Half five in the morning and the insomnia seems to have come back, fresh for a new year I guess.  Alcohol has worn off and my eyes have stopped stinging from just a little too much Call of duty 4 on XBox live.  It's not really bad at all, I'd say if I take one thing away from 2007 it would be "productivity".  If I could take two, I'd raise that a "control".

I spent this afternoon writing the start of what I hope will turn into a natural language email filter, I'm no expert in natural language processing, but I figure I can learn on the way.  In principle it doesn't seem that difficult.  I want to try integrate it into the anti-spam / email processing engine I'm writing at the moment (which I'm dabbling with the idea of open-sourcing, as everyone would obviously care).  I guess even if nobody notices, I'm trialing it at the moment and it's pretty decent, at least performing as well as spam assassin (with better actual performance) and native to the .NET platform using a nice plugin system (you choose how your email is received, what you scan it with and the actions that are then performed.  If what you want doesn't exist, write it!).  This isn't as much as a tangent as it seems, as this year I largely struggled to remember who I was and who I am, in the middle of a relatively large flurry of productivity.

I guess I also reaffirmed my knowledge that all the places you ever work will roughly be equal, made or broken by the people you immediately surround yourself with.  Because at the end of the day it's all profit, sometimes it's ugly profit and sometimes it's cuddly profit, but it's almost not worth trying to tell the difference as long as you perform at your maximum capacity, if only to prove that you can.  Saying that, work is good, I feel stimulated by it, and I don't tire of it.  I still come home and write proof-of-concept code for fun, so I'm almost relieved that work hasn't destroyed that.

In retrospect, apart from some of the work I've done (programming work) I can't really say I'm proud of anything about 2007.  I think I regressed into isolation slightly then pulled back out of it.  I think I'm proud of some of the Warcraft raids I ran.  I'm not proud that I repeatedly didn't finish illustrations I started and I'm definitely not proud of the solace I found in relative isolation.  I'm very proud that I finally got a holiday in December however.  I think I've let a little too much of me become my job and a little too much of my job become me recently.  It doesn't help that my job now is what was always my hobby, which whilst obviously a wonderful thing, blurs the line between my private and professional life a little, though on a slightly derived subject, I'm glad I've shared less of my life with the many and more of it with the few.

I think I spent 2007 roughly 1/3rd with loved ones, 1/3rd working and 1/3rd playing video games or other peripheral entertainment, and in a sense I guess I've found quite a delicate and even balance in my life, so I guess 2007 made me complacent, numb and happy.  I think I want to challenge myself more in 2008, I don't make resolutions and won't start now though.  I suspect I probably learnt more off my own back than I ever have this year, so I guess now it's time to start playing games, loose some of the productively balanced control.  I suspect I'll be more vocal (I hear the sniggering...) and attend to the things I let slide whilst I took a year to learn.

This isn't from 2007, but I think I like this photo looks like the way I remember this year...

... and a little something that is very much unfinished ...

I'll get round to that soon.

Mass Effect is very good, as is Mario Galaxy.  Call of Duty 4 online is excellent and I'm running a Magtheridon raid for god knows what reason (the loot is awful!) tomorrow / this evening.  Just so you can be happy in the knowledge that I'm still going to mention my crippling addiction to videogames every time I write something here. 

Goodnight.