Friday, December 29, 2006

New Year's Resolutions for 2007

It's time for making New Year's Resolutions and I've finally made a decision about mine. I know that I'm more likely to be successful if I am very specific so I've picked three specific things that I want to do in 2007, things that I can objectively assess. In keeping with the theme I've selected for myself for next year (preserving memories) I resolve to:
  1. Always enter the meta data for my photos when I first download them from my cameras to my computer. I absolutely must get into this habit! I love looking at every new batch of photos and playing with them (editing) but adding the tags and batch info is not so fun and I put it off. Then before you know it I have more photos to download and I haven't put the meta data in for the last batch yet. You may think, what's the big deal? Well, when I spend a day taking pictures I usually take between 100-200 photos, sometimes more, rarely less. Keeping track of who's in what picture becomes very important so that I don't have to search through the whole batch for the one I'm looking for. In the last year (2006) I took just over 6,000 hobby photos (not counting the photos I've taken for my customer's web sites). Yes, my hard drive is groaning (each of those images is either 6 or 8 mega pixels depending on which camera I used). But more importantly, I'm groaning! When I want to try to find a photo I took "sometime in the spring" it becomes a nightmare. So I'm going make a habit of adding my tags and batch info right away so that I can find all those photo memories :-)
  2. Become a tea drinker. I'm a Diet Coke addict. I love the stuff. It's my drink of choice in just about any setting. I've known for a while that it's not good for me and now I've decided to do something about it. I'm determined to become a tea drinker because not only is tea not bad for you, it's good for you! And hopefully the antioxidants will help me preserve my own memories (I'm having more and more "senior moments" and it concerns me). I like coffee but I don't love it. I like tea but I don't love it. I've never been a big fan of warm beverages. But for the sake of preserving my memories (and better health in general), I'm going to try to make drinking tea a habit.
  3. Pick one project (from my theme/focus for 2007) representing each of the 4 main branches of my family tree and complete it by the end of the year. I'm hoping this will keep me moving forward with documenting the history of all of them.
I'm trying to be realistic with my resolutions. I hope I can accomplish these and feel good about what I've done by the end of the year. It will be interesting to look back on these resolutions and see if I've been successful. Here's hoping we are all successful with our resolutions for 2007!