May Contain Nuts

Someone else has already used the monitor resolution joke, so I’ll go with a Microsoft product name joke instead… And now for some New Year’s Resolutions, 3 days late!

There are a lot of things I want to do this year, and it’s going to take a lot of work to make them all happen. Hopefully I can find ways to keep myself invested and motivated enough to follow through on all of these. Some of them are sillier than others, and some are more superficial than others as well, but they’re all things I want to do, so here goes.

1. Eat healthier. We’ve gotten into the bad habit of going out to get food when we don’t feel like cooking anything, and things like lunch meat and other simple-to-fix foods end up going bad all too often in our fridge because of this. There are a few things I’ve got in mind to try and combat this problem, and the first is to make extensive use of a nifty recipe program I found for the Mac called YummySoup!. A quick call home last night has ensured a steady flow of recipes and cooking ideas from the Family Cookbook, and I’d also like to go through the recipe books we’ve gotten through various sources in the past to build a comprehensive library of things to eat. This will be an ongoing project throughout the year, inputting recipes, cooking them, and photographing the results for inclusion in the program afterwards. It may be the sign of someone who’s lived so much of their life in the digital age, but I think creating a cookbook on the computer will be a much more likely way for us to actually make use of it than if we just stuffed a bunch of note cards with recipes on them in a drawer and forgot about them. Perhaps the nicest feature of YummySoup! that I think will be helpful (aside from being able to visually cruise through recipes ala CoverFlow) is the grocery list feature, which compiles and totals up a list of all the ingredients needed to complete the dishes selected.
2. Manage the money better. While I dare say we haven’t done a bad job of managing our finances in 2007 (and we did a far sight better than in previous years…), we haven’t exactly done a terrific job either. Most of this comes down, again, to eating out entirely too often, which is a huge money sink. In part as a way to try and counter this trend from another angle, and in part to try and get our ducks in a row financially, I’m looking at a financial app for the Mac called Cha-Ching. Obviously it’s not as full-featured as something like QuickBooks or Quicken, but it’s less than half the price ($40 instead of $90), it’s supporting an indie developer (a far nobler cause than shoveling more money into Intuit’s pockets), Intuit has a rather nasty track record of Mac support, and Cha-Ching, from my basic fiddling last night, seems to support pretty much everything that I’d need to have in order to keep track of our money, and also the finances for North of February (Ash’s jewelry and chainmaille outlet).
3. On a related note, pay down our debt. We made some initial strides in this last year, which have since been hampered by things like replacing Ash’s old computer in desperation when it seemed to be falling apart in a fairly terminal fashion, and draining the savings account on trips to see family this holiday season. This year, I want to seriously invest myself in paying off the debt we’ve already incurred, along with the debt I brought to the table in the first place when we got married. I know for a fact I won’t get it all paid off this year, but I can make a concerted effort to do so, and I will.
4. Don’t go through 4 different jobs this year. This one’s a bit on the silly side, but I had 4 paying jobs last year, and it was tumultuous to say the least. I seem to be in a fairly stable place right now, making a fair amount of money to boot, and hopefully I won’t have to leave for a new job for quite a while now. I’ll likely remain completely overloaded in the “hobby” department for most of the year, especially with regards to Mysterium, but I don’t want to have to deal with changing jobs this year and all of the hell that raises on the finances, especially since Ash isn’t presently working for anyone but herself.
5. Build a media center in the apartment. A superfluous one this time (and an expensive one, for that matter), but one that I’d like to accomplish before the year is out. The primary motivation behind this one is to make the apartment more like a home and less like an office with an attached bed and kitchen. Virtually everything that we do involves the computer somehow, and I’m kind of getting tired of having to either sit in my art chair (which is good for work, but bad for casual movie-watching) or lay on the floor whenever we watch a TV show or movie, for example. However, I don’t want to half-ass this project, and there’s a lot of pieces that we need to make it work. In no particular order of purchase, we need a new TV, a wifi network, and a Mac Mini to provide the actual media center capabilities. Assuming $600 for the TV, $400 for a refurbed Mini, and $200 for the wifi, that’s $1200 (plus tax) for this little project.
6. Get Labyrinth published. I created Labyrinth with Ash in about a week and a half for a contest sponsored by the company that produces the engine I’m using for game development. It wasn’t terribly well executed, it was a bit janky, and it’s just sat in the corner and done nothing since then. I intend to do it up right, with multiple levels, better visuals, more music, more options (like mouse axis inversion), and a pay-only downloadable version in addition to a simpler, free web-based version. The downloadable version would have more levels and probably include the options pane and high score tracking per-player, in addition to the all-time high scores being posted online. I hope to release it for about $15 by the end of July. For the time being, it will be Mac-only, and all proceeds from the sale of the game will go toward purchasing an upgrade to Unity pro, which will let me build the game for Windows (and thus hopefully open the game up to an even broader audience).

Obviously I have a lot on my plate this year. Some of the stuff I’ve listed will be easier to accomplish than others, but I want to accomplish all of it if at all possible. On top of all this, Ash plans to go to Faerieworlds, and we’d also like to be able to attend Mysterium, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Happy New Year, everybody. Let’s make it a good one, eh?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.