Making time for personal projects

I have been swamped with work lately, so I have been OK with pushing back two personal projects that have been 'itching' for while: a re-write and updating of my free Java AI web book to use Ruby and a free web portal for sharing healthy recipes (macrobiotic, vegetarian, low meat, etc.). I am hoping to have some free time after this summer, so I will put off deciding which personal project actually gets done until then. Right now, I am leaning towards doing the recipe web portal because my wife recovered from cancer and I believe that a macrobiotic diet helped her - I would feel great about promoting organic food and healthier eating habits. Also, I believe that I could write a very good web portal for cooking and recipes because I can leverage:
  • a strong interest in cooking
  • Ruby on Rails to facilitate a writing a database backed (with AJAX support) web application
  • a few clever ideas to use limited case based reasoning to help people use what ever ingredients that they have on hand
Anyway, my consulting work comes first, but I still like to plan for personal projects even if I can't get to them for a while.

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