So.
It’s 2011.
Being lazy and using that as an excuse to pretend I’m bucking a trend, I’m going to take this first day of the new year to reflect on the year gone by and look forward.
1.
Let’s start with some not quite arbitrarily chosen numbers for last year.
90 blog posts
318 tweets
5,260 photos kept (and I delete about 2 photos for every one I keep)
66 Kindle books (can’t say I read them all)
12 countries
48 cities
99 blog subscriptions (OPML if you know what that means)
2.
Travel was the biggest theme for 2010 as the numbers above attest. The year started in the snow of Whistler mountain and spring saw trips to Montreal and D.C.
Then, for a variety of reasons, we decided to leave NYC and the real travel began. Our first foray was upcountry to Yale/New Haven to sell Wendy’s car and then Toronto/Algonquin for a wedding.
The success of this led us on our world tour which has been been heavily documented.
3.
The numbers above illustrate a few more themes in my life:
- Digital narcissism. If, in the future, an anthropologist tries to understand my life, the period from about age 27 onward will be extremely well documented. Without realizing it, I’m leaving breadcrumbs to my personality-opinions, experiences, thoughts, musings-all across the web on an increasingly rapid basis. Perhaps in a few years time someone will write a computer program that will simulate my thoughts so well that it will be able to pass the Turing Test (however, I suspect this is highly unlikely)
- Attention is the biggest constraint in my digital life. It’s amazing that I can get the opinions and thoughts of over 100 people and organizations on a daily basis but I don’t have the right set of tools to digest it all. There are great tools for streaming it to me, but there is a distinct lack of tools to help me make sense of it all and coalesce the views and opinions of all these people. I need something that helps me filter their opinions for what I’m most interested in and then pulls out the main themes. Maybe this will finally arrive in 2011.
- Storage is the second biggest constraint in my digital life. When I was a kid we had a 20 Mb hard drive on our Mac Plus and I remember that it was hard to fill up. I just filled up my 250 GB hard drive. Where did all this come from? The 15,000 photos I’ve taken (1/3 in the last year), the 7,459 songs in my iTunes and the increasing number of digital books I’m reading. The easy solution would be to transfer all of this to the cloud. And I’ll probably have to unless I can keep doubling the size of my hard drive every three years (which could be possible). But I’m not sure I’m ready to trust the cloud with every last detail of my life. (And yes, there’s an irony that I’m saying this in a blog post)
4.
Here are some things that I enjoyed in 2010:
- Neal Stephenson‘s books. Having a Kindle made me realize that you can read anything on the subway and no one can tell what you’re reading. This is especially useful for authors like Neal whose covers can be questionable (why, oh why, do speculative fiction books have such stupid looking covers?) and invite silly looks. This year I read Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age and Anathem. Highly recommended.
- William Gibson‘s books. As you can see from above, 2010 was an exploration in don’t-call-it-science-call-it-speculative fiction. I re-read Gibson’s classic Neuromancer and followed it up with Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. I don’t think I’ve ever read four books by the same author in one year before. (See here for some interesting thoughts on why you might want to read “science fiction”)
- A short list of great songs that come out this year (to find stuff like this, be sure to check out the Blissful Thunder radio show and the Hospital Records and XLR8R podcasts:
-
- Would Know by Mount Kimbie
- 10 Mile Stereo by Beach House
- I Get Nervous by Lower Dens
- Now You See Me by Emeralds
- The High Road by Broken Bells
- Revival by Deerhunter
- Crazy by The Pack A.D.
- Blue As Your Blood by The Walkmen
- Good Enuf (Cash Flow Dub) by Major Lazer
- Young Aren’t Young by The Hundred in the Hands
- Little Oranges by B-Complex
- Bowls by Caribou
- Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells
- Good Intentions Paving Co. by Joanna Newsom
5.
It took a while, but I found my resolutions from last year.
It’s a mixed bag of results: since we ended up leaving NYC and traveling, a lot of them – like cook more, meet more people in the neighbourhood, learn how to program an Arduino, take a class at 3rd Ward, etc. – became moot.
I did learn how to be a better Django programmer and created a very early prototype of some location-based software (more will be coming this year!). I also wanted to expose myself to a lot of new ideas; the twitter and blog feeds above did that.
I utterly failed in my efforts to redo this website, dress better at work or do a better job of staying in touch with my friends (damnit, why don’t you all read this blog and get on twitter?).
6.
So, what will 2011 bring? This year I’m limiting myself to four resolutions:
- Launch my own company. This one’s going to happen. More details to follow
- Meet a lot of interesting people in Vancouver. New year, new city, new set of friends. I’ve lived mainly in cities like Toronto and NYC where the fun comes to you. Vancouver is going to be different: I’m going to have to seek out similar-minded people. I’m thinking a lot of yoga, rock climbing, trail running, hackspacing and tech meetups to try and meet interesting folks.
- Run a 3:10 marathon. I really want to qualify for Boston and, while it’s a step change in improvement from my personal best, I’m going to give it a try. I also lost 15 pounds traveling, so I feel like this could be the year
- Do less, better. Life is too interesting and there’s too much to do. So I’m going to try and do fewer things with more focus. I don’t know how this will play out, but we’ll see.
And with that, happy new year!