LunarLuau

Resolutions from 2009 and New Ones for 2010

This time last year I made a list of new year’s resolutions and I wanted to take them really seriously.  I promised myself I’d review how it went, otherwise it becomes one of those generic, meaningless, resolutions like “I want to be more active”.  Anyway, let’s take a look.

1. Cooking, This one didn’t really go that well.  I was suppose to cook something interesting every week, but that kind of went downhill by May.  By August I tried to either “cook or do a home improvement”, but that didn’t really last past October.  I think I’m going to renew the “cook something or make a home improvement every week” for 2010 since I wasn’t happy with the 2009 results.
2. Workout, This one went fine.  The goal was to do at least 4 1000+ calorie workouts a week.  Between Rugby early in the year, cycle commuting through the spring, summer, and early fall this wasn’t really a problem.  More recently I’ve been trying P90X to carry me through the year since I don’t really bike anymore.  I’m really happy with the result here and plan to keep going through 2010, but I don’t feel the need to keep it as “resolution” status.
3. Creative, The goal here was to make something that was more significant than the phonebooking.com phenomenon.  Originally, I was hoping it would be the “Which is Hotter?” site I created in Rails through the year.  Although I’ve learned a lot about web development and social media marketing through this, I can’t really say it’s been a huge success in terms of internet impact.  More recently, on a whim, I made Sustainable Tips on twitter, which has already grown to 2300 followers in a little over a month.  I figure it would need to crack 17,000 to be bigger than phonebooking.  17k being the number of hits in the initial traffic spike back in 2004.  The second wave had 60k visitors (although I don’t have the log info for that, so I’m remembering rough numbers), but I figure a “follower” is more significant than a hit, so it should even out.  Growth seems to be completely dependent on how funny the tweets are, so maybe I can hit this in 2010.
4. Reading, I was suppose to read one coding-oriented book a month.  I did a brief write-up of each one so I have a good idea how many I read.  I only got through 7 though.  Grantit, good programming books are pretty big so I think I overestimated my ability to read things as big as Code Complete.  I’ll keep going with this until I get to 12.  (and yes Porter, I’ll get Code Complete back to you eventually).

Of course, recycling and wrapping up some resolutions from 2009 doesn’t make for an ambitious 2010, so I’m going to add a few:

1. Reading, In addition to wrapping up the 2009 books on coding, I’m going to read one business-oriented book a month for 2010.  These tend to be a little easier to digest than the programming books and still are useful to me professionally so I can probably accomplish this a lot easier.  Examples being “Good to Great” and “Crossing the Chasm“, which are notable on tech business reading lists.
2. Make $100 Online, Either ads on whichishotter or some other entrepreneurial means, I want to make $100 of cold hard online profit.  Making a gag twitter site or videos of guys beating each other with phonebooks is cool and all, but it’s not really an enterprise.  If you think this is a low goal then you clearly haven’t tried to earn from Google ads or selling t-shirts online.
3. Grouse Grind, With the assistance of Mr. Strickland I got my time down to 55 minutes this year on the grouse grind.  My personal best may have been lower than that, but when Strick was acting as my personal trainer getting up that hill the timer failed so we couldn’t get an accurate measure (I would have been enraged, but I was too close to death for that to happen).  The 55 comes from the time after where I wasn’t so near death at the end.  For 2010, I want to get it down to 50 minutes.