A new month has begun.
After I got back from Cincinnati, I was so tired… I went to take a nap. Instead, it turned out to be a 5 hour one. I guess I’ll be off cycle for tomorrow. This is why I’m writing at 2 AM, CST.
I don’t know if you guys noticed, but I stopped making the daily list a while back. I had intended to make those lists monthly; a kind of “self-performance review”. I guess this is the first of many to come.
I’ve decided to break it down into subject areas… and so, here we go. In no particular order.
On the Blog
I promise to use more images. As soon as I figure out how to fix this image linking problem in TextMate. The image gets uploaded, but for some reason (maybe this is a feature), I have to create the image HTML element myself, which seems silly.
While on the subject of images: I guess I won’t be using Gallery for my blog image solution after all. It looks like WordPress/TextMate is an awesome combo. I might consider using Gallery for hosting pictures straight from iPhoto, but I’m sure there’s some Web 2.0 startup that’s looking to make it easy and painless… I’m looking at you: Sharpcast.com.
I also think that joshkim.org will become first and foremost, a blog. I think I’m going to formally announce the dropping of “/blog/” today, and implement the change with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.1. While that happens, I also need to implement a swankier interface… which I will painfully chronicle as I do so, so you guys don’t have to deal with plug-ins and whatnot if you are also creating a wordpress blog.
I haven’t even touched my “combine all previous posts into one” project since last year. I need to get started and finish it this month, so that Mr. Google can index it and I can finally have one place to go for all the Josh Kim fun.
Oh, and I want to double my site visits this month.
On Finances
In terms of expenses, I have only a few things. Apart from student loans and other bills… basically, it comes out to groceries, gas, and discretionary spending that changes from month to month. I’ve been trying to find the average spending on each category by tracing my spending for about two months. It’s become a habit to keep my receipts and check with my online statements (I hate checks and checkbooks… and paper).
Looks like I dropped my spending on food by about half, compared to December. This was achieved through this one rule: to eat out only ONE meal a week. Eating out has been categorized with “discretionary spending”, along with any fun things I had to pay for or gifts I’ve purchased. This month was kinda lopsided because of the iPod shuffle purchase for my sister (which, by the way, I’m lusting crazily after… it’s so cool looking), but still, I managed to keep it under $150. $100 is the goal for this month.
Groceries, though… The first time I went shopping after I got back, I bought almost $100 worth of groceries. I still have some of the stuff I bought from then, but man… I hope to never spend that much on food at one time ever again. Data for groceries was lacking, because while I did live in apartments for a year last year, groceries were split up between 5 people… and so I didn’t really have a clear number. This month, I ended up with about $200 for this category, which might be a little bit more than I should be spending. I’m going to be aiming for $100 for this coming month… we’ll see how it goes.
Gas was interesting. Without taking to account the trip to Cincinnati and back ($20), I ended up spending less than $50 on gas for the month. I will once again shoot for $50.
So that’s $250, on top of bills and student loans. All extra cash… well… that’s another post, dealing with retirement planning (yes… I’m doing it…) and investments and savings.
Right, taxes. I’ve already ran through the Federal, but I want to make sure I get all the deductions I deserve. Hope to finish by the end of this month.
On Spiritual Life
Seems like I’m a little behind on my Bible reading, but I’m actually not. The initial goal was to read 3 chapters, from start to end. The thing is, I got tired of Genesis real quick. I’ve done this book to death, since I’ve tried reading all of the Bible many times before. I think I even read it through in Korean, back in the day… So, I started to read Proverbs. But that wasn’t enough, so I jumped into Paul’s letters in the NT. Currently, I’m reading more than three chapters a day.
I just need to continue with this. In the morning, prayer and NT reading. In the afternoon, or other free times, OT readings.
Ah, let’s enter into prayer. I’m still having a hard time praying for the world at large. I feel like there are enough issues with me and me and me and me and other people. I feel like I put God in a box sometimes… I gotta pray through this one, as well.
On Code
Programming is fun and irritating all at the same time. But it gets that much more fun when you sit through the irritating times and figure it out.
Just yesterday… an IE bug annoyed me to no end. I had to make a design choice because of this bug, and ended making the wrapper background white because something wasn’t stretching properly (no, I’ve tried every hack in the book, and no, I don’t like hacks).
What I’m learning is to be flexible… in a lot of ways. I might even have to learn .NET this month, seeing how this multi-authentication system is going… or I might just get stuck with the PHP side to it, I don’t know. Even re-learning coldfusion is continuing to help me see how important flexibility really is…
It’s not the language, it’s the concept.
And while, yes… I’m finding certain areas of programming to be increasingly annoying… but someone (i.e. ME) should fix it so that it isn’t as annoying or annoying at all to other programmers going through the same thing. That’s the beauty of open source. Huzzah.
But closed source is fun too. Hooray.
Ruby. Need to keep going with ruby. I see great things in the horizon.
Also, some projects need to be written down on paper. Not a full blown business plan, but just some stuff. Post it online for the world to critique.
On Foreign Languages
Korean. I’ve completely stopped Hanja all together. I need to restart that goal of learning one page per day… but let’s tweak that to half a page a day for this month. I’ve also started a vocab list of Korean words I come across that I don’t know the meaning to. That list is going to get large real quick. I should also continue writing email to my mom in Korean.
Japanese. Going to continue with Pimselur for listening and speaking. I want to review one lesson and move to the next lesson each day. Hooray for WIMPE and mindless running… In terms of writing, I still have no clue with katakana. I still want to focus on hiragana, first, though, and so I want to go through one lesson in the Korean Japanese book each week.
Chinese. I’m not even going there. Someday… someday…
On School
MBA Info Session in two weeks. GMATs in four, if I ever register for it. Admission Essay and Application due in six. Awesome. I’m still not 100% sure if I want to go back to school… hmm…
In Closing
Wow, it’s day break. You’ve got to be kidding me. Okay, back to work.
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