My yearly recap of what’s happened in my life over the last year. Looking back on this year, it was much less active than last year. Most life changing events of the year would probably by Marilyn and my trip to Europe, having fun getting fit and trying to tackle more difficult problems at work (or at home).

Travel

Light year for quantity of travel, but the last one was big.

• Rails Conf in Austin
• Tampa various times
• San Francisco for my sister Kara and Morgans wedding
• Homosassa Springs for scalloping
• London, Paris and Amsterdam with Marilyn for an amazing trip

Events and Entertainment

• Saw a load of movies, my favorites for the year being: Cabin the Woods, The Hunger Games, The Dark Knight Rises
• Lots of audiobooks including The Hunger Games saga, Game of Thrones Series, Enders Shadow saga and a few more
• The TV Shows I looked forward to most this year were Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Homeland, Dexter and Breaking Bad
• Pink Martini concert in Tampa
• This American Life Live
• Went on a hot air balloon ride with Marilyn
• The Lion King at Bob Carr
• Zelda: Symphony of the Goddess at Bob Carr
• Beauty and the Beast at Bob Carr
• Food and Wine Festival with the EnvyLabs gang
• Reefer Madness at Theater Downtown
• MythBusters Live at UCF
• Weezer at House of Blues
• Loius C.K. in Tampa
• Front row of The Mikado at the English National Opera
• Cabaret at the Savoy Opera House

Body

Fitness was a fun priority this past year. It was less about pushing limits and more about finding ways to have fun that kept me coming back.

• Worked out at least 3x every week I was physically able to.
• Got a Lasik adjustment in both my eyes, bringing them a little closer to 20/20
• Strained my ankle rock climbing at Rails Conf in late April, took 3 months to heal to the point where I no longer felt pain
• Ate mostly paleo (some surplus, some deficit) to help build a bit more muscle
• Started doing yoga at work thanks to Aimee organizing it
• Dropped down to about 7% body fat during a month long paleo challenge at the gym before returning to a more stable weight
• Started playing Ultimate Frisbee again, this time in the competitive league
• Running more, including many runs around lake Eola with the EnvyLabs gang
• Strained my back during a workout, causing me to barely be able to stand up or walk for 2 weeks

Work

• Awesome year working at EnvyLabs mostly on CodeSchool
• Had one very crazy week where I worked 85 hours (including 24 hours straight), went to 3 fancy dinners for Marilyn’s blog and still hit the gym 3 times
• Involved in some way of releasing a number of educational courses for CodeSchool on a variety of topics including mobile web, backbone.js, RSpec, Git, Ruby, Sass, R, and iOS
• Rolled out a new framework for CodeSchool courses that allows more flexibility in how we implement them. Really looking forward to improving on this in the new year

Personal

• This year I did a lot of throw away projects – projects I worked on for a week or two then completely abandon
• Bought a Retina Macbook Pro, upgrading my 5 year old 17” MacBook Pro
• Took an iOS Programming course at Valencia Community College to keep myself on track education wise
• Moved off Bank Of America, and loving Simple so far
• Had a break in where they stole our TV and Marilyns jewelry box while I was in Austin. Luckily Marilyn was gone at the time and Lily was OK
• Lost our cat of 6+ years, Loverboy. He was always an outdoor cat, and lived to be at least 11 years old before disappearing. We can still hope that he was adopted
• Made some improvements to the backyard including a low fence and lighting that makes being out back more fun

Next Year

This coming year is the first that I won’t have any kind of fitness/diet related goals. I’m happy with where I am there, so just a matter of keeping the habits that have been built up. I’m not a fan of making resolutions in general, but more listing out what my current objectives are and where I’m trying to change my current behavior. At the moment this includes:

• Spend even less time watching TV and reading junk (reddit, hacker news)
• Be more conscious of my time in general
• Spend more time with friends and family
• More time working on non-computer related projects (garden, house improvements, etc)

We really have no plans whatsoever for the upcoming year right now, but I’m looking forward to it!

In college, and shortly thereafter, I wasn’t the best with money. I spent entirely too much needlessly upgrading my computer to the latest hardware for no real reason. Like many who come into some funds with a first job after college, I wasn’t the most thoughtful about where I spent my money. It didn’t take too long for that to change though.

A Catalyst

Three months after I graduated college, my mom unexpectedly passed away. The entire next year of my life was spent driving two hours each weekend to her now empty house and going through her lifes posessions and looking back on the home I grew up in for 22 years. During this time I made the decision to save a great many posessions of hers that I couldn’t push myself to part with. Still today I am sorting through this inheritance deciding what I want to keep for the rest of my life, and what is a memory I can save without the physical representation.

Since then one goal on my mind has been to go through and minimize the clutter in my life. This applies both to my thoughts on acquiring new stuff, and getting rid of anything unused. For instance, for every physical book brought home, I make sure at least 3 are removed. I try to follow a similar approach for everything I bring home - with the goal that whenever I bring something home for good, I donate or sell something to offset the addition.

Collecting Experiences

You’re not going to find many who disagree with the sentiment that experiences and relationships are the most important part of life. In my own experience it is easier to focus on this when your life is in order. In my case that meant fixing up and selling my moms old house, as well as simplifying my schedule to only those things that mattered most to me. I’ve found the less clutter I have in my life, the more open I am to new experiences.

The end result of all this is that as you become more restrictive when it comes to acquiring posessions, you can become more open when it comes to new experiences.

A Challenge

How many things do you own that you could get rid of? Do you think you could elimate enough possessions to where you were down to 100 things? If so, you might want to attempt the 100 Thing Challenge. The idea is simple – elimate clutter from your life to the point where you only own 100 things (though some things you could own multiple copies of – like shirts or pants.

Do you think you can make it down to 100 things? Do you think it would make you happier?

My yearly recap of what’s happened in my life over the last year.

Travel

• Ruby Conf in New Orleans
• South Florida for Danielle and Matts wedding
• St. Petersburg for Crab Feast
• New York City with Marilyn for Christmas and New Years

Body

• Got Lasik on both eyes in June.
• Changed up my diet to be more in line with The Primal Blueprint
• Dropped soda for the most part. Occasional diet at lunch
• Started going to CrossFit 2 times a week (and feeling sore the other 5)
• Got more clothes that fit well

Hobbies

• Continued gardening, but at a slower pace
• Moved from Plex over to Boxee as a media center and spent our first year without cable.
• Setup an awesome backup/recovery plan
• Began brewing beer, starting with an Octoberfest and a wheat beer
• Developed an appreciation for whiskey
• Ripped every DVD I own, and compressed them, then sold the physical DVDs.
• Moved music over to iCloud for day to day access.
• Massive consolidation of financial accounts, and using 1Password to keep things even simpler.

Events and Entertainment

• Behind the Seeds tour at Epcot
• Wild Africa Trek for my birthday
• Some movies
• Went to Evil Dead: The Musical and Avenue Q with Marilyn and the EnvyLabs crew.
• Backstage Disney Tour for Marilyn’s Birthday
• Went to Food and Wine Festival at Epcot a ton of times, including with the EnvyLabs crew complete with dessert party under the fireworks.
• Played through Portal 2 and Skyrim.
• The Mountaintop a block from Times Square
• Pirates of Penzance in New York
• Loved Fuerza Bruta, despite not knowing exactly how to describe it
• Saw The Moth live and loved it (but not the standing outside for 90 minutes in the cold part beforehand)
• Went to The Comedy Cellar for a great show

Work

• Decided to part ways with IZEA after 2 years, 10 months.
• Took a month off of work, mostly to relax, clean out some of the house, and work on a side project.
• Joined EnvyLabs in April, and continue to be amazed by both the people and the culture.

Programming and Technology

• Launched Line of Thought, a site for tracking what technologies different websites are using. More a “for-fun” personal project than a get rich project.
• Helped Marilyn on the technical side of her blog, Forkful whenever possible. Her blog is doing great so far!
• Moved the code for my first ever website, DDRei to github so I can continue to laugh at it for years to come.
• Created my first ruby gem, a super basic wrapper for TicketUtils. Have to start somewhere.
• Got my feet wet with iOS development.
• Started creating a budgeting application as a way of learning Backbone.js

As for goals for the new year? For most of this past year I was setting goals in smaller increments and working towards them, which I’d like to do more of. It’s great for developing a routine without too much overthinking. Most things I want to do in the new year are already in progress — going to CrossFit more, working on (and using) the budgeting app, learning more iOS development, uncluttering the house and bringing in more color. Other than that, I’d like to be more social in the new year, and spend less time watching TV.

A few months ago I made the switch from QuickSilver to Alfred. If you’ve ever used QuickSilver you have a good idea what Alfed can do – but it does it in a single pane rather than the multi-command way QuickSilver goes about it. Amongst other abilities, it’s an application launcher that accepts additional parameters. On their site, they give an overview of the abilities:

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Whether it’s maps, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, you can feed your web addiction quicker than ever before.

Pairing with Nate at work, we setup Alfred on our new pairing station and I instantly saw some of the power. Setting up custom searching was the first, and easiest, feature. With how often I search GitHub and RubyGems, these shortcuts help.

And another for GitHub:

Setting these up is extremely simple. Just do a search on the site you want to add, and replace the query term with {query} within Alfred. The result looks like this:

You should be able to follow this setup for any searches you would like to add a shortcut for.

Setting up Remember the Milk and Alfred

My favorite addon though, is Remember the Milk integration via terminal. In order to use RTM, you’ll need to grab the PowerPack (paid) version of Alfred. Unfortunately this version isn’t available through the App Store, so you’ll need to download it manually from the Alfred site.

In order to add tasks from Alfred, you’ll first need to be able to add tasks from the command line. There are many ways of doing this, but following this guide should help. I installed the rumember gem into its own gemset. You can then use an RVM wrapper to be able to execute the gem from the command line, even when it isn’t the currently set gemset. Alfred will have no concept of rvm or gemsets, so this helps make it available.

~/rvm wrapper 1.9.2@research ru
~/ru_ru Do laundry ^tomorrow

After creating the gemset and wrapper, you should be able to add tasks to your RTM account using the command ru_ru from anywhere, regardless of the gemset you’re currently in. You can always go into ~/.rvm/bin and alias “ru” to “ru_ru” as well, then be able to just use that.

Setting it up within Alfred is just as easy. Under Extensions > Scripts, click on the + sign to add a new “Shell Script”. You can title it whatever you want. My edited version looks like this:

After that, you should be able to add RTM tasks easily from Alfred! There is no feedback that it’s successful or not the way I have it setup, so it’s more of a fire and forget it approach to task management.

Extremely easy to fire off tasks to deal with later. It’ll even organization by date and category if you use the correct syntax in your messages. If you have any other tips that might help with RTM/Alfred integration, feel free to comment.

At the end of last year, I wrote a post about what I’d been up to in the past year. I do this every year (though usually unpublished) while things are still fresh in my mind, and find it fun to look back on the highlights and see what I was able to accomplish. It’s something I’d recommend to anyone.

Rather than writing this post at the end of year, why not try writing it a few months early? You might have a number of “new years resolutions” from eight months ago that need some reassessment, and now is the time! Go through everything you want to get done before the end of the year and write them down in a post as though you have already done them. Next, take the next steps to accomplish those tasks.

For me this called out a few things I really wanted to do this year that I haven’t made enough progress on. Cleaning out my garage, getting an iPhone app in the app store and any kind of exercise come to mind. Time to get crackin’ on those!