Happy New Year!
Time to reflect on 2016, time of the year to look at yester year’s “things to do” list and to feel either good about it or in my case mild regret on not getting to the important ones on the list.
Time to renew those unifinished, untouched yesteryear “New Year” resolutions and to add a bunch of new more to make the list bigger than it already is.
Highlights:
- Finished the Data Science Certification on Coursera
- Got married (doesn’t explain why I am so lazy about making blog posts)
Lessons learned:
Last year I started my own personal bookmark list, a file which contained all the interesting blog posts, articles, papers that I wanted to read later in the day. Over time that list of urls has grown to about 200. Well so much for bookmarking, in retrospective I think it was a bad idea to stash them away. The fault for was not in the stashing, it was my mindset that I have it and that I can read it any time. I learned a lesson, which is to read those articles the day they are bookmarked because everyday something new and exciting keeps coming out and lands in that bookmark file I created.
Don’t back any project at Kickstarter:
I constantly browse kickstarter from time to time to see if there are any interesting projects. In doing so I backed couple of few projects:
And needless to say that I put my money in the wrong place. The Pear buds should have been delivered early of 2016 or mid 2016 and I still haven’t received my earbuds. The forums in kickstarter page reveal that I am not alone and there are disgruntled backers who have started a petition to return the money. I backed that project because at that time (2015) the concept of wireless earbuds without the earbuds being connected to each was a new and cool concept. Least did I know that they won’t deliver and loose my money on it.
The second one another interesting idea of using your smartphone to power a laptop. I was really excited for this, and haven’t lost hope yet but its just its been more than a year since I backed the project without any clue when I (if at all I do) get my smartbook.
Third one, I take partial blame for this. Luckily I received the item just that my expectation out of was too high and I paid a little too much for that item. It is a stand for the smart phone. While the photos in the project page looked promising in reality it didn’t hold to my expectation and it certainly couldn’t hold my phone. It just caused a lot of scratches on the screen of my Nexus5x.
I don’t know if it is the projects that I back or if I am unlucky but this is the end of the road for me with Kickstarter.
Talking about 2017:
My list goes something like this
- Go
- Haskell
- Putting/improving my Data science skills to better use during my free time.
- Read 10 books