Well last season ended well and the upcoming season is close upon us. I've been invited to join the High Performance team this year which is going to mean a bucketload of training (where am i gonna find time for this???) but I think it'll be fun.

Goal setting is always tricky - you need to set achievable but challenging ones. I think my overall goal this year will be to place better in the final AFL rankings, and to place better in the open division of the tournaments. I'm usually in or near the top 8 but I'd like to get another open medal (or two ;) which would mean placing in the top 4. That will be quite challenging but I don't think it's too far out of reach. I'm going to really have to work on my mental preparation skills and refine my technical skills to even hope to have a chance at meeting these goals.

I spent some time at a conference over the past few days discussing with my collegues Scott Olszowiec and Mehmet Doğan the need for more than a technology conference in the Atlantic Provinces. Together, we agreed that the lack of a forum east of Montreal and north of Boston for brainshare between web professionals is somewhat frustrating. To this end, we will be working together to try and get something organized for next summer. We'd like it to be a forum to explore trends, techniques, solutions in web work today and discuss the possibilities for the future. I'd also like to see a track that blends the technology with the real life application in academia, maybe in the form of case studies - how is the web being used in the classroom today. How would you like it to be used in the future. Kind of a think outside the box track. Maybe a track would be too big, it might be better suited to a panel discussion.

Books, books and more books. I come from a family of readers and it seemed, growing up, that books were jammed into most available spaces in our home. I started reading at a very early age and books became like my favorite friends. Of course the early years went from Seuss to Miss Pickerel to Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew. And then my early teens were spent with Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Asimov, Clarke and others of that genre. A brief foray into the horror novels and then one day I picked up the Lord of the Rings and a whole new world opened up for me. The world of action, adventure, heroes, good vs evil. It also seemed that there was much variety in this area at the time. From novels spun from mythologies (my favorites being the Celtic myths) to action/adventure novels, dragon novels, relationship novels, but lately the pickings have grown increasingly slim, the bookstore shelves being slowly crowded out by the Forgotton Realms and AD&D series.

So after a long friendship with fantasy novels, it seems like the well has run dry and not much truly original work is being done in this genre. So one of my 43 things goals was to expand the range of genres that I'm reading. Happily, I've rediscovered Science Fiction, and I am now trying out some bestseller/action/adventure type novels like Brimstone by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child , DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, and others.

Also happily, while perusing books at the bookstore (they had a buy 3 get the 4th free sale) I checked out the young teens books hoping I could find something interesting for Aliya and there amongst the young angsty books and the O.C. novelizations I came across The Outsiders by S.E. HInton. Man, this was one of my favorite books at her age so I picked it up for her. She loves it. I think I'll borrow it from her when she's done and read it again.

Latest Books read:

• Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
• Pandemic, Daniel Kalla
• Decipher, Stel Pavlou
• The Family Trade, Charles Stross

• Still Life with Crows, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
• Sethra Lavode, Steven Brust

• American Gods, Neil Gaiman

It's February already but I've managed to start training again (as I set out to do in a previous post "time to reconnect...recommit"). So I went back to the club on Tuesday and Wednesday night and glad to be back. I'll be entering the Fundy Open at the end of the month - we'll see how it goes.

Happy New Year! With the new year comes new resolve. Although I’ve been fencing for about 15 years (and foil is my weapon of choice) I’ve been kind of on hiaitus for the past couple of seasons – not really training or participating in tournaments. When I stopped I had to stop because I was burnt out on the sport (training, coaching, competing, managing our Canada Games team…) but the hardest part now is getting re-motivated to return. I trained last fall for a couple of months and competed in a tournament but haven’t really committed to returning since late October. I don’t want to quit the sport so I don’t know why I don’t go in to the club every week. Surely I can’t be that lazy.

So one of my 43 things goals is going to be attend at least 2 more tournaments this season which in turn is going to require a commitment to training.

My dad was an amateur photographer (among other things) and he taught me how to develop black & whites and we’d go out on shoots together – it was lots of fun. He’s gone now and the darkroom’s dismantled. Fast forward a bunch of years and I still think of going out on shoots – but never seem to make time for it. Lately, we’ve been going on about getting a digital camera and finally got the one we’d been looking at, yesterday.

I've added "Take More Pictures" to my list of goals on 43 Things so to start on my goal – I’m going to work on the 26 Things photo challenge.

I was invited to this site to try it out. How it works is you create a list of 43 things you'd like to do - a list of goals to achive (short term, long term, lifelong). You can look at other people's lists, mark off stuff you've done, add comments to other people's goals. Interesting. In fact - addicting! I think this is an awesome concept and I think perhaps it may even help me to work on my goals (now that I've committed them to writing). Mental lists are fine but they don't seem to have the realness (weight? strength? whatever - ) of the written word. Seriously cool app.