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Last year I put up my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010. They were as follows:

1. Read 50 books
2. Dunk a basketball
3. Systolic BP below 120
4. Start a stats website

The final tally is:

1. I read 34 books total in 2010: the 33 posted here, plus Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Overall, I read 12 fiction books (2 more than the 10 I aimed for), 11 business books, 5 “about me” books, 4 sports books, 1 comedy book, and Art of War which I don’t know how to classify really.

I also have some partially finished books. I’m about 80% of the way through How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (which is awesome), halfway through the haunting short stories of Raymond Carver in Where I’m Calling From, halfway through Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, and at least a few pages in to The Essential Drucker, a collection of Peter Drucker’s thoughts on business. The real lesson here: don’t read a bunch of books at the same time.

2. Nope. Probably made negative progress in this one over the course of the year.

3. Yup! First success. It was a mixture of medication, diet and exercise, but I got it below 120, if only for a moment. Hopefully this keeps me on the “heart-not-exploding” path.

4. Boom. Is it the kind of stats I thought it would be at the start of the year? Not even close. Does it count? You bet it does.

So there we go. 2/4 overall and I’m going to count the books thing as a pretty good showing considering how rarely I read books before this year. The dunking thing though, yikes. I only have so much longer where this is even reasonable so if I want to do it ever again, it better be soon.

And now, on to 2011!!!

This year’s resolutions have a little different flavor to them. I’ve identified 4 of the most important areas of my life (and a fifth category for “other”) and then found something to do/improve in all of them. With that in mind, away we go:

Health – Run a half marathon
“What a weak goal,” you may say. “You have a year, why not do a full marathon?” Well, Mr(s). Overachiever, by doing it this way I still have the option of doing a full if I want to. Besides, while I have run semi-seriously from time to time (mostly when not getting rushed to emergency rooms with a busted appendix) there is nothing in my history that makes me think running 26 miles is a good idea. If this first part goes well, we’ll re-evaluate.

Mind – Create a mobile app
This was the hardest one by far to come up with. In fact, I’m not even sure I like it enough to fully commit to it yet. I’ve always been proud of being a relatively smart and knowledgeable person, but just how do you go identifying some way to improve that without testing? I think my 50 books resolution last year was a pretty good compromise, but I didn’t want to copy it.

So how does this connect with mind? Well, I figure there’s a whole lotta stuff I need to learn to make this happen. Some of it I’ve already started, a lot of it I will learn as I go. However, this is a learning exercise for me so I’m putting it here. I’m not trying to make money on it (although I won’t turn it down) so it’s not business, and I already have a really good “other” resolution so I didn’t want to put this there.

Business – Get paid by 20 people
The absolute bare minimum of revenue from that number of clients would be ~$36,000 for 2011. Not enough to live off of certainly, but we have pretty solid reason to believe that we won’t be only doing the bare minimum of work for many of our customers. I didn’t want to set a public revenue goal (although we are talking about one internally) just because I don’t want all you people coming around asking me for money (or realizing how broke I am)!

For the purpose of this exercise, a single company using us for multiple jobs counts as 1 client. However, if that single company is dealing with clients of their own (such as a 3PL or consulting firm) then each different client of their we do work for counts separately. We have a huge meeting coming up next Tuesday, so this goal could either be really easy or really hard after that.

Friends/Family – Stay closer to those important to me
I’m awful at this and have been for quite some time. There was a summer in early high school where I barely saw my friends from school because I never called them, thinking that if they wanted to hang out with me they’d call me. I’m certainly better now than I was then, but I’m making a point to improve even more over the next year.

Other – Figure out my life goals
Ted Leonsis was on Bill Simmons’s podcast (The B.S. Report) recently. You may have seen the post I made quoting him about how owners who give away tickets are killing their teams. Well he also has a public list of goals that he want to accomplish during his life and a running scorecard of how they are all doing. I like that a lot and therefore am going to do it myself.

Since a list of goals I want to accomplish over the next 60 or so years of my life is going to be pretty comprehensive, I feel like I shouldn’t rush into making it. So, instead of just thinking for a day and throwing a bunch of stuff out there I’m going to do this a little slower, making sure that I’m covering all my bases here. It will almost certainly be broken up into categories like Ted’s, so any suggestions on categories that need filling or goals that need doing would be great starting points for me.

And that’s the plan for 2011. 5 goals, all reachable, but all a significant improvement over where I am now. Let’s see if I can better 2010′s completion rate.

I need to complain about this somewhere. The world done done me wrong.

Stupid Desean Jackson and his stupid punt return doomed me from winning my fantasy football league for a second straight year. Here’s the play, if you haven’t seen it.

With that return, Ben got 6 points for the Desean Jackson touchdown, 1 point for David Akers’ extra point, and I lost 3 points from the Giants Defense. That’s a 10 point swing overall.

The final score this week? Ben wins 89-84. Blech.

At the end of every semester a handful of students from the Georgia Tech MBA program go down to New Orleans and volunteer with the St Bernard Project. This organization works to rebuild families’ houses in Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes. It takes about $15,000 and 12 weeks of volunteer work for each house, but they’ve grown from serving one house at a time when they first started to having 50 houses under construction and 279 completed.  It’s a great group of people doing amazing work.

I have wanted to go on this trip for a while, but had conflicts each of the three times previous.  Fall semester first year was a family trip.  Spring semester first year I was interviewing with Flat World Knowledge for my internship.  Fall semester this year I was on one last trip with Dave before he left the country again to go see Georgia Tech in the ACC Championship Game.  This semester, I made a point not to have anything else that could conflict with the trip.  Both my parents went to Tulane, my grandfather taught there for 15 years, my mom and aunt both spent more than a few years living there, and I’ve visited a ton of times.  It just felt like the right place to give back to.

This trip we worked putting up insulation and drywall on the Meshell House.  You can check out some of the pictures on the St Bernard Flickr account, or just see the two that matter (me holding up drywall with my shoulders and our pyramid) below.

So go to the webpage, check it out, sign up to volunteer, or maybe even donate a couple bucks to help this group keep it up.

Craps is, by far, the best gambling game for a group of people. There are bets everywhere, numbers getting yelled out, 90% of the people don’t really understand what they’re betting on, and everyone wins or loses together so the table really develops this great camaraderie. This is a story about one craps table in Las Vegas.

From last Wednesday through yesterday night I was with a group celebrating our friend Aaron’s wedding. We started Wednesday night with one last run through the bars we frequented in college (which was both a ton of fun and disturbing at the same time) and then flew out Thursday morning for a weekend at Ceasar’s Palace.

On Saturday morning Randy and I, the only two who hadn’t taken part in the marathon gambling session on Friday night, headed out early to get some breakfast and do a little gambling. We through some dice, watched some soccer, won some money on Chelsea, ate a couple crepes at the patisserie in Ceasar’s and then went to go meet up with the other 3 who were just waking up. Once they got some Gatorade and bread in their systems it was off to Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall; not the nicest place on the strip by any means but close to us and specializing in $5 craps tables.

Aaron and Dave were too hungover from the night before so they left but Ben joined us for some cheap entertainment.  It started well but nothing too outrageous. A couple people crapped out quick and one or two hit a few points. We had each bought in with $100 and were probably up about $275 combined.

Then, Dan got the dice.

I can’t due Dan justice, but here’s what I remember. He was an older gentleman, probably late 50′s early 60′s, with thinning white hair and leathery skin. He wore a yellow polo shirt and a ring on his right hand that was a little horseshoe inlaid with diamonds. Now it seems ridiculous that I remember that, but we spent a solid 90 minutes looking at Dan’s hands. Those magic hands were incapable of throwing a 7.

Dan kept rolling for what seemed like days. The table filled up in about 10 minutes after everyone kept hearing the commotion from our table. I’ve never screamed “53!” “44!” “23!” and “Hard Six!” so many times in my life. Dan would set a point, throw some other numbers (I think Randy made so much money of Eight that he’s going to name his first-born son that), hit the point and move along like it was nobody’s business.

Aaron and Dave ended up showing back up to the casino about an hour into it, seeing us flush with money and standing in awe as we just kept raking in more. Initially Aaron was okay with it, “that nap was worth $500.” But as we kept pressing our bets, the 6′s and 8′s kept coming in, and Dan kept hitting points that mentality changed. Dan rolled through 4 stickmen, they had to refill the table’s chips twice, and we had 6 pit bosses surrounding the table watching every roll.  I think in all Dan ended up hitting 10 points before crapping out, including closing a fire bet.

A fire bet means that Dan set and hit all 6 points (4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) before crapping out. It pays out 1000:1 and a few of our newfound friends made out very nicely on that one. As for us, let’s just say that while we bought in with $100, when Dan finally crapped out we each had at least 5 times that much in play on the board and many times more than that tucked away in our pockets. I was at that table for over 3 hours and the dice never made it around to me to roll. It was a run that people dream of. We talked to Billy, one of the dealers who had also been there a couple days before when we first gambled, and he said something like that happens maybe once every other month.

Some of us went on to lose a good chunk of that money trying to hit one more lucky streak and some of us managed to hang on to a good deal of it. But in the end all that matters is that for one stretch on an early Vegas afternoon, we ran Bill’s.

http://www.ajc.com/sports/georgia-tech/former-georgia-tech-football-347323.html

I will swear to you with everything I have in me that, in the six years I would say I was friends with Reuben, he was nothing but a great person

As 2010 comes rolling in, I’m rolling out for a couple days.  My friend Gouda is getting married tomorrow so I’m going back to Peachtree City for that.  Then I’m leaving with a couple friends the next day to head down to Miami for the Orange Bowl and, hopefully, a Georgia Tech victory over Iowa.

It looks like this next year is going to be a busy one though, and I’m looking forward to a lot of different opportunities I have on my plate right now.  One will involve helping family members with a project that I can hopefully talk a little more about soon, and I’ve got a few ideas floating around with friends that we’ve started to move forward on so hopefully one of those takes off too.  Not to mention that I’m graduating from grad school in 5 months and will need a steady income again.

Should be an interesting time.

I hope you had a good one!  I know my family did with my brother pulling down a Macbook Pro and my sister getting a Sony Reader and a Blu Ray player.

Well played Facebook.

To be honest, I kinda want to go though.

I want to be able to say “Do not show me anything else like this, and de-friend the person who caused this to happen to me in the first place, while also sending him a message explaining just how much I hate all things UGA basketball.”

By the way, how quickly do you think this post gets on the first google page of results for “Younes Idrissi?”  It can’t take too long, what else does he have going on?

Allison (my most famous friend) clued me in to an article from a few months ago about “one of central Atlanta’s last true ghettos.”  The location?  Boulevard between Freedom Parkway and Ponce de Leon.

Please reference the picture below.  The green street is what we’re talking about.  The red dot is the Pizza Hut mentioned in the article.  The blue dot is 511 North Avenue, where I lived for about 15 months, and where Aaron and Steve lived for almost 3 years.

Yup.  You can read the article here.