A New Year

Christmas has been cleaned up and the new year has come. Now it is time to think about how to make this one better than the last. Perhaps it might help if I take a quick look back at 2009 and see how I grew, if at all. Then I can set goals to make the coming year better.

2009 can best be described as the year that I spent working on my kiosk project. The software is done and now my partners and I are waiting for a large company to buy it and increase the number of users. The software is already in limited production and so we know it works. We would just like to see it work for more people.

2009 was also the year I spent preparing for a two-week backpacking trip at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. My oldest son and I spent countless hours doing practice hikes to help prepare for this adventure in the wilderness. Unfortunately it had the nasty consequence of burning down several money making opportunities. I don't regret my decision to spend quality time with my seventeen-year-old son, but my hope is that 2010 will be the year that helps me fully recover. I have some interesting prospects already and the year is only four days old.

2009 was the year I finally broke down and started to blog (as evidenced by this entry). I had been thinking about the idea for years but never done it. Then I read an important piece of e-mail that served as the catalyst to go through the simple process of setting up a blog. Now I just need to keep it up.

In the back of my mind I have been tossing around some resolutions or goals for the new year. There are certain parts of my life that are practically perfect and I don't want to change those. For instance, I get more than enough skiing in every year and so I don't need to set any goals about how many days I will ski this year nor do I need to have a goal about visiting new resorts.

While some parts of my life are perfect, others are not. I recently worked on a one-day project involving the C programing language and discovered that some of my skills have atrophied. Maybe I need to pull out The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie to help brush up on some fundamentals. Or maybe I need to find a good web-based tutorial on threaded programming and convert some of my projects to use threads (threads can make programs faster and smaller when done correctly).

Perhaps 2010 is the year I break down and try something completely new. I might try to learn a new computer language like Ruby, which seems to be gaining more mainstream acceptance. OK, that is not completely new as I already know several computer languages and one more really isn't that different. Istead I might try learning a language like Russian, Portuguese, or Chineese.

I'm not sure how 2010 will turn out but I do know that it has a lot of potential. All I need to do is keep moving in a forward direction and not let myself fall into a routine that halts any progress. May this new year be a great one for all of us.