New Years Blogolutions

IT has been a pretty good year, all in all. I didn't accomplish all I wanted - I only wrote 61 posts (not counting this), which is considerably less than the 149 I wrote in 2009, but many of those went into depth or required considerable research and preparation. That is also 61 posts while contending with a super-busy year at work and home, so I shouldn't complain. I have also made some new friends, which is always good.

StatCounter tells me I've had 25,381 page loads, 17,168 unique visitors, 14,364 first time visitors, and 2,804 returning visitors in 2010. This is actually down somewhat from 2009, but I've been less active, and 2009 included the remains of massive traffic spike I got from the Blog-of-Note in December 2008. Google stats tell me I now have over 200 RSS subscribers - Thanks everybody!

(and the ball drops - 10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5* - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - Happy New Year!)
(* about this point I jump up to kiss my wife and nearly knock over my painting tray in the process. If what you do on New Years Eve is a preview of what you will do in the New Year, then apparently I'm going to be spending a lot of time kissing my wife and cleaning up disasters. Could be worse!)

What I hope to do in 2011:

I think I've got one or two more good Lanchester's Laws posts in me, which ought to really nail that topic down. I might even use some historical data and do some of my own modeling, which would be good for a whole new series. I have a nagging doubt about the existing Lanchester's models - I think there may be something fundamentally wrong about the existing historical analyses, and I want to take my own poke at the problem. I'm probably wrong, but doing my own research on this idea could be fun.

The Lanchester posts have helped me see how point system can be built, and I've already written bit of this, but I want to consolidate this into a few concise posts detailing what I know about how it should work, and what parts are still open questions. This has been one of my long term goals, but now that I am finally within reach it is opening up new questions, so the quest will continue.

I want to write games. I have that grand idea in my head of writing my master game that combined every idea I have ever had (and that's a lot) into a single game, and I just know that's a bad idea. I need to write some smaller games and practice expressing these ideas in a form that others can try.

I really really need to get back to my painting again. When time is short my painting tends to fall by the wayside. Having a wet palette helps though, and I've got space clear in the basement for what is supposed to be our painting studio.

I need ... to get to bed! Goodnight and Happy New Year. Keep those dice rolling!

Dan