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I got back from my trip to Amsterdam a couple of days ago. I had a great time there. I took lots of photos, many of them of ducks.

This is caffeine:

I was pretty excited to find recently that you can now purchase pure caffeine from sports supplements retailers. Caffeine’s cheap – it’s the by-product of decaffeination – and I like the idea of caffeinating my own drinks (rather than just drinking coke or whatever). So I bought some. The picture above shows 200mg of the stuff, or about 2 cups-of-coffee worth. It was nice added to some orange juice and lemonade.

I present to you Jimm’s Page of Groovosity – one of the first websites I ever made. I only found it tonight by accident. Indeed, I have absolutely no memory of making this. Judging by the timing of it, I think it dates back to 1998 or thereabouts. I’d have been 16. I can’t believe it still exists. I can vaguely remember making those graphics in the version of Paintshop Pro 4 that came free on the CD of a computer magazine.

There’s some stunningly awful poetry there. I mean look at Visions of a Seer. I point out on the site that it won the senior poetry competition at school. What I fail to mention is that it was the only poem entered into the senior poetry competition at school. Seriously, how angstful is this?

Gaze upon the pain that you never dared believe existed.
Gaze upon it now.
But when you look away you won’t remember.
You won’t want to remember the truth.
For the truth
is pain.

Ha!

I do kind of like my collection of javascripts though. I particularly like the Shakespeare Quote Generator. I think I must have spent an evening typing in the Shakespeare section of the big book of quotations we had when I was a teenager.

I apparently only got the first bit of the website done and the section about my ‘online aliases’ is missing. Calaxir (which is the search term that led me to this ridiculous little piece of personal history) was the name a character I played in one of the early chat-room style free-form RPG’s on WBS. I really should have chosen a better name – one that didn’t sound like a laxative. I mostly hung out in the Realm of Elahrair.

Bah. Kids today with their MyBook and FaceSpace. Back in my day we had to hew the raw HTML out of the internet with our teeth. And we liked it that way.

So I have a few New Year’s resolutions. They’re the usual kind of things. Lose weight. Get fit. Eat right. Have more fun. Get more stuff done. That’s all kind of nebulous though, so to be specific:

Lose weight: I have a 38 inch waist. I want a 34 inch waist, which is probably a couple of stone.

Get fit: I want to complete the one hundred push-ups programme. I’ll be starting tomorrow and blogging my progress here.

I also want to start swimming one or two evenings a week. There’s a really good swimming pool on my way home, which should make it pretty easy to incorporate into my routine. I need to get some swimming trunks and, since I have really long hair, a decent swim cap. Goggles sound like a good idea, too. I’ll go shopping for this stuff next week, probably.

Eat right: I have a reasonably good diet most of the time. I want to eat breakfast every morning and prepare a lunch for the days I work rather than buying junk from the vending machine.

Have more fun: I haven’t been on holiday for years. I don’t want to spend too much money, but I’d like to take a long weekend off and go somewhere nice, either alone or with friends. I’ll continue to develop my guitar playing (being able to play decent barre chords by the end of 2009 will make me happy) and read more.

Get more stuff done: I want to start using Google Calendar and to do lists more to organise myself. I also want to keep up with paperwork better and utilise the filing system I already have set up more consistently.

So that’s the kind of stuff I’ll be aiming for in 2009. I made a lot of changes in my life last year, so there’s no need for me to do anything too dramatic now. If there’s one thing that 2008 taught me, it’s that small, incremental improvements are the best way of approaching this kind of stuff. I’m looking forward to 2009 (one more hour to go before it begins!). It’s really good to be able to be hopeful and confident about the future, which isn’t something I’ve been very good at before.