Resolutions for 2012

• Go to a Python related conference in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
• Attend at least one JavaScript related conference or event.
• Upload all my outstanding pictures to Flickr!
• Make Consumer Notebook profitable.
• Find more ways to make Audrey Roy happy.
• Pull off an Aú sem Mão during a Capoeira Roda.
• Attend my first Capoeira Batizado.
• See a place in the USA I've never been.
• Work out at least three times a week.
• Drop to a 32 waist
• Visit friends and family back east. Been over a year since I've seen my sister!
• Blog once a week. That is at least 52 blog entries!
• Visit a Theme park.
• Learn how to surf or snowboard.
• Implement something in node.js, backbone.js, and handlebars.js
• Take a high level Python class from the likes of Raymond Hettiger or David Beazly.
• Teach some Python or Django.
• Have a beer with Thomas, Andy, Andy, Tony, Garrick, Bernd, and the rest of Ye Aulde Gange.
• See my old DC area friends such as Eric, Chris, Steve, Beth, Sarah, Daye, Renee, Kenneth, Leslie, Whitney, Dave, and many others.
• Visit my Son.

I love this girl!

In every person's life there are those incredibly memorable experiences that stick with you forever. The entirety of PyCon 2010 is for me that experience. You see, PyCon 2010 saw me introduced to the lovely, talented, and brilliant Audrey Roy.

Moments after I heard her lovely voice for the first time, we looked into each other's eyes. After that moment, I spent every waking moment of the conference finding excuses to spend time with her. Fortunately for me, most of her tastes for talks and social events matched my own. Within days we were dancing in each other's arms.

By the end of the PyCon we both knew we had something special. So after the conference we both flew back and forth across the country every two weeks for months to keep seeing each other. My phone bill skyrocketed. I became intimately familiar with Skype. It was crazy and magnificent. Finally, on May 5th of 2010 I moved out West to be with her for good.

Audrey may seem shy at first, but she has a fierce heart (FYI, she played Ice Hockey for years and did the bargaining for my car). She has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She supports me in everything I want to do. If you enjoy Django Packages and follow Open Comparison, she came up with the idea. We cook and eat healthy, and besides our differences on seafood/mac-and-cheese we are a food match. She loves my family and they adore her. She is a talented visual artist in any medium she attempts. As a developer, she learns unbelievably fast and produces high quality code in languages such as Python, C++, JavaScript, Objective-C, and anything else she touches. She hacks the Linux kernel so she can use her preferred peripherals. Her role in the technical community continually grows, and recently she launched the PyLadies advocacy group.

Airborne girlfriend!

An incredible thing about Audrey is that she makes me a better person. I didn't see this at first, but my good friend and mentor Steve Holden pointed it out. She doesn't just bring me joy, she makes me a more tenacious, honest, and compassionate person.

Life is never perfect, but thanks to Audrey and the Python community that brought us together, life is just plain good.

Recap of 2010

This has been an unforgettable year. I can't believe all this stuff happened. I've moved many times, met wonderful people, and seen my life change in ways I could have never predicted.

The good:

• Met a whole new bunch of wonderful people - relationships to last a lifetime. Arthur, Audrey, Celso, Cody, Daniel, Jacob, Jeff, Lahn, Moriah, Skyler, Todd and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your awesomeness!
• Presented and taught at Pycon 2010.
• Had a blast in the blizzard of 2010.
• Prepped my house of 9 years for sale and sold it.
• Paid off my debts. I sleep so much better now.
• Left NASA after 5 years and 3 months for freelancing pastures. Thanks Eldarion LLC, Revsys LLC, Holdenweb LLC, and Bryan Klein. Being exposed to some of the incredible code and developers on these projects has made me a better developer. Show me more!
• Flew enough in the spring to put me ahead of notorious traveller James Tauber for about 2 months in sheer mileage accumulated.
• Got to reconnect with a cousin and met his lovely wife and handsome son. Also hung out with my Uncle Al and Aunt Sandra.
• Got a tour of Ames Research Center thanks to Michael Sims. He'll probably be presenting at Pycon!
• Attended another NASA wedding by Mark and Ariel.
• Took a cruise to Mexico on a ship that caught fire just months later.
• Said goodbye to Virginia and moved to Lawrence, Kansas to run with the unicorns and 5 months later to Los Angeles, California.
• Road tripped across the Western half of the country! Twice! Spent 3 days in Las Vegas over Halloween!
• Learned fundamentals of Capoeira from Celso Wills. Wish I could learn more from him. :(
• Learned how to drive and bought my first car.
• Worked on another course for Holdenweb LLC.
• Launched Django Packages.
• Presented at DjangoCon 2010.
• Started Muay Thai classes in Los Angeles. I've done quite a bit of it, but these were the first regular classes I've had in about 16 years.
• Brought my son to Los Angeles so I could spend a week with him for the first time in 15 months.
• Almost up to 7 years without a broken bone!
• Worked another year in Python related technologies.
• Started learning LISP and played a lot more with JavaScript (especially JQuery and JQuery UI).

The bad:

• Left my students in Virginia. The young ones were especially hard to let go.
• Had to say goodbye to friends in the DC area. Some people I'll miss are Alex, Beth, Brandon, Chris, Dave, Daye, Eric, Jim, Joe, Katie, Muhammed, Pilar, Rich, Renee, Ron, Sarah, Sebastion, Shawn, Steve, and Whitney. I know I'm missing some names!
• I'm far from all my immediate family: Carla, Ciana, Dad, Doug, Michele, Midori, Mom, Seth, and Timiri.
• Watched NOVA Django falter after I left the DC area. 
• Had to wait 15 months between spending more than a day or so with my son.
• Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.
• Didn't blog enough. Last year I blogged almost twice as much!
• Frustratingly, haven't been able to finish something that prevents me from writing about certain things. Yes, this is quite vague, and my hope is to clarify it in a few weeks.

2010 Resolution Summary

Items that are crossed out are completed.

• Sell the house, pay off the remainders of my debts, and get my own place to stay. And get a car too.

• Travel to another country.

• Take my son to another country.

• Drop the waist size 2 inches and not break any bones.

• Go to an amusement park, visit the beach, and also see a part of the USA I've never been.

• Do more educational work for Python related technologies, and that includes getting the Django Education Foundation really rolling forwards.

• Throw away at least half my current stuff. I don't have much stuff now, and I want even less. Also, If I don't use or interact with any one of my non-book remaining possessions by 2011, I'm throwing it away.

• Move my blog to my own system and blog at least once a week.

• Get a mountain bike and have reasons to use it.

• Get back into Eskrima, focus more on BJJ, get into Capoeira.

• Hire a maid. I'm not messy, but I want someone to do the fine tuning of my place.

• Go to Pycon, DjangoCon, and a new conference.

• Have a beer with Thomas, Andy, Andy, Tony, Garrick, Bernd, and the rest of Ye Aulde Gange.

I hate Mac & Cheese

I'm not a picky eater. I'm willing to eat every meat that is legal in the United States and wouldn't mind traveling to places where the laws are different. I have this strange desire to try pickled insects in a third world nation. I often eat things I don't like, such as eggplant.

However, the truth is that I really loathe mac & cheese. I hate cooking it, I hate eating it, I hate cleaning up after it. I've thrown away pots that have been used to cook it. I claim to be different because I despise this American staple, and silly as you may think it may be it is my preference not to have anything to do with cheesy pasta. Heck, it ain't even healthy.

Note: I sometimes like some cheese on top of tomato based sauces or chili that has pasta mixed into it. This is not the same thing as mac & cheese.

Yet the complication I face is that I have dear friends and family who think that their prize-winning homemade mac & cheese made from imported unpasteurized cheese will be something that I love. That I'll change and they'll get the chance to smugly say that it was the quality of what I've eaten that discouraged me.

That won't happen.

I've been forced to try everything from Kraft mac & cheese to gourmet cheesy pasta prepared by chefs I otherwise respect. I've had it dumped on my plate on picnics and in fancy restaurants. I've had the people proudly insist I try their recipe all while making it clear that they would take it as a personal insult if I didn't try it and would also take it as a personal insult if I didn't like it.

And you know what?

I hated it. Its vile. Its disgusting.

Please stop insisting that I try your concoction. You aren't going to change me.

Moving away from DC

Way back in 1969, when I was about a year and a half old, my family moved to Laurel, Maryland, which is about 20 miles north of Washington, DC. Since then, I've lived in central Maryland, Washington, and Northern Virginia. I enjoyed my friends and family, and the things that I've done.

Yet I always wanted to see the rest of our world, try new things, explore new horizons. Breathe different air, if you will. My ideal existence would be to live in a lot of different places, living six months for a time in place to place so I can get a good experience of the planet.

Not long ago conditions came together that made it feasible for me to do all this. My house is sold, my son is 18, I don't currently own any furniture, and I have a job that allows/encourages for telecommuting (and that is because of Python and Django).

So on May 5th I'm moving to Los Angeles, California for a short term stay. I'm there to hang out with a certain artist/developer and to go on a vacation that I've wanted to do for many months. More details on this move in another post.

In early June I'm moving again to Lawrence, Kansas. I've got a number of friends there, but much more important are the professional reasons. The entrepreneur for my start-up will be living not far from there, Revolution Systems offered me office space, and the cost of living is amazingly low. Another nice feature is that its in the central point of the USA, so flying anywhere on the continent doesn't take that long.

I'm very excited, but I'm also sad to go. I'll miss being near my son, my parents and siblings. I'll miss all my DC area friends, who are way too numerous to list. I will certainly miss all my students, young and old, not to mention the other teachers at OMAA.

I will be coming back in late June, and then perhaps in either late July or August. And who knows, maybe someday my travels will bring me back to the Washington, DC area for an extended stay?

Resolutions for 2010

Since I start my decades at zero, that means we have just 4.5 hours left in this first 10% of the 21st century. And with just 4.5 hours left, I post my New Year's Resolutions.

• Sell the house, pay off the remainders of my debts, and get my own place to stay. And get a car too.

• Travel to another country.

• Take my son to another country.

• Drop the waist size 2 inches and not break any bones.

• Go to an amusement park, visit the beach, and also see a part of the USA I've never been.

• Do more educational work for Python related technologies, and that includes getting the Django Education Foundation really rolling forwards.

• Throw away at least half my current stuff. I don't have much stuff now, and I want even less. Also, If I don't use or interact with any one of my non-book remaining possessions by 2011, I'm throwing it away.

• Move my blog to my own system and blog at least once a week.

• Get a mountain bike and have reasons to use it.

• Get back into Eskrima, focus more on BJJ, get into Capoeira.

• Hire a maid. I'm not messy, but I want someone to do the fine tuning of my place.

• Go to Pycon, DjangoCon, and a new conference.

• Have a beer with Thomas, Andy, Andy, Tony, Garrick, Bernd, and the rest of Ye Aulde Gange.

Recap of 2009

This has been an interesting year. Incredible life changes have meant I've gone between screaming excitement to the doldrums of depression.

The good:

• Made an amazing number of new friends this year. In alphabetical order I can think of Alex, Barbara, Brian, Chris, Eric, Jacob, James, Jannis, Jeff, Jesse, Mike, Niall, Rich, Shawn, Steve, Zain and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your support and also thanks for opening my eyes to what the world can be really like!
  

• I went to the West Coast for the first time! In California I visited friends in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and San Jose. In Oregon I visited Portland. The fun and food was amazing. California was vacation, Oregon was work.

• Got involved in the Python, Django, and Pinax communities, reviewed talks for Pycon, became a Pinax core developer, started up NOVA-Django, started up the still nascent Django Education Foundation.

• Worked another year in Python related technologies.
  

• Tested for my third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Worked my Muay Thai. Got better at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Learned a little Capoeria.
  

• Almost up to 6 years without a broken bone!!!
  

• Stayed with NASA, for five years total now. Saw good people hired like Chris Adams and Tom Rando. My team set up a collaboration space. Launched a big internal Pinax powered application called SMD Spacebook and am helping on a major outreach application.

• Began my new side consulting efforts which will be mostly educational based. I like teaching anything, from martial arts to technology! Worked on a course for Holdenweb, and am teaching a long tutorial at Pycon!
  

• Reconnected with some old High School and Middle School friends. Am able to give one of them some business.
  

• My son turned 18.
  

• Grew a goatee.
  

• Kept teaching martial arts.

• Got a new road bike.
  

The bad:

• My marriage of 12+ years fell apart. I've lived in a lot of places since, but none of them my own.
  

• Participated in a well done project that lost out to a mediocre project that won because of resource attrition and refusal of customer to effectively market the effort.
  

• Didn't push hard enough to prep my house for sale until December. Going into more debt to finance the work.

• Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.

• Lost a cat named Ao-Chan to kidney disease on Obama's Inauguration day. She was an aloof, regal, agile beauty who deigned to give us lots of love and affection.