Right now I’m relaxing, much needed, with my wife in an ocean side resort in Newport, Oregon listening to the waves of the Pacific crash on the beach below us. We are slowly making our way down the coast toward our new home in Crestline, California - near Big Bear outside of Los Angeles.

I left my job at Xbox back in September to work for a startup called Smilebox. And I left Smilebox on the last day of 2007 to begin a career - I hope - as a freelance Actionscript developer. Right now I only have two clients to speak of. Some would call it a leap of faith. Others might call it a fool’s hope.

2007 was pretty busy. I went to three conferences: 360 Flex in San Jose and Seattle and Adobe MAX. Like many out there I started working with Flex and loving it. My OOP skills have improved dramatically. video.Maru has really taken off and now has its own site. And I have a lot of half finished projects that I’ll soon have time to wrap up.

Obviously my primary goal for 2008 is to become a successful freelance developer. I’m fairly confident that will work out since I only need to work about 8 hours a week to make ends meet. However I’m scheduling 20 hours a week for freelance projects so hopefully I’ll do a lot better than get by.

With only 20 hours devoted to freelance I’ll have a lot of spare time to work on various projects. First and foremost is a site that will launch late Spring 2008 called RunPee.com. It’s a Flex/ColdFusion/wiki. You’ll be hearing a lot about it. It’s going to be a blast.

Besides that I plan on doing lots of video tutorials on polyGeek.com. My goal is to do one tutorial per week for the year, minimum.

I’d like to do some speaking this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to do a presentation on video.Maru at one of the Flash User Groups in the Los Angeles area. And I’d love to do a session at a conference like 360 Flex. I’ll just have to come up with something worth speaking about first. :-)

Technical goals for the year:

• Papervision3D: I have lots of projects in mind
• Webcam interactions/BitmapData class
• Mathematical modeling
• MySQL/SQL-lite
• I’m sure I’ll come up with a dozen more things.