The winter break to-do list

Tonight I ate enormous amounts of dessert, learned how to swaddle a baby, and renewed my dislike of television as a mind-filler (I like well-made television, but as a communication medium and deliberate form of art, not "for lack of something better to do"). I also need longer stretches of productive work-time with my laptop, which will be difficult to find, which means that I am really behind on a lot of things.. There are a couple things I'm trying to do over winter break. We shall see how well these turn out.

1. Start learning web design in earnest. In the spirit of learning by doing, I'm going to be working both on my website and on Bootstrap's, the itinerant and currently ill-defined design group that's spontaneously struggling into selfhood among a group of Oliners.
   
2. Set old ghosts to rest - there are a few things, academic and nonacademic, that have been nagging me for months. An essay I never revised. An email I didn't reply to. It's time to clear these from my conscience.
3. Echo: Make a professional-looking presentation package for the Japan Design Foundation Robotics competition that Bootstrap is traveling to in January. It's a design competition, but we came up with a robotics application, were shocked when we became finalists and people started asking us where they could buy the things, and are now trying to figure out the technology to implement it while getting provisional patents filed and everything; I'm mentally treating it as a tech startup because that's what it might become.
4. SCOPE magic. It's going to be a hectic next semester, and any sort of head start is very, very good. I haven't been able to convince my cousins that the PIC and Blackfin boxes I brought home are computers - they don't fit into their mental model of what a computer should be.
   
5. Solidify next year's journey. I need a coherent writeup and the beginnings of plans for my trek across the globe in the name of engineering education.
6. The mathiness! As Jon pointed out, I've got some research to catch up on over break...
   

Enough to do for a month, I think. But first I need to get over this nasty little cold and/or allergy; I can't tell which, but it's leading me to kill a good many trees in the name of uncongestion (and Kleenex).

Edit: Whoa, almost left the math out. Thanks, Jon. I wonder if I'll have enough time to learn dynamics and controls too, so I can hound Gui and Mark Penner incessantly with questions next term...

Edit: Man, this betting pool is old. Note that Mark Hoemmen has already lost his bet, as he's married. All others are still up in the air.