On To the New Year and Back To Work

While the Holidays were nice, it is nice to try and settle back into a routine, or at least have the prospect of doing so. I know the time for reflecting on the past year is supposed to take place in December, but I’ve been pretty much offline since before Christmas, so I’m a bit late.

Last Year’s Resolutions

Looking back to my list from last year, I hit 50% of my goals.  I ran in not one, but two marathons, and finished one of them.  I also managed to post a whole lot more here in one year than I did in the whole time I had my blog on MSDN. I hit somewhere over 200 posts last year (I’m too lazy to count), but still don’t really have a direction for the blog, which still suits me fine for the time being. (I looked the other day and they finally shut me out of my MSDN site.  Up until about July I still had edit access. )

Where did I miss?  I only read maybe two works of fiction last year - Angels and Demons as I mentioned in my post, and The Hobbit.  So much else  took my attention that I’m not sad I didn’t meet this goal. 

I also didn’t update my MCSD.  This goal was probably a result of my Koolaid hangover from working at Microsoft so long.  While I did do quite a bit of actual software development (my primary reason for leaving), I also opened my eyes to the world outside of Microsoft.  While I’m still focused on ASP.NET development, I’ve dabbled a bit in PHP, mainly in helping to maintain WMSE.org.

What About This Year

Toward the end of last year, I read a great post by Christine Kane on a better way to set goals for the New Year.  I don’t know where along the way I added her to my Google Reader feedlist, but she doesn’t write that often and when she does it’s usually insightful, so she’s stayed through a lot of the purging that I do when I find myself dedicating to much time to reading RSS feeds.

Christine points out that typical New Year’s resolutions have  a DO-HAVE-BE model, “I will DO this thing. So I can HAVE this thing and I can BE this thing.” She turns it on its head and says to start at BE.  Pick one word to guide you through the year and let your actions come from that.

So I’m choosing the word “healthy.”  If I got to pick two words, the second would probably be “balance” but that would be partly in support of the first.  While I ran a ton last year, and got in pretty good shape from it, I think it was at the expense of a lot of other healthy routines I had.  Plus, since the marathon, I’ve been running a lot less (”a lot less” meaning zero.)  Hopefully I can strike a balance and improve my health this year, both mental and physical.

Photography

One thing I thought was my list last year but isn’t, was to make some money with my camera.  I did manage to do that.  In September I got the first five star rating from the Popular Photography editors on their PopPhoto Flash blog and my image made it into a web exclusive article. Sadly, that didn’t net me any money, but it did give me some confidence to become a professional photographer, at least part-time.

While I haven’t sold any of my stock photography yet, I did do several portrait sessions and sold some prints.  Below are some shots from that:

I’m going to keep at the photography, too.  Try as I might, I can’t bend “healthy” into that endeavor, but do have one straight-up New Year’s resolution.  I’m going to take at least one picture everyday for the whole year and post it up for critique.  Not an original by far, but one that sounds challenging.  I haven’t figured out where I’m going to host the project, maybe Flickr, maybe here.  I’ve got my shot for yesterday, and will get my shot for today. 

Once I have a home for the project, I’ll put up a link here.

Thanks for sticking with me on this huge post.  It grew bigger than I planned.  Thanks also for stopping by my site.  Feedburner still tells me I’ve got dozens of subscribers, and the logs say I still get a fair amount of traffic on the site itself.

I hope you all stick around to see what this year brings.