Marty Nemko offers some good career resolutions for 2005. He circles around a theme but never quite lands on the most important idea. Think of your career like a business. You're CEO of your career and the one-person company that is your career is the most likely vehicle you have to succeed. Just like a Fortune 500 company you need to plan, budget, prioritize, increase education and understand the competitive marketplace. Although your annual report may look more like a holiday letter than a 50 or 100 page glossy, it is the process that is important. What is on your strategic plan for 2005-2010?

Purgatory, if ever there was or is to be such a place, has descended upon email at work. In this fifth year of the 2000th year after some arbitrary date many institutions have high quality, reliable email. On the other hand there are the places that have support of email only when it is convenient. For two days or more the system has been mostly down and definitely crippled. What I can figure out for certain is that most people aren't able to get or send email. Unfortunately the faculty and staff I support are mostly in the category of people who appear to not be getting email. So on a long weekend, when people need it most email is once again non-functional and the usual suspects are not reachable. On the upside we got reliable backups working on our own in-house system last week. I'm guessing that the time to transition may come sooner rather than later.

On December 20th I drove down to Florida to spend a couple of weeks with my youngest brother, Jake, at Florida International University. It was great getting to see him because it has been a long time since we spent any time together.

We went out to bars and clubs every night for two weeks. My typical day (night) involved going out at 11:00 PM and returning at 6:00 AM after a stop at waffle house or IHOP. I'd then sleep until the early afternoon, and, as they say on the shampoo bottle, "wash, rinse, repeat".

I am definately getting too old to keep partying with kids more than ten years younger than me but I have to say it was a great stress relief and a good break from the routine I have lived for the past year.

As for training, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am done with my flight training and am now certified to fly Blackhawks. All that I have let to do before graduation is two weeks of survival training and then additional month of classroom and field problems. I expect to graduate and get my wings at the end of February.