Cristiano on Tech/Life

After reading Melinda’s and Ian’s New Year’s resolutions on their blogs, I decided that it might be interesting for me to document my resolutions too. If not for your interest, at least for my personal motivation.

• Get my MSc Degree: I should have gotten my degree by now, but somehow London has kept me to busy last year.
• Work on my health: I haven’t gained weight in the last year, but this doesn’t mean I feel better. I will have to start eating healthier, although I don’t think that’s the main problem, which actually is: sport. I really need to get my ass moving and away from my laptop. I bought some running shoes and had my first 1.5km run today. Did it in 9 minutes and was completely dead after it. Let’s see if I can keep this up and do this twice a week, and so slowly increase the distance to maybe 3km and beyond.
• Organize events: Since arriving in London almost a year ago (yes, it’s almost a year now) I have been going to Barcamps, GeekDinners, GirlGeekDinners, all organized by great people with too much of a philanthropic nature. So this year I want to go and help people organize events, starting with helping Ian with the GeekDinners, and maybe even eventually help/organize a Barcamp-like-event.
• Read more books: I love reading books, but somehow I never get to doing it. I am not a very fast reader (especially not in comparison to Melinda), but recently I discovered Audiobooks on the iPhone. Especially the option to speedup the audio s simply brilliant. On my list to read for now are Freakonomics, Fooled by Randomness, Wheel of Time – Part 6 to 12, I am Legend, and many more.
• Wake up earlier and more regularly: This goes partly together with my plan to sport, but it is also simply more handy to wake up at regular times. Yesterday I was up until 4am, which meant I didn’t really wake up before 12pm.

Melinda, Colin, and I decided to celebrate the new year by standing in a pushy crowd for more than 4 hours in order to watch the fireworks at the London Eye. I only brought 2 beers which made this a very “successful” plan. We did take some nice photos though.

Instead of focussing on what is coming in 2008, or what was popular in 2007, I wanted to focus on what I decided to dump in 2007. Not Melinda, I would never dump her, but software (and related) I did dump. Here is the software I decided to stop using in 2007:

• Firefox: Although I still have Firefox installed, I never really use it anymore but for testing and debugging HTML. I don’t use it as a browser anymore because version 2 is so ridiculously slow in comparison to let’s say Safari. Furthermore I don’t like how insecure and inaccessible Firefox stores its login information for websites. Come on Mozilla, you do know that Mac OS X has a Keychain for that right? I mean, Mozilla Camino does it, Safari does it, then why doesn’t Firefox do it? Furthermore I don’t need 300 browser tweaks, so running Safari 3 with Saft and Inquisitor is all I really need.
• Microsoft Office: With the release of iWork ‘08 the use of Microsoft Office has really become redundant. I wrote before on how I think that a combination of Google Docs and iWork could be a far more valuable asset for most people. I personally don’t work for a company that wants me to use MS Office, neither do I feel it gives me something extra. It has even gone this far that I seriously don’t care anymore about what Microsoft is doing with Office 2008. Is it still coming in 2008? Is it out yet? Don’t care.
• FAT: Before we moved to London I still had a lot of data one external hard drives, partitioned in FAT32, because you never know when you need to access your data on a Windows machine. With the move to London and a very Mac oriented world I decided to dump FAT because it is too limiting and simply useless. If I ever need to share that data with a Windows pc I will just have to make the data available over Samba or something.