completed. By November, I had those pieces sewn together. I haven’t touched it since. All I have left to do on it is make a border of some sort and a back. My mom, the quilter in my life, says it should take three or four hours to add the border, tops. Maybe I should just sit down and finish it, then it would be done and I could move on with other projects.

Get Zend Certified. It’s probably important to stay up to date with what’s happening in my field. With that in mind, I am going to get my Zend PHP 5 Certification, and then maybe after that my Zend Framework Certification. I’m not sure about the ZF Certification, though, as I use Symfony on a daily basis and am not sure how good it would be to have those two things in my head at the same time. Also in this goal are sub-goals of improve my server administration and database administration skills.

Plan a Wedding. Mine, to be exact. We have a date set, and that’s about it really. I’m sure there are other details that are probably important. I should really look into that. Sub-goals: get in shape

Write A WordPress Theme / Customize My WordPress. This design is ugly and I want to make something prettier. With a better sidebar. And better photo integration. I love io9′s website (and content) and want to steal at least some of the elements from their page layout.

So that’s it. We’re going to call these goals, not resolutions, but they are what they are. I’m not sure the overflow of months into the years columns really requires such traditions as these, but taking the time to reflect and consider is always good.