Being in Tokyo I guess I'm one of the first to make the jump to 2009.  Here's hoping it's a great year for everyone!

Any new year's resolutions?  I used to not do that sort of thing (actually I usually found myself making them around March for some reason) but now I'm more inclined to do so.

My goals are to pass the JLPT level 1 test (if I didn't pass it this last December) and to try yoga several times and see about making it a habit.  The big one is to make a career change with an accompanying rise in benefits/salary.  For STC I intend to get the poll system fleshed out in the next couple months and start pumping out reviews on a regular basis.  And there are tons of little tweaks I hope to implement a bit at a time

My resolution is also related to the career move. My current annual income approximates 3,000k to 3,200k JPY. This doesn't necessarily suck given the current economic state but I think it's still very low for a college graduate and the likelihood of getting laid off is moderately getting high, and after all it's almost impossible to settle down in somewhere with the earning. To pass some civil service exams for stability (an officer of Tokyo government would be the best, followed by the revenue or the local court) and then start studying for a 2010 CPA exam while working there are my plan.

Aside of job switching, I'm going through a Lasik operation for vision improvement. Updating my TOEIC score (got 890 two years ago but a bit too an unsatisfactory result) is also good.

Happy New Year, all.  I've got resolutions, but my head's swimming from the champagne I downed just a half hour ago.  Mayhaps tomorrow we'll list.  I mean, later today.

Cheers to 2009!

If I've any resolutions at all, they're to get back to being involved online and to actually play the games I accumulated over '08. Big chunks of last year got swallowed up with work and assorted family emergencies, and I'm hoping this year will be a bit more forgiving.

shana and I went to the Grand Victoria casino on new years eve to play slots... we arrived around 9pm with $600. We played mostly the quarter slots, but sometimes the nickel and dollar ones too.. At 12:15am we fed our last $20 into a $5 slot and got 4 dead pulls from it...

Then we cashed out our winning vouchers which totaled $755 so we actually made $155. it was pretty cool to go gambling for the first time in 9 years and come out on top.

we mostly played the machines side by side and had rules.
-only put one $20 in at a time
-the instant you get a win that puts you above $50, cash out and get your voucher (start with a new $20 if youre staying at that machine)

shana (who had never been to a casino before) nailed a $240 win on her 2nd $20 and we were ahead the whole nite. My biggest win was $160.

gambling is fun if you go in with no expectations...

My New Year's resolutions are:

1. Do not upgrade to the Blu-ray format. Although visually impressive, my income is not. Furthermore, the Blu-ray format turns movie watching into detail observation. I recently watched 10,000 B.C. in 1080p on a Plasma and found myself paying great attention to little details. The smilodon (sabre toothed tiger) was clearly digital, along with many of the backgrounds. The woolly mammoths looked convincingly real. But the most impressive feature of Blu-ray is in revealing every conceivable macroscopic feature of the human face. Faces look more real than they really do. (Notice how I'm rationalizing my inability to afford this new format?)

2. Continue to write every day. I recently impressed myself by noticing I've written 22,000 words on a single subject, over the course of 6 weeks. (A typical 10 page college research paper is 2,000 ~ 3,000 words.)

3. Go to the gym earlier in the day. I've found myself become lazy about workouts, not in the sense that I don't do them, but in the fact that I delay them later and later in the day. (Life was great before I had to work. I used to go to the gym in the mornings, often a second time later in the day, and then finish the day by running at night. This partly explains why so many people with kids are usually not in shape. I don't have kids, a wife, girlfriend, etc., and I still have great difficulty finding the time to maintain a regular exercise program.)

I never understood New Year's resolutions, I guess for some people it gives them a goal to work towards, but my sole goal everyday of my life is self-improvement.  Sure what this means is fluid and ever-changing, but it's also not temporal or easily abandoned.  I do enjoy this time of the year however to see the number of patrons at my gym double, for about two months.

Rather than list all of the resolutions I have planned, I'll just list the two most important ones.  The first is finishing everything I start.  I've got a backlog of games, projects (both recreational and work-related), and assignments that sorely need tending to, so finishing them up would be the first order of business.  From that point, I hope to strengthen my resolve to better prioritize and simply gets things done in a more timely fashion.

The second is to curb my spending habits.  I've totaled an astronomical bill from 2008, much of which I'm ashamed to admit resulted in things I wished I hadn't bought.  "See, Resist, Save" -- it's a three step process that's easy in concept, difficult in practice.  Especially the second step; I've got the willpower of an eight year old in a candy store.

At the very least, I can proclaim that I've never gone into debt as a result of my spending.  It all gets paid on time, but huge chunks of change being blown is still huge chunks of change being blown.

My only new year's resolution is to find a new full-time job, mostly because I don't have a choice.  My company was recently purchased by a bigger company in the same industry, and there's no guarantee there will be a place for me at our new overlord's HQ.  So this will be an interesting year for me.  Yay! ;-)

Happy 2009, where I'll keep trying to make things happen that I've been trying to make happen for years.

Happy New Year to all you blokes. My holiday season was f---ing awful, and I sincerely hope for anyone who shares that opinion with me that their year in 2009 gets better. Be safe, everyone!