I did a little calculating and determined that the 1000th day from when I started posting again is on Monday, May 19 2014.  That is perfect.  Commencement for the 2013-2014 school year at NCSU is on Saturday, May 10, 2014.  Graduation in four years from start to finish with hard degrees like Statistics and Applied Math is very difficult.  It will be equally difficult for Lorena to finish her first two years of college for a 4-year college transfer (Associate of Science) degree while she runs (with an iron fist) our household.  I will need to pitch in at home more often to make that happen.  I have thought a lot about what I want to accomplish, too.  I do not want any more degrees, but there are lots of new and old things I want to learn.  I just need to pare my wants down to something tractable in the allotted time.  I figured that beyond the duties of my day job and household duties, there are several things at which I can aim.  I reserve the right to modify some of these goals as circumstances change, but I think it help to write them down and track progress.

  • Blogging and reading – I attribute part of my blogging hiatus to the fact that I quit taking time to read for both edification and pleasure.  I had less things about which to write.  I have two-fold goal here:  1) Daily progress through a book unrelated to my other goals.  Reasonable Faith qualifies as does Farnsworth’s Classic English Rhetoric whose author I heard on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America this morning.  I will try to throw in a novel now and again.  Most importantly, I will continue to track my daily Bible reading here.
  • GaugeCam – I make my living as a technology researcher.  There is so much stuff I would love to learn to allow me to do my job better, that I do not have time to learn everything.  We have identified a new project at GaugeCam to “webify” the work we are doing there.  My part of that task will be to write some vision libraries and to make the cameras and I/O devices available from an Android tablet.  My goal then, will be to learn how to program Android well enough on my Nook Color to write and publish a program to access GaugeCam connected cameras and I/O devices over the internet.
  • Get my weight down to 170 pounds.

I think those are good goals.  Enough to keep me focused and interest, but not so much I cannot help out with everyone else’s school and around the house.  The kids have additional goals on which they work, but I will leave that to them to talk about in their own blogs.  We might not make it all, but these appear to be worthy goals.