It's been a pretty good xmas break so far. Off from work from Dec 25-Jan 5th, a chance to read, get out of town.

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As usual, it was a very busy and difficult year at work, but overall it's been exciting and fascinating. 2009 will be even more-so. I'm looking to increase the number of people I hire in 2009, we want to improve our internal development processes, improve the quality of everyone's code, and generally push people to new opportunities.

Home

We finished off 2008 with a new car:

It's a 2008 Honda CRV, with a 4-bike rack attached. Snazzy :-).

Tech

Lately, there is a lot of buzz over netbooks. If you're not familiar with them already, think of them as minimalist laptop computers. Really minimal. These things are tiny! Which is the advantage to them of course. Having something that really is about the size of a paper back book (only thinner), that you can surf the web on, play videos and music on, is probably what most people are looking for, at least when they're on transit. 

I'm currently looking at three different ones;

Sylvania GNET28001SO Meso 8.9" Netbook w/ Linux (Ubuntu).

HP 2133 8.9" Mini-Note PC w/ Linux (SUSE)

ASUS Eee PC 1000 10" Netbook w/ Linux (not sure which distro)

And maybe also the Dell 9" netbook.

They all look quite interesting, but I need to read more. This market is seeing a lot of changes ocurring rapidly. Already the above ones may be obsolete.

Photography

I've been a bit slack on my photography this year (despite having some photo's published), but I'm looking to get out more in 2009 and fill up those memory cards. One things that's helping is the new Lightroom v2. It's making it so much easier to do some simple, quick changes on my photos to clean them up and then publish them. Check out the latest on my flickr page.

Fitness

To keep exercising during the winter, I've spent most of my time out running in the morning. Of course, with the large dumps of snow (and the even larger mountains of plowed snow on the sidewalks) this has become a bit more difficult. At least now I have a car so I can drive somewhere snow-free to run :-). I even spent Jan 1st out at Stanley Park, taking part in the Resolution Run (5k) put on by the Running Room. Along with having the bike on an indoor trainer, I should be able to keep my fitness level up.

Learning

So what are you doing for 2009 to keep your knowledge current, whether it's professionally or personally? Even before 2009 rolled around, I've been pushing myself to really work through new technical material, from algorithms and data structures to photographic techniques, mountain biking to house maintenance. There's a tremendous amount of information out there to learn anything you are interested in. What are you waiting for?