One should have a post at least once a year, surely? Herewith some hasty disorganized thoughts at year-end, focusing on the positive:
- Having a pretty healthy 5-year-old kid is one of the big successes. He was able to shed the egg allergy this year, so a wider range of foods opened up for us; hoping that trend continues next year with the remaining allergies.
- Joined a choir, the Alexandria Choral Society. I did miss singing in groups. The December concert went nicely, I had a solo (We Three Kings, the Myrrh verse) and didn't mess that up, so thumbs up there.
- The markets had a good year, which meant the 401K had a good year. Like/Favorite/+1.
- Big work project launched, pretty successfully.
Out with 2013, bring on 2014. A few select goals I have in mind:
- Launch a project which can simultaneously serve as a useful tool for communicating difficult ideas and as a way to demonstrate publicly some of what I know about software, UI and complexity. More on this to come.
- Level up at work -- I'm moving back into a team lead role, which requires a different focus than I've had recently. So I will need to consciously make some changes to succeed there.
- Blog more than once, eh?
After many years of relative quiet in public (mostly existing as a twitter feed), I would like to plan for 2014's underlying nature to be this:
- Enough reading, enough preparation, enough mulling. Do.
- To borrow from Teddy Roosevelt, Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. Instead of thinking about what would be possible to do, under better conditions than these, possibly ideal conditions (what would even be ideal conditions, really, let's mull that over a bit) and with a better set of tools..how would one measure which tools are the best ones, hm, that's a chinstroker, and so on, and so on.
- Real artists ship. - Steve Jobs
