My wife got me using a new site to keep track of habbits, daily tasks and todos: Habitica

Time to write some new goals for 2016.

It’s that time of year again. I want to make some new goals for 2015.

So now that 2014 is over I wanted to look over my goals that I wrote about last year and see how I did at meeting them.

I’ve spent the past few weeks redesigning my blog and moving it away from Posthaven and onto github pages.

This was without a doubt, the best mystery hunt I’ve been to year. I wasn’t able to attend the mystery hunt for the past two years and due to this I’m not only seeing improvements that were made over the past year, but improvements that have been made prior as well.

For many years while living in Boston (and even a couple from UMass) I participated in the MiT Mystery Hunt. I wasn’t able to go the past two years (2012 was right after we moved to CA, and 2013 was also a busy time at work). This year I can finally make my return to my team: Grand Unified Theory of Love.

So tonight was the 2nd night of Hearthstone Season 2, my first time playing Sc2 in a long time and a slow, but important day at work!

Yesterday I posted a picture of me, Kerrigan and my new Hafu shirt.

I had my annual assessment today. Nothing came as much of a surprise since my boss and I constantly chat. Due to this I know very accurately where I stand most of the time (not just at the review). My two main points of improvement at this point is documentation and negativity.

I’m REALLY good at buying things, so when I made the decision to try an analog journal for daily notes I got immediately excited about buying both the journal and accessories for it!

This morning I made a post about some productivity changes I’m making in 2014… or at least I posted about a lot of systems that I’m going to try and keep up with to see if they help. I did not talk a lot about why I’m trying these systems. Bullet Journal, Pomodoro and Scrum for my life sounds great… but what am I trying to fix by doing them?

I don’t normally do resolutions. I think I like the idea that I could change things at any time, not just at the new year. Regardless the change of a year is a good time to make changes especially in regards to productivity. I had a nice winter break in order to look into new systems to try both at work and at home in the coming months.

So after moving to CA we clearly don’t need our Sovereign Bank accounts anymore. I set out the other day on a mission to clear all auto payments from them, and also close the account.

So I ended up buying a new iPhone 4s on the apple website.

Just had my phone stolen out of my car while traveling in Ithaca. Accidentally left the car unlocked (didn’t think I did) and accidentally left the phone in the car.

I would gladly throw my $199 for a new iPhone 4S but according to the apple store website it would cost me $450 currently due to my contract… I hate cell phone contracts. So I guess most current iPhone 4 users won’t be able to upgrade at a reasonable price.

So today in preperation for the hurricane I wanted to buy a new flashlight. When I went to Lowes the salesguy laughed at me and said “A bit late buddy huh?”…

I think Serendipity Recording Studios is finally ready for action! For those that never saw it, here are a couple of photos of the room prior to any work.

I hired http://www.edenhomeimprovement.com/ to do the work and here are some photos after the first day.

Some photos of the room during work and after they were done preparing it for painting.

Now our work began! Caitlin helped me a ton on this project since I'm not good at painting trim at all! First was priming all of the walls and painting the ceiling.

After came painting the walls. I chose the blue and orange combination from our wedding combined with my favorite color: purple. Big thanks to Mark for helping put the final coats on!

And finally today I got to put stuff in it!

Hopefully I'll get some time in the next couple of days to hear how it sounds!

So with Sadie's passing me and Caitlin wasted no time getting another dog. We want someone for Grubby to play with, and want two dogs in general so there was no reason to wait

Caitlin did make the fatal mistake of letting me name the dog for the second time. Our first dog is named Grubby after my favorite Warcraft 3 pro player. This dog I decided to name Tcl after the programming language that I've used a lot while programming at Berklee College of Music. Like the wikipedia page says it's pronounced "tickle". It satisfies our requirements of being incredibly geeky, while at the same time being incredibly cute.

So our new dog Tcl will be spending the next few days getting used to Grubby and our 3 cats!

Finally getting around to moving my blog over to posterous. I will be moving some posts over to my coding blog at mx.kelsin.net but unfortunately I will be losing some information and making some long running google links no longer work. I'm generally ok with this since a lot of that data is so old it shouldn't really be relevant anymore anyway.

So after the horrendous delays we experienced on Monday the MBTA passed out these forms apologizing and saying that we can immediately get a refund for both Monday trips by filling out this form. The form stated that every customer can get a max of 2 refunds (inbound and outbound) and had a spot to fill in your monthly pass number, zone and how much you were getting back. We got this form Tuesday evening when coming home. On Wednesday morning another conductor tried to give us these forms and we told him that we got it last night, and he said "Ok" and moved on.

Fast forward to today. My wife and I filled out our forms saying Zone 5 and $12.50 each (each way is $6.25). When we got up to the ticket window the lady rudely asked why we filled out $12.50. We told her that we were delayed on the inbound and outbound and she then told us we needed two forms, not just one and that the conductor should have giving us two. We told her that he didn't and that the forms says we're allowed two and she just says "Not without two forms". Another employee came over to tell us the same thing.

Are you serious? Clearly communication is awful since the conductor didn't know, or didn't tell us this. Now tomorrow morning we need to ask for another form and see if the conductor still has it. This "bonus" is already a bit weird since you can apply for a refund everytime your train is 30 minutes late online. The only difference this time is the immediate money instead of waiting 4-6 weeks to get your spare ticket that you have to then bring to the counter to get a refund for. This is better but it's not like the MBTA is out any more money than they would be anyway without this apology. On top of that they make it very hard to get both refunds by requiring two forms even though the conductor doesn't know that AND the form doesn't say?

I wouldn't mind as much if other cities didn't have awesome transit systems. It's a solved problem guys. Improve service and stop acting like your customers are the enemy and maybe you'll see increased ridership?

We went to the gym again today. For now we really want to try and start a Sat/Sun/Tues/Thurs schedule. The only issues are Tues and Thurs mean really early morning if we want time for cardio and strength training (which I really want to keep doing).

Today was pretty much the same as yesterday but I used 4 upper body machines and did 4 sets of 5 reps instead of just 20 in a row. It's so weird how you can be extremely tired from one machine, but then the next machine you're perfect fine cause it's using different arm muscles.

Anyway, short and simple post but going to try and keep it up.

In other news we bought a electric fondue pot, and chocolate mix and cheeses. So tomorrow is going to be cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue. I know very different strain from the gym, but it's valentines day... not that we wouldn't do that dinner any other day of the year.

Today we went to the gym (on a Saturday!!! WTF???) and had our first "real" workout. The past two times I just used the bikes and that was it. Barely even broke a sweat actually. This time I used the elliptical for 20 minutes which actually had me completely worn out. After that I did 20 reps on one upper body machine, and 20 on another.

The doctor recently told me I should try to strengthen my upper body and shoulders so we'll see how that goes. Also quickly seeing that we really need to come in the morning with like an hour of time, so maybe the weekend + two days a week (for like 45 minutes) is the best route. We'll just have to see.

Either way today felt good and I got some upper body work in. Now time for a shower. Today I'm going to play in the TL Open (with bo1 rounds though it won't take very long) and then we're going to go buy some groceries and a fondue pot.

So this morning I check my tracking info and it says that the package is in Watertown MA and that the delivery date is Monday. I decide to call them and find out if it’s possible for me to pick it up. The automatic phone system says “You’re package is out for delivery”.

This clearly makes me very excited.

When I get an agent on the phone I ask to confirm this and she says “Sorry, the automatic message must be mistaken you’re package is not out for delivery. It will be there on Monday.” After confirming this again and confirming that I can’t go pick it up I hang up.

We go out to breakfast, we get home to a notice on the door saying they tried to deliver a package from Apple Computers.

I call them immediately and finally get someone on the phone. The nice lady (who of course I didn’t get the name of) says that they will get a research team on it and try to find the package and get the driver to bring it back to my apartment. I say thanks and she takes my phone number down.

Now that it’s an hour and a half later I call back wondering about the status and of course get run through 3 different people who all can’t find a record of any of what happened 1.5 hours ago. The most recent guy keeps saying that my phone number might have been taken down wrong? WHY DOES THAT MATTER! We are talking about the same package designated by my invoice AND tracking number. Why should my phone number be required to figure out what happened an hour and a half ago? Are all CS requests filtered by phone number and not package number? He also had the balls to tell me that anything communication I would get back should get to me by Monday and that they don’t guarantee any communication back on Saturday. WHAT??? We’re talking about you guys screwing up and then your guys telling me I’ll get a call back soon about the driver bringing me my package! Getting a call on Monday means NOTHING.

So now I “supposed” to have a manager call me back within the hour. I hope that freaking happens. This is ridiculous. If UPS didn’t TELL ME ON THE PHONE that my package was not out for delivery I would have it by now. Not to mention calling back to try and get a status is impossible cause apparently NOTHING of what my first agent told me got saved to any type of note on my account.

So Caitlin and I both want to get smart phones at some point. Mainly I want to be able to check email on my phone. Not only is it important for work (the biggest reason) but I’m sick of my old really bad phone.