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One task that I have pop up every week on my Reminders “Weekend” todo list is filling in a weekly log note in Obsidian. In each week’s log entry I have a few headings pre-populated, for the general categories of things I try to write down that I did every week. These headings are:

  • ColdTrack – to write down either important happenings, or things that I did for the “jobby job”
  • QQQ – again, to log any significant work done there
  • Home – for writing down anything notable that I did around the house, or with the family
  • Watching – to keep track of what shows and/or movies I’ve watched
  • Reading – to keep track of what book I’m working through

I’ve found it a slightly useful exercise to spend 5 or 10 minutes every weekend sitting down to reflect on each of those categories. But, even more interestingly, now that 2024 is wrapping up, and I’ve got more than a full year of these log entries, I thought it would interesting to take a look at all of my entries for each of these categories, to give myself a snapshot view of what the year 2024 looked like for me.

Technical aside: Since these notes were written in Obsidian, which means they are simple markdown (text) files on disk, I was able to use a little bit of shell to quickly grab each specific section from the files, with a series of commands, such as:

find . -type f | sort | xargs -I % sed "/\#\#\#\ QQQ/,/\#\#/p;d" "%" | grep -v \#\# | grep -e "- .*[a-z]"

Broken down, that command is doing:

  • find . -type f | sort | xargs – that is: find the files under the directory with all of these entries (I do file them by-year, by-quarter), then sort them (because find wasn’t doing that on its own, which surprised me a bit), and pipe them into xargs – mostly because the filenames had some spaces in them.
  • The argument to xargs then is:
    • sed "/\#\#\#\ QQQ/,/\#\#/p;d" "%" – that is: print (p) any lines between the header I was looking for (### QQQ in this case) and the next header below it (##) – and delete (d) the rest of the lines.
    • I hadn’t used the -I % option to xargs before, but that option let me specify where to put the filename in the sed command, and I believe it also implicitly set xargs to process one filename at a time, and maybe even to split on newlines instead of the spaces.
  • Next get rid of any lines that are markdown headers, with the grep -v \#\#.
  • Finally filter that output to only include lines where I’d actually written something after the bullet, with grep -e "- .*[a-z]"

I really enjoyed spending an hour or so looking back at these summaries of my year. Somewhat like a personal version of Spotify Wrapped. Here are some of the highlights:

QQQ Headlines

QQQ saw a wide variety of new features this year, covering the full spectrum of backend, middleware, and frontend enhancements. Some of the bigger efforts were spent on getting data in and out of the material dashboard UI in better ways, with Saved Views, Saved Reports, and Bulk Load v2.

  • MongoDB backend
  • Saved Views
  • Dashboard “Blocks”
  • Schedule Manager (including Quartz and Simple Scheduler variants), and Scheduled Jobs table
  • Saved Reports
  • Sharing (initially for Views and Reports)
  • Process Locks
  • New formal concept of System User Session
  • Connection pooling (C3PO) and read-only database connections
  • Published version of qqq-starter-app along with youtube intro video
  • “State Machine” flow for Process steps
  • Initial build of Android frontend app
  • OpenAPI definition of middleware
  • Bulk Load v2

Books

I’m such a slow reader, but I actually had more books on my list than I would have thought. There were also 2 or 3 that I started, but bailed on. The books I completed this year are:

  • Julia (a retelling of 1984)
  • The Expanse 6.5 (Strange Dogs) (short story)
  • Contact
  • Diaspora
  • The Expanse 8 (Tiamat’s Wrath)
  • A Scanner Darkly
  • Off to be the Wizard

Shows

I was most surprised by how many different TV shows I watched this year. It’s been a few years now since I started watching shows other than just Star Trek reruns while I exercise, and it is something I really enjoy doing. I guess that’s not much of a headline, that somebody likes to watch TV… but, it is still somewhat new to me, as I used to identify as someone who didn’t really watch much, and I always felt left-out of conversations that I’d hear coworkers having about shows that they were watching. Of course, a solid half of the new shows that I watched were either Star Wars or Star Trek based. But all of the old shows I’ve watched are something different.

New Seasons of Current Shows

  • For All Mankind
  • Star Wars: The Bad Batch
  • 3 Body Problem
  • Star Trek: Discovery
  • Shogun
  • Dark Matter
  • Star Wars: The Acolyte
  • The Bear
  • Star Trek: Prodigy
  • Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy
  • Shrinking
  • Silo
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks
  • Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

Watch-Throughs of Older Shows

  • Mr. Robot
  • Invasion
  • Chernobyl
  • The Wire
  • The Good Place
  • The West Wing

Movies

I only watched just more than a handful of movies in 2024 (six, whereas a handful is (obviously) five). I do prefer shows to movies, but these were all okay, I guess:

  • Tetris
  • Glass Onion
  • Oppenheimer
  • Blade Runner 2049
  • Terminator
  • Terminator 2

Personal

Finally, there’s the stuff that I file under the “Home” heading in my weekly log. I’ll omit a lot of the more personal and family-related items from this list, but there were some good accomplishments in here too, which I’m happy to share:

Technology

Around-the-house

  • Cleared washing machine drain with a drum auger
  • Fixed mom’s radio with soldier (!!)
  • Planted 2 trees in front yard
  • Bought some flowers for the front porch and pots in the back 🙂
  • Bought new Washing Machine
  • Built small wall of landscaping bricks around back yard rock bed
  • Installed water hammer arrestor on fridge ice maker
  • Planted grass in the front mostly where the old tree was. Filled in ~12 bags of dirt in the hole there too first.
  • Added White Marble rocks in the bed in front of the garage. Re-did the edgers in front, and added them up the sides too.

Health

  • Did bloodwork that was ordered about 9 months ago, revealing high cholesterol – which is bad to have – but good to know about, because now I can work on it.
  • Started morning Yoga 2-3 days per week (done in vision pro)
  • Started recording meals with FoodNoms app
  • Changed to eat salads for lunch every day
  • Switched to new dentist
  • Ordered 5 pound dumbbells. Started using them after exercise bike 4x per week. (Later moved up to 8 pounders!)
  • Got new recumbent bike, after pedal fell off old one.
  • Weight under 180 lbs for the first time since 2011 🙂
  • Went back to the doctor. Got an updated Blood test. Cholesterol went down by 10, but still 43 higher than goal, so more work to do!
  • Ending the year under 170 lbs, down a total of 60 since I started eating better after that blood test.

I suppose looking back at it all, the biggest thing was really my weight loss. I’ve had similar (though not quite as big) diet periods before, but they all felt much more forced, and more of an effort. This year, for the most part, I don’t find myself “suffering” at all to loose weight, and hopefully that means I’ve actually changed my relationship to food and eating, and it’ll be a permanent change.

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