Andy Gapin

Normally, I don’t do any Summer projects, but I think it’s time to change that. I always have a ton of things I want to get done, but the bigger ones never make it. Tasks that I can’t do in a couple of hours tend to just sit on my to-do list without ever being started. Half of it is because I just don’t have the time for most of these things, but the other half is laziness and lack of motivation for tackling these things. However, this Summer I want to do a few of the things on my list. Hopefully, it’s not too much, but I’ve got four projects that I want to do.

First, I want to get on the task of organizing all of my photos. I was thinking about this a lot last week and wrote an entire entry about it here, but I think this is a doable task. I’ve mostly worked out how I’m going to tackle the project and I’ve actually started already, which is good because this will probably be the project that takes the longest to complete. I’m just a hobbyist when it comes photography, but I’ve been getting into it a lot since getting my DSLR camera. Even before that though, I took tons and tons of pictures, I have tens of thousands of them on my computer. But for all of these pictures that I take, I rarely ever go back and look at them later on. Not only will this project allow me to get all of these photos better organized so that I can find anything I’m looking for later–I’ve got a pretty comprehensive keywording system that I’m planning on using and blogging about soon–but it will also be fun to actually go through and look at all of these pictures that I’ve taken over the years.

My next project is to actually clear my to-do list for the software I develop for the radio station. Okay, not the overall to-do list, but the one that’s been growing recently with about two dozen items on it. I started development on it again for the first time in a while this year and I have a pretty awesome new feature to push out, but there’s a lot more I want and need to do with the software. It’s hard to find the motivation to come home from developing all day at work only to do the same thing at home, but I think over the course of the summer, I can push out everything I want. My general process in the past was to do a ton of enhancements and then push them out in big groups. This was great at first, but it ended up causing some things to sit forever before going out. My new approach is going to be to push out each enhancement and bug fix as I finish it. This will get the new stuff to the users much quicker and also make it easier to check things off my list to make it feel like I’m actually getting things done.

I’ve got one more nerdy indoor project that I want to do, this one is not super important to me, but I think it would be a great learning experience. I want to develop an iPhone app. I downloaded the SDK a few weeks ago when I couldn’t sleep one night, but I haven’t had a chance to actually play around with it. I don’t know Objective-C yet, but I don’t expect it to be too hard to learn given the fact that I do software development for a living. I’m still trying to think of a good idea for an app though. It doesn’t to be the next big thing or even make me any money via the App Store, but I don’t want to make another to-do or fart app or anything else that will just get lost in a sea of similar apps.

And my last project is going to be to take enough pictures to be able to walk away with at least one “useable” picture everyday. I think this will be the most fun project out of the group. I know some people do photo 365 projects and make it a point to shoot everyday, but I’ve totally botched that idea for the year already, so I’m going to make it a Summer thing. I’m not going to try to limit myself to any particular theme or anything, but given that it will be Summer, I think I want to try some action photography. Maybe I’ll take some pictures of my soccer buddies one week or I’ll just go hang out at the park one day and take pictures of what’s going on. Who knows!

So that it. It’s a lot of nerdy stuff that will keep me indoors, but given that I’ll be playing soccer once a week, running a few times a week still, hopefully mountain biking here and there, and my fiancée and I finally got a table and chairs for the backyard so we can eat dinner out there, I’ll still be spending plenty of time outside. And besides, once the temperature starts to approach 80° I’m pretty miserable being outside anyway.