New starts for the new year

We’re getting well past the new year now, but there’s still a lot of new starts coming along for me.

The most dramatic (at the moment) is new glasses. A long overdue optometrist appointment in late december informed me that my eyes have actually been very stable over the past 8 years, with effectively the same prescription I had before. Armed with a new prescription in hand, I made Karen help me choose out some new frames this morning. The lens are wider and a bit more rectangular (gasp – I’ve actually purchased somewhat fashionable frames), but mostly I’m noticing the incredible increase in clarity in viewing the world around me.

The “next big thing” that’s coming my is a new surround sound system to match the “new” television. That dark humor in this is that the new TV is now two years old, and I’ve never had a surround sound system – so it’ll be new in a couple of different ways. We pulled the trigger last night on a Bose system with the little jewel cubes and a plethora of inputs so we can “slot in” the Xbox 360, Wii, and so forth. I need to check out a digital audio cable to run from the iMac in our little library room – I’m looking forward to some slightly cleaner sound with that. It’s not what I’d consider a HiFi system in the “Oh my god – the sound!” sort of way. I think it’ll be good sound for the living room combined with a very unobtrusive impact on our relatively small living room.

Now I have to pull out Halo, Gears of War, and a couple of movies (Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator and True Lies comes to mind…) to really get the feel of the new all-around sound. The new stuff is coming towards the end of this next week, so next weekend will hopefully be the trial run. I’m going to have to pick up more popcorn too…

The last new thing is arguably the largest. Dramatic isn’t quite the right word for this new thing; long term it is the most impactful: I’ve taken a new position at Disney. I’ve moved from my “free radical individual contributor” role in central engineering to run a tools/metrics/automation team in Technical Operations. I’m really jazzed about the new gig, which technically started last monday. For the past 10 days or so I’ve been submerged beneath the tidal force of a whole bunch of new systems, information, and processes. Friday I felt like I managed to get my head above water a bit. Even before I formally accepted the position, I had started thinking about what I’d really like to accomplish with this new team – and the first week has come to a conclusion that my new team and I will be able to make some incredibly positive changes.