Well, its 2011 so that means its time to review my goals for 2010 and set some new ones. This post will be focused solely on reviewing 2010.

• Goal #1: work less – SUCCESS! I think that 2010 proved that I could be more productive at the office without putting in a lot of nights and weekends. My boss recently gave me the permission to say No! which has been huge for my productivity. I’m hoping that this current work environment continues through 2011. The future is exciting!
• Goal #2: 2 in 12. – FAIL! This was my running goal and while I did run more this year, I didn’t hit my goal. The best that I did when I was running quite a bit this summer was 1.5 in 9. 1 in 6 happened a few times but I couldn’t make it to 2 miles in 12. I was more commonly a 8 miler man honestly and it was only when I really really REALLY pushed myself did I hit those numbers. And to be honest, it was stupid when I did push myself like that. I always paid the price and couldn’t run for crap the next couple of times out. Nolan coming along kind of killed my endurance as I didn’t exercise nearly enough. But I’m turning that around.
• Goal #3: the 5 hour work week.– FAIL! I didn’t put in 5 hours a week, but I did do quite a bit better on the side business. More hours before Nolan but he’s falling into a nice pattern which is making it easier to dedicate that one hour back again.
• Goal #4: Inbox Zero! – FAIL yeah, not even close on this one.
• Goal #5: read one book a month. – SUCCESS! While it doesn’t seem like it, I read quite a bit this year. Maybe not every book all the way through, but a good majority of just about every baby resource I could get my hands on. A lot of them were fairly short and not near enough fiction books. But still, I call this one a success.
• Goal #6: Stop checking email first thing in the morning. – SUCCESS! I think it goes with #1 but I have definitely stopped checking things first thing in the morning. Maybe not as much now that Nolan is around and I need to pass the time while he sits up and falls asleep (typically) after his morning bottle.

Conclusion

It wasn’t a steller year, but still fairly successful as far as my goals went. While I fell short in quite a few areas, I did better than I expected while failing. I’ll live with 50% and look to improve this year. Onto 2011!

4 people worked together simultaneously on a single Google Docs spreadsheet. Each cell in the 100 row x 186 col spreadsheet was filled using 18 different colors. The entire process was captured in time-lapse.

You can get the original spreadsheet used in this video and learn how it was created at: http://docs.google.com/holiday

Happy Holidays!

This is more for the programming geeks out there than anyone else. If you are looking for a quick and dirty way to store your BlackBerry username and password when using the BESUserAdminClient.exe, refer to the following document.

It allows you to simply pass a secondary password that will reference the credentials stored in the registry.

To set the password:

To access the credentials from the registry:

Those that know me know I’m a big fan of 37Signals. Heck, I even applied for a job there once upon a time along with several hundred other people.

Over the last week or so they have been having some major issues with their campfire product. And in true 37signals style, they have an explanation and apology all wrapped up in one great blog post.

What’s so great about it?

Well, first off, its honest. There’s no marketing bullshit. No fake apology. Its sincere and straight forward. They had several issues, they laid them out, and took full responsibility for stuff breaking.

This was very productive for me at the office. At the beginning of the week, my boss gave us some pretty strict instructions that we needed to focus on getting some projects done. Basically, if it didn’t come directly from him, we were to tell whichever person was requesting our time that they needed to talk to our manager and we couldn’t help them. Simply put, we were getting too distracted by others pulling us into customer support issues.