Now Archive: January 2021

  • 1st Jan 2021
    •  • 
  • 4 min read

This is my Now page and here’s what’s up for me these days (as posted on 01/01/21). For my current Now page, go here.

Welcome to the new year…finally! I for one plan to use all that I’ve learned from the trainwreck of 2020 to do my very best by 2021.

What does that mean, specifically? Well, I’m doing a lot of reflecting, as I tend to do about this time of year. I’m looking at what worked and what didn’t, not only in the last year, but in life. I’m happy to report that I’m having some new thoughts and realizations. More posts to come on all that.

Along with this, my day job as Global Learning Technology & Analytics Manager for ConvaTec is taking a lot of my time and attention right now. Our main admin just quit, and I just hired someone new, and there’s a lot of chaos in the transition that I have to tend to personally this month. So that’s the main thing, and my main challenge will be in not working like I would work if it were my company…as in 80-100hrs per week. So I’m learning how to be a manager and how to let stuff drop. Lessons I’ve never really learned thus far in my mostly backwards, weird & wonderful life.

In case you missed it, I’m living in the middle of Utah, working as a full- time employee for the first time in my life as of last July. Crazy, huh?

While I likely won’t get to do much outside of this in January, because it’s enough (and because damn, it’s cold out right now!), I do have some personal projects still:

  • Learning Spanish = For this month, I’m focusing on complete mastery of my first 1000 words. I probably already have several hundred that fit in my mouth already, but I don’t really know what they are yet. After enjoying the book Ultralearning recently, I’m inspired to take a more rigorous approach. I have time set aside to work on this every day.
  • Gaining strength & losing weight = I’ve been mostly vegan for a year now. Though for the holidays, I did make exceptions for the traditional turkey and such. Then more exceptions for pies and treats and…you get the idea. I’ve also been tracking my weight for the last month, watching how it cycles through all this. In January, I plan to release 10lbs of fat and gain about that much muscle. So while my weight may not go down very much, I’m also measuring the diameter of my biceps, chest, thighs, & waist which are where I’m focusing my results. Exercise isn’t as easy this time of year, so I’m doubling down what I’ve got.
  • Drop50 cleanup = My annual Drop100 turned into a Drop50 this year, and I had to roll over quite a few things. I’m still chipping away at all that as I can.
  • Tableau Certification = Because I just finished my Data Analytics & Visualization course, I should have the skills to get my basic certification in Tableau now. But probably not if I wait too long. I plan to take the test in a week or so while all this is still relatively fresh in my mind. Fingers crossed that I can pass it!
  • NAS maximization = When I started setting up my Synology NAS last Summer, I didn’t know all that it could do. I had a lot of simple data management to do at the time, and was happy just to have one place to put everything. Now I think I know what I want from it, and I plan to have it fully configured as an automated backup solution for all my devices, mobile storage and streaming for all photos/music/movies, collaborative fileserver, public webserver, local email server, and remote VPN by the end of this month. Wish me luck! We’ll see how far I get. If I get far enough, I plan to set up an offsite backup for this backup in February. And I also want to host this website there by my birthday in March (and transition from Textpattern to Hugo in the process).

So that’s me for now! Hope you're now is treating you well.