I thought I would write up a quick New Year's post today, with a few status updates. I mostly write this kind of post for my own future reference, just to see where I've been, and what progress (if any) I've made in certain areas.
First, I'm happy to say that I stepped on the scale this morning, and it read 200 pounds. I started my diet around Sept 1, at 230 lbs, with the goal of losing a pound a week, until I hit 200. So I hit my goal, and I hit it earlier than expected. I guess my next goal will be to get down to 180, again at one pound per week. We'll see if I can manage that. I'm still logging all my calories with the
Lose It app on my phone. I think that's really been the key factor in being successful. I'm not sure when I was last under 200 lbs. Maybe back in college?
On another front, I haven't done quite so good. I blogged, back in November, about
Coursera. I had enrolled in two courses, Algorithms, Parts I and II. Part I was technically done before I enrolled, and Part II was just starting up. My plan was to breeze through the first part, then catch up with the second. I was doing OK up through the end of November, and gotten through about 80% of the material in Part I, but then I got busy with other stuff in December, and never went back to it. Meanwhile, Part II wrapped up, so here it is, 2014, and I haven't done anything on Coursera in a month. It looks like I can still watch the lectures, and even submit the programming assignments for auto-grading, so I may just pick it up again this month, and finish Part I. Or I may wait until it "officially" starts up again, on January 30, and try to take it in "real-time". Then, I can take Part II in real-time, when it's next offered in March. Or maybe I'll just try something different this year, either from Coursera or
EdX.
Professionally, I started my job at
SHI in January 2013, so I'm at just about the one year mark there. I had my performance review with my boss yesterday, and it went pretty well. I'll likely stick with SHI for another year. Given that I'm doing almost 100% Dynamics AX work though, I want to see about doing more web stuff on the side this year. Last year, I did a project for my former employer,
Electric Vine, that allowed me to exercise my ASP.NET and JavaScript skills a bit, but I don't have any consulting work planned for 2014. I should really find some, or maybe get involved in an open source project, or something like that.
Labels: health, programming