About this time every year I sit and write about my plans for the upcoming year the way that a city would write a master plan to make sure that zoning and development goes in the right direction. Being as distractible as I am from day to day, its easy to lose track of the big picture goals. Taking a few days to really get everything down in print about what's going on in my life makes a huge difference for me in being able to figure out what's important and what I need to work towards in the medium term.

This year I really wasn't going to bother. If this year has taught me anything, its that even the best laid plans are never really in your control. It's almost worth it just going day by day and enjoying the adventure as it comes. Then suddenly at the end of this weekend's adventure, motivated by the chemical influence of a double espresso, a thirty minute train ride, and a small helping of uncertainty, 2,000 words poured out from my fingertips and into the screen of my laptop.

This year's theme appears to be embracing risk for opportunity. It's become obvious to me that after nine years in the same industry, and five and a half in the same place, surrounded by the same stuff, doing the same things, that something needs to motivate and energize me to move forward and use what I've built not as a plateau to coast along, but as the foundation for things that are to come.

This week, this month, and this year I will be taking some chances, none of which I have more than a fleeting control over. I think its the only way the universe is going to continue to be good to me and continue to send wonderful things my way.

The dorkier part of this story is that since I'm writing what's essentially a big guiding document and general design for my life, I feel that its necessary to put it into some sort of version control system. When writing something that will evolve the way this document always does, being able to go back and look at the process is as important as the final document.

In years past it's been either done by hand, or RCS, or CVS, or most recently Subversion. This year I decided that I would try to use a decentralized version control system in order to be able to make changes and commits freely to the document but be able to keep it in a series of secure, not network accessible places so that I wouldn't be reluctant to write what was on my mind.

My first thought was Linus Torvalds' git, which appears to be so completely brain damaged as a Debian installer package that its almost unusable. Even after watching his interesting hour-long talk at Google and reading all the HOWTO documents and even a tutorial describing in great detail how everything in a git system is stored in directed acyclic graphs (with pictures), I was still no closer to being able to make good use out of it than I was in the beginning.

Enter Phil G. After a quick conversion on IM about the different open source DVCS out there, I went to the Mercurial site and realized that it was exactly the system that I was looking for. Five minutes later I had copies installed and decentralized repositories synchronizing between my Eee PC, my home server, and my Mac over my SSH logins. My only regret now is that the business cases for DVCS is so weak that even Linus couldn't make a good one (imho) to a room full of Google employees stuck on Perforce.

Well, that's about all I have the energy to write this evening before bed. Tomorrow will be a busy day of work and house cleaning (some more) for friends to come up to Baltimore this weekend to take a tour and hang out underneath the Cockeysville post office and punch holes in sheets of paper from long distances. And that'll be after a night with Phil and Rebecca G. pulling me around town to go dancing, a Playa del Fuego planning meeting, and an evening walking around Artomatic with Teresa.

My life is action packed, and I'm loving it.

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