I´m sitting here in an Internet Cafe on the last night of our yearly 2wk holiday break in Playa Del Carmen with all the shopping and packing done for a flight home tomorrow. I figured this is the perfect excuse to take a minute to do the ’06 Kernel Dump and reminisce this trip.

THE SURREALITY OF THE PAST MONTH

I received some of the greatest Christmas gifts of all time this past month-

• JumpBox landed half of the investment we were seeking to move the company forward.
• This blog was accepted to the 9rules network.
• My brother announced he´s having a kid.
• My idea for the Virtual Render Farm made it to the finals of the Cambrian House tournament (winner announced tomorrow)
• The local media in AZ (newspaper, ABC news station and FM talk radio station) each have requested interviews regarding the last post I made.
• I made a pinkyswear with a girl I care very much about.
• To top it all off, this morning I got a taste of the extreme sport I’ve been wanting to try for a year now called Kite Surfing and it´s every bit as amazing as I’ve imagined it would be.

It’s a bit surreal sitting here pulling up the business section of the 9rules website almost 2000mi from home and seeing Scrollin´ sandwiched in between Guy Kawasaki’s and Kathy Sierra’s blog – two personal heroes who I’ve been reading daily now for over a year. Anyways, I made a New Year’s resolution a few days ago to come strong this year with quality, solid writing deserving to be placed alongside these superstars. This means probably cleaning things up a bit and dropping the first person tense but I’m thinking it’s still kosher to reserve the personal style for the Kernel Dumps so here goes…

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

-Get JumpBox cashflow positive
-Write more better
-Lose the weight I gained on this trip
-Record the Cold Turkey Stasis album
-Simplify

I have a handful of others but those are the top five. What are yours? If you believe in the power of the open source goals meme, publish yours on your blog and then leave a trackback.

PLAYA´S EVOLUTION

Our favorite place on earth, Playa Del Carmen, has undergone some interesting changes this past year – namely a TON of development. We heard from a couple people that said this is the fastest growing city in the world right now for it’s current size. I would not be surprised. There has been a frenzy of development since our trip here last year. While it bodes well for local businesses, it´s sad to see the arrival of the corporate chain establishments.

It’s understandable why a place as magical as this one continues to draw enormous crowds this time of year (especially given that Denver is under 20′ of snow in some places right now). I’ve got great photos from this trip that will be up this week along with a post soon that explains a striking correlation I discovered today between entrepreneurship and the sport of kite surfing. Playa diffuses stress like no place I’ve ever been and I could write a page-worth of commentary on our trip, but in the interest of the new spirit of brevity and given that pictures are worth 1000 words, I´ll leave the Playa summary at this.

MUSIC FILM BOOKS PODCASTS

Music – all you need to know is Mike Doughty’s new one. Wow.

Movies – Cars and Primer

Books – I killed a ton on this trip. Crichton’s latest, Coelho’s Devil and Miss Prym, Scott Adams’ God’s Debris, The Prophet by Kahil Gibran, and Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

Podcasts – check out the 43 folders podcast with David Allen, the latest couple from Venture Voice with the guy from Kiva.org and Jay Addleson of Digg and the Fresh Talk podcast.

IN STORE FOR THIS YEAR…

We’re heads down on refining our virtual appliance offering for JumpBox to make it THE simplest way to solve business challenges with hassle-free deployment of virtualized, open-source software. We’re maintaining the mission of Grid7 to help people Build Something Bigger by continuing to deliver more quality audio interviews with local AZ entrepreneurs in order to share the wealth of experience from people who have been able to make their ideas reality. I have a handful of personal goals, the top five of which are listed above but the underlying thread of it all remains the same as last year- laser focus on the things that are most important. The mantra for this year I’ve decided is Rock steady. We got JumpBox off the ground in ’06 and rocked it in many ways and we’re planning to do more of the same in ’07. Happy new year all and may you rock steady in your pursuits in ’07 as well.

-sean