I received an email from a friend of mine informing me that a friend of mine had just passed away. His name was Robert (Pete) Simar, and had been suffering from Mesothelioma.

Pete was the step father of a good friend of mine, but I was very close to the family as a whole. I was included like I was a member of the family, and I considered them as part of my family. Pete was really a great guy, he was kind, and was a lot of fun to be around.

This situation is a bit worse because I have never had anyone really close to me pass away. I had a few family members pass away years ago, but we were not close. Pete and I were much closer and I wasn’t able to visit him while he was in the hospital, which makes it even worse.

I am so excited about 2010, last year was exciting enough, but this year is going to be fantastic. I moved to Mountain View in October to start working with a new team and work on transferring to another department. It looks like that is going to be finalized around March/April and I just moved the rest of my belongings out to Mountain View.

I had two separate posts with resolutions last year, one for January 1, and another for my birthday, since that really is a new year. I am going to roll over my old ones because I had no time in 2009.

• Sell/trash old stuff that I don’t use anymore
• Spend more time blogging (project52)
• Take better care of my health
• Improve Django and Python skills
• Work on a startup
• Create an Android application
• Eliminate all debt
• Start dating again
• Create a solution log
• Move up in Google

Today is Christmas, and for many years my family has done very little for Christmas. There are many reasons for this happening, but it is sad none the less. This year I am alone, I wanted to get the apartment cleaned up before I fly to Atlanta tomorrow because I am bringing back a lot of stuff. I had offers to eat dinner with my team lead, but as I said I just wanted to relax before a very long week.
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So in my last post, which was a while ago, and also happened to be my birthday, I mentioned my new years resolutions.

So since this is MY new year, here are my resolutions:

1. Lose weight
2. Take better care of my health
3. Start dating again
4. Transfer departments at work to the department I would like to stay for the rest of my career
5. Spend more time blogging
6. Write an article or two for an online site, like I used to for Linux.com

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So today is my birthday, and I am 27. The day was like any other, I was in my apartment all day, and just relaxed. Later in the day I did start to feel a little odd after a nap, just sorta bleh.

So as another year starts I feel some things need to change. I need to get out more often, and start to take better care of myself. With my mouth finally starting to hurt less I am taking fewer pain killers and can hopefully start taking my cholesterol meds again. I’m sure they don’t conflict, but I didn’t want to take any chances and forgot to ask the doctors.

My career is in my opinion starting to take shape and taking the shape I would like. While I have had to put a lot of effort into it, and worked a lot of hours, I feel the effort was worth it. I do feel that I may regret some of it later as I didn’t really enjoy life and instead pushed for the career. That may have been the wrong approach, but I have seen a lot of people spend their entire life working towards a career or their piece of the pie and I think that getting that out of the way early leaves you more available for the other stuff later in life. The people in my life who know what I have had to do, mainly friends from work, understand just how difficult it was because they have intimate knowledge of what we do and what challenges exist. Maybe one day I will be important enough that writing a book about my life will make sense, after all a book is a life goal of mine.

So since this is MY new year, here are my resolutions:

1. Lose weight
2. Take better care of my health
3. Start dating again
4. Transfer departments at work to the department I would like to stay for the rest of my career
5. Spend more time blogging
6. Write an article or two for an online site, like I used to for Linux.com

We’ll see how it goes, I don’t know that I do such a good job completing my goals that I write down.