It’s the end of the year and as we prepare to welcome in the new year I want to take a moment to reflect on the past year.

The majority of my time this year has been into building up my primary company, Traffic Engine, Inc.. Very similar to what I was doing after ditto.com after it shut down and reformed as VPP Technologies (even though they still operate under the ditto.com brand). We’re basically a technology provider for web publishers. Our ad-serving platform provides them a meta feed of ads, based on the quality of their traffic, along with real-time reporting. Of course, everyone just assumes I do spam. Little do they know the long hours spent honing my finely-crafted algorithms to detect and block click fraud.

The rest of my time has been spent split between writing short stories and working on Open Source. I didn’t attend any writing conventions this year, but I did go to Penguicon in April, LinuxWorld and the Ubuntu user conference at Google in August, and the GNOME Summit in Boston. My two passions (writing and technology, for those folks who haven’t caught on to that yet) have merged, as I’ve begun a literary love affair with cyberpunk.

Travel-wise, I made several trips to southern California for work (I’ve lost count of the exact number), San Francisco, Boston, Las Vegas, and a layover somewhere in Texas along the way. Dena made one trip to southern California with me and the Las Vegas weekend was our little vacation this year. I had a planned trip to Paris, France for work, but it was too close to the holiday crunch so I canceled it.

Health-wise, I’m feel better than I ever have. I’ve lost 100 pounds and lost 10+ inches around the waist. I’m happy and healthy.

As far as resolutions go, making a list is the thing to do.

• Write more
• Work less
• Delegate more (I’m hiring web designers, a systems/linux administrator in the Chicago area, and a php/perl programmer)
• Lose more weight
• Enjoy life

Happy New Years!