digitalBush

I thought now would be a good time to sit down and see what I managed to accomplish from my 2008 resolutions.  I think it's important to write down your goals, reference them throughout the year, and ultimately answer to them.  Here we go.

1. Finish up my 2007 Resolution of losing 50 pounds. - FAIL! This was more successful than any other time I've made this resolution, but I fell far short of my goal of 50 pounds.  It's going to be more like 20 pounds that I lost by the time it's all said and done.  The first 9 months I stayed with this goal very well, but after my summer vacation I never got back on it completely. It looks like this one will make it on the list again this year.
2. Read more. - SUCCESS! My goal was to read 4 books this year and I did that plus some.  
3. Create another open source project. - FAIL!  I Never got the time to get any of my ideas down into a something suitable for public consumption. I'm okay that I didn't meet this goal.  I just had other things to do.
4. Get my existing jQuery plugins into better shape. - SUCCESS! All of these are now in source control and I've made updates to the Masked Input plugin that I feel are positive.  I didn't get all of the plugins where I want them, but I definately moved things forward like I had hoped.
5. Grow this blog more. - SUCCESS! I didn't post as much as I would have liked, but I still managed to get this thing moving forward.  I've posted 75 times so far in 2008 and now have 120 subscribers and 127,000 visits.

It looks like I met 3 out of 5 of my goals.  #1 is the biggie for me, and that's the one that's most disappointing to have not met. I absolutely have to get my weight under control, so this is going to be my main focus for this next year.  It wasn't a total disaster since I did end up losing weight at the end of it all.

Please take the time to reflect back on what you set out to do for 2008.  Did you do everything that you wanted?  Please comment and let me know how your year turned out.

There is now a new version of my Masked Input Plugin for jQuery.  Version 1.2.1 moves one step closer to my bigger picture for the plugin.  I had to make a few breaking changes to do so, but I feel that the end result is worth it.  This release adds a lot more polish to the 1.2 release.  Here's what we've got.

• BREAKING CHANGE: Removed deprecated $.mask.addPlaceholder method.  Use the "$.mask.definitions['']="";" syntax instead.  I said I was going to do this on the last release and now seems just as good a time as any.
• BREAKING CHANGE: Removed "allowPartial" option in favor of new mask syntax I'll describe below.  A discussion and code exchange with Michael Bray inspired this change.  I hate that it's a breaking change, but the new way makes a lot more sense.
• New mask syntax option '?'.  Anything listed after '?' within the mask is considered optional user input.  The common example for this is phone number + optional extension.  The new syntax will look like this: "(999) 999-9999? x99999"
• I got rid of the awkward input behavior where users typed over top of existing input.  The plugin acted like a word processor Insert mode.  This has always agrivated me, so now the input shifts on input and backspace/delete.
• Now calling .change() on blur if the value has changed since the plugin prevents the change event from being fired naturally.
• Pasting incomplete test no longer wipes the input.  Instead, the cursor is just placed where the input leaves off.
• Fixed backspace detection for iPhone.  Plugin is now iPhone compatible.
• Fixed pasting bug when mask starts with a literal and caret position is on the literal character.

Photo Courtesy of Brymo

I have a huge number of ideas swirling around in my head, but lately I've been struggling to find time for anything.  Work has been madness and I'm not sure why.  We're in the middle of a growth phase and it feels like I'm taking the brunt of it.  Normally we're slow Decemeber and January, but we've had no breaks, no time to take a step back and clean up some things.  It has just been go go go, forward forward forward.

Decemeber is a my time to reflect.  It's cold outside (not today though!) and everything around me is usually moving slow.  I do the same, gain a few pounds, and just look around me.  I need some time to evaluate what I'm doing, where I'm going, and figure out where I want to go.  I need down time.  I guess that's life for ya.

There is now a new version of my Masked Input Plugin for jQuery. After a long absence with this project, I finally decided to tackle some of the more requested features that have been sent to me. I also did some big reorganization to make room for some future enhancements. With all the changes, it seemed appropriate to bump this version from the 1.1 series.

• Paste support for more browsers. It should now work in IE7, Firefox 3, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
• Fixed backspace bug in Opera.  I had originally put in special handling for Opera to get past a bug that appears to be fixed in current releases.  This code is now removed.
• Calling .mask() with no arguments will now return the value of the input without the literals.
• Added option "allowPartial" that will allow partial input to remain when focus is lost.
• Exposed the hash table of the mask definitions directly to replace the $.mask.addPlaceholder() method.  The old method remains for now, but will be removed in a future relase.  You should now add custom mask definitions by "$.mask.definitions[char]=regex;"
• Code refactoring and  house cleaning.  I made things more jQuery like and removed some crufty code in the process.  The end result is better organization to build on for future enhancements.

This is cross-posted from geekintoshape.com. Since I started this weight loss goal on this blog, I'll continue to post my monthly updates through the end of the year. If you want to read more about my weight loss adventures, please head on over to Geek Into Shape.

November was a weight GAIN month for me. I stopped weighing myself sometime early in the month and stopped caring about my weight. It's amazing how fast things can go to shit. Thanksgiving hit me like a ton of bricks and I fell back into old habits. I'm back to weighing myself daily and making better decisions. Once I realized that I crossed back into the 270's, I started kicking my own ass. See the damage for yourself.

November Weight Gain

Yup, there it is, a 6 pound weight gain. My goals fromt his month are to just make better decisions and get back below 270. I've been dreading reporting this. Knowing that I'm going to have to report this to the world is plenty of motivation to not fall off the wagon completely.

Gobble Gobble, damn it.