Whilst out walking on my lunch break, I saw some winter lettuce. 😀 🚶🏼‍♂️ 🥬 📷

It was good to get out of the house for some fresh air; I really need to do more of that this Winter.

I don’t really put much stock in the whole “New Years Resolutions” thing everyone else in the States seems to do…but I do like to set some overarching “goals” for the year. Last year, I only had two goals, one of which I succeeded at and the other was a miserable failure. So, this year, I’ve decided to be a little more ambitious.

Yes, I realize calling them “goals” instead of “resolutions” is a silly semantical quibble but it’s how I prefer things. 🤣

Goals

• Be Healthier
  • No junk food in January ¹
  • Start building better eating habits
  • Restart my fitness journey ²
• Continue Tracking Finances ³
  • Commit to a single financial aggregator ⁴
• Be More “there” For Family and Friends
  • Be a better Partner
  • Spend more time with my family
  • Reconnect with old friends, rekindle old relationships ⁵
• Work On My Career
  • Stop treading water
  • Regain my “senior” title (long story) ⁶
• Be More Organized
  • Clean things up as I’m working on them…or better yet, just don’t make a mess in the first place
  • Don’t go to bed with a dirty kitchen
  • Finally clean up and organize the basement…and keep it organized

I suspect I’m going to struggle with more than one of these goals but a new year is a good time to start improving one’s self. 🤞🏻

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1. My Partner and I have a ski trip coming up at the start of March, it would be nice to be in better shape for it. ↩︎

2. I was working out on a semi-regular basis throughout the year but given the stress and trama of October, I completely fell off the wagon. ↩︎

3. This was the successful goal from last year. ↩︎

4. I started out with PocketSmith earlier this year but as they raised their prices without providing anything new, I’ve switched to Banktivity…but now I’m trying out Copilot. 😅 ↩︎

5. The year started off very rough, causing both me and my Partner to “withdraw” from the world with our grief. ↩︎

6. Short Version: When I left my old job, I lost my “senior / architect” title to become a “consultant”. During the hiring process, when I pointed out my experience, I was informed as I’d never done consulting before, I’d have to work on my “senior” title. I wasn’t all that bothered about it as I was attempting to leave a bad working situation (people don’t leave good companies, they leave bad managers) and even with the title loss, I was still getting a raise in salary. 🤣 ↩︎

Aside from two events, the year hasn’t been too shabby…but those two events wreaked me. I’m very much looking forward to another go ‘round the sun, see everyone in 2024! 🥳🎉🎊

Last working day of the year for me and wow, I really need more coffee. ☕️🥱😪

Migrated 18TB of data from one server to another and even though the “new” server has redundancy, I’m still hesitating to click ”delete” on the old server… 🤣

So, I did a thing last night…I finally moved to a new server case. 🎉📷

It took far longer to get started than I though it would and I ended up with a bloody hand (it’s a very nice case but that metal is sharp 🤣)…and I haven’t installed case fans yet but…the server is back online and running!

House chores are done for the day, now off to Costco. Fingers crossed I spend less than $100 today… 🤞🏻😆

I was going to spend my lunch break working on creating a single-page app, to bulk-upload photos to Micro.blog but…I ended up throwing in the towel and just wrote a C# script instead. It still makes me happy Microsoft open sourced .Net and it runs natively on the Mac. 🤓😀 #HappyGeek

Follow-Up: My @atpfm@mastodon.social pint glass finally came in the mail today, after years (it was my own fault, I always put off ordering their stuff until the last minute…and then things are out of stock… 🤣). 🎉🥳

Follow-Up (Part 2): I was trying to listen to some Holiday music this morning, only to realize none of my Sonos speakers worked with AirPlay. After digging online, it turns out the only way to get a Sonos speaker back into HomeKit after the home is deleted is to factory reset the Sonos. 😱😅

Follow-Up: I think my HomeKit set up is mostly back to normal. I was a little stupid and didn’t take backups / exports…so I lost some historical data (mostly temperature / humidity / air quality) but at least my Holiday automations are working again. 🎄😅

My HomeKit set up has been rock-solid for years but the minute I added a Matter plug (the “Meross Matter Smart Plug Mini”), everything breaks…and as it’s Apple land, where everything works perfectly until it doesn’t, fixing it is going to be…unpleasant. 😱😭

Follow-Up: The IKEA Sonos speaker is working perfectly (which is more than I could ever say of the HomePod Mini stereo set up) this morning; holiday music is flooding the room whilst I’m debugging some legacy Java code. 🤓🎄 (Yes, I had a spare speaker lying around… 🤣) 📷

Follow-Up: The package was found in the bushes below my house, next to the sidewalk…completely soaked and disfigured from the rain. 🌧️ I’m guessing the steps were just too much for the delivery person, all ten of them. 😅 Also, there is no way that box can fit in my mailbox, so again, someone lied.

So, either Amazon is lying, the US Post Office is lying, or someone has taken my new Kindle from my mailbox. 😭📭