Thus starts a new year in the life of /me

Well originally I had intended this to be the first post of the year, but my airplane weapon post ended up coming in on New Years Day itself (much to my own surprise – I mean who goes looking for security exploits on NYD ?), but still I only really feel like the year has started today.
Firstly, I’m back in Cape Town as of last night, and I started the next set of builds on Kongoni this morning, to run through the day for me to verify the results tonight. Secondly, I’m back at work with what looks like quite a busy year ahead of me.

I still want to fit in my centralized configuration file repository, and I intend to put it on my goals list for the year, along with that an overhaul of a number of related procedures is in the works, and ultimately I want to bring out average server uptime over 95% in general, and over 99% if you excluded scheduled outside-of-business downtimes. To achieve that I will probably have to push the average down a lot in the near future to get a bunch of proactive measures done, but once they are in place, that is where I want the average to normalize.
In a pure Linux environment I would have insisted on nothing less than a 100% average (it is doable with virtualization and fail-over tech) but since I’m dealing with some rather obscure unix variants as well that is not realistic here.

Enough about work though, I am going to be pushing hard on kongoni’s baseline1 in the next few weeks because KDE4.2 is due later this month and I would like to be ready for it. Wife->SilentCoder is coming home on Wednesday from her holiday and that I am really looking forward to because sleeping single was roxette’s worst song ever, and I hate acting out the lyrics.

Between kongoni and spending quality time with the lady, I am not expecting to have much free time left for anything else but of course – I am an expert at making time for drinking beer with friends (this is as much a survival skill in my life as knowing how to check the free memory in Tru/64Unix :p).

While I’m not one who makes much of the New Years concept, it’s pretty much an arbitrary point in the earth’s rotation around the sun with about as much actual meaning as the GPS coordinates of a unicorn preservation center (e.g. a number attached to a purely imaginary concept) to me, and I am furthermore all too aware that the date on which it is celebrated has changed not only several hundred times in our own history but is still not a constant across cultures (almost every non-western culture that celebrates New Years does it on a different day) which really just highlights how arbitrary the idea is. Nonetheless a new year does have some meaning – if a purely attached one – banking and tax cycles follow it, promotions and increases, inflation measurements and economic forecasts. Ultimately, the year is a convenient measure of time because it does correlate to a physical event which, while it affects us all in different ways, does affect us all equally.

To use an example, while different parts of the planet have different lengths and natures to their seasons, we all have all our seasons every year. So there is a lot of practical activity that does get affected by the New Year, not because New Year itself means anything – but because society uses it as a convenient reference point – and I for one am looking forward to the remaining 360 days of 2009 – a year that promises to be full of new adventures.

PS. I bought a WII -it kicks ass.