Need Focus, Badly

To provide a bit of structure for my time off, I’ve thought about a few things that I’d like to achieve before I need to seriously think about a new job. Some of my goals for the next month:

1. Finish cleaning up my resume.  I haven’t had a real resume for years, and since I always assumed that I would be working at Vanu forever I never bothered to keep it up to date.  I’m playing with xmlresume; fiddling with style sheets and autogenerating output formats appeals to me a lot more than mucking with fonts and margins in Word.
2. Get some sort of regular exercise. I’ve been a sloth for long enough that I’ll be happy if I just get out and walk for an hour a day, but the rain that we’ve been getting recently has put a bit of a crimp in getting that off the ground.
3. Write a non-trivial Ajax web app.  I’ve been living in a largely C++ sandbox for the last 10+ years, so while I’ve got an academic understanding about how such things work, I haven’t really gotten my hands dirty.  I’ve got some reasonable python clue, so I’ll probably go with Django or Pylons for the back-end just to reduce the initial degree of difficulty, and possibly look at Pyjamas as something to play with for the client-side JavaScript.
4. Write at least one insightful blog post. I’m busy working my way through the n00b blogger’s cliched hits, just trying to bang out enough posts to start to find my voice a little bit. Despite the fact that I know that the only people likely to read anything here are the few friends that I’ve told and an armada of webcrawlers, the mere possibility of a large audience has made me tighten up. It takes me seemingly forever to crank out even the crappy little posts that I’ve made so far, and everything is very cautious and conservative. It’s hard to write anything thought-provoking if you don’t take any risks.

With the exception of the last one, I think these should be easily achievable in a month. I’m hoping they’ll provide some further inspiration as well. Check back in May to see how I did.