Some years ago as a chronically busy person at work colleagues expressed more than just a degree of concern when I announced that I might be stopping working for the foreseeable future.I ventured that I too was a little worried, but not for the reasons of impending boredom that my colleagues were predicting. No, in fact quite the converse, in that I envisaged liking not working so much that restarting might be something of a problem. I suppose it is also a sign of maturity that one is strong enough to reject, or at least look straight in the eye that Protestant Work Ethic that had been drummed into you from the earliest age.
And now, with the Unemployment clock ticking down to 4 days and counting I'm facing this angst again. There are so many home projects to attend to I might be rather too busy to start working for some time. Here is a random 10+1:
- Christmas: planning how to survive, avoid or at least come to terms with that once pagan, and now Christian festival which it seems is now obsessed with an orgy of irrelevant spending.
- Most of my home networks are stuck down to 1 Gigabit, and this is simply not adequate. A speed increase using Trunking has been planned. The kit is bought, but either not installed, connected or configured. No time - well not yet.
- We joined the OSX and iOS development programs but have made little use of them so far. I did setup a virtualised OSX infrastructure for Agata to work on, but we didn't really get started.
- The Psion to Nokia netbook data migration is still in flow. Among the things that are not attended to: Foolproof encryption, seamless and automated backup.
- Old gadget disposal: With the echoes of our Engineering Forefathers (who never threw anything away) looking down on us disdainfully, we actually have finite storage space. So we need to gift away those old gadgets and hopefully not just into the trash.
- Snowboard season approaches. Kit and exercise readiness is desired.
- I read over 40 Oracle and DB2 database articles daily and all the good ones are saved up for testing out later. Now would be a good time to reduce the considerable backlog
- I've never really investigated home NAS RAID disk storage. Our subsystems can already sustain transfers at over 100MB/second so moving to external RAID over a Gigabit LAN is just potentially slower. But might be good for ESX VMotion and other projects. So reluctantly I think I should prototype something.
- Agata and I are now at a fitness level that we should consider an exercise plan for 2011 in advance. We need to plan our training, and what competitions we should enter. For example, do we train and enter an Ironman or longer distance event??
- Our large datastore Website of Computer Information in particular the Vintage variety is totally overloaded. As my Economics professor told me, when the price is free, the demand will be high. So I'm considering moving it to the cloud or to dedicated hosting to ease matters.
- With a likely Euro and contagion based financial crisis coming to a continent like ours soon, it's probably a good time to understand and plan: What assets to hold where, what debts to hold [and where], and really in which country should you be living so that when the [financial] Armageddon strikes you will be least effected. (Sorry this last point can't be more cheerful!)
