New Year’s Non-Resolutions

This isn’t the first year that I’ve resolved to be the same, so even my resolving to stay the same is staying the same.

I noticed I’ve gotten a lot better with javascript over  the last couple of years, a little better with PHP and SQL. My resolution is to keep doing that. As with everything in life, I’d like to get better faster, but I don’t expect that to change either.

I used to read some book on programming before I got out of bed in the morning. Lately, I’ve been reading the New York Times instead. I think I’ll go back to reading programming books because the news doesn’t change much. Some people are shooting at some other people in a place I could not find on the map. Country X is doing better than the U.S. in math. Country Y had a natural disaster and the people who didn’t die are now homeless and hungry. The Republicans are against health care and the Democrats are against the Republicans.  I’d be better off reading about new javascript libraries or modeling techniques.

Speaking of modeling techniques, I’ve been back and forth with SAS over the past couple of years. The new on-demand offerings hold some promise. Teaching biostatistics I got to use some procedures I hadn’t used in a while, or at all. On the other hand, I did almost no macro programming in SAS this year. Just didn’t come up, which is kind of weird. I’m teaching a data mining class in August, so I’ll finally be using Enterprise Miner. I’m looking forward to that. I’m also intrigued by the new model selection procedures and I may just be apply to apply those to a project I’m working on now, so I’m looking forward to that.

I have two small contracts to finish this month, and three others that run out this year. I keep saying I’m going to do less work but it seems as if whenever I cut back on one thing, something else increases. If there was anything I could make NOT the same, it would be that I’d find it easier to relax. It’s not that I don’t have plenty of opportunities –  I could walk on the beach, hike in the mountains. The problem is that whenever I’m not working I keep thinking about that training video I need to make or programming interactive questions for the pretest or the next game activity. Though I have gotten better at turning down contracts, I still take on more than I should. The most helpful person with that has been The Spoiled One, who today suggested we walk down and try out a new vegan Thai restaurant on Main Street. (To my amazement, it was excellent). Tomorrow, the two of us are heading to Disneyland – the Invisible Developer bought me an annual pass for Christmas.

We applied to Co.lab for our newest start-up, 7 Generation Games, so if we get in there, that will be awesome and we’ll be relocating to Silicon Valley for a few months. If not, I have another source in mind for supplemental funding that I’ll apply to. I always have a Plan B and a Plan C and a Plan D and I don’t expect that to change, either.

My resolution is to make this year pretty much the same as last year, only better. Which might sound a bit boring, but looking back on it, I realize 2013 was pretty damn awesome. (If you’re curious, you can read my Christmas letter here, on my personal blog, which prompted my mother to call me and say that she thought a woman as educated as me should use better language. Obviously, my mother seldom reads my blog – or talks to me, for that matter.) New resolution: call Mom more often.