In my last blog post, I laid out a rough schedule for the first two-thirds of 2015, and I designated January my "mop-up month" where I'd put in some extra time and effort to make good on my existing commitments before moving forward with new projects. Here's that recap for January and a look ahead towards February (even if it's already started without me).
The short synopsis of the last month is that it was indeed a mop-up month, but more along the lines of it using my sorry carcass to mop-up whatever it damn well pleased. Rather than spending the month in a consistent forward slog working through my to-do list, I mainly played defense throughout the month as new challenges were thrown my way and it was a fight to deal with these challenges while chipping away at the original plan. It's not worth going into the details of January's surprises (health issues, record-setting blizzard, accidental time-bomb left by a departing coworker, etc.) other than to say that I feel like I ducked and weaved like a pro.
Here's what got done:
Most of the Intellicare apps got their Material Design facelift and are available on the Google Play store for your enjoyment. I managed to complete a redesign of 12 of the 13 apps in the suite and I'll knock out the last one as soon as I can carve out six to eight hours of contiguous time to focus on that last app.
Purple Robot's gotten some solid reliability and performance upgrades and is a much better product than it was earlier in the month.
I'm on-track with my Goodreads "read 100 books in 2015" challenge. I've especially been enjoying Garth Ennis' "Preacher" series from Vertigo as well as clearing out some books that have been on my Kindle for a couple of years. (Hello Barsoom!)
I've managed to keep my head above water with Fresh Comics' data demands. This last month has been the month where everyone shares their convention plans for the upcoming year, and the conventions page reflects the magnitude of that ongoing effort. I was pleased to discover that Wizard will be bringing a show to Chicago in March, so I don't have to wait until the end of April to attend C2E2 (as an attendee, not exhibitor this year).
What didn't get done:
I haven't had a lot of time to wrap up work on my dad's iPhone app for tracking wells around the Southwest. I need a solid uncommitted weekend to make this happen and those have been in short supply.
My to-do list is still in the 80s and 90s, and not back into the 30s and 40s as I'd like. The good news is that big items in the list are going away (e.g. Redesign Intellicare app #X) and being replaced by smaller tasks that are more tractable (e.g. Update app #X's list view to be like Z).
For the month of February, I'll still be playing catch-up with January's leftovers and the new major task is a redesign of The Pnakotic Atlas for Android. I've already been kicking around some ideas and getting an initial version of the redesigned app out will probably take over the latter weeks of the month. The odds of me getting to the iOS app are slim at the moment, but that may change if things go smoothly and Fate decides to take a break from lobbing firecrackers at me.
(Image: "Sisyphus - after Titian" by tombennett)
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