I thought I would just round off the year’s blogging personally, rather than just with the machine generated summary in the previous post which is very interesting, maybe more so for me than for the readers, just to give you all my warmest wishes for 2013 and to hope that I may continue to be part of what you look at online in the coming year. Your ratings and comments and hits, both here and on Quoracy.com blog and also on the YouTube channel, on Linked-In and Facebook and several other places are all very highly appreciated and at times of crisis I do derive a certain strength from knowing that I’ve still got my readers, at least I got my friends:
In the deliciously ironic video to this interesting recent hit, the girl’s friend is a robot, but in my case behind the robot face of the internet and it’s various interfaces are real people who have been willing to share a bit in my life by watching the videos, listening to the voice droning on, reading the posts and the comments. That means a lot to me, and some of you I’ve got to know as well as people I’ve spent time with in the same room, or better.
I didn’t manage to do as much as I wanted to in 2012, partly because I always set my plans too high anyway, but also because I had a bad round of pneumonia in the summer which wiped out July and August.
Just to show that, here are the results of the pedometer I have been using since May 2011:
First the 2011 graph, and below it the 2012 one, giving 20 months in total:
This shows pretty clearly what an effect this pneumonia had on my ability to do anything. Not only physically, but also mentally I was on a very low ebb. After this, however, I felt much better and weighed less and was able to break walking records of mine in October. November and then December started to become lower only because of the outside temperature.
On the mental plane I didn’t get enough done also because work has been very busy. The projects of writing a goldlist book, a course book for the Huliganov video Russian course and with that more lessons on video too have all been placed on the back burner as my work in three countries, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, has needed to take more and more of what a less dedicated fellow might consider his leisure time, but I will say at least that the work is interesting.
I think that it really means that these other projects aren’t cancelled just pushed back until the time comes when I can do them. Doing face-to-camera video isn’t easy because my kids are these days too big and too rowdy. As regular viewers will know two of my children are autistic and my wife has multiple sclerosis, and all of this puts a growing strain on the nerves, on time and on finances. Given the recession, which in this particular dip is affecting Poland more than before, earnings are under pressure but the disorders of my family cost more and more money. In order to make sure they don’t have to go without therapies they need during this squeeze, I finally made up my mind to take the advice and urgings of friends and break my pride and finally accept donations for the purpose of my family’s needs and in order to do this I set up a sub-account on Fundusz Avalon, which will enable Elena, Tatiana and George respectively to benefit from the 1% tax redirection scheme we have in Poland.
If anyone is a Polish taxpayer and doesn’t already have a favorite charity to give to, and if you feel that you have received something from any of my online work and would like to give something to my family without it costing you one single extra penny, please let me know before you finalise your 2012 tax return for Poland and I’ll explain how it works and how you could help us. For people in other countries of the EU donations given to these three funds should in most cases also be tax-deductible, but it would involve you in making some form of cash donation and my first aim is to ask for help to those who are paying tax in Poland, because it will cost these friends no cash at all to help us. There’ll be more details of this coming up in the near future.
As far as plans for 2013 go, I have now bought a membership to a gym club and will be going 2-3 times a week for a work-out. The aim here is to keep going as long as possible and to at least double the strength I have at this point at the end of the year. When I have doubled the weight I can do 3 sets and 18 reps on from what that weight is now for each of the machines I am using, then I will have another examination to see what my fat% is, metabolic age, etc etc.
I also intend to remain on a diet, and to be closer to the Montignac diet. I bought a few books about it and they are waiting for me in the UK, where I hope to be going at the end of January. I take metformin for my metabolic syndrome and also two blood pressure medications, which I’ve been on for most of the second half year.
I intend to keep using pedometers – the one which uploads and gives the above graphs is on its last legs and I have a new Omicron one, but unfortunately that one doesn’t upload and make pretty graphs, so I will have to note the results myself on paper, do the graphs myself and scan them or make them in Excel. Silvaconnect gave a notice somewhere that they were discontinuing the website that gives the above, which would be sad, but if they do I will work around it. As it is they have not got for sale the ex-connect model that connects to a computer. What a pity. The aim anyway is to do 6km per day over the course of the year. You’ll see from the above that I only managed this in October of last year. But I will be including the fat-burning on the treadmill at the gym – I will have the pedometers on for that. Right now I am wearing both to make sure that by and large they do corroborate each other and I can go on with the Omicron alone if need be in confidence.
I weigh in at 128.8 kgs at the close of the year, about the same as I was at the start of it, although during the year I got up to about 133 kgs and down to about 118 kgs during the bout of pneumonia.
I also have a bicycle which I plan to use more in 2013 once Spring is here. I used it a bit last Spring but got out of the habit while laid up with pneumonia.
I have been doing some Japanese, Chinese, Czech, Thai and Romanian this year. I didn’t take the JLPT 4 exam but plan to take it next December which will mean more intensive learning of Japanese in 2013 – intending to use several materials all of which have their individual goldlists and also http://www.readthekanji.com, a fine resource. I will probably allow the Mandarin to rest for 2013 and return to it only when I know Japanese Kanjies much better, but I will be doing more Czech – hopefully getting closer to the end of that project which has already been going for over three years and is about 2/3 of the way through. I will be attempting to decipher the Thai writing scheme and getting a vocabulary of about a thousand words of Thai and maybe the same in Indonesian. I am refreshing and advancing two old goldlists from the 1990s because of scheduled travel in 2013, namely Romanian (where I am going for a few days in January) and after I do that one, then Danish (Copenhagen is scheduled for June). Other travel I have in mind is to the places I usually go anyway, namely UK and the three countries I’m responsible for, namely Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, plus a short visit to Amsterdam. I hope also, although this is far from definite, to get into the former Yugoslav countries. We will see in the end how all of those plans pan out.
I’m also intending to read some nice history books and some more literature in the original languages in 2013.
So what can subscribers to Huliganov.TV expect in 2013? Well, in addition to articles on languages many of which will have arisen out of answers to readers’ questions, there will be new ones with polls and images as well as rich images for the header. Now I have purged the images that are changed in the headers and all the images you’ll see up there, a growing number, are either of me or made by me. Of course on top of that I ought to continue with the plan of uploading the things I had before on other parts of the internet up here, and no doubt some process will be made on that. I should also progress the original plan I had for this place of having links to all the YouTube work only properly categorised. Less than 10% of that channel is on here so far, and I should try to increase that to 20%, but at the same time the channel itself, http://www.youtube,com/usenetposts , is growing all the time.
I close the year with 1480 videos there and as can be seen by the last video of the year, which is the previous year’s New Year celebrations, I have a big backlog of films to upload. And that will take priority, actually getting the old filmed material up onto YT. So I will be changing the algorithm for uploading in the new year meaning that the new films should be appearing more frequently. That’s the only way I can catch up – the aim is not to be more than about three months behind, which was the way it used to be for years and years.
And there are going to be some exciting series coming up, even though I didn’t have time or peace and quiet to make any face-t0-cam video that people have wanted. The thing is when I go places I want to capture the experience and share it. When I am walking around I cannot do anything but talk, but when I am at a desk I need to be at work, hence that sort of film hasn’t been done while the walking and talking kind has been. The exciting places the loyal viewers are going to be taken to in 2013 include Malta, Beijing, Hemel Hempstead, Sofia Bulgaria, Kiev in the Ukraine and more Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Stay tuned!
For those who haven’t linked to me in all the places please use the buttons on the top of the blog to find me on places like Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, and who knows whatelser. On Linked-in you can find me by searching David James Poland and please link up. Your feedback to the whole experience here or on YT is always very valuable and please go ahead and tell me or ask whatever you see fit.
Once again, all the very best for 2013!
Related articles
- Cold Claims 49 Lives in Poland This Month (novinite.com)
- Goldlisting may or may not be from the very beginning of learning a language, but it’ll take you on as far as you like! (huliganov.tv)
- Several die in Poland after drinking poisoned alcohol (euronews.com)