To Do

There’s a light dust of overnight snow on the streets this morning. Maddie’s upstairs playing “Climb On Mummy” while Sadie reads a magazine; seems like a good time to figure out my to-do list for 2008.

1. Make Maddie laugh as often as possible (on purpose or otherwise).
2. Do a major release of DrProject, and recruit at least 100 new users.
3. Do a much better job of teaching my courses than I did this past term.
4. Attend SIGCSE'08, ICSE'08, Agile'08, CAST'08, and SC'08. (I'm running a panel on "CS-1 for Scientists" at the former; I'd like to put together a workshop for the latter on Software Carpentry-type stuff.)
5. Do some interesting research with my graduate students in time for them to finish their theses by January '09. I'd like this to be one of the big ones---after all, it's one of the major reasons I came back to academia---but I'm pessimistic about my ability to stay focused.
6. Recruit and supervise four Summer of Code students from U of T.
7. Institute a professionally-oriented master's degree in Computer Science at U of T. (We have a strawman proposal, and will be doing a market survey early in January to tune it.)
8. Retire the server this site is running on, and move to some kind of hosting service. (This'll mean moving StreetKnit as well.)
9. Finish and publish the "CS-1 in Python" book that we've been working on since early 2006.
10. Go to B.C. for my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary.
11. Lose 15 pounds (there's a family history of heart disease, so the weight I've put on in the last 18 months is more than just a matter of vanity).
12. Write a children's picture book equivalent of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. (I figure if I start now, it'll be done in time for Maddie's fourth birthday.)
13. Arrange at least one good demo by a U of T student at every DemoCamp in 2008.
14. Take Sadie somewhere nice for her birthday. Just the two of us---oh, and a cellphone, so that she can check in with the babysitter at regular intervals ;-).