New Challenges for a New Year

A new year begins and with it I find myself reflecting on the year that was and planning for the year ahead. So lets start by looking back at the 3 geeky challenges I set for myself last January 1st. There were 3, Finding my Blogging Voice, Project 365, and Coding Challenge. Over all I’m proud of how I met my Challenges. Though there still work that needs to be done. So before I set out my new goals for 2011, lets take a look at the successes and failures.

The Successes:

Where I succeeded was my blogging, taking and posting a picture everyday was surprisingly difficult.  Though I managed to get through it and find that I don’t want to stop. I like being able to look back and see snapshots of my life from the last year, and think it’d be great if I could do it for the last decade, More on that in this years challenges later. I’ve also found that by having to post a photo every day on my blog I want to post more. Though I don’t always have the time to find the words. I’ve started Mobile Mondays and I’m looking to add more regular posts soon.

The Failure:

Where I failed was the coding challenge.Though it started out well, I even had a great source for inspiration on the Dream in Code Forms, I just couldn’t manage to keep it up. What really bothers me about it is that I don’t have a single new program to show for the last year. I have a few skeletons, but nothing that I can point to and say look what I did. This is something that I really want to change this year.

Challenges for the Year ahead:

Choosing challenges are hard, you want to choose things that are hard to achieve, but still achievable.  I think my Coding Challenge was perhaps a bit ambitions but it should have been doable. So what challenges do I have for this year. This year I’m branching from just geeky challenges. 

Loose Weight:

For most of the last year I’ve been working at being a healthier me, eating better and loosing weight. Over the last year ‘I’ve lost close to fifty pounds, though over the last month my weight lose has stalled. With the beginning of the new year I’m back to watching what I eat. My goal is to be below 200 pounds by June. That’s around 25 pounds after my Christmas gain.  I’m planning to share my experience in weight lose but I’m still trying to figure out how I’ll share it.

Running:

The real key to my weight lose so far has been running. Last May I began to running, I started out with C25K, but soon moved beyond it and with the help of Runkeeper (Review coming to a Mobile Monday soon). I’ve been running longer and farther every week. My Record for Distance so far is 14km in 1 Hour and 35 minutes back on the 18th of October (See Here). Fastest pace was on November 23rd when I ran 10.11 km in 59:28 (See here), of course I think I might have run 10k faster but it was part of an 11k or 12k run and not as easy to pick out from list of activities on Runkeeper.  So going forward I’ve set a bigger goal for myself, I plan on running the Half Marathon on May 15th @ the Mississauga Marathon. I know I could do it, the challenge will be to do it in in under 2 hours. From there I hope to tackle a full marathon, maybe in the fall but more likely in 2012.

Picture of the Day [POD]:

After the success I had with the Project 365 last year, I don’t want to stop taking a picture every day, but there have been times when the picture I want to use a picture that Melissa or even Jacob took. With my new Picture of the Day Challenge I can. Each day I’ll still post a picture, and most will still be taken by me. Just keep yours eyes open for our guest photographers throughout the year.

Missing Coding Challenge:

This has been the hardest challenge for me to both succeed at and to frame. I want to program more, I want to write applications that I will use. The problem is two fold. I don’t know how much time I’ll be able to devote to programming, and I’m not sure what I’ll program. I have one application that I know I want to write, an interface for viewing my 365 and POD pictures. I started the project but it’s stalled after I just got the basic framework done. I know I want to commit to a regular amount of programming