January 3rd, 2006 | 5 Comments

New Years’ Revolutions

I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year - here’s hoping you have a great 2006.

It’s at this time that everyone starts talking about their resolutions for the year ahead, and I’ve been thinking about mine. Beware: there is nothing original in this list, all of these are probably de facto resolutions, but it will hopefully act as a reminder to myself if nothing else.

The first thing I intend to do is to eat more healthily. Up until about a month before Christmas, I had been managing to eat reasonably healthily and had started to lose a bit of weight. I’m quite lucky as I’m the sort of person that people tell not to lose any weight - but the fact is that I’m the heaviest I have ever been, plus I’ve noticed the onset of several chins in photos of me, so it’s time to do something serious about it. Sure, I don’t need to lose that much, but firming up certain areas is definitely on the agenda.

As part of the weight-loss plan, I must try to drink less beer. As with the eating, I hadn’t been doing too badly up until the party season started, but have really fallen off the wagon over the past few weeks. This resolution might be used as an excuse for drinking more wine, but we’ll have to see. I think the easiest way for me to cut down on the drinking is to cut out the odd weekday beer, hopefully replacing it with water (as I must drink more water this year, too).

I’d also like to start getting up earlier - I’m convinced the morning hours before the kids get up (and before I have to get ready to go to work) could be the most productive time for me. It’s yet to be proven, but having an extra hour in the day has got to be a good thing. Could I survive with one less hour of sleep? I think so.

I will definitely listen to more music this year - I find myself getting behind the times with new music, and I tend always to listen to the same things in iTunes (Beatles, Zeppelin etc.), which tend to be 30 years out of date (still great though!). I also want to go to more gigs and see more live music, and hopefully we can get the band practicing again (and perhaps reconsider that name?!), and maybe even gigging at some point?

I got a few new books at Christmas; Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions, and Defensive Design for the Web by the the guys at 37signals.

Web Standards Solutions was written before Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design book, which I read a few months ago. Although I love the writing style and the way these books are published, I didn’t really get a great deal new out of Bulletproof Web Design, so we’ll have to see if Web Standards Solutions has much to offer. I’m a fan of a lot of the stuff that 37signals publish on their website, and the Defensive Design examples they used to have were always interesting, so I’m hoping that their book will prove to be quite useful.

I find that I’m often disappointed by books on web topics (as most of the stuff they contain is usually available on the web itself, or out of date by the time I get to read it), but they do make for easy presents when you can’t think of anything else! Hopefully these will be useful additions to the book shelf, and that I will find the time to read more this year.

As well as reading more, I will endeavour to write more blog posts more often. One of the problems I have is that there are plenty of other people who can write more intelligent posts on the subjects that interest me, so I largely leave it to them. But if I was to spend more time over my posts, rather than trying to knock them out in 10 minutes, I think I would be happier with the quality of my work.

So there it is - I’m sure there are other things i’ve forgotten about, but that’s plenty to be starting with. How long will they last? Probably no more than a couple of weeks in some cases, but I guess it’s better going into the New Year with a few goals that may or may not be met than no goals at all.

What are your New Year resolutions?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.