ChrisMerriman.com

Why publish a to do list on my blog? Because it will hopefully kick me into action and cause me to actually accomplish some of these!

Get ruthless and actually get around to selling off any domains I own that a) I haven’t added new content to in a while and b) Haven’t generated any serious income in the last 12 months. I have already put a few up for sale over at sedo.com , but no interest has been shown yet, so I either need to consider dropping my prices, or looking at other markets.

Find a reasonably priced office chair. Our original one broke a few years back when a couple of ladies decided to try and share it. It leant back, but that part of the mechanism snapped, and so is tilted towards the ceiling permanently. Rather than throw it away, I have a very comfortable chair to smoke on, when sat on the balcony! We need to find a furniture shop in Astana that sells comfortable chairs (tilting isn’t a deal breaker, but definitely would like a swivel one), in a material that won’t instantly shred with a cat sat on it, nor stain the moment Tim or Anna spill something on it. Oh, and obviously somewhere that sells a chair like that without it costing three months wages!

Sorting out USB issues on this PC – something is preventing devices plugged into my USB3 card from properly waking up after the PC is put into hibernation mode. This will either be a breeze to fix, or a real pain. I’ve done the obvious in terms of checking for driver updates, fiddling with the USB selective suspend setting, altering whether each USB device was allowed to be put to sleep and/or used as a trigger to wake up etc.

Once the hibernation issue is fixed, check if our UPS will correctly hibernate the PC when power is lost. I originally tried to save some resources by not installing the software that the UPS company provided, instead using Microsoft’s system, normally used for laptop running on battery power. Unfortunately it didn’t quite read the battery levels correctly, so I had to relent in the end.

BACKUP!!! I think we have about eight or nine months of photos that aren’t yet backed up on to disc. Moving swiftly on…

Edit and upload some of the car video recorder clips I’ve taken in the last few months. Mainly to just give people a general idea of the driving style over here, but I’m pretty certain I caught a few WTF moments along the way. This will unfortunately mean delving back in MOV editing, as the first and current cameras we tried use this format for some reason.

Anna and Tim’s photos – I have once more fallen woefully behind on publishing anything other than snapshots from my phone’s camera. Sorry, I will one day get close to real time publishing, I’m sure.

Check whether our current GPS device has the correct hardware to display video sources, or if it was disabled by the manufacturer. If it does work, source a good (enough) non-obtrusive camera and wire it up, for that rare occasion in Astana when parking doesn’t involve going local, and just stopping wherever you like, at whatever angle/distance to the kerb!

Start writing up more restaurant and bar reviews. I realise that there are quite a few new ex-pats in this city, and that some only ever frequent one or two venues. I’m hoping to get back to my old habits and write up/record on my phone observations.

I’m sure there are a lot more, but that will do for now. Hopefully I can come back in a month or two and cross some of these off the list!