How Did 2025 New Year's Resolutions Go?

It is almost time to change the calendar to 2026. I thought about posting something about New Year's Resolutions but realize most of them are broken in the first 30 days of the new year. So I thought about how I did with mine this year. As I think about it, I did pretty good but there is always room for improvement.

One of the most easily broken resolutions relates to weight loss. I find that there are smart goals and there are stupid goals in this area of my life. A stupid goal is that I want to shed a certain number of pounds. It is stupid because it doesn't include how to achieve the goal. A smart goal is setting a number of days I want to ski. Skiing is exercise but it is something I love to do. The more days I ski means I exercise more. This year I set the goal to ski over 100 days for the 2024/25 ski season. I ended the season skiing 126 days. Goal achieved!

Unfortunately I can't ski all year long. So what is a smart summer exercise goal? The past couple of years I have not done as many bike rides as I would like and so I set a goal to ride over 1000 miles for the year. I have had some years where I achieved over 6000 so my goal is very doable and stretched what I accomplished the previous year. I have one more day to go but have over 1200 miles ridden so far this year. Goal achieved!

Now while we all have that stupid goal to lose a couple of pounds, did my smart goals help contribute to what I really wanted to do? I can say, "Yes." I am at my healthiest when I weigh less than 160 pounds. The skiing and biking goals helped get me down to 156 but you don't lose weight in the gym, you lose it in the kitchen. I set some smart goals related to eating well and that is what did it for me. If you are trying to lose weight without GLP-1 drugs, the way to do it is by leaving every meal hungry. So hungry you cry. If you can do that, you will drop weight easily. Well I guess it is not so easy as you cry 3 or 4 times a day.

I also had some mental and professional goals and did fairly well with them. This coming year I have set a technology goal that actually applies to computers and technology. My recent post about a single 4K monitor not being enough has me wanting to build a new computer with two 4K monitors. There is more to think about than just purchasing the hardware. I will have to redesign my office to make the space for both 43-inch monitors. I will also need space for my work computer and its second or perhaps third monitor. That is a lot of screens to look at and so I am going to have to build up . . . and maybe down. I will be sure to update readers with how the project is going.

One goal I had for this past year is doing more with artificial intelligence (AI). Fortunately I still have a few months left in my company's fiscal year so I'm not quite out of time. I did get a work environment set up for myself and all I need to do now is a bit of tweaking to tune it for my sample use case. Ultimately I want to be able to type natural language and have it generate the complex SQL to pull the data from a sample database where information is spread across multiple tables. So instead of typing code, I want to type, "What is the most popular movie over the past year and did it effect any video game sales?" The first question is a pretty simple query to a single table. The second is significantly more complicated. I'm close to being able to ask my question but have a little more Symantec modeling to do, which is really just accurately describing the data in natural language terms. I am close though.

As you start the new year, don't create New Year's resolutions without thinking about how you did last year. If you kept some of them but not others, think what you can do to set smart goals and not just boring number ones. Get creative and figure you what you can do to become excited to accomplish what you want. Right now, I'm thinking about going to various Disney parks 4 times in 2026. If you can avoid eating all the food, you really do a lot of walking and can surpass 25,000 steps in a single day. That ought to help with anyone's diet.

New Year's Resolutions

This morning I headed into work on my bike and then to the company gym where I usually start my day. Keeping with my early-rising habit I developed over the Christmas break I found myself there earlier than usual. I expected the gym to be packed with those seeking to lose a bit of weight gained over the Holidays. Nope, it felt really empty. Perhaps the idea of making and then breaking resolutions has gotten to the point where the new trend is to not make them in the first place. I hope I am wrong about that as the new year is always a great time to reflect on how we can improve ourselves.

On Sunday my wife asked if I had set any goals or resolutions and I had to confess that I have not made the effort yet. I sort of have a few ideas that carry forward from previous years like skiing more and dropping a bit of weight. So far I have started the year off right as I am down a few pounds which is a freaking miracle considering all of the feasting most people do during the holidays. I have also come back to work with a sore body from skiing so much over the break.

In this vein of looking at ways of improving myself over the next 12 months, I think I would like to learn a new technical skill or two. I have a very strong understanding of relational database systems and have even dabbled with other database technologies. Therefore those are not good areas to expand. Instead I should look at where my weaknesses are and set some goals to improve those parts of my professional skill set. I have used both Amazon's (AWS) and Google's (GCP) cloud platforms but could definitely improve there. Our company has a learning portal and should probably leverage it first and then fill in any shortcomings with a local conference.

Another area I would like to focus some effort is improving my artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge. Last year I ran through a Reinforcement Learning book and learned a lot. The book wasn't all that great but I did enjoy the code segments and doing the examples. There are a number of new AI tools emerging and I will try to find one that catches my interest and do something with it.

Finally I want to do more with gaming technology. I have dabbled with the Unity game engine but think I could learn a lot by learning Unreal as well. There are so many samples and tutorials that it would be good to spend an extra hour on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings hanging out at the office and building something interesting.

While it is nice to create a list of improvements, be sure to write them down. Someone once said that a goal not written is just a wish. If you want the wish to come true, start by writing it down and then coming up with a plan. I have the starting part down, now I should follow through and make a proper plan for each of these resolutions. Good luck on your own New Year's Resolutions.

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.