It’s the new year, and that means it is time for my traditional start of year tasks. Some of the you should consider doing as well…
- The Ritual of the Folders. One habit I picked up from my accountant parents was keeping a paid bills file. I keep one for the current year, and have folders for prior years. So, this morning I made sure all the bills were filed, and then made the 2010 folder set. I then transferred all the 2010 paid bills to the 2010 folders, leaving the current folders for 2011.
- The Ritual of the Annual Report. One thing I do every new years, and you should too, is get one of my free annual credit reports at annualcreditreport.com. You get one a year from each of the agencies, and I recommending requesting one every four months from a different agency. But you should check your credit at least once a year.
- The Ritual of the Backup. Based on my recent survey, a lot of you simply trust that your system will never crash or you’ll mistakenly delete something. That’s mistaken trust. Everyone should be doing regular backups, but lacking that, doing them at milestones is better than nothing. So pick your favorite backup program and do a full backup on January 1 and July 1. I did it for most of our systems earlier in the week; all that is pending is my wife’s notebook (trying to decide on the right backup software for a netbook running XP) and my daughter’s laptop (I’m waiting for her to finish moving the data to her system so her recovery backup will be complete).
Looking back on 2010, there were some highs and lows. I think the low point of the year was the death of ixixlix, our dear, dear friend. If you are wondering why I didn’t do New Year’s Eve gaming, it just didn’t seem the same this year without her. The high point was the focus on health: both my wife and I have been working on losing weight, and both have lost a significant amount over the year. I hope this continues in 2011.
I wish all the folks reading my journal, either on LJ or Facebook, the happiest of years. You can look forward to more theatre reviews and more news chum, and hopefully you’ll make the resolution to comment more. As a reminder to those on Facebook: You can use your Facebook ID to log into Livejournal and comment. So far, only one of my friends on Facebook has done it. So come on over and comment on LJ. We don’t bite (plus you may discover LJ is quite a good place if you like long form writing).
