Farewell 2007!

It's New Year's Eve and the holidays are pretty soon going to be over - although it's been hard to tell where work ends and holiday starts since I haven't been doing PAID work (through choice :)) since the end of October. Hopefully the New Year will change all that, although I'm going to miss relatively easy days at home in my study just learning (playing is probably a better word!) new stuff.

This is the time of year when it's traditional to make resolutions for the new year. For me it's going to be pretty much 'business as usual' - which means that, in the short term at least, blogging is going to be taking a bit of a back seat. Apologies to those who follow my various film/shiny disc review blogs - these are likely to remain relatively quiet, at least until I've made some progress on activities I've marked as higher priority for January.

At the moment stuff related to work is taking priority and the company web site is effectively the test bed for some infrastructure stuff that will make auto-updating of my personal web site and various blogs much less time-consuming. My Shiny Discs web site will be the ultimate benefactor of all this 'behind the scenes' work, but that is still some way off. Blame Microsoft, who seem to release new technologies and updates on an almost daily basis, such that keeping sufficiently up-to-date to know what's important and what isn't and trying to guarantee code isn't obsolete the day it's written is becoming increasingly difficult.

I have no real plans for New Year's Eve, other than to have another iteration of my CV so that it's ready to submit for some advertised contract vacancies on New Year's Day.

On the blogging front I intend to sort out my work-related blog first, if only because I'm way behind on stashing useful and essential work-releated links, an activity that needs to be accelerated given today's news that The Daily Grind (Larkware News) - a useful set of daily links for the .NET developer - is shutting down shop today. A new year's resolution is to make sure I update the work-related blog daily, with similar plans for this personal blog not likely to come to fruition until later in the year - in the meantime my Twitter 'tweets' (blog entries limited to 140 characters) are usually updated at least a couple of times a day.

Looking back, 2007 has been a good year after what was for me a very bleak year preceding it. Hopefully 2008 will be even better - for me, and for you, although I see Gordon Brown is already trying to spoil the party with warnings of doom and gloom.

Anyway, Gordon Brown aside, Happy New Year wherever and whoever you are (that doesn't apply to Christopher Lee or any of his family, obviously ;-))

P.S. Forgot to mention that I did a quick write-up on My Top 10 Shiny Discs of 2007 over on the rather excellent Filmstalker blog.