What are your 2025 goals?

It's just a rotation of the Earth around the sun but there is something special about the timing of the year. You go through all the seasons, one pass through each holiday. It is a good amount of time to set big goals for yourself but also long enough for those goals to get lost along the way.

I've neve been a fan of 'resolutions', especially vague ones like 'eat healthy', 'exercise more', 'do less social media'. But I do like goals and tasks. At any given time, I have a few goal and task lists that I go through to check off. For a year, I try to set some big goals for myself. Here is what I had for 2024 and how I did:

1. More novelty. I want to try more novel things, outside my usual routine or comfort zone. I think one per week is too easy so I am going to aim for 100 which is about 2 per week.
Result - I think I did good on this one. :)

2. Wear more fun socks and hats but get them all at independent shops or as gifts.
Result - I think I got only one new hat in 2024. But on the socks, I nailed it. I have about a dozen fun sock pairs that I wear regularly. I get good comments on them too!

3. Do something with Eyes on FF.
Result - I call this a fail. I did make progress in trying to figure this site out, just ask BoB, Samuraid, or o_O. And those guys were super helpful and probably did even more than I could. However, I still have o_O's helpful instructions in my email inbox that I have yet to try out. I may make another thread on this pleading my case.

For 2025, here are my two goals:

1. Read 100 new things. I started a thread on this.

2. Advance my skills/knowledge in each of 10 construction trades. In my middle years, I find it enjoyable to do some light fix it work around the house or build things I can handle on my own. I want to do more of that and just develop these skills, as they are very handy. Nothing to the point of being some kind of certified guy in any of this, but enough that I know the lingo and the basics. I identified the 10 based on my own groupings and here they are:

• Carpentry/woodwork
• Electrical
• Landscaping
• Glazing
• Metalwork
• Painting/finishing
• Masonry
• Plumbing
• Roofing
• Mechanical/automotive

What are your goals?

I did okay with my 2024 resolutions. My main easy one was drinking more water and trying to eat healthier. I hope to cook more this year to sort of piggyback off of both of those.

My main goal, as it usually is, is to write and last year I did a great job. I am over 500 pages in my novel, which I have now decided I'm going to break up into a trilogy just so I can feel some sense of accomplishment and get this whole 'hey I'm a writer" schlick actually going. My goal for this year is to finish the first book, of which I think I have between 100-200 pages left to do depending on how side tracked I get and then spend the rest of the year refining what I got and looking for a possible publisher. I may also go back to a few smaller writing projects as well and start from there as well.

I think my biggest production killer last year was easily YouTube, spent way WAY too much time on there and mostly watching the kind of stuff I roll my eyes at when other people talk about it, so I guess I'm no better. My goal to combat this is to spend more time actually gaming surprisingly and catching up on movies. I have a massive backlog of both as well as reading, so I am hoping to put down the phone and close the internet tab and spend more time immersing my self in film, games, and books this year. My GF got me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I also acquired a copy of Childhood's End. I think I will also try to read The Lord of the Rings this year, because I have surprisingly never done so despite The Hobbit being a top favorite book of mine.

I also hope to just take better care of myself now that I'm pass the big 4-0. I'm overdue for a physical and while I'm not going to be joining any gyms anytime soon, I am hoping to start playing DDR again and build my stamina back up and maybe shave an inch off my gut. Hopefully with my goal to cook more, I can get myself back into a healthier lifestyle.

Other than that, my final goal is just to get rid of some old stuff around the house and replace it with new stuff. My couch has been broken for over a year now, my car is over twenty five years old now and only works through my sheer force of will, and it might be nice to finally invest in a new entertainment center so I don't have stacks of movies and games cluttering up my space.

So those are all my goals for the year. I even made a Bingo card with some of the objectives on it.

Honestly, I really couldn't put my finger on any particular goal for 2025. I managed to get to NZ last year, see literally everyone in my fam (even if not all at the same time/place), had two trips to the US too, so I'm kinda travelled out (although I'll be in Chicago in a couple of weeks so it's not over yet). No major game releases coming out. I don't like to make an annual goal "do better at work" or anything like that, because I consider that a constant for every year.

I'm in a weird state of just going through the motions in a lot of parts of life right now and while it's not something I'm particularly enjoying in any major way, I'm absolutely not interested in a relationship and I can't think of anything else of note that would make a huge difference in a positive way.

So I guess my goal is to find a bit more purpose in my life, if anything. Easier said than done at this age. Maybe meet an old friend or two.

And yep, can confirm Murd has been taking steps on EoFF stuff! It hasn't been as easy as one might like.

I can imagine it's difficult with the forum. I remember my days in staff and the issues. I trust the team to make the right choices though.

It's more site/hosting stuff than forums stuff but yeah.

Gotcha

Yeah, the forum is what it is. We are running on an old version of an old software (vBulletin), but it runs just fine. It would be great to upgrade but I do not know enough about that for the benefits to outweigh the risks. The biggest risk to me is to lose the old post database in a conversion, since that history is the great thing about this place.

The issue is on the site/hosting. This site is hosted in a linux-based platform and I do not know linux. When I try to bone up on some basics, I go and find that we have a lot of custom/old settings that simple tutorials will not give me enough information to solve. Many of those answers are on prior tech admin hard drives or in their heads. It is tough for me to bother these guys who have their own lives that have moved on from EoFF, though I will say that everyone has been very forthcoming and helpful when I do bug them.

What I am trying to do is really two things:
1. Make the place run smoother. It usually runs fine but there are odd spikes in activity that cause slowdowns. I am 90% sure this is due to bots.
2. Reduce the monthly cost. It is about $60 a month to host EoFF which to me is entirely too much for a barely active website. The cost goes to two things: CPU and storage. We can reduce both to go to a lower tier.
For CPU, I think limit the bots and we are good.
For storage, there is something bloating up the DB that is not the current posting activity. Due to the limitations of the site as it is built (and my own limitations), I have yet to figure out what that is. The post database is not large enough to justify how much storage we are using.

Oof, that does sound like a hassle. The only thing I would possibly check in terms of the storage is whether you're accidentally making copies of backups but not deleting old ones? It's likely a long shot and I'm sure someone like Samuraid has already checked for something like that. I was never good with the backdoor stuff with web design so I doubt I would be of much help. Linux is also a no-go for me. I am neither nerdy or paranoid enough to fall into that OS system. I imagine it some kind of old set up that worked maybe back in 2005, but tech has come and resolved it and this has never been changed. I don't know, I'm probably just babbling at this point.

Lose weight
Stop drinking so much
Actually get back into playing game
Read a book a week
Get back into playing my bass

That's it for now.

I'm planning to do my PhD at some point in the next couple of years, probably somewhere overseas. So my goals are mostly aligned with that - write and publish another paper, get some more research experience if I can, and save money for moving, etc.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

What I am trying to do is really two things:
1. Make the place run smoother. It usually runs fine but there are odd spikes in activity that cause slowdowns. I am 90% sure this is due to bots.
2. Reduce the monthly cost. It is about $60 a month to host EoFF which to me is entirely too much for a barely active website. The cost goes to two things: CPU and storage. We can reduce both to go to a lower tier.
For CPU, I think limit the bots and we are good.
For storage, there is something bloating up the DB that is not the current posting activity. Due to the limitations of the site as it is built (and my own limitations), I have yet to figure out what that is. The post database is not large enough to justify how much storage we are using.

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Some questions just out of curiosity:
- What is the current hosting provider?
- What size of machine do you use? (CPU+RAM)
- What type of database is being used? (Postgres, MySQL?)

I probably don't have any useful advice but I do have a lot of context on common bottlenecks for self-hosting stuff.

- Get through what people have told me will be the hardest semester of my masters degree.
- Turn 30.
- I've been told I should see a promotion from intern to associate by the end of the summer so we'll see if my employer follows through on that.
- Really push myself to improve at photography more in my spare time.

Things are moving well enough along, just can't let myself lose steam.