New Month’s resolution

Today is the last day of April. Today, as I do every last day of the month I’ve picked my goals for the next round on Health Month.

To those unfamiliar with Health Month, it’s gamification website for people who are trying to live healthier lives.

Health Month started when Rick Webb got dumped by his girlfriend and he decided he wanted to lose some weight. His friend Keith Butters joined in and another friend helped create the official set of rules. Over the next couple years the monthly ritual gained popularity amongst some friends in New York and Seattle. The draw of the event was more about doing something drastic and dramatic, with friends, as a form of penance for the previous year. Improving long-term health habits wasn’t so much the goal… proving that you could go 30 days without a drink (and justifying a spirit of over-indulgence the rest of the year) sort of was.

I’ve never thought about it, but playing this game month by month feels very natural and the only reasonable way to do it. A week is a quite short period to achieve something meaningful and a year otherwise are extremely long and therefore scary.

Everyone makes their own resolutions on New Year’s Eve. And usually those resolution are a quite massive goals, like losing 90 lb of weight, stop procrastinating, visit Brazil or buying a house. Of course, you have a full year, 12 months, 365 days in your hands to accomplish those goals and it’s feels pretty feasible. But what happens then? I bet 95% of people have never committed to most of their New Year’s resolutions. You know why? These goals are very intimidating and you don’t know where to start.

So, why don’t we just break them into smaller pieces like the David Allen himself advices in his legendary book:

Break down tasks such as ‘complete report’ into smaller, more manageable and actionable goals such as ‘read research paper X,’ ‘write introduction,’ et cetera.

Don’t stop with those crazy New Year’s resolutions they are amazing, but let’s make month’s resolutions as well. Let’s break down our big goals into 12 smaller and achieve them one by one. Month by month.

 
So, here are my May 2012 resolutions:

  1. I will start over my course on Codeacademy and keep studying at least twice a week.
  2. I will participate in this year’s MoFilm Cannes Lion Video Contest.

Geo-Fencing

It’s great to see where geolocation technology is heading. No offense, checking into your favorite coffee shop is fun, but here are some way more useful possibilities:

Imagine traveling to Los Angeles, and when you land, your smartphone instantly alerts you with information about the address that you’re heading to. More than that: Geoloqi has cross-referenced your arrival time with the bus schedule, and it alerts you about the departure time of the next bus that will get you to your destination. Now once you’re on the bus, the phone alerts you when you’re approaching your stop, allowing you to doze off during the drive in.

 

Or imagine another scenario in which you get off the subway or highway, and a text message is instantly generated to your roommate or spouse, indicating that you are five minutes away from home. Or how about an alert when you enter the grocery store as to what you need to buy, or an automatically-generated text message to your boss that you are going to be late when you’re not at your desk by 9 a.m., or even a hospital that’s instantly updated with a patient’s medical records and status report when that person passes through the front door of an emergency room.

— Why Geo-Fencing Might Change Your Life (and Make You Believe in Location Sharing)

Even though some of those cases may not be that helpful (like the text message to a spouse about your late arrival; hint: welcome to the new level of cheating with a 21st century tools), I was fascinated with the hospital and public transport cases, which I think is exactly where technology should be heading.

The New York Times on Portland

Among my friends I am the only one who wants to visit Portland, OR. Most of the people I know haven’t even heard about this city, so they always ask me why the hell I want to go there so bad. Well, that’s enough to say why:

With its celebrated bike culture and obsession with all things independent and artisan, Portland is a small-scale metropolis with an outsize cultural footprint. Spread across the twin banks of the Willamette River, this provincial hub of the Pacific Northwest has more than its share of natural beauty and an earnest, outdoorsy reputation. But in recent years, the city has emerged as the capital of West Coast urban cool, earning it a television series, IFC’s “Portlandia,” devoted to satirizing its aesthetic and progressive social bent. Indeed, Portland — whose nicknames include Beervana and Soccer City, USA — is easy to poke fun at. It’s also hard to resist.

36 Hours in Portland, Ore.

Llama Birthday Party

Last week we celebrated 17th birthday of my girlfriend’s younger sister. She is fond of llamas and theme of a presents and the whole birthday party wasn’t a tough choise.

If you check #llama tag on tumblr you’d see that internet is obsessed with them. Llamas are the new cats. Why? They are fucking adorable. And don’t you even dare to try searching for images of alpacas (small llamas). You could die a slow death from sweetness and beat in the throes of charms of those little creatures.

Oh, what a hell, here’s a picture of them: picture of alpacas (click at you own risk).

Anyway, since the lack of content about llamas on the internet was not a problem we’ve stated searching. And here is what we did:
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Analog Sunday

Several months ago I stumbled upon an article about the idea of “Analog Sunday” — the day when you get rid of all of your gadgets, turn off your internet and try to enjoy your life as a person from the time before the internet.

Analog Sunday is an informal idea to encourage people to take a day off away from all thing digital. Any or every Sunday can be an opportunity to unplug, get off computers, relax and take a break from usual technology base routines by engaging with the world in a different way.

I found that article in April and we’ve decided to try this straight away, next Sunday. But… It never happened. I’ve got a freelance gig for the weekend and blah-blah-blah, typical misarable excuses. Next weekend we completely forgot about it and kept living our typical digital lives for the next 10 months. But yesterday we got home from work and out of blue decided to take another shot. So, tomorrow, on Sunday, November 20th we are going to turn off the internet, leave all our gadgets and try to enjoy a real life. Sounds like we are some weirdos from a nutshouse, I know :)

We haven’t decided if phone calls are allowed (at least incoming) or not, but we’ll figure this out. So, let’s see what happen. See you on Monday! :)