Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

And so now we start a fresh new decade. It seems to be an American tradition to come up with resolutions for the New Year to do things (we Jews have been doing this for our New Year celebrations, which tend to be much more sober affairs than secular New Years, for generations.), and so as not to break with this tradition, I offer mine own insights and hopes for the new year, both personal and professional.

Personally, I'm hoping to achieve a number of things, including finishing off the last 20 lbs or so of weight loss I've been working on (I'm about halfway there -- ideally I'd like to be under 200 lbs, which is a place I've not been since I was about 17 years old) and I have incentives this year in that I'm hoping to test for Black Belt in my karate organization (which does not officially require me to lose the weight, but sure, it has held be back and continues to hold me back.) I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to do it "this year for sure", since coming into 2009 I had no idea that I'd ever be able to run 5 kilometers, and I managed to hit that a few times before I damaged my achilles tendon during the summer...

Professionally, I've got a number of goals, among them:

1. Updating my company's website 3 Phase Computing -- that link points to the old site, not the new one
2. I, personally, have never really been into marketing, but this has to change now, as 3 Phase has to grow, so I've decided to begin marketing in a truly geek fashion: by writing papers and software to establish a name, rather than make vague promises backed up by smoke and mirrors. So this part is to actually write papers/blog entries (not here) and post them to the corporate website. I'm also counting on the abilities of my talented co-workers as well.
3. I have a Ph.D. already, so in some cases having a long string of professional certifications in addition may label me as more of a "test-taker" than a "do-er". Nonetheless, just for my own edification, so I know that I know some material, I'm sitting a few of these exams. If it turns out that presenting these additional certifications helps with marketing, then all the better, but I'm not counting on it.
4. Finally, although I don't spend much of my time writing code any more, my resolution in this regard is to write better code so I don't need to purchase offsets for my ... code. Luckily, this is a relatively easy resolution to keep, because I have so many other hands who are looking at my code and complaining to me about it.
5. There is a long list of new technologies that I've not sufficiently explored or played with:
   • ZFS and Solaris Containers, and upgrading my develoment environment to FreeBSD 8.
   • While I've used VMWare quite a bit in the past, trying some of the new, fancy features in the enterprise suite are things that I need to definitely get my hands on more frequently,
   • Some other smaller projects, like network shell
   • Larger, new programming areas, like Python 3
   • And of course, there is the whole new NoSQL/Document database burgeoning movement that has captured so much mindshare and intellectual energy recently.