First, Happy New Year! May we all be safe and happy in 2002.

I promise not to make any New Year Resolutions I can’t keep, but I wrote back in November about using a Database to display sites and other features. Even though that’s a great endeavor and might yield great results down the road. I feel the need to do something now. Update this site and that just involves sitting down and writing and cranking out new sites.

It’s easy to get caught up in new developments and my work with Direct X programming has taken up a lot of my time, but doing a comparison from this year to last year I see a significant increase in the number of hits to my site. So I feel the need to keep the momentum rolling and push forward to new things. I want to bring back the sites and shareware reviews.

I turned thirty on December 28th. Friends and Family had fun giving me cards that say over the hill and my friend, Otto, went as far as giving me an old man kit shaped like a coffin. As always, I found myself reflecting on what it means to be thirty and all I came up with…I see the world differently. I don’t think about things like I am going to do this or I am going to overcome that or I am not afraid to do this or risk that. It’s a bunch of bull. Sometimes there are obstacles I just cannot overcome right now. I am often deathly afraid of trying something new or doing the right thing and wind up procrastinating or not pushing forward and missing what I consider golden opportunities.

I’ve been pushing my business, in my imagination, for almost seven years. Reflecting on those years I realized I don’t have the skill and resources to run a successful business at this point in my life, still. Giving up on those things was close to impossible. I was reluctant to give back my post office box key even though all I received was junk mail. It was also hard to give up my business phone line, which was used as a residential line for years. Sometimes fantasy clouds reality to the point where I don’t change my thinking and keep running the same play--even though I’m the only player on the field against a team of five hundred thousand.

So I’m not saying that I am going to give up the web, far from it. I think this website has the most potential to provide information, the better I do this fundamental objective, the more chance I have for success later. I cannot compete and measure my site against any corporate giant, but like I said, if I constantly pound, circumvent, strike, climb, plan, reevaluate an obstacle eventually I’ll find a way over it. Alas at thirty, I also learned that spending all my effort on one obstacle creates others with friends, family, work, and even myself. The balancing is not going to be easy, but most of life is just that.

Thanks for reading,
Joe Delgado