It’s 2012, time to update my new years resolutions and make plans for this year! :-)

Firstly, what’s happened since the start of 2011?

• I met Lisa, we’ve been together 11+ months now! :-O
• I’ve packed up my life and moved to Auckland after Lisa started a journalism job up here, it’s the first time I’ve lived outside of Wellington, so it’s a big change for me!
• I’ve been working for Prophecy for over a year now, these days working from home or from customer sites in Auckland, going pretty well.
• I’ve done more travelling around NZ than ever before, various road trips around the North Island and seeing new places.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job of the resolutions I made last year:

• I’ve reduced the amount of stuff I have, sold almost all my rackmount servers, sold all my beloved data centre components and cleared out huge piles of things from the flat.
• I haven’t quite gotten down to the goals of my less, less, less life approach, now that I’m not single it’s not quite as easy, if I clear out some space, Lisa just fills it in with something.  ;-) Although I’ve done a pretty good job of holding myself off buying gadgets that I don’t really need this year.
• I’m working sane hours and having a bit more of a work/life balance. Will be interesting to see how this lasts now that I’m working from home though.
• My blogging is more frequent, although not as much as I think it should be.

What I haven’t achieved is as much projects or geeking as I wanted, so I will be making more time this year for doing so and getting into more fun projects. :-)

So, my new years resolutions for 2012 are:

• Complete planned minimalism, selling off items I don’t need or use, reducing to things I actually care about. I still have too much cruft IMHO, but it’s hard to keep it low.
• Getting fitter – I need to lose weight and want to level up my fitness to potentially tackle the Te Araroa walk in late 2012 or early 2013, and with the move to Auckland I’m not getting the level of exercise I used to have in Wellington.
• Reduce amount of crap in my diet – reducing alcohol and snack foods will be the major difference, if I don’t buy it, I won’t eat it….
• Get out and explore the Auckland region!
• Get back up the mountain for some more snowboarding! I loved my first trip and want to do much more!
• Blog more, social network less. Blogs take longer, but are much more meaningful posts and I waste far too much time on social networks. Target is at least one decent blog post per week.
• Improve my saving situation and consider investment options for my savings.
• Move off proprietary networks as much as possible – mostly twitter at this stage, but also interested in options to replace google search, maps, etc.
• Complete many mostly done projects and release publicly! Lots of cool things I’d like to get out there. :-)
• Self enhance – work on improving my computing work environment with better tools – I’m planning to try one new tool every week and then pick the best ones for my needs.
• Learn new computing languages: Python, C++ and Java. I know bits of the above, enough to get by, but I want to be fluent in them.
• Learn a new IRL language. I want something I can use and then go overseas and live there for a while, so thinking maybe something like French or German, both places I’d like to go. Maybe German, then I can sing along to Rammstein songs better ;-) I think the key bit will be having someone to practice with, ideally a native speaker somewhere.
• Decide what my long term plans will be – Auckland, Wellington, or overseas. It’s a little more complicated now that I’m not as unattached as I once was.