Goodbye 2006

Time for a little reflection on where I’ve been.

My creative interests have withered all over the place. New Songs, photos, blog posts, movies (theatrical and DVD) all dropped by about half between 2005 and 2006. I’ve written far less in my personal paper journal. Miles traveled went down. I’ve had less interesting ideas to jot down.

I think I’ve gone up on the number of books read, especially if you count comics. Thank you Brian K. Vaughan (Ex Machina, Y: The Last Man, Pride of Baghdad), Garth Ennis (The Boys), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, 52), and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise). I’ve stayed about the same on my fiction and non-fiction reading.

On the professional front I’ve done great. I’ve finished out the year with a 4.0 GPA. I’ve got a great job.

In the last half of the year I’ve been trying to get into more hobbies. Most of them revolve around building projects that interest me from Make magazine.

One of my Christmas gifts was a book on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms. I’m hoping this gets me back on track with building a collection of BEAM bots to solve Sudoku puzzles using ACO. My other BEAM bot building projects have been an exercise in frustration. Soldering together BEAM bots without any kind of circuit board has proven to be extremely difficult for me.

I did get a cordless Dremel for Christmas which I think will be exceptionally handy for fixing up some clay sculptures I made with Emily. One got messed up in a kiln accident, and the other needs some surgery. I’m also thinking about creating a chess set with theme fruits and vegetables using Sculpey and will probably Dremel out mistakes.

Most frustrating was the lack of emotional connection to the people around me. I drifted away more this year. I’m hoping that changes in 2007 but I’m not sure how to make that happen.