I haven’t blogged anything yet this year, mostly because there’s been nothing to say. 2006, frankly, feels so much like 2005 I think it’s the least significant new year I’ve ever had.

That said, having moved back up to Manchester a few weeks early to revise for some exams, I’ve started to get things in order and review whats on offer from the year ahead:

• Not making a student loan budget last term has hurt and means I can’t spend any money until about May. It’s my own stupid fault, of course, but I suspect I’ll be eating a lot of pasta from here on. The immediate aftermath of this discovery is the near-overwhelming desire to buy an iPod Shuffle for the gym, just so I can sync it with Last.FM afterwards, which my phone’s media player won’t.
• The first exam is just over a week away. It’s going to be hard and there’s a lot to cover. But as I read through the material I don’t feel overly stupid, which I think that’s a good thing.
• Oak (my final year project, desktop search tool) needs some progress. The design remains solid (apart, possibly from the choice of a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express database. There may be a late change coming up). Regardless of backend technology, there should be a beta 1 around the 28th of February, and then two more releases over the following weeks.
• ResinTheBand.com is up for a Wordpress based refresh. The site exists partly to offer up as an example of my work and because the current site has some severe faults, I want to fix them out of shame before a prospective employer uses it against me
• There’s the Carson Summit on February 8th. That’s going to be very interesting indeed with a lot of extremely influential and inspirational people there. I understand there will be a substantial social afterwards, which conveniently runs into my birthday on the 9th (just in case anyone was mistaken that I might be settling my beer debt).
• I’m almost certainly going to travel for short-bit over the summer. New Zealand is an option (although it won’t be a prime time of year over there, of course) although the front runner is Iceland (perhaps with some of Scandinavia thrown in). Colly is so enthusiastic that I go there, I may yet hire him as a guide (for hire read kidnap or blackmail, see the above point about having no money).

Which all means that from having had a fairly sedate Christmas break at home with the family, life has very suddenly got busy again. I don’t really know how it happened

Happy (belated) New Year.