Dead Ink Vinyl

My daughter turned one year old today. She is crawling and cruising, exploring and learning, smiling and laughing — a happy baby on the cusp of her toddler years. You would not know to look at her that she was born six weeks premature, that she entered the world at just 4lbs 13oz, and that she spent 11 days in the neonatal intensive care unit. Our family has been very fortunate to have exceptional doctors and medical facilities, to have loving and supportive family and friends, to have great health care coverage, to have access to prenatal education and information about prematurity, and to have a daughter who is a tenacious fighter.

We are very fortunate, but we know that our story didn’t have to turn out so well. For many newborns, premature birth is just the beginning of a long struggle for survival, where every breath is a small victory. For many families, a premature birth is an incredible and lasting emotional and financial hardship.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The March of Dimes is working to ensure that one day all babies will be born healthy. After successfully supporting the development of two vaccines against polio in the 1950s, the March of Dimes refocused its charitable infrastructure to serve mothers and babies with a new mission: to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality. The organization accomplishes this with programs of research, community services, education, and advocacy, along with the annual March for Babies.

My daughter’s first birthday was made possible by research funded by the March of Dimes. Help me in supporting the March of Dimes during this year’s March for Babies so that more children can see their first birthdays. Donate any amount by visiting http://www.marchforbabies.org/dlkinney0603 or clicking on the March for Babies badge to the right (if you are viewing this on my web site).

Best regards,
David

Tonight I found myself trying to decide between “me” and “myself” while writing an email. My usual heuristics failed me, so I decided it was finally time to learn the grammatical underpinnings of “myself” and know with certainty which word should be used in which contexts. I headed over to the excellent Grammar Girl blog and found an article about the appropriate uses of myself. If you’ve ever been tripped up with any English grammar, check out Grammar Girl.

In January, I posted my goals for 2009. I haven’t looked at them much since then. Let’s see how I’m doing.

Finish reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning I haven’t picked up the book yet this year.
On target? No

Learn Erlang and develop at least one non-trivial application with it I have read a few more chapters about Erlang, but I couldn’t read or write a serious Erlang application.
On target? No

Learn git and use it exclusive on at least one project I have read the PragProg book and I now have a personal project for which I’m using git exclusively and hosting as a private project on GitHub.
On target? Complete!

Learn Mercurial (hg) and use it exclusively on at least one project I haven’t looked at hg at all
On target? No

Learn OpenSolaris and adopt it as a part-time development platform I have “two”: books and VM instance of it, but I don’t think that I will make serious progress learning OpenSolaris until I install it as the primary OS on a workstation
On target? No

Learn dtrace and other application performance analysis tools, and use them to improve the performance of at least one solution I develop I have read about a third of Sun’s DTrace guide, but I haven’t been using the knowledge on anything so it’s slipping away from me.
On target? Yes

Learn enough about Nagios for basic system monitoring I haven’t started on this yet, but it has shuffled up a little on my priority list now that I have a VPS
On target? Yes

Play with CouchDB Haven’t touched it. Haven’t even read the book going up online.
On target? No

Spend serious time learning EC2, running instances, monitoring them, respawning them, and so on — get comfortable in the cloud I have already spent a lot more time spinning up and working in EC2 instances than I did in all of 2008, but only for experimenting and profiling — basically using EC2 to avoid buying another computer for my home. However, I have started using Slicehost for VPS. It’s not utility computing and it’s not really cloud computing, but it’s moving in that direction.
On target? No

Significantly contribute to at least one open source project I haven’t even picked an open source project to which I want to contribute. I had considered Adobe Alchemy, but it’s not OSS.
On target? No

Write 80 or more articles for this blog over the course of 2009 This is only my fourth post this year.
On target? No

So there I am. How are you doing on your new year’s resolutions?