Happy New Year 2010

I am sitting here at my desk, writing in the quiet of my thoughts. This is when I take time to reflect on the past year and consider the year ahead. My new year’s ritual.

First, I do not make New Year’s resolutions. I do not feel it necessary to wait for a specific day to make a change in my life, or start a new venture, or … live.

It was in May of this year that I decided to start developing and designing with WordPress. I had been blogging for a few years; I like to work with graphics; I enjoy resolving issues with web sites; and, WordPress was an accessible platform. It seemed a natural progression to actually focus my attention on it and get to work becoming part of the community.

June 4, 2009 was my WordPress New Year’s day. That was the day I saw the WordPress Themes Team approve my popular Desk Mess Mirrored theme. I still use it at BuyNowShop.com the site I use for focused WordPress related activities. August 15, 2009 I committed my first plugin to the WordPress Plugins repository. BNS Login is used on every blog I manage, and I have even incorporated it into a couple of themes, too.

As I look back and see what I have accomplished with WordPress this past year, five publicly available themes and seven publicly available plugins, I can only look forward and believe there is more.

There is more that can be done.
There is more that will be done.
There is more I will do!

That is not a resolution, resolutions can be broken.
That is a promise, and promises I do not break.

Popeye Creator’s Birthday

I love Google doodles, really I do. Today, Google Canada presented one that is another childhood reminder. Today they celebrated E.C. Segar’s birthday, the creator of the Popeye comic strip character.

Here is the doodle:

… and here is a bit from wikipedia:

Evening American Managing editor William Curley thought Segar could succeed in New York, so he sent him to King Features Syndicate, where Segar worked for many years. He began by drawing Thimble Theatre for the New York Journal. The strip made its debut on December 19, 1919, featuring the characters Olive Oyl, Castor Oyl and Horace Hamgravy, whose name was quickly shortened in the strip to simply “Ham Gravy”. They were the strip’s leads for about a decade. In January 1929, when Castor Oyl needed a mariner to navigate his ship to Dice Island, Castor picked up an old salt down by the docks named Popeye. Popeye’s first line in the strip, upon being asked if he was a sailor, was “‘Ja think I’m a cowboy?” The character stole the show and became the permanent star. Some of the other notable characters Segar created include J. Wellington Wimpy and Eugene the Jeep.
Wikipedia