{"id":2457,"date":"2012-12-29T00:01:50","date_gmt":"2012-12-29T00:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2457"},"modified":"2012-12-31T16:14:49","modified_gmt":"2012-12-31T16:14:49","slug":"my-new-years-resolutions-for-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2457","title":{"rendered":"My New Year’s Resolutions for 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t always do New Years Resolutions, but this year I did, coming up with over a dozen things that I wanted to achieve in 2012. <\/p>\n

With a couple of days left, it’s time to see how this worked out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Go back to school<\/h3>\n

I learn most stuff informally or on-the-job. It had been years since I did any formal education so I decided that in 2012 I would find and complete a formal distance-learning course.<\/p>\n

I completed Stanford courses in Natural Language Processing<\/a> and Machine Learning<\/a> with coursera, getting good marks. These were challenging and time-consuming, but definitely worthwhile.
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<\/p>\n

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Conversational Internet<\/h3>\n

After getting the idea at an event in December 2011<\/a>, I decided that in 2012 I would make this happen and get a working prototype off the ground.<\/p>\n

I pitched the project as one of last summer’s Extreme Blue projects and mentored a team to produce the first pilot version of “ChattyWeb”<\/a>, which generated interest from various sources including the BBC<\/a> and Channel 4<\/a>.
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<\/p>\n

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Mobile development<\/h3>\n

I put mobile dev stuff on hold while I focus on Watson stuff, but I wanted to do something to keep my hand in and write at least one mobile app in 2012. <\/p>\n

I helped with an IBM Research project by writing an Android app that gathers sensor telemetry data and submits it to a server. And I tried writing a Windows Phone app<\/a>. But that was all… basically my mobile dev skills are still getting rustier.
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<\/p>\n

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Hack something<\/h3>\n

I used to spend free evenings hacking away on personal projects or geeky ideas. But since starting my new job<\/a>, I fell into a habit of working evenings and weekends, and stopped doing these sorts of random hacks. I decided to get back into creating non-work-related hacky stuff in 2012. <\/p>\n

Work still displaces personal hacking. I used face detection as a form of sentiment analysis<\/a> to measure my reaction to TV viewing, I mashed up my fitbit personal activity data with stuff<\/a> like sentiment analysis of my tweets, and I wrote an app that monitored my daily happiness<\/a>. Better than nothing.
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<\/p>\n

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Keep a daily log<\/h3>\n

I decided to maintain a daily log, making a note of something good that happened or that I did every day. <\/p>\n

I’m still doing it<\/a>. I’ve missed the odd day, but I’ve got something for almost every day this year. And I’m glad, as it is a positive and useful exercise.
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<\/p>\n

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Blog more<\/h3>\n

I went quiet on this blog in 2011, mainly because I got absorbed in my new day job<\/a>. I decided to revive it in 2012 and write a post at least once every couple of weeks. <\/p>\n

This is my 37th post this year. I’ve added an impressive quantity of inane rambling to the Internet. I wrote ten posts about stuff I did with the kids<\/a>, six technical posts about something I did at work, seven random personal posts, five posts about geeky hacks I did in my own time, four posts about IBM Watson<\/a>, three posts about Conversational Internet<\/a>, and one post about an event<\/a> that I went to. I’m happy with that mix.
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<\/p>\n

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Get in shape<\/h3>\n

I hadn’t done any running in 2011, other than jogging a slow mile or two when Grace wanted to run<\/a>. I decided to get back into shape and be able to run at least 10 miles. I entered the Great South Run (which I’d done in 1hr 45mins<\/a> before) and set myself a goal of completing it in 1hr 30mins. I started 2012 at a somewhat chunky 89kg, and set myself a goal of getting down to 80kg. <\/p>\n

I ran over 390 miles<\/a> in 2012, and did the Great South in 1hr 26 mins. With the help of a new fitbit<\/a>, I got my weight below 75kg, and felt better. I undid some of this in the last couple of months, doing no running in Nov-Dec and eating too much junk as work got manic. But this is salvageable and overall was a win.
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<\/p>\n

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Charity trustee stuff<\/h3>\n

There are a few things I wanted to concentrate on in 2012 for SYA, such as an employment tribunal we had to handle, completing a restructuring that was necessary after the loss of much of our funding in 2011, and a revamping of our website. <\/p>\n

Most of this was done, although the website work is still incomplete. The employment tribunal dragged on far longer and was more time consuming than I had expected, and derailed a lot of other work.
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<\/p>\n

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UIMA-AS using WebSphere MQ<\/h3>\n

UIMA-AS (an Apache framework for building asynchronous text analytics applications) uses JMS messaging internally. It comes with the Apache JMS messaging provider, Active MQ. I wanted to modify this so users have the option of using IBM’s JMS provider. <\/p>\n

I have a rough-and-ready but working proof-of-concept that shows that it can be done. I talked with some UIMA contributors about tidying this and formally submitting it to Apache for inclusion in the UIMA project in some way. I’ve not finished this.
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<\/p>\n

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Read books<\/h3>\n

I read 29 books in 2011<\/a>. I set myself a goal of reading at least 24 books in 2012<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I read five books this year. Oops. Reading is the main thing that got squeezed out as I got busy with work this year. I need to rectify this in 2013.
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<\/p>\n

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Others<\/h3>\n

There are a few other things that are either confidential\/work-related or a bit private. <\/p>\n

I finished one. I barely started the others.
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<\/p>\n

\n

Having New Year’s Resolutions was a helpful thing, and I’ll be making a set for 2013. I know there is a fair amount of cynicism about them<\/a>, but find that they help me focus. In GTD terms, I made each resolution into a Project, and made sure that each one had at least one “Next Action” in my tasks list. In this way, my GTD Weekly Review meant I reviewed my progress against my resolutions every week. I think reviewing them regularly was why they (mostly) worked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t always do New Years Resolutions, but this year I did, coming up with over a dozen things that I wanted to achieve in 2012. With a couple of days left, it’s time to see how this worked out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}