Adam's Interweb

Now seems as good a time as any to post my a list of goals I want to accomplish in 2009. I think everything is quite realistic. So, I now have 364 days left to:

Financial

• Fully fund 2008 & 2009 Roth IRAs
• Pay off second mortgage OR refinance into single mortgage (with much lower rate and no PMI)
• Get my side income up to the point I could live off of it if the need arose (NOT trying to get this to replace my actual income level…although that would be fantastic if it did)
• Maintain at least a 3 month emergency fund (currently at 12 months, but expect some of this to use used for other financial goals)

Health

• Get weight to 190 or lower and keep it there (~25 lbs to lose)
• Decrease caffeine intake – and keep it down (target is around 1 12oz can of soda per day or less)
• Drink more water (no particular amount – just when I’m thirsty, grab a water instead of a soda)
• Cook (healthly-ish) meals at home more than I eat out (including lunch)

Personal & Professional Development / Other

• Read at least 1 non-fiction (but not computer related) book a month
• Read at least 1 fiction book a month
• Attend WWDC 2009 (contingent on other financial goals being met/on track in May)
• Get my passport
• Write at least one blog post per week on this blog – just to start writing more

Just a quick post to say I’m still around…  I haven’t been updating this blog much because things got quite busy at work and after that settled down, I started working on a small iPhone app that I’ve been wanting for a long time.  On October 14th, I finally released my app (called Budgee) to the Apple App Store.  So far, it’s been a blast – I use the app daily, I’ve heard good things overall from those that have contacted me about it, and I have some interesting things I’d like to do with it in the future…plus several more apps that are in the queue.  If you’re interested in seeing what I’m up to in the iPhone world, the blog I’ll be updating for that (and I will be updating it) is: http://blog.cogitu.com (if you want to see Budgee, it’s here: http://www.cogitu.com/Products/Budgee/).

Anyway – not much else to say other than I’m still not going to be posting too many updates to this blog in the near future.  I’m really trying to focus most of my free time getting my new iPhone venture up and running at full speed.

Well, I’m still working on my new blogs based on personal finance and technology. So far, I have about 20 posts planned out for the personal finance one, but I haven’t touched the technology one yet. I’ve been toying with writing my own blog engine for the technology one – not because there aren’t good blog engines out there, but more as a learning exercise (and it would use some of the newer .Net features that the other blog engines haven’t used yet). I’m not sure if I’m going to do that now or not…

I have maybe 3 personal finance posts written, but still need to proofread them before I make them public. My original plan was to not post anything on the personal finance site until I have about 14 posts ready to go so I can queue them up and start writing the next week or two worth of posts. That’s still my plan as of right now, but this is going to be harder than I imagined as far as keeping fresh content coming out. My target is to have one new article a day during the week. I just have to figure out a rhythm and then hopefully it’ll get easier, but I guess we’ll see.

I may go ahead and start the tech site as well with a series of posts about building a new blog engine. I’m not sure that I want to do that or not, but it may be useful and having feedback on the design as I go along would be helpful. Just have to find the time to do that too.

I’ve also been trying to get back into the habit of taking more photos and getting a little photoblog up and running, but I think that one is on the back burner for now. Just not enough time to do everything.

At the end of last month, I paid off my student loans – it was quite hard to write a $14,000 check, but once it was written, I didn’t regret it at all. It feels great knowing they are out of the way. The only debt I have left at this point (other than my primary mortgage) is a second mortgage I got when I bought my house (my down payment didn’t go as far as I had hoped due to closing costs, new house expenses, etc). This one is higher than my student loans ($18,000), but it’s possible that I can knock it out by the end of the year assuming no major financial issues arise between now and then. I may end up having to sell some stuff to make this happen, but we’ll see how that goes…I’m willing to do what is needed to take care of business.

This morning I sent in my monthly payment with a nice little $500 additional principle attached and I’m already starting to feel better. Debt free, here I come!

WordPress 2.5 / New Theme

I just finished updating this blog to use the new WordPress 2.5 engine. It’s really quite nice – everything on the admin side is much more refined that before. The upgrade process is amazingly simple – you just upload the new files, run upgrade.php, and in a minute or two (or longer if you have lots of posts) you’re ready to go. While I was doing the upgrade, I decide I would go ahead and update the theme as well. I liked the last theme, but I saw a new theme that looked a little better to me – so I just popped it in since I was already messing around with the site anyway. It is a bit more streamlined than the last one and more my style.

New Blogs

Over the last week or so, I’ve been planning out some topics that I want to blog about. I realize I haven’t been actively blogging for a while now, but part of that is because I can’t decide what I want to include on this blog. I’m always torn between putting all of my thoughts on this one blog or trying to keep them on different blogs so that each blog has a particular topic. The problem is that I would end up not posting at all. So, I have finally decided I’m going to dedicate time each week (and perhaps more often) to blogging in general and I have also decided I am creating more focused blogs going forward. At this point in time, I’m going to start maintaining three different blogs:

AdamByram.com

This blog will continue to be blog that is purely personal – more to communicate with friends and such than anything else. If I have a topic that I want to talk about that doesn’t fit into either of the two new blogs, it’ll end up here.

New Personal Finance Site

I’ll announce the name later once I finish getting things setup and get the initial content loaded, but I’m creating a new site focused on providing personal finance advice / observations for Generation Y. My generation has the opportunity to do great things, but I keep hearing (and seeing) how so many in this generation can’t (or don’t want) to manage money. To me, this is one of the most important things someone can learn. Money isn’t the key to happiness, but it’s one of those things what you need to understand and learn to use to help you achieve your dreams. So I’m hoping my new site will prove useful to people that want to start learning about personal finance, but don’t want to get bogged down in the technical details of it.

New Software Development Site

I’ll announce the URL for this once it’s up and running as well, but this will be the place that all of my software development related ideas will go. At the end of 2007, I started a new job at a software startup and I’ve had many experiences there that I’d like to blog about (as far as what works, what doesn’t, and things I’m learning about). I’ve wanted to do a blog like this for a long time, so we’ll see how it goes, but I think it’ll be fun.

I Tweet

I have also started using Twitter. I seems like a nice way to stay on top of the latest happenings, particularly in the software world. I don’t tweet non-stop or anything, but I try to tweet every now and then. I have my latest tweets in the sidebar of this blog and you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter if you’ve like – http://www.twitter.com/adambyram/.

That’s all for now – more updates to come.