Its over!!! My month long vacation ends tomorrow when I have to wake up before 10 for the first time. 30 days ago, I created a list of things I was going to do. Time to go through that list and see what I actually did. I think it worked out even better than I planned and I'll tell you why afterwards:
- Tweak this site - come up with a blog design that I really like and that isn't broken in some spots. Make it easier to update and friendlier to you - Well, I tweaked it a bit, but not a whole lot. I had some fun with it.
- Read some books I have bought in the last few months (and put them into action)
- Organize my life -
- Get rid of some of this extra crap in my apartment - I bought some more crap instead
- Get rid of the extra feeds I don't really read in Google Reader - They are all too important
- Get rid of the extra crap on all my PCs, etc. - Nope, didn't do that either
- Every time I have seen something interesting on the net, I added them to my del.icio.us account. Now I can actually look at them. - OK, good in theory, but didn't quite get around to it
- Prepare for my new apartment - Be a bit more involved in the renovations as they come closer to completion. - It was certainly easier to do when work didn't get in the way, but I wasn't any more involved than before
- Write up some reviews of amazing software I use everyday and that I can't live without
- Dash - No, but I still love it
- ClearContext - A review would have given me a free license, but I just paid up instead to upgrade
- SpinVox - Did that one
- Trog Bar - No, but its really cool...did that count?
- Learn about new and interesting technologies that I haven't had a chance to really focus on yet (I could probably spend a month alone on each of these):
- Sharepoint 2007 - I am still riding on the memory of my time as a Sharepoint PM at Microsoft...didn't touch it this month
- Facebook and Facebook development - Nope, but I played plenty of Scrabulous on Facebook
- Windows Vista Sidebar development - Nothing here
- Firefox and Thunderbird addon development - I briefly looked into Chrome dev
- The new stuff in Visual Studio 2008 - Never even launched VS
- LINQ - I can now spell it correctly
- Windows Presentation Foundation - No
- Windows Communication Foundation - Nada
- Windows Workflow Foundation - Zilch
- Silverlight - I tweaked a Silverlight slideshow
- YUI - I scrapped it from my site
- Everything else in .NET 3.5 - Closer to nothing else in 3.5
- System Center - Still need to download it from MSDN
- Actually start to use Powershell more often so that I don't have to relearn it every time. - Never touched Powershell
- Maybe see a little bit of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. There is so little I have seen of this place. This guide might help. - Didn't see anything new
- Sleep - I plan to sleep a lot. I haven't been getting much of that for a while. - I did exceptionally well on this one.
So there is my list. As you can see I did far better than I had ever expected. I managed to stay away from semi-work-related stuff for an entire month. It was magical. And I did a lot of work in managing my photos and using Lightroom and Photoshop to prepare for a wall of photos in my new place. My Lightroom catalog went from 4000 images to well over 11000 photos. Very few were new, I just had them scattered across 4 different PCs. It was especially amazing to find some photos I thought I lost from Nepal, Costa Rica, Moscow, and more.
I wholeheartedly recommend taking a month off at the end of the year to relax. Don't go anywhere, just sit and rest. What? You only get 2 weeks vacation? OK, sell everything, move to Europe, get a job, and then take that month off. Even better, take the full 6 or 7 weeks everyone gets over here. I will someday be able to change my ways to do that too...