thursday already?

Not sure I'm happy or ticked that the week is going by so quick. To business.

115 days until the Pittsburgh Marathon. I hope to hit the Half Marathon. I have ~16 weeks to get myself in good enough shape for this event. We'll see how it goes. Getting back in the exercise groove is hard, but working on getting it going.

Trying to get an iPhone Developer's Kit. Still working thru the activation process. Not going very badly, but not exactly a smooth process either. I might be late for this goldrush, but it is an interesting space and doing mobile application development is something I've been interested in for a while. I've built WAP based sites before but mobile device programming would be a good thing to play with. Learning Objective-C and reminding myself how to do stuff in C is also a good challenge. Slow progress, the past few days, an the opening of the Situational App contest may delay making many more changes, but we'll see. Thinking about strategy for developing new apps. My plan is to start with a few free applications, and depending on adoption and feature requests, I may look at adding a paid version.

As I mentioned the Situational Application contest is back on so trying to get a sMash application out there. Also looking at moving an old PHP application to Zero, updating it to use ZRM instead of PHPDB. There was some AJAX items I wanted to add, and this would be a good way to handle that. I've got sMash running on my OSX box, going to reinstall it to my linux system.

Getting my feet wet with Portlet Factory, trying to update my Portal development skills. To date I've been heavy with portlet programming using the IBM Legacy Portlet API, JSR-168 and starting JSR-286, but as the tooling changes so to shall I.

ah... back to the grind

First day back after 2.5 weeks of vacation. Lots to do and have to hit the ground running. Eight hours of phone calls is a rough way to start back from vacation!

On the plus side got further with my iphone application. After trying to do some debugging realized that I had not associate the text entries in the nib/xib file with the Application Delegate. Once I got that straightened out it worked just great. Now that I have some basics working I want to fiddle with the app a bit more. I'm writing a basic financial calculator. There are a few things I always keep checking and it would be nice to have a quick calculator to do the work for me. Planning out some other ideas of things I would like to try.

Did a little more basement cleanup this evening. Still have more to do, but I do think it is shaping up now. Going to try and get some pushups in before bed.

today's progress

Almost have my first iphone app going. Having some strange times with basic math in Objective C, but at least I have the UI working. I suspect I'll have this wrapped up tomorrow.

Made good strides in cleaning the basement. Trying to organize the shelves, and toss as much junk as I can. I've made good strides consolidating like materials, cleaning out some space and trashing material I didn't even realize I was keeping. The space looks better, but still has more work to go. Something to continue chipping away at.

a touch at a time...

Built my first iPhone Application tonight. Only targeted the simulator, and it was an out of the box example. But I got it to work. Going to try and go back and fix my botched application next. It is essentially a very raw hello world, but it is a start. Getting the hang of Xcode and the tools associated with it.

Also made it out for my first run in a few months. Only hit up a mile, and I was hurting at the mile mark. Did about a 10 minute mile, but I have a lot of those to put in before I can get to the half marathon. Did find an appropriate amount of clothing so that felt good. Also tried to get some pushups in. That went ok-- I'm following the hundredpushups.com program. My baseline was 27, I have the option of starting at Week 3, but I think given my general conditioning from the last few months, I may roll back to Week 1 and build slowly.

Project Spotting...

Projects I am currently working on:

- Project A at work. Major releases due this year. Not much posting about that here. I may find other places to play with that.

- Fitness -- I plan to run the Pittsburgh Half Marathon in May. I have 18 weeks to get ready. I plan to mix up running with biking to build cardio conditioning. I want to try and get my Great Race speed to a sub 8 minute mile. We'll see how it goes. I have some consecutive pullup (25) and pushup (100) goals that I want to reach as well for general fitness

- Coding -- Lots of sub projects here: iphone and android development, WebSphere sMash, some skill retooling and growth as I look towards the future. Building some skill with Python and Javascript won't hurt either. Going to do some plugin improvements for Quoteurltext.

- Writing -- A few articles I would like to write and I want to get started on writing a book. I think I have it in me, just need to focus and push it forward. Blogging and journaling will also be good to bring forward.

The big emphasis is getting things done this year. Work fast and get some completion marks.

Welcome to 2009

Let's do something great! I will be building some blogs and posting a bit more requently as I make progress on different speheres. Expect more posts!

Thanks to everyone for a great 2008! Let's do better with 2009!

Jay

timeliness

100 Days left in 2008.
13 Weeks.

Not a lot of time to get things done. A good deadline though.

So what do I want to do with my life? A few goals:
- Write a book
- Run a marathon
- 100 pushups in a row
- 20 pullups/chinups
- Read 100 books for 2008 (I've read 45)
- Replace windows

I can't do all of them in 100 days, but I am going to see how many I can accomplish.