From Where I Sit
My Resolution for the New Year

By Larry Eiss

I am not one to make New Year’s resolutions. It has become abundantly clear over the span of my life to this point that they are invariably broken, forgotten, or rejected—and who needs a self-inflicted dose of guilt? Yet this year I feel confident that turning a goal I’ve had for a while into a resolution will prove beneficial. As I reflect on this goal I see that I have had it for quite some time now. In fact I have been carrying it out with increasing vigor for the last 18 months or so.

I had always wanted a good camera, but I felt that if I didn’t have an SLR there was no point in taking pictures. If I couldn’t change lenses, I reasoned, then I couldn’t be creative with my photography and I’d rather “just say no.” Consequently, I had never been interested in taking pictures with any of the cameras we had over the years. It was June 2006 when I chased the moths out of my wallet and bought a digital SLR camera. It rocked my world. A new hobby into which I could pour money and energy was launched.

After the messy bubble burst of 2001-2002 I had written off most of the business potential of the Internet as nothing more than wishful thinking. Yet by 2005 or so I was hearing an enormous number of increasingly convincing reports of money being made on the Internet. In September 2006 I decided to do something about the fact that I was out of touch with what was going on in “Web 2.0.” I began, with significant assistance from my technical-wizard of a son-in-law, by creating a blog. I have had a lot of fun with this, and along the way it has introduced me to other important concepts such as podcasting, social networking, affiliate programs, etc.

For over a year I enjoyed writing articles for my blog. I saw it as a sort of online magazine about topics of interest to me. Initially, I covered three major topic areas on my blog, but eventually I began to see that one of them needed its own space if I were to feel comfortable writing about it. I facilitated that by creating a second Blog dedicated to that topic. That was all it took! Now I have created several, including one for our church, and I have benefited enormously from everything I’ve learned.

After I had been taking pictures for a while it occurred to me that if I learned to make frames, I could combine photography with woodworking. I “ran right out” to Amazon.com and bought a few books on matting and framing and then went and got the tools I needed. Never in a million years did I ever see myself doing this, but now I can mat and frame my pictures or anything else my wonderful wife wants to hang on our walls!

Framing and matting brought with it the revelation that it was possible, and a whole lot of fun, to combine photography and woodworking. In so doing it catalyzed another idea for combining my hobbies. Just this winter I began creating more interesting blog articles in which I provided a photographic tutorial about how to make end-grain (butcher-block) cutting boards.

What a great time I am having with this latest endeavor. It seems effortless for me to create significant content for my site, and I get to do three things I love: make sawdust, take pictures, and write. From where I sit, life is good!

This year I plan to get a lot better understanding of social networking via tools like Plaxo Pulse, Twitter, Spock, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and others. I think there is treasure to be had there, but I don’t yet really know what it is, hence my resolution for 2008.

In the year 2008, I resolve to continue to try new things.

We have a lot of new things planned for WebFOCUS this year as well. Though I am not yet able to talk about most of them, I encourage you to sign up for Summit because we’ll be showing some amazing new things there. Summit will be held June 1 through 5 in Nashville this year, and I, for one, am excited about that location. The music and hospitality are legendary.

I invite you to join me in resolving to try new things this year. There is much to be gained. A new excitement about career and life in general is one worthwhile result. Who knows, one of your experiments might just make your BI system more valuable as well!