Author: Kevin Lawver

After I posted my New Year’s Resolutions, I started thinking about taking control of my time, and what I was really trying to do, and it’s come down to a single goal: reducing my guilt. I have goals and ambitions, things I want to accomplish, help with, and see get done. These things keep getting put in a bucket, and it’s now full to overflowing. It’s a massive burden of guilt (self-inflicted, of course) that’s not helping me get my time under control, or more importantly, my health.\
So I’m doing something about it… Instead of fooling myself into thinking that I’ll have some great meadow of free time open up, I’m admitting defeat and removing goals. It’s not easy. Here’s what I’m doing about it:

• I sent my farewell post to the CSS Working Group listserv this morning. I’ve been a member of the CSS Working Group for about four years, and in that time, I’ve never really been able to dedicate the time I want to it, and don’t see how I ever will. It hurts to leave. CSS is vitally important to the future of the web, and I want to be a part of it, but I’ll have to do it outside of the working group.
• As soon as I find a replacement for me, I’ll be leaving the HTML Working Group as well. I’m just a placeholder anyway since Arun left, but again, it’s important and I want to be a part of it, but I just don’t have time.
• And one more decision I’m not ready to announce yet that’s more painful than the other two combined. I still need to talk to some people before I can blog about it. But, just to set expectations: I’m not leaving AOL, and it has nothing to do with my family.\
  I’m also making great progress on the feeds and twitter front too. I’m down to 194 folks I’m following, and only have twenty-seven feeds to dump in the next week to get to 500 feeds.\
  Update: I heard from a couple worried friends who said this sounds “ominous”. That’s not my intention. I’m happy to finally be making hard decisions and to stop worrying about things I don’t have time to worry about anyway. This is all good stuff. I’m sad about leaving the CSS Working Group, but I honestly haven’t really been a true part of it for a while. It’s about accepting things I have no control over and prioritizing my health and family over work and everything else.

I’ve seen this a couple other places (sorry, can’t remember where at the moment, or I’d link to you), and decided that I’d try to remember all the books I read last year. With all the traveling I did, I did a lot of reading on planes. Thanks to Good Reads, I at least have a starting point to jog my memory.\
h4. Fiction

• Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony by John Scalzi: A great trilogy by ficlets former blogger-in-chief.
• The Android’s Dream also by John Scalzi: This one’s not in the same universe as the Old Man’s War trilogy, but a royally good time – great pace, humor and a really good story.
• Overclocked by Cory Doctorow: I never really read science fiction when I was younger, though I watched a bunch. I started with John Scalzi since he was blogging for ficlets, and then picked this up. I loved it. The story about sysadmins after the apocolypse was awesome.
• World War Z by Max Brooks: I stayed up all night on the flight to Paris reading this. I wasn’t freaked out at all while reading it, but thinking about it later, got the chills thinking about it. This one will stick with you – a great zombie book.
• Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet by David Wellington: The first one is the best of the trilogy and each successive one is less enjoyable, but they’re a lot of fun. An interesting twist on the zombie genre.
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman: I love Neil Gaiman, and this book is a great time. It’s funny, quickly paced, and has his regular wit and skill.
• Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman: This one’s uneven, because it’s all short stories, but there are a couple real winners.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling: Much better than the one that came before it, and a decent end to the series. I try not to lay too much of my own expectations for how stories should go on authors and as long as it rings true, I’m usually pretty happy. I was pretty happy by the end.
• a couple by Michael Connelly, but I can’t think which ones at the moment, which probably means I need to take a break from him since they’re all running together.\
  h4. Non-Fiction
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: This is my favorite book of the year, even though it was writting over thirty years ago. It’s a collection of essays about life and nature and contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read.
• Agile Web Development With Rails by a bunch of smart dudes: Yeah, I’ve made it through this one a couple times, and I should probably add…
• Ruby in a Nutshell by Yukihiro Matsumoto: If you count flipping through to jog my memory, I’ve probably read this one eight or nine times this year.
• Words I Wish I Wrote: A Collection of Writing That Inspired My Ideas collected by Robert Fulghum: A great collection of inspiring stuff. Always handy for a good quote. I’ve read this one every couple years since I got it.
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith: This was a book club book for work, and I hated it. It’s a dark and unpleasant view of the internet and government control of it.\
  h4. In Progress
• Wikinomics by Don Tapscott: Mr. Tapscott gave a great presentation at an AOL internal development conference over the summer and I got a copy of his book. I started it, but stuff came up, and I haven’t finished it yet.
• Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger: Another one I started but haven’t finished. I don’t like taking hardbacks on the plane because they’re cumbersome.
• Getting Things Done by David Allen: I know. I’ve been meaning to get to this one for over a year. I’m definitely not GTD.\
  I know I’m missing some in each category. I’ll try to remember them and add them later.

I’ve been thinking all week about what my real New Year’s Resolutions would be. The initial list was long, a good baker’s dozen of things I want to accomplish this year. But, the more I thought about it, the more I decided that this year is about one word and one word only: control. So, I’m down to two resolutions:

1. Get my health under control. If you’ve ever seen me in person, or even just a picture, there’s no hiding the fact that I’m a large man. I make jokes about it, because, well, it’s funny. But, it’s also extremely unhealthy, and I’m not getting any younger. I’ve lost weight before (over sixty pounds a couple years ago), but because of injuries or just not being able to form good habits, it’s almost all come back. This year, that changes. I’m not going to do anything radical, just try to finally follow my doctor’s advice and get my health under control. The easiest goal to track is to try to lose one pound a week. That means I’m shooting to lose fifty-two pounds this year. That feels reasonable and not too hard to accomplish (I’ve already lost three since coming back from Mississippi). I also want to get back to monthly doctor visits and following his advice more closely. If I get to the six month mark and am rocking this one, I’ll up the ante.
2. Get my time under control. I have a really hard time saying “no” when people ask me to do something, especially when it’s something I think would be cool or worthwhile. I tried to be better last year about agreeing to do things when I know I don’t have the time for them and then either killing myself to get them done or having to bail, which feels awful. I need to go through my commitments and start simplifying things. I spend a lot of time dealing with work stuff, traveling, speaking at conferences (almost a dozen last year, plus a dozen internal presentations), keeping up with W3C stuff and then squeezing in writing a chapter for the book, ficlets. and then spending time with my family, which I don’t do enough of, and when I do, I’m either tired or distracted. I don’t necessarily want to do less, I just want to make sure that anything I commit to will actually get done and that I won’t be shortchanging my family to get it done. I’ll probably start cutting back on some stuff (I’m already trying to keep it to one trip a month, and I’m not planning on writing any more books). Hopefully, if I succeed with my first resolution, I’ll have more energy for the other stuff (and maybe finish reading Getting Things Done – ironic, I know). As an addendum to this one, I’m going to try to set some “data intake” rules:
   1. I will follow no more than 200 people on twitter, and have fifty or less sent to my phone. I just pruned my list to 195, but this one’s going to be struggle, especially as I attend conferences.
   2. I will subscribe to no more than 500 feeds. This one’s going to be really hard. I’m giving myself two weeks to get down to 500. I started this morning with over 630 feeds, and have whittled it down to 531, mostly through dead feeds or feeds I added on a whim. I think the next thirty-one are going to hurt a bit.\
      That’s it. It’s all about control – not some Pinky and the Brain scheme for world domination, just getting myself and my little sphere in order. Feels pretty reasonable and something I can actually get done.

I have to send out another headshot for another conference (SxSW this time). I usually use Dan Budiac’s great shot from SxSW 2005, but decided that three years is long enough to use the same shot. So, I went searching through flickr for stuff tagged kevinlawver and found a ton of shots of me making a goon of myself. Here are some of my favorites:\