Happy New Year, y’all!

I love New Years.  LOVE IT.  After Halloween, Talk Like a Pirate Day and my birthday, it’s my favorite holiday.  I think like the fact that it’s a clear deliniation in time and an opportunity to make a fresh start.  I can look back over the past year and see what went well or not so well and make plans for the future.

2009 was quite a year, one that I will not be entirely sad to see go.  It wasn’t a bad year, necessarily, but often a stressful one and filled with some high highs and low lows.  The important part about the bad things is that I’ve learned some important lessons from them, and I think if you learn from an experience, it’s never truly all bad.  And the good things? Boy howdy were they good!  The trick now is to remember the lessons learned from the bad stuff and try to repeat the whatever it was I did to make the good stuff happen.

And also to remember to have fun while doing it.

The other thing I like about New Year’s are the predictions and resolutions.  I’m not really good at making or keeping either, but I have fun trying.  So what will 2010 hold?  For me personally, I started to do an inventory today of all the things already on my calendar for 2010 and it’s shaping up to be another busy one.  Not quite to the *stressbarf* point, but as I learned last year, I have to occassionally say no to some opportunities. But I guess, if 2009 is any indication, I can safely predict that I will find myself doing something that I never considered doing before with someone I’ve recently met.

Predictions on a global level?  I guess if I were to pick one, I’d say that mobile technologies and “smart phone/pda as tool” will be big – either using the camera/scanner functions, geolocation, apps – will probably be what people will be experimenting and talking about.  But really, I have no idea.  The technology arena changes so fast that it’s hard to predict – but that’s what makes it sort of exciting!

As for resolutions, I have a couple professional ones:

(1) I’d like to formally learn at least one more programming languages, emphasis on the formal.  I’ve self taught myself into being at the point of being dangerous.  I can break a website real fast.  Real fast. But I think I’d like to take a class on some of this stuff.

(2) I want to get an idea and start in on the research of a serious scholarly work. Something with statistics – I want to keep the science in Library Science.  Additionally, I’d like for it to be a topic that is both needed to be studied/written about and can hold my attention for the months that it would take to complete the research and writing. Finally,

(3) I’d like to learn a little bit more about what happens in tech services.  I don’t ever want to be in tech services – no offense to tech services people – but I think I would like to understand better what people are talking about when they talk about our ILSes and thus be able to judge what they can and cannot (and what they should and shouldn’t) be able to do.

I guess I’ll check back in 2011 and see how I did.