For the past few years, people have posted their theme words for the year instead of just resolutions. I think this is a great idea as it can give better focus to the things you want to accomplish and help you gauge where you are at throughout the year. Tara’s word is ACHIEVE while Erica has chosen ADVENTURE. There are plenty more out there.

My word for 2010 is (RE)BUILD.

2009 was a tough year for me on a personal level. I had some things I had to face up to and because of that, people and things had to be allowed to fade away.

Well, 2010 is going to be about building those relationships back to where they were and beyond. I’m especially talking about my two best friends that have been extremely patient with me and last year I didn’t pull my weight with the friendships.

But I’m not only talking about interpersonal communication with my word, I also want to recapture the building of code, apps and ideas and sharing them with the world. I want to explore new technologies and thoughts, putting things up for people to see.

There is plenty more I look forward to doing in 2010 but I want everything to flow out of my word: (RE)BUILD.

This is pretty weird for me because I played football with Jay when he was a senior and I was a junior. There was always little bits of chatter about his strength and workout routine and some speculated he was getting help.

It’s a crazy, connected world sometimes.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

Such an amazing speech!

Seth Godin put together a great list of possible ways to make an impact in the world.

Obie and the crew at Hashrocket are going to build things for the Apps for America contest.

I don’t know what I’m going to do but I want it to be meaningful whether that is Monday or beyond.

If someone were to ask me exactly why I was leaving, I couldn’t do much better than pointing them to this post by Jeff Atwood and drilling down to this quote:

Also, having programmers who believe that their employers actually give a damn about them is probably a good business strategy for companies that actually want to be around five or ten years from now.

I could go on and on, citing specific examples but really what would be the point? I’d burn bridges and embarrass the people I know and respect who are still there. That’s really not my style.

Instead I’ll just say I had an amazing time while working for The Times and I’m very proud of the work we did for Topics and the Archives. Those will hopefully stay around and benefit the world at large.

But that’s all in the past now. Tomorrow is a new day, filled with new challenges.

Since I worked from home, both were behind a router but I didn’t want to pony up money for a static IP so you never knew quite was the IP was if things were reconnected. Obviously this wasn’t a big deal when I was sitting at my desk home but became an issue when I was up at HQ in San Francisco.

My solution was to have a cron job run every hour on the server and compare its IP with the one it had an hour ago. If it changed, it emailed me so I would know.

I mention all of this because Jeremy Zawodny has done the same thing though he has made it much more Web 2.0-compliant by using Twitter.

I imagine I would do exactly that as well if I needed to right now.

I have lots of windows open, everything from TextMate to iTerm so usually the desktop is just in the background but when it was so cluttered I could see the files piled up behind the scenes.

Will this help me at all? Who knows? But at least I’m not seeing little file icons everywhere. That has to be good for something, doesn’t it?

‘Mad Men’ review…