Some ideas for 2021, books to read or to get, stuff to plant, exercise to do

Here are just some ideas of what I would like to do in 2021, these are all non professional goals if you will

Run 800 miles

I ran 800.3 miles last year, this should be easily doable, it's about 4 miles 4 times a week

Read 50 books

Last year I read 60 books.. I assume at some point, I will be back in the office two times a day or so, this will maybe bump it down to 50 books from 60 books

Books in the queue

These are  books I or my kids already own, some of these I have gifted to them this Christmas season (Masters of Doom, 1984, Brave New World, Infinite Jest, Pirate Latitudes)

I have not read any of these except for 1984 and Brave New World, I will re-read those, it's been 20 years or more since I last read those

Here is a picture of some of these books.....

Here is the full list, the titles link to Amazon so you can read the reviews there

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
• Endymion by Dan Simmons
• Philip and Alexander Kings and Conquerors by Adrian Goldsworthy
• The Prince by Macchiavelli  
• The Dutch Overseas Empire by Pieter C. Emmer, Jos J.L. Gommans
• 1776: The riveting story of George Washington by David McCullough
• The Great Bridge by David McCullough
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis
• The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton  
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 
• The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War Paperback by Michael Shaara 
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
• How Computers Really Work A Hands-On Guide to the Inner Workings of the Machine by Matthew Justice
• Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year by Michaelangelo Matos
• Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula by Bram Stoker , Valdimar Ásmundsson, et al
• Black Box Thinking The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed
• Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go by David Weintraub
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
• Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton 
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• 100 Things Millionaires Do Little Lessons in Creating Wealth by Nigel Cumberland
• Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
• Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination by Amy Tan
• Gerald's Game by Stephen King
• If It Bleeds by Stephen King
• The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King
• The Dead Zone by Stephen King
• The Running Man by Stephen King
• Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner  
• SQL Server 2019 Revealed Including Big Data Clusters and Machine Learning by Bob Ward
• The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick

18,300 pushups

Do about 100 pushups every other day.. this adds up to about 18,300 pushups for the whole year

10,000 in dividends

Last year I received 9551 in dividends, since companies increase the dividend payout usually every 4 quarters and since I reinvest them, I should be easily able to get 10K

300 Hours of Pluralsight watching

I plan to watch about 6 hours a week of Pluralsight content. About 1 hour at lunch time and then 1 hour over the weekend

Get 10 of these book in 2021

Get at least  10 9 books of the "wish list" below

I have heard about these from friends or family. I also might have heard about these books from the various podcasts I listen to

• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz by Eric Larson
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• 1/1 The Prince by Macchiavelli  
• The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart
• Hero with a 1000 faces by Joseph Campbell
• The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield
• Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
• Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami
• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Innocent Anthropologist : Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley
• Shogun: The Epic Novel of Japan by James Clavell
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
• The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by John Toland
• Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy 
• The End of October: A Novel by Lawrence Wright
• Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
• Azure SQL Revealed: A Guide to the Cloud for SQL Server Professionals by Bob Ward

Plant all these peppers

We got the following seeds in December

The 3 packs on the left side are the Carolina Reaper, Trinidad Scorpion and Apocalypse Scorpion. These are some of the hottest peppers.... these things just look menacing, you can see they look spicy

Last year we planted 31 plants, you can those in the 2020 in Numbers... post

I am excited about the chocolate habaneros, those look pretty cool

Progress so far

Activity	Count	%
Pushups	370	2.02%
Run	22.17	2.77%
Pluralsight Hours Watched	2.13	0.711%
Books Read	1	2%
Dividends	$63.89	0.6389%

Done

Book Finished

Date    Title

-----    -------------------------------------------------------

Jan 3    St Petersburg

Pluralsight Course Finished

Date    Title

-----    -------------------------------------------------------

Jan 6    Optimizing Query Performance with Columnstore Indexes

2020 in Numbers...

I am glad 2020 ended and hopefully 2021 will be much better.  A couple of items on my list for this year got either postponed or will never happen.  I planned to go to the PASS Summit in Texas in 2020, that obviously didn't happen and it looks like it won't happen in the future either. PASS is no more :-(

Here are some numbers for 2020 that I put together looking at some sheets and journals

123,116
Calories burned running. I ran a little over 800 miles this year and burned what seems like a lot of calories. But since we are all home, the wife and kids did a lot of baking, this evened out the calories :-)

13,930
Pushups.  I try to do 100 pushups every 2 or 3 days, this is the total for the year

9,551 
Dividends. This is the total amount of dividends I received this year. All of these have been reinvested. Until I retire, I am doing a reinvestment into the same security

800.3
Miles run. My goal was 800 and I stuck to it... It's nothing major, about 4 miles 4 times a week

300

Days since I was last in the office

I told my wife when the office is open again, you won't see me for a month :-)

60
The number of books I read

Since there is no commute, I had some more time to read this year, I read about 5 books per month

Some of the book I read

Will have my 5 favorite books after the numbers list

40

Longest bike ride. 

Did this bike ride with my oldest son. We left around 6:40 AM because it went up to 95 degrees that day. I Also managed to get a flat tire 30 miles in :-(

After we came home we just sat on the couch for the rest of the day

31 

Number of pepper plants planted

We planted 31 spicy pepper plants. We picked a lot of the peppers, gave away a bunch, made pepper flakes etc etc

Here are some pics

The first one is the ghost pepper

11

Seasons of shows I watched and finished with my wife

Narcos Mexico II

Mr Robot I

Mr Robot II

Mr Robot III

Mr Robot IV

The Crown I

Succession I

Succession II

Succession III

Ozark III

Curb Your Enthusiasm X

0

Number of tables I dropped on the production database server

Best item purchased

Since I am working from home constantly, I decided to invest in a universal docking station. We got new laptops from work, they only come with 2 USB ports, and of course these are right next to the HDMI port. Using this USB docking station makes live so much easier

The one I picked is the Hiearcool USB C Hub,USB-C Laptop Docking Station,11 in 1 Triple Display Type C Adapter Compatiable for MacBook and Windows(2HDMI VGA PD3.0 SD TF Card Reader Gigabit Ethernet 4USB Ports)

And here is what it looks like, I included a mouse for scale (sorry didn't have a banana)

As you can see it comes with a nice pouch, it's really small and fits easily in your bag.

Best 5 books

Here are my favorite 5 books I read last year, I did not include books I re-read like The Stand and Fellowship of the ring

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg 

This is even more relevant now after the SolarWind hack

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow 

I admit I did not know much about Hamilton, this was recommended by my brother in law. This is a fantastic book about a man who was part of the beginnings of the US

The Terror by Dan Simmons

I watched the show 2 years ago on AMC, the show is really good... but the book is even better

Permutation City by Greg Egan

Will this be us in 100 years?

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles Mann

There are two ways to go about things... either conserve.. or use technology to fix things.....

That's it for 2020......  I will be back in a couple of days to show my list of things for 2021....

Have a good 2021