DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A number of people whose sites I frequent lamented the year 2001, as if some ‘2001' entity had caused them to have a bad time for most of the past 12 months. I’ll admit to having burned a calendar in effigy at one recent New Year’s celebration, but in truth I believe that anyone who is struggling to find highlights for the past year is bound to repeat the exercise 52 weeks from now.

In 2001 I achieved a number of exciting things — one of which I’d been talking about for years but begun to question whether I’d ever actually accomplish. In a word, I got fit. I changed my diet, began exercising, and lost more than 15 lbs. I must have changed my metabolism too, because during my recent trip to Europe I ate just about everything in sight for 10 days, yet came home weighing less than I had when I left. (Either that, or someone reset the scale at the gym.)

In 2001 I wrote 232 items for this journal, the traffic to which increased tenfold over the course of the year, thanks to terrific readers such as you, and lots more at googlebot.com.

In 2001 I released my weblog software — my first piece of open-source software.

In 2001 I took excellent vacations to Germany, Amsterdam,St. Louis, Sun River, Canada, Sonoma, San Diego, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. I saw two fantastic music shows, Stomp and the Blue Man Group. And I ‘ran into’ two local musicians of note, Mickey Hart and Tom Waits. Heh.

In 2001 I changed most of my house’s lighting to fluorescent, and reduced my consumption of electricity dramatically. My wife and I also managed to complete two remodeling projects that had been in the works for far too long, and which I continue to appreciate daily.

In 2001 I baked about 200 loaves of bread, and I was told by at least 3 people (who had mouths full of my pizza at the time) that I should dump my engineering gig and open a pizzeria.

To round out the year I replaced a flaky and noisy old webserver with a new machine that is about 3x faster and one-tenth as loud.

Looking forward, I’ve made a number of challenging resolutions for 2002, one of which is to not let this journal go unattended for weeks at a time. How am I doing so far?