Raw

Bill de Hora's posted his Activity list for 2007, prompting Niklas Gustavsson's ToDo for 2007. Is it a blogosphere meme yet? ( "5 Things..." is languishing on my to-do list). Seems a good idea - start of year checklist should help structured procrastination, doing anything on the list can be considered a Good Thing. Bill's got "Staying focused" on his list - yes indeed. So here's mine (in no particular order, provisional):

House Stuff

There's a huge amount of work needed on the new old house [aargh, I was going to link to the photos on Flickr, but they seem to be out of reach because I only have a free account, 200 viewable - that sucks]. I've just started a window frame (nine to do, gonna take forever at this rate), then there are the stairs - planning on making a doll's house model first. I'm new to joinery so the whole thing's a big challenge (I've warmed up with a book tote and a cat stand, trying to figure out how to use bandsaw, router and electric-hand-planer).

Guitar

The real to-do is learn how to play the thing, and to help with that I've turned over a machine for use as a music workstation, which needs a fair bit of work to get usable. Also with modding the current guitar I inadvertently got myself hooked on the construction side, so making my own electric guitar is on the list (well, bought metalwork and neck, I don't think I'm up to making those yet).

WWW 2007

I'm chairing the Dev Track (with Mark Nottingham). Right now I really need to figure out what needs doing there, and do it...

GRDDL

(Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) - I'm on the Working Group, but my contribution so far has been neglible. Given the timescale (the plan is for this to be a short-lived WG) that's likely to remain the case. I'm not overly worried, the other guys are way smart and are coming at it from all the necessary angles. But I still think GRDDL is hugely important (read the recent Moz/microformats stuff bearing the Semantic Web in mind), and intend to get a Java toolkit implementation going asap. I've already done one prototype, but it started getting alarmingly complicated, so I've scrapped most of that. I'm now aiming to express most of the basic mechanisms/logic through XSLT+RDF, and only use Java for the minimum of wiring.

SWEO

(Semantic Web Education and Outreach) - what I'd particularly like to do around there is help get some showcase apps online (beyond demos). This should be possible by collecting a handful cool ideas and gluing existing tools together to implement them. Not entirely sure how best to proceed (right now I'm kind-of researching stuff for my own purposes, see Dogfood below). But I'm thinking maybe get things to working prototype stage then hand over to someone else for production scale (and maintenance ;-) Suggestions very welcome.

Travel

We've not explored beyond a couple of hour's drive from here, so there's a lot of new areas in easy reach. For sanity' sake I want to try and stick to a minimum of one decent walk/trip per week. There's the trip to Canada for WWW 2007 in May to look forward to (although I'm dreading the expense, or to be more precise the marriage-impact of the expense...). We really should have at least a week's proper holiday somewhere - may involve snorkling. A trip to the UK would be good too, to visit the folks (and remind myself why we moved to Garfagnana).

Writing

No new book work this year. I want to keep going with the IEEE column, and there are one or two bits and pieces I'd like to do. (I don't count this blog as writing, it just appears when I'm distracted).

Dogfood

I've got increasingly frustrated at how poor my own knowledge management is, given the available tech. A lot of what I want should be available using existing tools plus a bit of glue. Where new stuff is needed, ideally get other people to help (been collaborating a bit with Reto around these parts).

The Agency

A dev project I've been mulling over for a while, a lightweight agent framework built on HTTP & RDF/SPARQL. Right now I'm noodling & reading up on concurrency, tuplespaces and the like (again). Should be fun.

Languages (machine)

Carried over from last year, the big one is to learn Common Lisp. Nearby I must make time to properly work through SICP and Concepts, Techniques and Models (which I've had for almost exactly a year - ouch!). There's some Smalltalk stuff I need to fix up one of these days. Also a lot of theory around Description Logics, rules etc I should know but don't. (Hmm, maybe I should set aside a day a week for this kind of thing).

Languages (human)

Bill's plan to learn Chinese made me chuckle, given that I've been in Italy >5 years (?) and still can't speak the language. I have picked up a fair vocabulary, and can understand a lot of what other people say, only can't string a sentence together myself. Best next step I think is spending some time with a grammar book.

Paid Work

Yeah, got to do some. I'm very lucky at the moment, doing contract coding for Immuexa - generally interesting semweb stuff, great e-colleagues, nice office ( tee-hee), good hours (my own), respectable pay. Can't see too far ahead, but should be ok for the next few months at least. This last year I made the huge mistake of taking way too much on (think I got up to 4 different concurrent jobs), leading to big stress & inefficiency. We have a pretty low cost of living, it's better for me to err on the side of too little work (*grin*).

@en