Let’s take a look at my past year’s resolutions:

• Keep my desk cleaner: FAIL
• Eat better: Mostly FAIL
• Take more photos: FAIL
• Speak Japanese to Kaio: Mostly FAIL. Sigh
• Be less of a spec junkie when buying stuff: Neutral
• Buy a fricking iPhone already: WIN!
• Sell more old stuff on craigslist/ebay: WIN

Ok so that looks pretty bleak. And here’s some for this year.

• Exercise
• Speak more Japanese to Kaio
• Be “smarter” at work
• Take more photos and videos
• Move this blog to some hosted service

And onto the rambling.
I’m quite happy with the Mac Mini. I had all kinds of performance concerns, but it turns out it’s totally good enough, even with it’s 5400rpm disk, and an external 7200rpm disk for photos and such. Maybe I just don’t have time to push it, or maybe Lightroom got good enough. But once again, all that worrying beforehand seemed silly. And I still have room to upgrade to SSD or to 8GB of RAM when I need it.
Yes I paid the apple tax. But I think I stopped caring about that about a week later. And after hearing how much pain my friend just went through upgrading his box, I’m kinda glad I saved that time.
Win7 was nice, and it was lame, basically as I had thought it might be. It makes the core OS part of the windows experience slightly better, but lots of other problems remain. Shitty OEMs, disconnect from the unix/linux/oss activity, etc. Aero glass looked nice for a while there, but after using a mac for a while again, it just feels silly.
Over the winter break, I pretty much didn’t touch Windows, and I was fine.. which made me realize that the only reason I need windows is for Exchange at work and Office (mostly for work as well). Actually, browsers worked better on windows until recently, but with the release of Chrome for linux, that’s not really the case anymore. Chrome for linux might be a game changer. It brings a top-class browser to Linux, and it has process isolation, which really makes Linux browser annoyances go away (like Flash killing all your tabs). This makes a Linux-based browser appliance even more viable (thus ChromeOS). I know web apps aren’t quite there yet, but you can definitely see the trajectory now.
A lot of people still don’t really believe in web apps, and I don’t blame them. But I think “web apps” will become more and more the code-delivery mechanism that things like Java were supposed to be. There always were and always will be things that make more sense to run on the client.. but there’s basically no reason that those things shouldn’t be delivered through a browser like experience. Back in the day we have all these thick client apps that were client-based by default and reached out to servers when necessary, but maybe we’ll start to see a world where things are server-based by default, and code will only be delivered to clients as necessary. All the pieces aren’t there, but you can’t really deny the efficiencies of this model.
I dunno about this whole Apple tablet thing. The first version is probably going to be slick but have some annoying shortcomings, like the iPhone. It’ll be about the “3GS” point in time which it may get interesting. I’ll probably by a netbook first. These thinkpad x100e’s look mighty tasty. I wonder if they run linux.
Another unexpected thing I did at home this past year was get a chorded mouse. I was happy with the MX1000 for the longest time, but nobody makes good mice anymore. The magic mouse was not very ergonomic, and new high end mice require too much software. Maybe I’m an old fart, but I just want a mouse to be a mouse. Three buttons, clicky scroll wheel. Why is it so hard?
On the photo front, I strongly considered a GF1 at the end of the year, but didn’t get around to pulling the trigger. But after talking to my dad about it a little more, it might actually happen. I just want something that can take slr-quality images, but that is easier for me to bring places without having to think, “oh this is going to be a camera kind of outing”. The nikon dslr is still big enough that it modifies my behavior when going out. Whatever camera gets me the same performance/quality as the dslr but has less of that negative effect is a winner in my book. I think.
The iphone’s been good. AT&T sucks, but oh well. I like my bejeweled. I can see myself getting an Android in a year or two though. I like the trajectory more than the iphone. They just have to figure out their whole multitouch story, and make a good keyboard.
Hmm, not much to say this year I guess.