Tag Archives: reading

2012 Year in Review

Family Margaritas and ScrabbleEvery year, I like to write some kind of year in review blog post. I started writing these in 2007 as  a way for people that I don’t talk to very often to keep up with what I’ve been doing, but I’ve found that it helps me see what I’ve accomplished (or not accomplished) that I can use to reflect on what I want to do in the next year. You can find the 2007200820092010, and 2011 editions if you want to see how this year compares with previous years.

2012 in Review

This year, I spent more time doing things that I enjoyed: reading, running, working in a job that makes me happier and much more!

  • The single biggest change I made in 2012 was leaving Intel and taking some time off before joining Puppet Labs. I had been at Intel for 2.5 years (along with an earlier stint from 2000 – 2006). While I loved the people I worked with (and miss them), the job left me drained of energy, and I just wasn’t passionate about it anymore. I left without a real plan other than to take a month (or a few) off before starting anything new. I used this little sabbatical (aka funemployment) to read, run and hang out with friends. I started at Puppet Labs 7 weeks later feeling relaxed and recharged. I’m loving the work and enjoying being back in a startup!
  • I read over 70 books last year! Most of them were science fiction / fantasy, and I keep a list of everything that I read here on my blog.
  • I also ran … a lot. In 2012, I ran over 470 miles, and just over 100 of those miles were in August during my funemployment. My longest run of the year, also the longest run of my entire life, was 11.3 miles (just 1.7 miles short of a half-marathon distance). I also did some weight lifting and other workouts. Aside from falling off the wagon over the past month due to a couple of back-to-back colds, I’m feeling pretty good on the fitness side.
  • Like last year, I did a fair bit of travel. For work, I went to Brussels, Belgium; Seoul, South Korea; Berlin and Nuremberg, Germany; and Barcelona, Spain. For fun, I took trips to Hawaii, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Ohio to visit family. I even have pictures from many of the trips posted on Flickr.
  • As part of this travel, I presented at a few conferences. I did a few Tizen presentations earlier in the year, but recently, I’ve been speaking about open source metrics at LinuxCon in Barcelona and the LibreOffice Conference in Berlin.
  • I’ve also been dabbling with programming again, mostly in Ruby, since that’s what everyone at Puppet Labs uses. I’m pretty terrible at it, since I haven’t done any real programming since the mid-90’s, but it’s enough to accomplish a few simple things and be more self-sufficient. And, I enjoy doing it 🙂
  • I am still selling my vegan cookbookWhat Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird. It was published last year and is available in paperback, Kindle edition and PDF format.

If I look back to what I wanted to accomplish in 2012 from last year’s year in review, I did pretty well!

  • I continued to travel and visit new places (South Korea, Spain and maybe Belgium were new last year).
  • I wanted to do runs in the 8-13 mile range and more regularly hit the gym to lift weights. I made it just over 11 miles, which is pretty good, and I did quite a bit of weightlifting, so I feel good about this one, too.
  • For several years, I’ve been wanting to do some light programming, and this is the year that I finally started real work on that one!
  • I also said that I wanted to get to a point where I can actually carry on a conversation in French that goes beyond basic greetings and travel phrases in 2012. With one lesson a week, it’s taking a while, but I’m finally getting to the point where I can carry on very simple conversations … as long as you speak very slowly, repeat yourself a few times and use mostly words that I already know 🙂
  • I failed miserably at my goal to keep my blog updated.

What I Want to Accomplish in 2013

  • Yet again, I’m going to make an effort to blog here more often.
  • I want to travel to even more new places. I’m off to a good start on this one, since I’ve already scheduled a work trip for February in Belgium, Norway and Sweden along with a fun trip with mom to Aruba in May!
  • I plan to continue meeting my fitness goals from last year with regular running, weight lifting and other activities. This will be a little more challenging because I expect to be doing quite a bit of travel this year, and working out is a lot harder when you are jet-lagged and busy working in another time zone. While I was happy with my general fitness in 2012, I still tend to eat too much, so I’ll work on that a bit.
  • I also want to continue to work on my French. I’d love to be more conversational next year and ideally, be able to read simple books and watch movies in French without relying entirely on the subtitles.
  • I hope to spend more time writing code. In addition to being more self-sufficient, I would also like to learn how to not suck at it by spending the time to learn how to do things properly rather than just doing whatever gets the job done the fastest.
  • While I want to continue to read, I actually need to pull back on that a bit. I love reading, but it’s taking too much time away from other activities, so I’m going to try to read a bit less to free up more time to actually do the things mentioned above!

Your Twitter Followers Are Smarter Than You Are

Mack Collier wrote an interesting post recently with five reasons why no one likes you on Twitter. If you use Twitter, especially on behalf of a company, you should read his post along with the post that I wrote about using Twitter for brands. Both have quite a few tips for what to do and what not to do on Twitter. I read Mack’s post this morning, and one particular idea really resonated with me after an experience that I had last night on Twitter. Mack said that on Twitter “the people that are following you, are smarter (as a group), than you are.”

I’ve known this to be true before last night. I’ve received all kinds of great information, links, recommendations, and more from people on Twitter over the past few years. However, last night is a great example of how incredibly smart and interesting my Twitter followers are as a group and as individuals.

Yesterday afternoon right before a trip to Powell’s Books, I realized that I had lost my to-read list of science fiction books. I remember putting the list together right after a Beer and Blog discussion with Craig and Amber who made several great recommendations. I even remember adding a few more books to the list based on suggestions from other friends. I suspect that I stored the list in some service in the cloud that I no longer use or maybe doesn’t even exist anymore, and no amount of digging could uncover my lost list of books. Sigh.

Since I needed to compile a new list, I put the request on Twitter to help me get started.

SciFi Tweet

I also provided people with a link to the list of books that I have been reading recently (over the past couple of years) to give people a sense of what I might like. I was looking specifically for science fiction books. I also read quite a few business and technology books, but from my desk, I can see a couple of stacks of books (20+) that I already need to read, so no shortage of ideas in those categories.

I started the list with a few authors that I have already been reading, but haven’t finished reading enough of their work, and by the time I got back to Twitter, the storm of recommendations had started. New recommendations have still been trickling in today, too. The end result was dozens of recommendations for books that look exactly like the type of thing that I enjoy reading. I spent a huge chunk of the evening reading about the books and authors being recommended as they came in through Twitter. If you are interested in the list of recommendations, I have added it to my reading page here on the blog. I’m starting with Cryptonomicon, since Neal Stephenson had the highest the number of recommendations of any author and Todd already owns the book, so it was a convenient place to start.

Let’s get back to Twitter for a minute. Twitter is a give and take relationship. I suspect that I got this overwhelming response for a few reasons: 1) many of my friends are science fiction geeks, so the topic resonates with people; 2) I try to provide recommendations to these same people whenever I can; and 3) I was providing credit and thanking people for their suggestions (I probably missed a few, but I tried to catch everyone). Twitter is a great place for these types of experiences, but you have to be willing to give back and help others when they need it, too.

The moral of the story? Yes, my Twitter followers are smarter than I am.

UPDATE 7/22: Corrected a typo in a name. Sorry, Mack 🙂