opinios

Looking Forward

It's nearly the end of 2004, and that is a good excuse to break the silence with a post, even if no-one will read it because I haven't written in so long y'all have probably given up on me!

So let me look forward to the year we are about to embrace and set a few goals. In 2005 I intend to:

• redesign this wretched web site, and post more often. I have enrolled in a part time Associate Diploma in Graphic Design and will keep the content pretty design-specific, with the occasional tangent if I go travelling somewhere exciting. The site revival probably won't happen until March, as work will be too hectic before then. But when it comes, it will be worth it. New illustrations, a portfolio, and much, much more. Really. You'll see.

• buy a house! This is on the cards very soon; Kim will be eligible for employee-discounted home loans from The Bank at the end of January, so we will be looking in earnest pretty soon after that.
• organise my contacts list in order to keep in touch with my overseas friends a bit better. Dear friends of ours have had babies, changed jobs and sent us wonderful presents from afar, and I haven't got round to congratulating or thanking any of them yet.
• take more pictures. I think I'll put in an order for a small digital camera for my birthday and try and adopt Kim's approach to capturing the moment. Well, maybe not as extreme as that, but I certainly want to build a larger collection of stock images to use for web projects and personal little artistic ventures.
• revive the Kanji web site. This is something that I began with great gusto in January last year, and then hit an SQL error when retrieving search results and never got over it and let it fall by the wayside. Now that my job is more technical and I am having to improve my SQL skills at work, I should be able to translate some of that knowledge to get this going again. NYC-based fellow blogging Japanophile gleek has offered to help out, which should be extra incentive to get the ball rolling.
• learn Macromedia Flash. I have gone through several phases of being motivated enough to do some tutorials and try to tackle the learning curve but have never gotten much further than being able to make a circle morph into a star with sunglasses on. Woo. Hopefully this year I can get my Flash skills up enough to be able to integrate this important medium into any sites that could use a dash of that little extra something.
• do some more drawing. I have neglected the pen and paper for too long, and want to expand on a few ideas and styles that I started to flesh out a couple of years ago. I also bit the bullet and bought the Adobe Creative Suite, and plan to colour/touch up some of my drawings with Illustrator and Photoshop, to share with you all! Stay tuned.
• and a couple of other small projects which I won't elaborate on just yet. But they will be exciting and rewarding and hopefully I can get them up and running fairly soon.

Ok, that's it! An ambitious list, and I probably won't get through all of them, but if I can knock off a bunch of them I will be happy. Tomorrow we are off to Hobart for Andrew and Kathleen's wedding and a holiday in Tassie. Hope everyone had a safe Christmas and that you all have a terrific New Year.

And if you have in fact had a great 2004 and feel like sharing the love, why not make a donation to the Red Cross to help victims of Sunday's tsunami in Asia. They sure could use it.