While seeing friends & family in NC was awesome, the most important thing I got out of this recent vacation was a chance to reflect. It's hard for me to divorce myself from my work and my mindset in San Diego long enough to take an introspective look at where I am in my life. My life is defined by project after project, milestone after milestone, release after release. I'm so hard looking a couple days ahead, that before I know it, I've been in San Diego for nearly two years.

That's not to say that I'm unhappy with my life - I'm quite happy with it. I've achieved more than I wanted when I got here, and I work at a job I truly enjoy with coworkers I have a ton of respect for. But while I've grown professionally, I've neglected my personal life. To hang out with friends that have no connection to work ... it had been nearly seven months since I had done that.

So what am I doing now? I'm doing a bit more to feel happy outside of work. To tether my whole state of joy to work is unhealthy (at best). I bought a piano before I left for NC - already I'm enjoying learning new pieces (started Clair de Lune today!) and it's such a relief to not think about work when I'm playing piano.

I'm also going to start biking again on the weekends. In NC, I used to bike for hours on weekends - at least 4 hours a day. I loved just whooshing by trees in the trails and being alone in nature. I need to do this again (time to get a bike tune-up!)

The most important thing is to not live selfishly. I'm always floored with Southern hospitality (yes, it exists, and yes it's significant). I always complain about it not being here, but whose fault is that? My own! Even if it's weird, I need to stop living in my own world all the time and start being nice to strangers, too.

The last thing I don't do as much is write. Back in the day, I used to love reading my RSS feeds and commenting on the news of the day. Do you realize the last time I've done such a thing on this Tabulas? You can search, but it's been a long time.

I used to write to help spread knowledge and information. It seems I just write for myself - how narcissist it must sound. Maybe it's because there's not much left to learn in the web development world - everyone pretty much has accepted standards, and all the tools are already there to do whatever you'd like. Maybe it's the maturation of the industry ... who knows. There seems to be less to read and less to be interested about.

Maybe it's cause the whole notion of Web 2.0 is dying, or that Facebook came along and did everything that everybody wanted to do. It seems the whole industry lacks real vision - it used to be so easy to build up something new and fresh - it seems it's not so easy to do that now.

I do seem to lost the ability to truly think critically. Lately, I found myself reading a whole lot of material on economics (refreshing myself on some macroeconomics), and it was really refreshing to learn and think critically about a subject. My day-to-day is so scattered that it doesn't lend itself to deep thinking - much more instinctual shallow thinking. Maybe this is why so many managers end up being developers again - to sit in one area, think critically about a problem, and solve it, is so refreshing. I have to be honest, there are very few "wins" I get - most of the job is dealing with cleaning up the "losses" and making sure they don't happen again. And it really is hard to measure the absence of failure ;)

So maybe I'll start providing some more insight into ideas on this journal again - ideas about communities and wikis and social software and politics and economics. Who knows.