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I thought I'd write down a list of my heart's desires. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I've not done it for some reason, even though doing such things is motivating.

All of these desires are near and dear to me. Some of the items on this list I've wanted since I was a small boy (possessions, mostly), and some of them are newer desires (higher-level desires like love and fulfillment). Many of the list items appeal to my vanity, but they aren't the most important things on the list by far. The traveling is more important to me than owning a Ferrari and a helicopter, for instance. The people I travel with are just as important as the destination, because it wouldn't be the same without them. Things like that.

Some of them won't happen until I'm much older. Some of them are ongoing things and can never really be checked off.

Dreams are goals with time limits attached. I have time limits attached to many of these things, I simply didn't put them into the list. I've struck off the goals I've already accomplished.

1. Fall in love and get married
2. Stay married
3. Have a son
4. Have a daughter
5. See them both become self-actualized, successful people at whatever they choose to do
6. Meet my grandchildren
7. Never stop moving towards self-actualization and always make forward progress in self-improvement
8. Own my own business
9. Start my own financially-successful website
10. Open 12 VA offices in NY
11. Be out of debt by age 26
12. Have a net worth in excess of $1 million by age 30
13. Have a net worth in excess of $50 million by age 39
14. Have a net worth in excess of $1 billion by age 65
15. Be on the cover of a prominent business or news magazine
16. Write a fictional book
17. Go to South Africa with my dad
18. Visit Egypt and the pyramids with Fabien
19. Own a collection of fine watches. (God I love watches!)
20. Get my helicopter pilot's license
21. Own a Robinson R44 helicopter
22. Go to a professional driving school
23. Drive an open-wheel (Indy) car
24. Design my own home and have it built for me.
25. Own a new Ferrari
26. Order and pick up a brand-new Porsche 911 Turbo in Europe
27. Participate in a Porsche event on two seperate continents
28. Buy a Dodge Viper for Rich. Just to say "Thank-you."
29. Visit Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand with my dad
30. Visit Antarctica
31. Visit Iceland
32. Visit Norway
33. Go on an African safari (non-hunting)
34. Get my SCUBA license in Guam and go diving with Nick there
35. Dive the Great Barrier Reef also with Nick
36. Spend two months in Europe back-packing
37. Go to China and see the Great Wall
38. Throw a huge birthday party for myself when I'm old since I've only had one in my life.
39. Get rid of the bittersweet feeling that the holidays brings by having my own family where we stay home and celebrate and people come to us, rather than having to figure out where I'm going on what day. Be the center rather than participate in other people's centers.
40. Own a beautiful home somewhere in New Hampshire
41. Contribute something meaningful to a great charity or organization
42. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox-Yankees game
43. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox World Series Game
44. Go to the summer Olympics in another country
45. Go to MacWorld with David and/or Paul (Nerd alert!)
46. Do something truly extravagant with my close friends, just for the hell of it.
47. Create a full college scholarship to a worthy institution based on need and merit that can only be won by a white male.
48. See a Josh Groban-Charlotte Church duet. Live. In the front row.
49. Start a news-media company
50. Touch the lives of 5 children less fortunate than myself in a meaningful, personal way.
51. Start an angel/venture capital fund for startups
52. Retire and run my own (or someone else's) charity.

I've decided to go to South Africa, most likely in 2010. I'd like to see Johannesburg and Cape Town. I've always wanted to go, so now I'm actually making plans to do so. As they say, goals are dreams with time limits attached… I asked my dad to go with him, and he's interested…

Click for full-size.

[Image from this page.]

Travel, tourism, South Africa, Cape Town

I was going through some old image directories the other day, just to see what I had., and it turns out that I have pretty much every screenshot I've ever taken from 2002 until the present. I was looking through some of them, and I came across some screenshots of Outlook 2003 — specifically of the "To Do" list functionality. (I used to be a huge O2K3 junky.)

Looking back then, to see what I had to do (I was a second year in Pharmacy school)… man it's a freakin' joke. I used to think I was so overwhelmed back then. Now it's like "Hmm, I'd take me maybe 2 days to get all that stuff done now.") The 4 screenshots span 12 days, and most of the stuff didn't get done in the timeframe that I wanted it done in.

Click each thumbnail for a larger view.

Seriously, the amount of stuff in screenshot 1 would be done in literally three days at the most today. I waste so little time now, it boggles my mind. Even compared to just six months ago.

I guess starting your own business will do that to you, though, won't it?

Outlook 2003, GTD

Despite what TechCrunch says, Gmail is not perfect.* It's missing two more key pieces of functionality that I (and many others) would likely use. They are:

• Sort mail by attachment size
• Delete attachments (but not the entire email message)

I'd like to be able to sort by attachment size, so I can delete attachments which are large, and/or I've already downloaded to my computer, which is the second bullet on my list. I just sent out an attachment that didn't work as expected, and I wanted to delete the attachment from my email, and leave only the working version. Can't do that the way that Gmail is currently set up — I can delete the whole message, but I don't want to do that.

Maybe they'll add this functionality later on. I surely hope so. I'm not running out of space, I just don't like keeping superfluous junk in my email — I like to pare everything down to the bare essentials, and broken email attachments aren't essential.

* This of course, is ignoring the fact that some 60 Gmail users lost almost all of their email in recent weeks. Oopsie.

Google, Gmail, email, Internet