Statusin': 2026
I can't quite remember where "statusin" ascended to its role as a made up but useful word at work. Sometime at Boeing. Maybe AvionX. What are you doing? Workin? Maybe. Statusin. Anyway.
New Year means another shot at habits—or at the very least, starting a new streak of some kind, often restarting an old streak that got broken. Like, say, writing online. Here. Today. Now. The first of the year. Check the box. The streak rarely if ever starts with good writing, just a good solid kick to knock the thing out of its rut. And then hopefully it starts up or rolls itself downhill or whatever it takes. If nothing else, 1 January 2027 will arrive eventually and we'll give it another shot.
Where are we in January 2026? Where are we going? (The royal we. I'm going to die on this rock before figuring myself out, don't wait for me to solve your problems, too.) Statusin.
Almost inadvertently I've got an eight day running streak going—now nine, bumping it up one today. I don't care so much about running every day. A good deal of training or maintaining or whatever is knowing when not to run. Push it some days and you get stronger; push it the wrong way and the machine breaks. I'm at roughly 30 km per week now and I'd like to bump that up to 50 km. No races in mind, but keeping the machine in tune just in case a race does come to mind.
Other physical things? I'm in the gym three times or so a week. Maintain that. Planks after waking up. Maintain that. OK.
Learning? Whatever needs to be done at work. Looks like software testing, then system testing, then whatever is next, maybe breaking out some old IVHM (integrated vehicle health management... don't worry about it, it's as exciting as it sounds) references and oiling those old skills as well. Just in case. For whatever reason in the past, I'd act at the beginning of the year like I was going to add some other learning topic for home. Never panned out. A few weeks of extra effort on that topic siphoned off of something else, then abandoned.
Speaking Chinese? Miserably hard. Still grinding. I've got a 198 day (now 199 day) Duolingo streak going. Duolingo has the intellectual nutrition benefits of eating candy as a diet, but consistency is useful. I don't think much of Duolingo as a sole source of language learning, but it has it's place. I think the trick will be finding something more rigorous to pair with it.
Ye olde newsletter? OK, sure. I've been avoiding it. I drafted some but I don't think I sent one out in 2025. Audience of one, I guess. Once a week is unlikely. Maybe call it every other week. Resolution resurrection.
Other projects? Chinese Word of the Day is still out there, and I've been putting together a Python app to run it. It doesn't need an app. It's just me looking up words and don't know and copypasting them to, say, universeodon.com/@zhwotd. But it has been a useful way to learn how to do things with Python or databases or whatever.
That's enough for now. There are some other things rolling occasionally—cooking, thinning out things that are forever stuck in the house in storage (especially extra Cedar Creek Trail Books stock that will never sell, or sell for much), filing piles of digital photos, building things around the house, etc., but it's hard to think of them as discrete goals in need of resolution. They're things that need to get done (have to eat) or things that I will one day to resolve to make a resolution about (so many digital photos, incomprehensible amounts). We'll deal with it in the future, if we make it there.
Off we go.