New year, new start

Welcome to 2011!

Last year, while having some good points, was overall a mess. But one of the lovely things about Stanford's mandatory Christmas shutdown is that it provides a nice breathing period and an opportunity to relax before planning and getting ready for a new year. (And, this year, a chance to recover from the cold that knocked out a bunch of December for me.) So I've been unsubscribing from mailing lists, organizing to-do lists, and getting myself into the right mindset for the next year.

I'm a strong believer in starting as one means to go on. The best way for this to be a lower-stress, lower-obligation, more enjoyable year is to make it a lower-stress, lower-obligation, more enjoyable January. No resolutions: that's too much of an obligation. But I will say that one thing 2011 is going to have a lot more of is video games.

I don't think I've mentioned here, but if you enjoy the Xbox 360 at all, TrueAchievements is the best gaming site on the web. Its claim to fame is that it adjusts the gamer score of achievements based on how many people who have the game have acquired that achievement, resulting in an adjusted gamer score that takes the difficulty of achievements into account. But as fun as that is, it also has a comprehensive database of games, tracks all one's game progress and that of one's friends and provides a feed summary of that, collects reviews and solution guides for achievements, and quite a bit more. I've been an off-and-on gamer for years, but TrueAchievements is what really got me into gaming again. Now I have a rather substantial backlog of games and I'm itching to spend a fair bit of 2011 playing them.

Just one day of vacation left, and then it's back to work. There's another month of coding left in our major Java project that's been consuming me since October, and then another couple of months of integration, so I'm still going to be slow on Debian work and other software releases. After that, my opportunities to get back to open source development look much stronger. But I'm going to see if I can weave a bit more Policy and Lintian work into my schedule than I have been.

Here's to a smooth, balanced, and more comfortable and enjoyable 2011.