#taskboy

Well, it had to happen. I reached my fortieth birthday this week.

Given that my son is a year and change old, I don't have as much time for blogging as I once did.

They say parenthood changes your perspective on many things. Despite my best efforts, I am afraid that has happened to me too.

I launched two web services this year in the social media space: Nestor and Linksnest. While neither is wildly popular, these tools helped me learn the latest web design principals and tools.

Looking back at the start of the year, I see that I began with a stealth project for a friend that involved collaborative filtering and ajax. Need to get back to that at some point.

I sponsored a few kickstarter projects and contributed a prize to the Interactive Fiction Competition. I guess if I can't do stuff myself, I can at least help those who are.

I got a mole on my face removed, but am experiencing some blow-back. Stupid organic body.

I worked for three different companies this year, one of which I worked for twice. We got our house painted and traded in our cars for new ones. I tasted 30 year old Laphroaig. Materially, it was a better year than many others had and I know how lucky I am.

We lost a great old lady cat, Miss Lulu, this year. She will be missed.

I just discovered that the taskboy RSS feed has some broken links. I fix that as soon as I can.

This extended hiatus brought to by my son, Angus.

I decided to do some year end number crunching on this web site's usage numbers. These are, of course, generated from the servers access log. I present them here as a benchmark for the future.

Monthly Averages for 2010 Gigabytes served 2.9 GB Visitors 20,834 Pages served 53,423

In late November, I put an end to remote linking to images hosted here. It was a small drain on resources, but an annoying one.

Frankly, a good bit of the traffic listed above can be attributed to google, yahoo, bing and their moral equivalents spidering this site.

While I'm generally proud of my blog output this year, I still haven't found an audience for this content. Or I haven't found content for this audience. :-/

In the Projects section, I have added two new games: 7Tries and Hanged Man. These are poor implementations of classic time killer games.

UPDATE: I have re-organized the project section to break out online games from desktop ones. I have also added a clone of Mastermind.

As is my tradition, I post a sort of year-end evaluation of my life around my birthday. This year is no exception.

I was on a holiday sojourn in Brooklyn this year when I turned 38. By weird chance, I was but a few doors away from John Hodgman's home. I did not see the nerd hero and fellow Massachusetts native in person, but I did detect his home's WiFi network. How do I know this? Because his network is very clearly marked.

This year was a transition for me and I suppose many people. I lost my long-time job with Leostream, a company I helped launch. That was the first job from which I was ever let go. Technically, I was laid off. Had the economy been better, I don't think there would have been a reduction in force. But, for every door that closes, a new one opens.

I have not been idle during this time. I have done some contracting and have attempted to launch my own software company. Although that failed, I did learn how to write a formal business plan. I have been revitalizing my technical skills, which had become narrowly focused during my Leostream years on virtualization. That lead to two restructures of the taskboy.com site and a few new public utilities. I have become interested in video production using python. And I have some ideas for next year that I'm very excited about.