First off- I want to wish everyone a very happy 2009. It’s a strange thing that most of the important people in my life, for all manner of reasons, have been looking forward to the start of this year or the end of 2008. The opportunity to start the new year with a fresh mindset is something that I’ve decided to fully embrace in all it’s clichéd glory and give Future Me a great year to look back on. So here’s the plan.

I’ve got a couple of typical resolutions in mind; concentrate more on my friends and relationships, cook more food rather than buying in, no alcohol for the whole of January, give blood – the usual stuff. Plus, there are more specific goals I’m definately pushing for; a couple of websites I’m really looking forward to getting involved in, a few changes to this site to better reflect the direction I want to take it, and there’s a couple of personal aspects of my life that I’m definately looking forward to getting on with over the next year – if all goes well, you’ll be hearing a LOT about them over the next year!

I also plan to start doing some dedicated learning this year – the Simple Dollar has a great article on this very matter. It’s just a case of now deciding which two to choose! Here’s the shortlist so far:

• Playing the ukulele (comedy musical instruments have huge appeal)
• Improving my PHP skills (2008 was the year of .net languages for me and I relish the idea of change)
• Learn to cook more Japanese food at home (my Wagamamas trips need to be cut down!)
• Improve my javascripting (I worry I’m getting too reliant on frameworks and would like to keep my skills more focussed on the core language rather than, say, jQuery)
• Invest more time in Twittering (I finally got Twittering in 2008 and I plan use it a whole shed-load more over the next year.)
• Learn some sweet-ass card magic tricks really well.
• Rediscover my passion for Flash Actionscripting (it was the thing that got me into web-technologies in the first place, and I’m very aware that my skills in that arena have waned in the last year or so..)

I’m going to give it a few more days of thought before choosing my final two – but I’m going to aim for a balance between marketable career skills and something that can keep me entertained (and enable me to show off to others, obviously). In the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts on learning a skill I hadn’t considered and am possibly missing out on, let me know!