PolarLava::Blog

So I was heating my lunch up today when I heard a coworker talking about going to KFC for lunch over the holidays and being told they were out of chicken.  Lets review.  Your business is called Kentucky Fried CHICKEN and you're out of um, CHICKEN.  Am I alone in finding this unbelievable?  It's your staple product.  It's in your name.  Shouldn't you always have CHICKEN if you're a CHICKEN restaurant?  Ok, thought so.

Let's review the year of slow to no progress.  And it's unlikely to get much better so for 2009 I'm going to just continue to meet the goals I missed here.

In no particular order, here are PolarLava's goals for 2008:

• Resume getting the backlog of all my writing online. PARTIAL, I did get more of them online, but there's a long way to go.
• Explore/Move my PhotoBlog to a separate photblog specific platform.  FAIL, Did look into this a bit, but not too seriously.  More than anything now that I got a new camera I need to take more pictures!
• Start commenting on my PhotoBlog entries so some of them are not quite as abstract.  SUCCESS, This I have done as it's relatively easy.
• Add the ability to drill down and view monthly summary and individual rides from the Yearly Summary page of my Cycling Log.  FAIL, But I still want to do this at some point.
• Add graphs to the Calendar and Yearly Summary pages of my Cycling Log.  PARTIAL, I did this everywhere except the yearly page.  And doing that shouldn't be to tough, but I just haven't gotten to it.
• Add a route mapping feature to my Cycling Log.  This might be either adding an external link to a third-party mapping site or ideally some sort of mapping within my site.  FAIL, Would like to do this as an integrate feature, but likely to go third-party as that's the only way it will probably get done.
• Write a DB class for PostgreSQL and integrate it into MyClient so you can connect to both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases at the same time.  FAIL, Another no progress thing I'd like to do, particularly for MyClient.
• Start learning a little Ruby.  FAIL, Ditto.  I actually looked at buying a book about though a couple of months ago.
• Complete project pages for my current and future projects. FAIL, Unlikely to get done and may get scaled back as I just can't support so much FOSS these days.  Bummer.
• Actually release an update for Yapter.  FAIL, This might get killed as an independent project.  I'd like to keep it and I still use an updated but unreleased version.  Really needs a complete rewrite as I'd like to use it on other projects.  Then again, I've been thinking of moving to a framework for those.
• Add a calendar entry view to PolarBlog.  FAIL, This actually is about 90% complete, but I just haven't tied up the loose ends.

So now that we are into 2009 it's time to look back on how we fared in 2008.  There won't be any set goals for this year as I know my riding will be down.  I have lots of work around the house that I've been neglecting and my position change at work has also put a lot more demands on my time.  So let's review…

I've been thinking the past few weeks about what I want to accomplish on the bike in 2008.  These are the goals I've set:

• Ride 4000 miles. That might have happened in 2007, but vacation, back issues and sickness detrailed that in the early fall. - SUCCESS, 4,001.67 miles.  Required a concerted effort in December as I got lazy in November.
• Ride 10% more miles each month than in 2007.  I probably won't make this goal every month, but if I can do that overall it will put me close to that 4000 mile goal. - PARTIAL, I haven't figure it out exactly, but most months I did do this, but I know there were a couple that I didn't.  But overall I had more than a 10% increase over 2007.
• Ride 3 century rides.  I did one last year for the first time in 9 years.  The last time I did three was in 1996. - SUCCESS, yes, yes, and yes.  And those last two were on consecutive weekends.
• Set a new personnel distance record.  This means topping my 153.90 mile ride in August of 1996. - FAIL, This was a pipe dream and never be topped.  But mentally my goal is to someday ride a double century (200 miles).
• Have an overall average speed outdoors of 18.50mph.  That an small increase over last year's 18.22mph, but still shy of 2004's 18.70mph. - FAIL, I actually slowed down to 18.00, but I did ride faster indoors so my overall average was up about 0.4 mph.