I thought I would write a list of the things that I think about doing sometimes, so you can all see what a fascinating, action-packed type of guy I would be. If I could be bothered.

• Be more hardcore about my kung fu. There’s this great little line in the book Snow Crash about how every guy under the age of 25 thinks he could still go and spend 10 years in a Shaolin Temple and become a ninja master (or something like that). I still have dreams like that, though slightly more modest. The practical side is doing 2-4 hours of training a day and actually making some progress.
• Learn Django and build a research web site. I’ve actually done a bit of this. Though I’ve been doing bits of it for about a year now and there’s nothing to see so I wouldn’t hold your breath. The plan sometimes includes getting a lot more familiar with presentation side web programming like CSS and AJAX.
• Get super fit. I could go to the gym a lot now that it’s part of my student fees. In fact I do attend some of the “free” fitness classes, but if I went every day for a year then  imagine how fit I would be. And I could start a crossfit training program, or I could start practicing parkour (though maybe when there isn’t snow on the ground).
• Learn french. I’ve started to learn french a number of times. Most recently, I completed a number of classes at the Alliance Francais in Sydney just before Callum was born. I’m told Busuu is good, but of course learning anything requires time.
• Learn a musical instrument. I have a cheap plastic recorder and we’re about to inherit a piano. We’ll see how I go with taking time to practice.
• Complete a PhD with impact. In these early days, I have hope for both real-world and academic impact. (As a side note, I find it amusing that “real-world” is actually the accepted and understood term for the opposite of academic.)
• Lots of other things that are fleeting ideas. Maybe I’ll make more of an effort to document them now that I’ve thought about this a little more explicitly now.

A typical problem that I find is that I come up with an OK idea that is manageable, but then, instead of just going ahead with it, I think too much and start adding to it. The plan quickly becomes this monstrous thing that’s completely impossible and gets cancelled because it’s too much. For example, a plan to practice kung fu forms every second morning turns into a glorious plan to work out every part of my body for 3 hours every day.

The tone of this post is a little depressing. Let me tell you though that I usually hold high hopes of at least partial success in all of these things.

Ironically, I actually started writing this post about six months ago. I do feel a little better that I came back to it and finished it eventually.

Anyway, one effect of being here is that the physical exercise I was used to getting - minimal, irregular and infrequent as it was - is no longer happening. Apparently those 3-4 bike rides to work, 1 hour of kung fu, and 1 hour of stretching and conditioning each week was enough to keep my body feeling like it was still useful. Since I’ve been here and not doing anything at all, I’ve started to feel a bit restless.

So I’ve started doing some exercise. I’m not generally very good at self-disciplined exercise programs. The productivity experts like Leo at Zen Habits, recommend some helpful steps to start:

1. Tell some people about it to set up social pressure to keep going,
2. Set goals so you know where you’re going,
3. Measure progress so you can see how you’re going.

Those are the ones I remember anyway. Step 1 is why I’m writing this post. For step 2, I decided to do the One Hundred Pushups program, for no other reason than I came across it at the right time. Conveniently for step 3, there’s a pushup logger on the web already. You can see my progress. I’m just doing standard pushups - maybe if I make it through the program I might repeat it, using a different kind of pushup.

I also do a little run, using healless or natural running (that’s a commercial shoe page but seems to have the clearest description). Most of the web pages about natural running seem to be also about barefoot running. Maybe I’ll think about that later. It was also recommended to me in the one Parkour class that I went to. All I have to report about the running is that I’m slow and unfit and my calves are in agony while I run, when I walk up hills, when I use the stairs, and most of the rest of the time. I’ll implement steps 2 and 3 for the running once I work out how to measure the distance.

There are three reasons why I decided to do this. The first is that (I think) it was reducing the chances of me feeling inclined to write an actual blog post. Why write on the blog when it already has all my tweets? We’ll see if that’s actually the case and I end up writing more now.

The second reason is a vague feeling that these twitter update posts were creating so much noise as to drown out the “real” posts. I may have a slightly inflated view of the importance of my blog posts.

The third and final reason is that twitter statuses and blog posts seem like very different communication media. It would be interesting to find out how people cross-post between blog, twitter, social media, etc. and why they do it. Anyone interested in doing a study with me? I’m thinking an online questionnaire with a few followup interviews.

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