It's beyond passé to wish yourself a happy blog birthday. But this *is* the root node of my vast vanity media empire, and I *just* happened to see the timediff "52 weeks 21 hours" in a log file, and it's been an inordinately long year so I feel the need to reify something of its essence and be done with it. I don't currently have a "regular" job, so instead of singing myself a song and trolling for happy comments I'll just write up my year's worth of accomplishments and areas needing improvement for next year as if I were undergoing an "annual review".

Accomplishments:

• Seeded vast vanity media empire with humbly named "One Big Library [1]" online publishing venture; now has 350+ subscribers, and unprecedented annual advertising revenues which funded my recent purchase of two bags of groceries
• Completed class in formal languages and automata [2]
• Gave talk at code4lib 2006 [3]
• Co-authored paper indexed in MEDLINE/Pubmed [4]
• Served on first grant review panel
• Led development of unAPI spec [5]
• Gave first talk in a few years on FLOSS in libraries [6] in Ohio
• Co-authored paper on unAPI [7]
• Landed a great consulting gig on a useful and fun project [8]
• Learned some ruby and rails
• Started a fun podcast that's been "featured" in iTunes [9], now with ~200 subscribers
• Learned the basics of audio production (what *not* to do, in particular)
• Managed to not ruin Access Hackfest for a fifth straight year
• Saw Ottawa, Corvallis, P.E.I., Dublin (OH), and a tiny sliver of Quebec for the first time
• Got hand/wrist/arm strain roughly under control through divers implements of destruction, refraining from work, and dragon naturallyspeaking install
• Joined advisory committees for two fascinating projects
• Finally started writing that book
• Gave worst named talk ever [10] at NISO meeting (it went much better than the title might lead you to think, honestly)
• Started a magazine column (slated to begin January 2007 in an actual paper-based periodical)

Areas needing improvement:

• Still *really* need to build up parallel processing knowledge and chops
• Improve skills in the area of killing projects that aren't working and need to be put down
• Get back to work on the book
• Stop thinking up projects faster than I can do them
• Learn to consistently communicate very technical ideas more usefully to less- and non-technical audiences
• Get better at doing projects faster
• Improve focus - practice doing one thing at a time
• Keep up better contact with people I've worked with in the past
• Improve practicable understanding of probability theory and combinatorics
• Stop freaking out every time I hear somebody say something idiotic like "at four petabytes it's five times bigger that the Library of Congress!"
• Learn a functional programming language
• Be sure to take time to exercise regularly while away on business travel
• Stop killing kittens (not what you think! film at 11)
• Learn to approach important deadlines more, um, gracefully

All told, 2006 will go down in my personal history as a year when many people I'd greatly admired and had met - some of whom I'd been lucky enough to spend some time with - passed away. If there's a party goin' on out there somewhere I'm certain that John Iliff, Ali Farka Touré, Ross Atkinson, and Fred Kilgour will be there. Or at least the library there will be *amazing*, with the most fantastic West African guitarist you ever heard playing nearby. And my dad will be taking pictures of all of it.