Resolutions high and low

I was amused to run across this post from a year ago, in which I apparently – and I had forgotten this – set working on the PDF DVD and finishing it as a new years’ resolution. Holy crap, I actually kept a new years’ resolution? Put a star on my calendar. Now let’s talk about this year’s resolutions (or lack thereof).

At some point soon, I’ll be coming out of the current “hiatus” of work on PDF Level 2, and get back to work on that. It helps to take a break from these things sometimes. I’m still trying to figure out what other topics could be covered in a similar vein to the PDF DVDs, because to a certain extent, the window is closing: my video gear, much as I love it, is very, very standard-def – it’s standard-def to a degree that upgrading would mean buying a whole new setup. Let’s not kid ourselves: the first PDF DVD made money, but not the tens of thousands I’d need to do that. So there’s a limited window on this whole DVD-making thing, after which the gear that I have is mainly good for putting web video together and that’s about it. Not that there’s anything wrong with web video, which dovetails nicely with another resolution of mine…

I want to make 2009 the year that I seriously go digital, and start to distance myself from having bucketloads of physical media laying around. I’ve gotten an internal terabyte drive on my main PC at home, which is a good start: it contains backups of a lot of the media I own legit copies of, from music to movies. And at some point, I’d like to start divesting myself of the physical media. I’m already working on a massive project of scanning CD booklets for everything in my collection that I have ripped, and at some point I’ll divest myself of the physical CDs; I’ll probably be taking a loss on most of them, though there are a few collections and sub-collections that’ll bring a dime or two in. I know this gets into thorny issues of rights to the contents of the media once ownership of the physical media has passed, but I’ve owned many of these CDs for nearly 20 years at this point – I think I’m grandfathered in on that front, and it’s not like I’m sharing stuff. Having recently done some serious, wholesale boxing-up of computers and game systems that I rarely play on the original hardware anymore, I have to say that it’s very liberating to be dealing with less stuff. It’s a trend I’d like to continue exploring. Jan recently pointed me toward a show about people called “hoarders,” and she thought that I fit that mold. No. That’s not me. I’d like a reliable working (and younger than 10 years old) scanner so I can do some wholesale digitizing of old papers, magazines and so on, prior to getting that stuff out the door. I’m all for this whole going-digital business.

Getting back to the PDF DVD for a moment, I’m also on a mission from God to establish a pattern of getting projects done and published – three to four of them a year if possible. The problem is that I had a schedule worked for doing so in 2009 that’s now been shot to hell: the CGE DVD isn’t out the door yet (at this point, my side of things is done – I’m waiting on other people’s stuff, such as the box art), and with the announcement that David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who at the end of this year or early in 2010, my idea for a summer target date for a nonfiction Doctor Who book is sort of nonsensical. That’s like publishing a book called Everything You Need To Know About The New World…in 1491. I’ve given some thought to changing horses in mid-stream and doing a similar book on the subject of Star Trek this year, with the idea that I’ll get it all done in time for May, and then once the new movie comes out, give myself about a month or so for rewrites and generating new material to take that into account, and get it out the door. The delays of the CGE DVD set have made me rethink another idea I had, of releasing a “booster pack” DVD or two late this year that would have the footage I shot of panels and keynotes at CGE 2003 and ’05. PDF Level 2, the (still lamentably untitled) Doctor Who book and CGE “add-on” DVDs would have been 2009’s three projects. Now the only one that’s really chiseled in stone is PDF. I’d like to do PDF in book form at some point, but I hadn’t planned on it this year, because I need to do some serious thinking on the shape that would take in print so that it isn’t just a printed version of a web site that everyone can look at for free. The whole “mission from God” part of establishing a set schedule of publishing projects would be to prove – to myself, to the universe around me, and to certain members of the family who think that this stay-at-home-dad gig has been the biggest vacation in the world for me – that there are things I could be doing with my time and (if you want to call it this) talents that would be of more use than trying to carve out an Earl-shaped niche in the already-shrinking local work force.

It’s almost a cliche to make a weight-loss resolution, but I might as well join the crowd. In the spring of 2008, by switching to a largely vegan diet, I shed 30 pounds. I felt better and – dare I say it – looked better than I have in a long time. The problem there is that, during the summer, we hit a big time budget crunch that brought us right back to eating cheap crap. Between that and the fact I was still heavy enough that keeping up with a playful toddler was a chore, I wound up sitting around a lot…eating (especially “stress eating”)…and guess what? I’ve got all 30 of those pounds back. I want them off again, and maybe 20-30-40 more of their friends. This time I want them gone for good.

So…there are lots of things I’d love to do this year. The only problem is that so many of these things require the stars and planets to line up a certain way. So I’m posting this on the anniversary of last year’s resolutions post so I can keep score in 2010…you know, that year that we’ll all be busy making contact and stuff.