On this final day of 2014, I thought I should reflect back on my "four words" for 2014. They were:
- Running
- Religion
- Audio
- Strategy
How did I do? Let's take them one by one...
RUNNING
The good news is that I did make running more a regular part of my life. By adding up the monthly totals in my iPhone app I see that I ran over 288 miles this year. It was spotty, though. I only ran 6.2 miles in September yet I ran over 56 miles in July! I finished the year doing 26 miles in December... which works out to be about 6 miles a week. Good... but not great. Next year I'll aim to do better.
It was also a strange year in that I ran only one race... and that was the short 1-mile "Pumpkin Mile" that was part of the Keene Pumpkin Festival and that I ran with my five-year-old daughter. For all the other races I wanted to do I either had a schedule conflict or in one case it rained harder than I really cared to race in.
My goal starting off 2014, though, was to get running more a part of my life... and I think I can safely say that I did that.
RELIGION
Back at the beginning of the year I wrote:
But you wouldn't know any of this from what I write and post online. There are thousands of blog posts online from me since 2000 and many thousand tweets/updates/posts on social media...
... but pretty much NONE of them say ANYTHING about religion.
There are a lot of reasons for WHY I have been silent about the religious side of my life in my online activity... and I'll write a post about that at some point (probably soon).
But I've realized that in being silent and hiding this aspect of myself I'm not really letting myself be truly whole.
So I'm going to start... I've been letting pieces of that side of me leak out into Facebook lately. THIS blog post is a huge step for me.
I'm not going to be "in your face" about religion or anything (that's not the UU way! ;-) ). But I'm going to stop hiding that side of me. I will treat it instead just as yet another facet of the complicated person that I am (and that we all are).
We'll see... this will, in all honesty, be a bit challenging for me... but is an area I'd like to grow personally.
This has been hard for me, but I have started to be more open about this side of myself. For instance, I participated in a panel that was recorded on video distributed on YouTube where I talked about our church and my involvement in the "community breakfasts" that we do for the homeless each morning during the winter months. I also shared on Facebook and social networks when I was giving a sermon at our church in late October on the subject of "Facebook and Fox News: Escaping the Echo Chambers of Affirmation". I actually recorded that sermon but have yet to put it online... perhaps in 2015.
I also shared out more links from our church's web site and social media feeds into my own feeds... which was a big step for me.
Baby steps... but at least I'm no longer hiding my this part of me. We'll see where this goes from here.
AUDIO
Unfortunately this area remained a bit of an "aspiration" this year. I had hoped to do more with audio this year. Now I did do more with my "The Dan York Report (TDYR)" podcast... producing over 155 of the short episodes. I also didn't miss a single week of For Immediate Release (FIR) reports, producing 52 of those reports. I also started using several new applications on my iPhone to more rapidly produce podcasts
BUT...
... I'd had aspirations to do more. Here's how I wound up with what I had hoped to do:
- FIR On Technology with Dan York - Sadly I only cranked out one episode during the entire year. :-(
- Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast - I'd hoped to publish some interviews... but... nope. None. Zip. Nada.
- Internet Society Deploy360 Programme - I only published one episode here, too, but a very large part of this was that I spent a good bit of time seeking an audio publishing platform that supported IPv6... and never found one (SoundCloud doesn't). In the interim I held off on publishing episodes.
We'll see if this gets better in 2015. I thoroughly enjoy audio and would like to get back to doing more!
STRATEGY
I wrote in January:
Finally, there is an exquisite irony to me that while my job title at the Internet Society is "Senior Content Strategist", my own personal content online is severely lacking a strategy. I am inconsistently writing across 8 or 9 different places online - and I'm adding more sites like the Monadnock Curling Club... and there are a few other projects in the works.
Yes, this is a bit of a case of the proverbial "cobbler's shoes", but in 2014 I'd like to pull some of this together a bit more and have a bit more discipline about what I'm doing with all my online content. I'm at least aggregating my online content at my danyork.me site, but this year I want to do more with getting more consistent with the creation of content.
Alas... still a work in progress...
So there I was for 2014... good progress with two of my words... less so with the other two. How did your year work out?
An audio version of this post is available on in my "The Dan York Report" podcast:
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