2019 in Review

As is tradition a quick rundown of the year is due. It’s been good to do as it makes me reflect on the past year, and see that I did indeed do some things, and to look ahead a little.

2019 Non-Geek Achievements

1. Played around with Isidor.

   It’s hard to describe how happy a kid can make you.

2. Read a bunch of books.

   I like the idea of tracking all the books I read. But I hate the actual tracking part, so I don’t actually know what books I did read. The Big Short, Permanent Record and A Little Hatred are some I read recently, and they’re great.

3. Regular grappling training.

   Since we moved, I’ve only been training grappling very rarely. But now I train Submission Wrestling here once a week. I love it.

4. Built a small home gym.

   It’s a real luxury.

2019 Geek Achievements

1. Started writing a book.

   So far I’ve written around 80% of the planned chapters, so I guess there’s only around 80% of the work left. I’ve managed to produce a bunch of words:

   > wc -c *.html.pm | sort -n
   402050 total
   

   (It’s an overestimation, but it gives a rough estimate.)

2. Did some memory training.

   I had a goal of becoming better at memorizing things. Like a deck of cards or better at learning a new language. I haven’t done a lot, but it clearly works (although the training is very mentally draining).

3. Wrote a QR code generation in Rust.

4. Wrote some Racket.

5. Assembled my Ergodox Infinity.

6. Built a bunch of Lego.

2019 Failures

1. I wanted to have come further with the memory training.

Plans for 2020

1. Adjust to a new family member, expected in February.

2. Finish my book.

   I can at least finish the writing part, and probably produce a pdf/ebook/epub or whatever digital format is the fashion nowadays. The ultimate goal is to get a physical book in my bookshelf, but I have no idea how long that process might be.

3. Complete enough of the memory training to start learning a new language.

4. Go through the book building git.

5. Read some books.

   

   And then some books I want to re-read:

   1. A Song of Ice and Fire series

      Assuming the new Game of Thrones book gets released in 2020…

   2. The books in the First Law World

      I regret I didn’t re-read the books before I read A Little Hatred, which is the first book in the new trilogy in the world. The other books are to be released in November 2020 and 2021, and Joe Abecrombie did a good job by writing the story of the whole trilogy before even realising the first book.

   3. Dune

      I should prepare for the movie that’s coming in 2020 by re-reading the classic book, which I don’t really remember other than it being very good.

   This is a whole lot of books for me, as I don’t usually read that much. Maybe I need to stop reading so much manga, or lower my expectations a bit. I should be happy if I go through even a third of this list.

It was a pretty good year. Looking forward to an even better one next year.