Category Archives: Inspiration

2023 Reading List with Lots of Neil Gaiman, Do Books, and Colson Whitehead

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2023 was my best year reading to date.

It was the first year I started reading books by Neil Gaiman, seven books, five Do Books, and three by Colson Whitehead, making them the top two authors and group of books.

My Yearly Plan

Each year, the plan is to read a book a week, and this year will be the closest I get to that goal. This year, I’m close to finishing reading a book every eight or nine days on average, even though because I read a few at a time, I finish them a day or so apart.

Typically, from mid-November/Thanksgiving until the end of the year, I attempt to finish up many books I still need to finish, along with some of the shorter/more straightforward/easier-to-read books.

NOTE – I typically read a handful of books at once.

Reading more than a book at a time allows me to switch around depending on my mood. If I need some light reading or have time to read through something a bit denser that needs more attention, I can.

My List of Books for 2023

I broke my list of books into categories in the order I read them.

  • I try. I Fail. I learn. – Hiut Denim (Do Lectures)
  • Delicious Beans from Rancho Gordo – Every Pot a Victory – A Guide to Happy Beans Every Day – Rancho Gordo
  • Arbitrary Stupid Goal – Tamara Shopsin
  • Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation – Michell Pollan
  • Shop Class as SoulCraft – Matthew B. Crawford
  • Lark Ascending – A Novel – Silas House
  • Dave Grohl – The Storyteller – Taste of Life and Music – Dave Grohl
  • Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkman
  • The War of Art – Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles – Steven Pressfield
  • Rebel without a Crew – Or How a 23-year-old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player – Robert Rodriguez
  • No. 4 – On the Writing Process – John McPhee
  • I Will Teach You to Be Rich – No Guilt. No Excuses. No BS. Just a 6-Week Program That Works (2nd Edition) – Ramit Sethi
  • Salt Fat Acid Heat – Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking – Samin Nosrat and Art by Wendy MacNaughton
  • Eat That Frog! – Get More of the Important Things Done Today – Brain Tracy
  • Scrap Steading – Prosperous Homesteading on Any Budget – Billy Bond and Matt Hundley
  • The One Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results – Gary Keller with Jay Papasan
  • Toby Dog of Gold Shaw Farm – Morgan Gold
  • Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – A Year of Food Life – Barabra Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
  • In the Blink of an Eye – A Perspective on Film Editing – 2nd Edition – Walter Murch
  • The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees – The Ash in Human culture and History – Robert Penn
  • Man’s Search for Meaning – Revised and Updated – Viktor E. Frankl (Reread)

Books by Neil Gaiman

  • Coraline
  • Good Omens – The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter. Witch – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
  • The Graveyard Book
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane
  • American Gods – A Novel
  • Neverwhere – A Novel
  • Stardust – A Novel

Do Books

  • Do Earth – Healing Strategies for Humankind – Tamsin Omond
  • Do Make – The Power of You Own Two Hands. – James Otter (Re-read)
  • The Book of Do – A manual for living
  • Do Interesting – Notice. Collect. Share. – Russell Davies
  • Do Sourdough – Slow bread for busy lives. – Andrew Whitley

Books by Colson Whitehead

  • The Nickel Boys – A Novel
  • Harlem Shuffle
  • Crook Manifesto – A Novel

Homesteading/Farming Book Club

  • The Living Soil Handbook – The No Till Grower’s Guide to Ecological Market Gardening – Jesse Frost
  • The Art of Fermentation – An In-depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World – Sandor Ellix Katz

Apartment Building Book Club

  • The Maid – A Novel – Nita Prose
  • Perfume – The Story of a Murder – Patrick Suskind

Remote JavaScript Book Club

  • Cracking the Coding Interview – 189 Programming Questions and Solutions – Gayle Laakmann McDowell (The group did not finish it.)

Total Books Read

I finished the year strong and managed to read 41 books.

I’m Learning More Through YouTube

I continued watching more YouTube to learn about cooking, shooting videos, storytelling, starting a YouTube channel, starting a small farm, etc., and taking a few courses I purchased about editing with DaVinci Resolve.

Less Reading in 2024

Here’s to less reading in 2024 than in 2023.

In 2024, I plan to spend more time learning how to shoot, edit, and add special effects/graphics to videos to start my YouTube channel.

Please comment if you have read any of these books, what you thought of them, and if you have any suggestions.

Starting a Places to Eat Web Application

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Over the last couple of years, I have wanted to have an application that can keep track of places I want to eat be that from friends, new people I meet, the internet, TV show, etc. but I haven’t found it yet. Not that I have been looking all that hard and would know what best to Google for to find it.

So after being inspired once again by Amy Hoy, Alex Hamilton, and crew with their create something new in 24 hours I’m going to dive into to this with a 12 version Sunday, December 6th, to see what I can find out this idea. See #jfsathon and Just F’ing Ship the book.

Have already sat down and figure out a few things the application would need to get started and other things that would be nice to have later on. I know they would say I’m doing it wrong without doing research, so that is what most of my time fill be spent doing in this first 12 hours. Then over the course of the next few weekends and will most likely spend some time after work on more of this idea.

My 12 hour started at 9 AM and will most likely finish by 9:00 PM, so I can relax and get ready for a week of training starting on Monday morning. Of course, I will be taking a few breaks to get away from the computer and let things I have found out sink in to help me further down the road in this process.

If you have any suggestions or examples for me to look at please leave them in the comments.

 

2014 = FOCUS

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No, New Year’s resolutions for this guy, but this year’s theme will be “FOCUS”. Themes is an idea, which was taken from Jared Goralnick’s blog posts from a few years ago:

Instead of doing New Year’s resolutions, which I haven’t done in decades I’m going to spend an extra five hours a week minim, hopefully at least ten hours, a week on a given subject for a month or more depending on the amount of knowledge gathering needed for a given subject. More time will be spent each week if my schedule happens to allow for more, but at least five hours a week, which will make over 250 extra hours of training over the course of the year. The week will start on Monday and ending Sunday night, which allows me the opportunity to either catch-up on the weekends of add more hours for that week.

Plan for Spending My Time

I will spend the first two to three hours per month writing down more details of what and how I’m going to spend my time learning that month. The months focus maybe to spend the next five or ten hours reading blog posts, books, etc. on a given subject before diving in to learn and work on a given subject. Or it might be to spend an hours reading a book, blog post or whatever and then another hour or to doing something like coding or painting.

Will also need to spend and extra hour or two towards the end of each month contacting people that are smart and know more about a given subject for recommendations on what to read and anything else I will need to stay focused on the next month’s subject. This time spent asking questions, for help, or recommendations will not be part of the hours each week/month focusing on a given subject.

I want to spend at least four full weeks on the subject. If the month starts or ends somewhere in the middle of the week, I will need to decide if I have learned enough or if I should spend and extra day or so continuing to learn or move on to the next subject/area of focus.

Topics of FOCUS

A lot of the topics I’m going to be focusing on for one month will hopefully help prepare me for the next month and be able to be improved upon and use this whole time. By the time, I get into the months of August and September (PHP), October and November (mySQL), and finally December these focus areas are going to get me closer to finishing my web based event registration application Hold An Event or at least build something a little less complicated, so I have some kind of finished project by the end of 2014.

Below are the months and what subject I plan on focusing on during a given amount of time. Some subjects span a few months because I have determined that to learn anything useful I will need to focus on them for a longer amount of time. Under each month/topic of focus is a list of things I can think of now that I want to focus on with more to be added at the beginning of each month or as I delve deeper into a subject.

January – Improve My Writing

  • Start with doing a bunch of reading on how to improve my writing and grammar.
  • Create outlines for some writing examples.
  • Next will be outlines of blog posts, slide presentations, etc.
  • Write short blog posts or stories to get more practice in .
  • Write Hold An Event content from the perspective of first time user/visitor to website/application.

February – Creativity, Inspiration, and Passion

  • Read about how to be more creativity, inspired, and passionate.
  • On the weekend or weekday night take a trip to the National Gallery or Art.
  • Take a bus road trip to NYC to visit MoMA or one of the other museums.
  • Spend time painting.
  • Watch YouTube videos to learn how to play the guitar.
  • Take a guitar lesson or two.
  • Do some sketching on iPad using Paper from 53 of new “I Gotta Eat Here” web application.

March – Learn Git, along with Github

  • Learn Git.
  • Learn Github.
  • Practice starting with:
    • Improving my website content.
    • Update blog posts for grammar and spelling issues.
    • HTML code, JavaScript, CSS, etc:
      • Improve or remove obsolete code.
      • Delete commented out code.
      • Make pages responsive.
  • Add META data to web pages.
  • Continue to improve my writing by re-writing website content for:
  • Accessibility improvements need to be made in the process of learning Git.

April – Learn More about Accessibility

  • Some subjects include ARIA, JAWS, Dragon Naturally Speaking, VoiceOver, etc.
  • Use accessibility information gained at CSUN to start working on being a better developer.
  • Focus on improving my knowledge about ARIA/accessibility issues the better I will be at building websites, web applications, and making JavaScript/jQuery items more accessible.

May – Better Health

Originally had this January as everyone does to start the year out on the right foot and decided, since that usually doesn’t work, why not try it later on. This allows me to focus on other subjects during the colder months and start with health once ti gets warmer, since I tend to like to walk as my exercise.

  • Starting with food (better choices, smaller portions, etc.).
  • Exercise more by walking after work and on weekends.
  • Work on having more energy to be able to stay up late to work on Hold An Event later on down the road and still feel rested.
  • Create easy ways to cook and prepare healthy meals.
  • Decide how many days during given a week I should cook/prepare my own meals.
  • Decide how to have me to bring my own healthy food to work for lunch, which saves me money.

June and July – Javascript/jQuery

  • Find best book(s), video tutorials, or blog posts to learn JavaScript.
  • Learn JavaScript and to start with the basics, maybe with Jeremy Keith’s book (DOM Scripting), if it’s still a good resource, which will make understanding and fixing jQuery issues easier.
  • Learn jQuery, since most websites now a days use it to perform their JavaScript functionality.
  • Create accessible examples, along with ARIA, error messages, etc. examples for others to use.

August and September – PHP

  • Learn the best way to optimize code.
  • Create ways to read different parts of the database by changing parms.
  • Create API to use to create, read, update, and delete records.

October and November – mySQL

  • Create databases.
  • Write new records.
  • Update/delete record (not really deleted, but mark as done using date so I will know when record was deleted).
  • Find the best way to optimize database to get information as quickly as possible.

December – Security

  • Stop denial of service.
  • Look into protecting data, but mostly user information.
  • Figure out how to add SSL to website, along with cost per year, etc.

In Conclusion

After each month, I will write a blog post to continue to improve my writing, along with explaining what books, blog posts, videos, etc. I read or watched to help me focus on that months subject. Will also rate myself on how I thought I did with a given subject and if I truly learned anything, long with to tell everyone how many hours I managed to focus on that months subject for.

So this year I plan to “FOCUS” on monthly topics and hope to be better and more knowledgeable person by the end of 2014.

What are you planning to accomplish in 2014?