Resolutions for 2007

Rather than post all the usual, wishy-washy things I half-heartedly convince myself I will do after my third champagne (“eat better”, “get fit”, “fix my finances”, etc.) I thought I’d try to pin down some measurable, either-I-have-or-haven’t goals for 2007. It’s time to get scientific people!

That’s not to say I’m going to ignore the other types of resolution and become a broke, junk-food eating slob. I just thought it would be fun to also have some things that I can actually finish and draw a big, red tick next to at the close of 2007.

So, there are 52 weekends left in the year, what am I going to do with them?

Blog Regularly

If all goes well, I’d like to post at least 12 substantial blog entries this year. By substantial, I mean something that takes me longer than a couple of hours to organise, research and write.

There are a number of topics I’ve be reading about lately that I’d like to spend time really thinking about. I find writing short pieces for public consumption a good way to pin down ideas that would otherwise bounce around in my head before being muscled out by the next Really Cool Thought. I expect that the more I jot them down the easier it will become. Hopefully, as a result, I’ll be able to make a habit of thinking more clearly about things.

I’ve been enjoying discovering writing for fun again post-thesis so I’m hoping this resolution won’t be too difficult to keep, especially considering I only have to average one a month. I’ll even let myself count this one if the going gets tough towards the end of the year.

Sit the JLPT

Thanks to some free lessons through work my interest in learning japanese was re-ignited last year. I managed to continue learning kanji once the course finished but haven’t really increased my vocabulary any since then.

Things are looking up for this year though since Julieanne’s Christmas present to me was some lessons at UNSW’s Language Institute. Emboldened by this I’ve decided that I’m going to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test that is held in December of each year.

Juggle Five Balls

I started juggling about nine years ago. Learning the basic three-ball cascade took all of a few days. I was pretty content with that for many years before discovering the internet juggling database, it’s wiki and the absolutely enormous number of tricks I was missing out on.

Through that site I also found the sydney jugglers club which I attended for a while in 2003/2004. The people there were great and through them I started learning siteswap which let me pick up heaps of new three-ball tricks and got my four-ball juggle pretty solid.

The gap between four- and five-ball juggling, however, is huge. I’ve been trying to get a simple five-ball cascade down pat for the last few years and have only made small amounts of progress.

This year, the plan is to put in some solid practice so I am able to make 30 throws fairly consistently - let’s say within any three attempts. I’ll post a video once I can do it.

Enter the 2007 IF Competition

For the last thirteen years an annual interactive fiction competition has been run by fans of the text adventures of yore (read: the 1980’s). This genre of computer game included commercial and critical hits such as Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet all but disappeared with the advent of increasingly powerful graphics cards.

The demise of Infocom and other commercial publishing houses (as told in Nick Montfort’s “Twisty Little Passages”) left behind a discerning yet prolific band of enthusiasts. Over the years they have built a thriving community, some great tools and a few outstanding pieces of work. I’ve played a number of these recently and (perhaps foolhardily) thought, “I could have a crack at that”.

I figured out a basic structure and a few scenes for a story of my own towards the end of last year and started messing around with Inform7. So, modulo my foolhardiness, I hope to enter a short piece in this year’s competition.

Release an Album

One of the hardest things I had to give up during the thesis crunch of 2005/2006 was writing and playing music. Writing music was made even tricker with my switch to a Mac at the end of 2004 and the giving up of my main PC-only tools for composition: ACID Pro and Audiomulch (Please port this Ross!).

Fortunately, I was very lucky to receive a copy of Ableton’s most excellent Live program for my birthday last year. After much playing around with it over the Christmas break I’m completely enamoured of it and have already recorded some short sketches that may have some potential. To make things easier I might even try to get myself a good mic and a cheap MIDI controller later this year.

To ensure I don’t cheat and release a collection of jingles I’m going to ask that my album be at least 8 tracks long and each track be at least 3 minutes long. Oh, and no 4’33” conceptual trickery either!

Overcommitted, moi?

Looking over what I’ve just written I think I’ve set myself up for a busy year. Oh well, ad astra per aspera and all that. At least I won’t be able to complain about being bored!