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.
- Make Maddie laugh as often as possible (on purpose or otherwise).
- Do a major release of DrProject, and recruit at least 100 new users.
- Do a much better job of teaching my courses than I did this past term.
- 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.)
- 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.
- Recruit and supervise four Summer of Code students from U of T.
- 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.)
- Retire the server this site is running on, and move to some kind of hosting service. (This'll mean moving StreetKnit as well.)
- Finish and publish the "CS-1 in Python" book that we've been working on since early 2006.
- Go to B.C. for my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary.
- 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).
- 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.)
- Arrange at least one good demo by a U of T student at every DemoCamp in 2008.
- 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 ;-).