Time for a little reflection on where I've been.

My creative interests have withered all over the place. New Songs, photos, blog posts, movies (theatrical and DVD) all dropped by about half between 2005 and 2006. I've written far less in my personal paper journal. Miles traveled went down. I've had less interesting ideas to jot down.

I think I've gone up on the number of books read, especially if you count comics. Thank you Brian K. Vaughan (Ex Machina, Y: The Last Man, Pride of Baghdad), Garth Ennis (The Boys), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, 52), and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise). I've stayed about the same on my fiction and non-fiction reading.

On the professional front I've done great. I've finished out the year with a 4.0 GPA. I've got a great job.

In the last half of the year I've been trying to get into more hobbies. Most of them revolve around building projects that interest me from Make magazine.

One of my Christmas gifts was a book on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms. I'm hoping this gets me back on track with building a collection of BEAM bots to solve Sudoku puzzles using ACO. My other BEAM bot building projects have been an exercise in frustration. Soldering together BEAM bots without any kind of circuit board has proven to be extremely difficult for me.

I did get a cordless Dremel for Christmas which I think will be exceptionally handy for fixing up some clay sculptures I made with Emily. One got messed up in a kiln accident, and the other needs some surgery. I'm also thinking about creating a chess set with theme fruits and vegetables using Sculpey and will probably Dremel out mistakes.

Most frustrating was the lack of emotional connection to the people around me. I drifted away more this year. I'm hoping that changes in 2007 but I'm not sure how to make that happen.

Vast landscapes can have much the same anxiety-reducing effect on us as ruins, for they are the representatives of infinite space, as ruins are the representatives of infinite time. Against them, or within them, our weak, short-lived bodies must seem of no greater consequence than those of moths or spiders.

Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

A timely reminder that my present struggles would do well to be set aside, and that perhaps a trip to a vast landscape would do much to rejuvenate me.

The NY Times has a good story about Netflix and their rental patterns.

Netflix sends and receives 700 million DVDs a year. Out of their 60,000 titles 35,000 to 40,000 are out every day. That number is surprisingly diverse. I would have expected Netflix's 5 million subscribers to be more homogeneous. I guess the movie interests of Netflix subscribers are far more diverse than the mainstream movie theater crowd.

I wonder what the difference is between an average Netflix subscriber and an average theatergoer. My guess is that ticket costs make the theatergoer less likely to take risks. I'd love to see some of the art house theaters offer up a subscription program like Netflix that encourages people to take more chances.

Yahoo launched a new TV site and then got repeatedly bashed in the comments by users. I was surprised to see the normally snarky Techcrunch comment on how this is a good thing for Yahoo. The idea being that Yahoo is soliciting feedback and acting on it.

It reminded me of my own recent woes trying to figure out a useful way to translate an email message into a blog post or comment. The problem was that what may be useful in an email message (quoting every message in the thread, signatures, etc) are mostly noise once you structure them in a web site. Recent events have reminded me of the importance of feedback. I've started trying to think of a way to collect feedback inside the web app as to what's noise and what's signal in a posting.

I also noticed that others have problems gatewaying HTML emails out of mailing lists as well.