Another year has come and gone — as tradition dictates, it’s time for a birthday retrospective. Since last October, I’ve…

• dabbled in print design for friends
• had some code published in a book
• finished the first half of my clock and have seen the first output from the second half
• read Ulysses and The Name of the Rose
• redesigned this site (again)
• started using Twitter as a 1-to-many communication tool for little updates on life
• secured my home network

One thing you’d be hard-pressed not to notice is that I’ve slowed down the rate at which I post new articles… I’ve been taking mobile photos instead of high-res ones, and I’m using bookmarks instead of blog posts to share articles and sites I find interesting. (If you subscribe to my blog via RSS and aren’t getting a daily rollup of these, be sure you’re using the combined feed for this site.)

I’m following Gruber’s lead here — frequent links with short comments on each, and an occasional larger article about something new or original. What do you think?

In terms of where my time goes, the missing piece I don’t blog about much has been our involvement in the high school youth group at church… we’re often hanging out with the students instead of exploring parks or taking photos on the weekend. This has been incredibly fulfilling — to make a long story short, we’ve discovered that what the kids value isn’t so much our talents or our personality, but that we’re consistent in our participation and are committed to being involved in their lives.

At work, I’ve seen a shift from growing my technical abilities to really becoming aware of strengths and weaknesses in my soft skills — with an eye toward career choices I’ll need to make in the next couple of years.

Oh, and I’ve started learning to play guitar, too. Nothing to write home about yet — give me another twelve months!