101 in 1001 for my 1000th post

So, for my 1000^th blog posting I wanted to do something special. And I decided that the something special would be a “101 things to do in 1001 days” list.  The first time I saw one of these was on Dave’s blog and I may or may not have soon after written a parody version called “102 things to do in 1,000,001 days” on a satire blog that may or may not have been removed from the Internet for possible libel issues. Anyway.

The idea behind this list is to come up with 101 things you want to do – things you’ve always meant to do but haven’t gotten around to,  things you want to challenge yourself to accomplish and, let’s be honest, a few things that sound good but you are pretty sure you’ll do so that you can gain the satisfaction of checking at least a few things off your list.  As well, it’s important that the goals are clearly defined/measurable (or, as we say in the Research Methods world – you need an “operational definition” of each) so that you know whether or not you’ve done it.  Props for this idea go to triplux, who appears to be the creator of this idea (or, at least, is the first Google hit for “101 in 1001”).

So, after much thinking and pondering and reflecting and considering and deliberating and contemplating and ruminating and reading the thesaurus, I have come up with the following 101 items that I intend to do in the next 1001 days:

1. go to New York City
2. leave the continent
3. live above ground
4. run another half marathon¹
5. run the full marathon in Sacramento (i.e., the net downhill one!)
6. assemble my last 7 years worth of photos into scrapbooks²
7. give something a cool name (i.e., not just adding the letter “y” to the end of what the thing is a la “froggy” or “puppy”)
8. get my blog onto WordPress.org
9. participate in a political campaign
10. attend Women’s Campaign School
11. conduct some kind of  education research project
12. conduct another systematic review for the Cochrane Collaoration
13. publish a paper in a scholarly journal on the training program that I run
14. write something creative (e.g., a story, a script or a poem)
15. change a life
16. write a book
17. teach a course at a college
18. ski at Whistler ³
19. ski at Big White
20. ski on Grouse Mountain
21. learn to snowboard (or at least try it)
22. go surfing & actually stay up on the board
23. skate at GM Place
24. coach a hockey team
25. hike Black Task
26. hike the West Coast Trail
27. write a computer program
28. start a business
29. learn French (at least a little bit. Like more than just what’s on the cereal box)
30. write a blog entry entitled Word to Your Moms, I Came to Drop Bombs⁴
31. read something by Salman Rushdie⁵
32. visit Macchu Picchu⁶
33. for one week, go to bed at 9 and read non-work related books⁷
34. read The Last Spike by Pierre Berton⁸
35. take pole dancing lessons. Like, a whole set of them, not just the intro class.
36. beat my current record of 10 points in a hockey season (which I achieved on the Blazing Blades team in both the Winter 2007/08 and the Spring 2008 seasons)
37. teach the same course at UBC twice⁹
38. participate in the “365 Day Challenge”. This involves taking a self-portrait every day for 365 days and posting it to the 365 Day Flickr group.
39. make a list of 100 things that make me happy
40. buy a Smart Car
41. buy an iPhone
42. skate on the Rideau Canal
43. take Tod to a Vancouver Canucks game [Accomplished: 13 January 2009, Canucks vs. NJ Devils. Next time I should try to take him to a game when the Canucks win!]
44. take Tod to a Vancouver Giants game
45. go to a BC Lions game
46. go to a Vancouver Canadians game
47. see a Vancouver White Caps game
48. start composting
49. keep a plant alive for a whole month
50. write in my journal every day for a month
51. go kayaking
52. camp at Joffre Lake
53. visit Galiano Island
54. visit Salt Spring Island
55. visit Bowen Island
56. save $500 in coins¹⁰
57. deposit that $500 worth of coins into my 40th birthday savings account
58. write 10 friends real letters, on paper, with a pen and snail mail them
59. follow Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating every day for 1 month¹¹
60. go to a Bikram yoga class
61. go to a spa for a facial
62. visit 5 new American states¹²
63. visit Newfoundland
64. visit Nova Scotia
65. visit New Brunswick
66. visit the Yukon
67. visit Nunavit
68. do a 24 hr blogathon
69. do 15 minutes of yoga every morning for a month
70. sort through my many boxes of papers (most of which contain papers from my thesis), recycling the papers I don’t need and filing the ones I do need
71. find out my credit rating
72. determine my net worth
73. buy a bike
74. bike to work every day for two months
75. record a cooking show (at least 5 episodes)
76. publish said cooking show online
77. participate in five research projects (as a subject/participant, not as a researcher)
78. sell counter top dishwasher on Craig’s List¹³
79. see at least one Bard on the Beach performance¹⁴
80. put up a Christmas tree and decorate it with chili peppers¹⁵
81. live blog something
82. go to bed every night for a week with all the dishes cleaned
83. achieve inbox zero and maintain for one full week (where “maintain” = by the time I go to bed each night)
84. up my blog readership to an average of 200 readers a day¹⁶
85. break my current record of 460 blog views in a day¹⁷
86. write a blog posting about the Car Co-op¹⁸
87. go sky diving
88. resurrect my teaching blog
89. see the Dresdan Dolls in concert
90. see Groove Coverage in concert
91. see a show at Richard’s on Richards before it closes down
    
92. devise some sort of proper back up system for my computer files
93. get my ring from my great Auntie Bernice re-sized to actually fit my finger
94. buy a pair of brown dress pants¹⁹
95. bake at least one thing per month for 12 months in a row, without baking the same thing two months in a row²⁰
96. go zip cording
97. make homemade vegetarian marshmallows
98. go on a polar bear swim
99. recycle my old Sony Vaio desktop and my old Palm Pilot that are now just taking up space in my apartment!
100. scan all the photos from my pre-digital camera days
101. publish a blog posting for each of the next 1001 days!

So, there you have it.  I expect I’ll be posting updates when I get stuff on the list accomplished and possibly some excuses about my abject failures.

End Date: Monday, October 10, 2011 (thank you dateandtime.com!)

Footnotes

¹Ya, this one is totally cheating, since I’m already training for another half. But it’s hard to think of 101 things!

²Um, ya.  I have seven years worth of photos in boxes, waiting for scrapbooking.

³Can you believe that, having lived in Vancouver for more than eight years, I’ve not yet skied Whistler?

⁴This one is stolen from an homage to Dave’s 101 things in 1001 days list. He didn’t actually manage to do it, but I think I can. I think I can.

⁵Also stolen from Dave’s list. I’ve been wanting to read something by Rushdie, so here’s an extra push

⁶This is the last one I’m stealing from Dave’s list. Promise.  Also, Dan said I should go there.

⁷Stolen from Triplux.

⁸Which Sarah’s been telling me to read since forever. And which she just gave me for Christmas, so if I fail to accomplish this one, well, that would just be sad.

⁹I always seem to get a course for one term only.  I taught Nutritional Assessment last year as a sessional, but the department hired a new prof and he chose that as one of his courses to teach, so I don’t get to teach it this year. And then, this past term I taught another course as a sessional because the usual sessional needed a break from it for one term only, so I probably won’t get to teach it next year. Now I want some consistency!

¹⁰Just because it would be difficult.

¹¹i.e., meet the recommended number of servings for each food group every day and consume no more than one unhealthy “other” food per week.

¹²i.e., ones that I haven’t been to before. Or ones where I’ve only been to their airport/airport hotel (I’m looking at you Texas, Oregon and Arizona), if I actually go to somewhere other than the airport/airport hotel.

¹³since it doesn’t fit in my kitchen. =(

¹⁴I can’t believe I’ve lived in Vancouver for 8+ years and not once have I been to see Bard on the Beach. I like Shakespeare (I even have a minor in Drama that included a whole course in “Acting Shakespeare”). And I like beaches!

¹⁵Inspired by the tree at the Mexican resort I stayed at this Christmas.

¹⁶My 2008 average was 93 readers per day.

¹⁷Which occurred on Friday, September 26, 2008 as a direct result of my list of the hottest players in the NHL

¹⁸Which I have partly written and can’t seem to get around to finishing.

¹⁹I’ve been trying to find a good pair of brown dress pants since forever! Hopefully I’ll find them in the next 1001 days.

²⁰Because I really enjoy baking and I never seem to do it anymore.

Contest Entry: CanadaHelps Gift Card Giveaway

Miss604 is having her last contest of 2008 and this blog posting is my entry.  Supporting Canada Helps, a site that facilitates online charitable donations, the prize for this contest is one of two $25 e-gift cards that can be donated to the charity of your choice.  The contest requires that you write a blog posting about a charity that is close to your heart.  This is surprisingly difficult, as there are so many good charities out there.  But I’ve decided that the charity I would donate my $25 e-gift card to, should I win the contest, is the Pivot Legal Society.

Pivot Legal Society is a non-profit legal advocacy organization located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins.

We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such as opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law. (From the Pivot website)

Pivot has been/is involved in a number of important issues, including addictions (including supporting the supervised injection site in Vancouver), homelessness, child welfare, policing, and sex workers rights.  I’ve had the opporutnity to meet with some amazing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (and I have a number of inspiring colleagues who have done a great deal of work in the DTES) and I know that Pivot is doing really important work.

The Smoking Gun’s Top Ten List of Mugshots for 2008.

Now that Christmas is officially over, it’s time for all the various news channels and websites to start releasing their “best of 2008” lists.  Beth’s still enjoying a couple more days in the Mexican sun, but she thought you might like this:

The Smoking Gun’s Top Ten List of Mugshots for 2008.

Some of my favourite tweets

Over on Dave’s blog, he put up a screenshot of some of his favourite Tweets.  Always one to steal Dave’s ideas recognize a good thing, I’m stealing Dave’s idea going to show you some of my favourite tweets:

Gender Analyzer FAIL

Apparently, I write like a man:

Dave brought this to my attention yesterday.  He thinks that it’s all the “bawdy talk going on” that makes GenderAnalyzer think I’m a dude. I think may have to do with all the talk about hockey.  Although I’m not sure how to reconcile all the talk about the hotness of male hockey players.  Perhaps they think it’s written by a gay man?

Before I got around to actually posting this, I noticed that Gillian had just posted her discovery that she also writes like a man!  I tried a few others, and have to say that this site isn’t very good at predicting the gender of the writer.  It correctly figured out that both Dave and Darren are boys, but it thinks that Tod writes like a girl.  But my favourite one was that GenderAnalyzer thinks that Miss604 is written by a man.  I guess the *Miss* in Miss604 wasn’t a tip off.

All math should be taught via foodstuffs

Not sure how to cite this one. It came from here.  Props to my friend Dan for posting this in Facebook.

Non-inclusive language makes me angry

I was doing a little light reading about Bill C-51, “An Act respecting foods, therapeutic products and cosmetic” and noticed this in the FAQ from the Government of Canada’s “Healthy Canadians” website:

Mothers?  Really?  You couldn’t go with something more inclusive like “parents”?  Fathers raise kids too, you know, and sometimes, they give them vitamin C.

Also, DIN stands for “drug identification number“, so “DIN numbers” is redundant.

I can has votes?

I’ve been trying for a while to think of a good caption for a lolcat. I finally came up with one that really amuses me:

For the uninitiated, lolcats are pictures of cats with captions in a form of broken English, called lolspeak. These pics are created by whoever is hit with the desire to create a lolcat and posted to the icanhascheezburger website. Interestingly, a number of story lines have sprung up around lolcats, including their deity, Ceiling Cat, and their devil, Basement Cat.  If a lolcat gets enough votes, it goes up on the main page of the site.

You should *totally* go and vote for my lolcat!

She’s A Member

Congratulations to my friend Kristina who was recently accepted to the prestigious Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™.  The club is “for scientists who have, or believe they have, luxuriant flowing hair.”  I think we can all agree that Kristina’s hair is both luxuriant and flowing.  And she’s a pretty damn good scientist to boot!

I’m sure everyone remembers where they were on that fateful day in July 2007 when me and my luxuriant locks were accepted to the LFHCfS™.  I’m honoured that I have now led the way for another luxuriantly haired colleague into this venerable organization.

Who You Gonna Call?

Browsing through Craig’s List, I saw this ad:

Thought I’d share in case anyone is looking for a job, and has mad ghostbusting skillz.

You’re welcome.

Geek Cred

Cred in the tubes of the Internets, if you will.

I was featured today as a Geek Girl Blogger on Spyjournal:

I love the smell of bac’n in the morning

I wonder if this would work with soy bac’n?

No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you’re Jewish.

Check it out here.

Props to Jeff for bringing this fantastic innovation to my attention.

Buh bye, sweet Scrabulous

As you know, I heart Scrabulous.  So you can imagine my reaction when I saw this Tweet from J.K. Parker this morning:

Sad that Scrabulous is gone from Facebook! 😦

Tanya sent me a link to this article on the Wired website:

The creators of a Scrabble knockoff responsible for countless hours at the online hangout Facebook suspended their word game Tuesday after being hit with a lawsuit, disappointing fans who logged on expecting to make their next moves.

And clareondrey sent me a link to this petition: Hasbro: Don’t Hate, Cooperate!

THE PITCH
Yes, copyright laws exist for a reason.
No, we are not anarchists.
BUT
Can’t Hasbro work together with the creators of the Scrabulous application?
Pluses: We keep our Scrabulous; Hasbro retains its rights; everybody stays happy!
Minuses: None!
Many of us have learned the joys of Scrabble from this online application. Some people have enhanced their previous love for the game. Reward the Scrabulous makers for this accomplishment – and take over from there!

Oh Scrabulous, remember the good times we had?  How I will miss you.

Seat Guru – Infant Not Included

While waiting for *4 hours*¹ for my flight home from SFO yesterday, during which I was (a) Twittering with another BlogHer attendee who was also stuck at SFO, (b) talking on Skype, and (c) being looked at like I was crazy because I was talking loudly to my computer, I was also checking out whether I would have a good seat on the plane, should I ever actually get on the plane, using Seat Guru. Seat Guru provides you with all kinds of useful tidbits about your particular seat on any given plane, including:

Detailed seat map graphics.

In-depth seat specific comments denoting seats with limited recline, reduced legroom, mis-aligned windows.

Color-coding to help identify superior and substandard seats.

In-seat power port locations.

Galley, lavatory, Exit Row and closet locations.

The Guru informed me that my seat was neither particular good, nor particularly bad, that I would have a personal TV screen and an in-seat power port. However, I have to say that there was some false advertising with respect to the in-flight amenities:

My seat did not, in fact, come with an infant.

¹It was delayed 2 hrs^a, but I was already there well in advance of my flight, because you never know how long it will take to get through security.
^aFirst it was delayed due to weather, then it was further delayed because the “front flap” on the plane “wasn’t working.”

I now forgive Stephen Colbert for what he did to the Hockey Night in Canada theme song.  Because this video was made as part of his “Project Make McCain Exciting“: