Tag: Goals

Goals past and present

I pretty much failed at 2013’s goal of tasting and grading 50 beers. I did pretty good at the front part of that goal, mind you, but it’s the second half of the process that proved difficult. I did a reasonably good job of exploring the world of Trappist abbey ales and found an IPA that I can tolerate [1]. I tried an oaked beer (bleh), a sour beer (double bleh), and a chili beer (could have been better). I found an awesome session beer in Stone’s Levitation [2]. I never found a roggenbier to try—it’s all Rye-P-A here in the states. I brewed a few beers and tasted the heck out of those too.

Again…just lacking documentation.

Looking forward, perhaps the commitment to try and document fifty beers was a little much for one year. This year I’m pledging to follow through on 25 beers. They don’t need to be new ones. They don’t need to be commercial beers. I just need to drink and document them. I’m going to do this using BeerAdvocate [3] and you can track me there.

To take up the slack I’m also pledging to read 25 books in 2014. You can track my progress on Goodreads [4] which seems to be a place where people I know who read books hang out. It just isn’t any fun unless someone is tracking all the data I’m generating. 😉

Notes:

  1. http://lagunitas.com/beers/ipa/#
  2. http://www.stonebrewing.com/levitation/
  3. http://beeradvocate.com/community/members/nixquips.773588/
  4. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27242031-nick-hansen

PandoraJammin’

In which our humble narrator lays out an ambitious web portal plan under the guise of a paltry review of PandoraJam.

Just today I decided I’m making a commitment to keep iChat open when I’m online just because it seems like I need more distractions in my life. nickspictsatbfp in the event you’re in the same frame of mind… Anyway, this created the need to have my status message be updated with what I’m currently listening to. In iTunes, you get this for free. In Pandora–what I’m always plugged in to–you don’t. Enter PandoraJam, a useful stand-alone app to listen, scrob, and update. Free version seems to do everything I need so we’re all good on that front.

The upshot of all of this it seems is a strong urge to rearrange stuff on my vanity domain (the very same one you’re reading this blog post from). I want to keep the blog but would like to rebrand and rename it I think. Primarily, though, I want to create a dynamic about me page that pulls from all of my various online presences into a portal of shameless self-promotion. Kind of like Facebook, only without it being on Facebook. I also want to write a new portal for myself that pulls from around the web into a single page that I can use as a springboard.

It’s not a new idea by any means. My first web page did the same basic thing. The coolness of this one, however, is that it is more aggregator than springboard. It should also help clean up my inbox as I presently consume > 500 RSS posts a day via my collection of feeds. I do this because I want to archive the damn things, but, after a few years of usage, I haven’t really used the archive in any meaningful way.

Besides, I’m feeling sad about the decline in my webmonkey skills, having primarily written C# and Java the last few years. I haven’t the faintest clue as to CSS and HTML5 support in modern browsers, much less the degree to which they successfully implement W3C standards. In all, this would be a useful learning experience now.

So…we’ll see how far any of this goes given Cataclysm went live earlier today and the holidays are just around the corner.