First Post

So here I am in 2009 starting off the year horribly sick and unemployed in a terrible economy.  Still, I have very high hopes that I can make some good things happen for me and my family this year.

Last year I posted some goals, and I only hit 40% of them.  This year the 2009 goals are much more personal and private.  Still, it's pretty interesting looking at the posts from January 2008 to see how myself and the world have changed in a year.  Here are some thoughts on year old topics:

Warner Goes Blu-Ray exclusive:  Even a broken clock is right sometimes, and I'm still glad BD won the day.  A year later, HD optical media is still where I said it would be; the infrastructure is not there yet for downloads to rule the universe.  Since I will most likely end 2009 with 1.5mb DSL (come on, U-verse...) I don't see this changing in 2009.

Program Control: Man, I continue to be somewhat disappointed in the entire Windows Mobile/Compact Framework universe.  I will not shed a tear if I never do mobile development again.  I have a post coming out regarding what I think (whatever that's worth) MSFT could do to use its strengths to Win in the post iPhone world.

Task Parallel Library: I went on do do a LOT more parallel programming in 2008, my favorite being getting xUnit.Net to run my unit tests in parallel.  I have a lot more stuff coming this year, including a re-working of the tree-based scheme.

New Office: Hard to believe, but Wednesday was my last day in the aforementioned new office.

I think 2009 is going to be a great year.  I don't think it's too pessimistic to think that in terms of the economy there are areas where we might not have hit bottom yet, but in general I think America is still free enough to pull ourselves out of this.  A lot of people are excited about the new president, who seems to be settling into Reality and his economic team has promised to lower taxes across the board which is what we need; definitely not the platform he was elected on though.  Markets are driven heavily by Expectations, and a lot of folks expect great things from this guy, so at the least I'm glad to see some positive energy out there.