I won't go into detail, but 2010 was a tough year for me and my close friends and family. Due to certain trials and tribulations, I had a difficult time reaching all the goals I set out to achieve at the beginning of the year. But we're surviving and making progress. Here's the 2010 list, full of fail:

1. WIN!: Learn to say 'No'

I turned down quite a lot of work this year.

After years of thinking about it, we're finally going to do it. 'It' being spend a year or two traveling the world in search of epic adventure. This is a big deal for us. Sure, when you're young and single, traveling is easy. And I did my fair share of traveling in my days sans wife and kids. But now with a family in tow, it's going to be a challenge. But we welcome this challenge knowing it could mean memories to last a lifetime. So stoked.

My last blog post was called, "When Clients Don't Pay". I ended that post on a positive note stating that the faster a client pays my invoices the more keen I am to quickly complete their work. I have no shortage of work at the moment, so I've setup an informal client ranking system. Wether that's right or wrong, I don't know. I can't help but give first rate clients, first rate service.

I have a sudden urge to rant, so bear with me.

For the most parts, I've been very fortunate to have great clients. I often hear about 'clients from hell', but I haven't had any. Most of my clients have been very pleasant to work with, and only one has ever disappeared without paying. All but one paid my invoices... eventually.

Some clients however, don't see an urgency to pay, sometimes making me wait months, all the while telling me "the cheque's in the mail".

I have had many business ideas. Some never saw the light of day, other have. I've always been an 'ideas man', constantly starting new projects. By far my most successful business venture has been Katanamite Interactive. Though it's been my main source of income, I don't believe it's reached anywhere near it's full potential. Katanamite can be so much more. We can attract more high profile clients, do much more meaningful projects, contribute more to the open source community, provide more jobs and make more money.

I've been holding off publishing this post for a very long time because it's intensely personal. But I've been unusually AWOL around the web and local meetup groups enough that some people are starting to notice. I'm getting a lot of "where are you? I hope you're ok" messages lately, so I thought I'd fill people in. I've also got a few clients that for sure have noticed a slow down in productivity and deserve an explanation. This post was originally twice as long.

I love conferences. As a web developer I spend most of my time indoors by myself. Conferences are a great way to escape the norm, see new environments and socialize with people in real life.

Early tomorrow morning I'll be flying to San Francisco to attend Drupalcon. I'm sure I'll post more about Drupalcon soon, but this posts not about that. It's about packing light.

I wanna see how little I can get away with packing and still be productive. I still have web development work to do in between conference sessions and in the evening when I'm not partying. I'll only be away one week.

So this is my list of stuff:

• Travel size tooth brush and paste
• Deodorant
• A few pairs of underwear and socks

I'm sure no one noticed or even cares, but I've been on a bit of a social media fast in the last little while. Not a complete fast, since I did check in on Facebook and read a few articles from Digg and my Google Reader. But I've resisted posting to my blog, updating my Facebook and Twitter statuses and significantly limited my media consumption. My last Facebook update and the last time I even looked at Twitter was 11 days ago.

I love being motivated and inspired. Who doesn't? Books and movies can sometimes be just the extra push you need to drive you towards your goals. Maybe one day I'll do a roundup of movies and books that inspired me the most. But today I want to talk about short web videos.