2009 - What I'll Do

- Eat better
- Exercise

Fucking hell.

- Play the piano.
- Improve my guitar skill level.
- Finally get a proper living room sound setup.
- Figure out my next career step.
- Make more of an effort to better understand important, but far away, happenings.
- Cook more varied meals.
- Isolate myself less at work at lunch time.
- Move into a terraced house giving me more space.
- Try harder to meet people.
- Try harder not to have that argumentative tone in friendly conversation.
- Get into the local music scene.
- Visit more of the UK. None of it is that far away.
- Educate myself better on libertarianism in order to better explain it to others.
- Throw out every VHS cassette.
- Weigh less than eleven and a half stone.
- Put away less alcohol. It's becoming less enjoyable.
- Clean up more.
- Find the best view in Leicester/Leicestershire.
- Stop using standby.
- Don't cave in to climate change propaganda beyond career supporting lip service.
- Walk more and further.
- Code something outside of work. dotnet, java, python, whatever, just do it.
- Keep plants alive.
- Visit Japan.
- Learn every country on the map.

This is so much more fun than what I did last year. It never occurred to just blurt out a list like this. I'll see how it went on 31/12/09!

Predictions for next year:

- The economic situation will somehow stagnantly stabilise. To the likes of me, things will get a little worse, but not much. Most of the pain will come from prices affected by the value of the pound. The greedier and less well off will fare worse.

- Apple fails to impress launching very little new or exciting. Other companies follow suit.

- Netbooks gain traction despite being given a bad rap. The tech pundits finally realise that it really is true about the majority of people not needing all that computing power.

- Amazon MP3 does better in the UK than it did in the US. iTunes starts to lose market share. Fewer and fewer artists speak out against piracy, whilst secretly wondering how they're going to continue to be rich.

- 2008 was the appetiser for destruction. 2009 will be the undoing of many things. Upwards of 90% of the western population won't notice. Far more of the rest of the world will, but we won't hear about that.

- Gordon Brown's leadership will be called into question yet again, this time resulting in an actual leadership challenge. It barely matters. Barrack Obama's shine will continue to fade, leading the media baffled as to where all the initial support came from or went.

Even if these are pure shit, you must admit, i've nailed the way they're supposed to be written. The format in general is: Prediction > Outcome > Smartarse comment.

It's gonna be a year. Not necessarily a crazy year or a good year, but a year all the same. Will catch you somewhere along the way, no doubt...

Happy New Year!

PS: I'm about a day away from buying a Casio Celviano AP-200. There is damn near no information on this model. If anyone has any pointers, please let me know. The only criticisms i've seen about the sound quality don't match my experience stacking them against the better known low end models eg Yamaha YDP140, Casio Privia 720PX, which both sounded weaker to me.