What A Year Means.

I’ve started and stopped numerous web sites over the past 16 years. Either personal in nature or topic-specific. Sometimes they are updated frequently, other times they run out of steam. I started a podcast for awhile too, but that came to an end after about 6 episodes.

Often, I find my voice in these journals reflects interests I may have, but not necessarily the composite picture that I have of myself. So, as we say in product management land, they inevitably come to their “end of life”.

However, I’ve really enjoyed this incarnation over the past year, starting with colejolley.blogspot.com, and now carrying over to colemanjolley.com. I think it provides me with an online presence, a journal where I can form my thoughts, and keep a record of my interests throughout the week, the month, my life. Maybe someday, I’ll squish it all down into a book and annotate. Smile.

So, what a year means to me. This year. A raft of uncertainty. Floating like Huck Finn and Jim down the river at night, away from their dogged past. Most of it on “sabbatical”. Which means I took a long time off between jobs to unlearn the bad habits of the previous one and to open up my eyes and mind to what was exciting about the world of today.

I spent time on fitness. I traveled a lot. I listened to a lot of music, but remember mostly the hours rediscovering vinyl with my friends at the Loft, Katy Perry – IT girl for the year, and the final version release of Chinese Democracy. Here’s a top 10 of what I heard the most:

1. Timberlake and Timbaland – What didn’t they touch?
2. Katy Perry – she was everywhere.
3. GnR – Chinese Democracy. Axl reinvents a reactionary medium.
4. Vinyl – after decades, it really was amazing to re-hear Revolver and all that I have been missing, again.
5. Dengue Fever – Cambodian pop, present and past.
6. Maroon 5 – Rihanna opened my mind to them a little more, and there’s some really smart pop in here.
7. Rihanna – Ella, ella, ella. What the 80′s should have sounded like.
8. TV On The Radio – numerous. Repeated listenings reward.
9. Nat King Cole Trio – The Columbia Recordings. Simply greatness.
10. The Ones – When We Get Together. THE song of the summer, in all its variations.

I walked the dog a lot. Took classes on real estate and java. I spent a lot of time interviewing for new jobs, honing my story and presentation and finding some truly awful people in software and media companies that will go unnamed. I waited in line for 6.5 hours to buy an iPhone 3G, on a whim, and it ended up changing my life.

I resolved to focus on that which matters to me, and not so much on the less important. And now, as the year comes to a close, this site/blog/journal/lab graduates from its first year of existence into a new platform and new plans for the coming year. If you stop by with any regularity I hope you will keep reading.

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