Geoff Holden

These are not quite resolutions, but a short list of my (personal, not professional) goals for this year. I’ve never been in to the whole ‘make resolutions and change your life on the first of January’ thing. Maybe it’s because I’m not really that long out of school, and the start of the school year always seemed like a more logical place trace in some vices for virtues. So these are goals, they’re fuzzier than resolutions and if I get off track, I can correct myself later in the year and still meet them.

Take a photography course/workshop/etc.

Now that I have my DSLR, I’d like to learn more about photography and make my photos better. This may be a class, an online thing, or (worst case) start doing the ‘projects’ on some of the photography websites and get critique on my pictures.

See more of the Bay Area

I’ve been living in Palo Alto for ten months now, and there is so much there I haven’t seen yet. I’d like to get out and see the sights and do the activities that are available in the area.

Read more books

I used to read a book a week or so, I’ve been on my current one for over a month. This will probably mean spending less time watching TV, but that’s OK. It will also mean picking up a few of the ones I have sitting on my Amazon wishlist (which I use as a ‘things I might want to buy’, not as a list for others), but first I have to get through my current queue–which is at least five books long.

Post here more often

My (unpublished) goal for this site in 2006 was to do an average of a post each week. For the last two and a half months I was doing OK there, but only because of the ‘Photo of the Week’ posts, which don’t really count (in my mind anyways… I consider them to be half a post or so, depending on how much I write to go with them). This year I’d like to get to the real one post per week, but so long as I do better then 2006 (42 posts, minus 10 photo of the week, so lets call that 37).

Buy less things impulsively

I always have good intentions about planning to buy something in the future (a few months out), but end up telling myself that I have the money available and just buying things right away. As soon as the idea starts going in my head, I keep thinking about it and just do it. So, part of this goal is to stop doing that (both by holding off on bigger things, and just not lying to myself about waiting to buy other things). The other part of this is to develop the ability to walk through Fry’s (to pick up a magazine, etc.) and not buy other DVDs just because I see them there.

There we go, five goals for 2007. They don’t seem like they’ll be too difficult to reach, but they have enough wiggle room that some of the areas can always be improved upon.