I started out the New Year with a resolution to develop a very serious grip. Never done it - sounded cool. It is cool, but I hurt my left hand and it's taken months to heal. I've kept the power I've developed so far, but more serious grip training will have to wait a bit.

Never fear! I am rarely without a backup plan. OK, so this wasn't a backup plan - I just came up with it last week. But we're not going to talk about that. Anyway, I'm getting into powerlifting in a serious sense. In powerlifting, there are 3 basic lifts - Bench Press, Squat and Deadlift. Since I just got into squats and deadlifts, my ability isn't up to par, but I'm not called Ironwil for nothing! I'm going to develop...

I prefer to compete in "Raw" meets, where you aren't permitted to use bench press shirts, squat suits, and other aids which help you lift the weight, but in the competitions coming up that isn't an option, so I'm hoping to scrounge enough $$$ by Christmas to buy a decent bench press shirt (I'm going to try to avoid getting the rest altogether).

As of right this very minute, my ability isn't quite up to my personal best, but it's not too far off, either. Actually, since I'm so new at the squat and deadlift, those are up to my personal best, but still not very good. My current stats are:

• Bench Press: 285 lbs.
• Squat: 315 lbs. (to competition depth, which is really damned deep)
• Deadlift: 345 lbs.

I've recently gotten swept up by the Augmented Reality (AR) craze. It's very cool. For those that have no idea what AR is, check out this site: AR Demo. The really cool deal is that my work is currently interested in AR, and so some of us have been set to research applications, brainstorm on ideas of how we could incorporate AR into education, and to experiment with those ideas. Way cool!

My 1-year review is coming in a couple of months, and we have to complete some professional goals by that time. My goals were to learn to develop in Flex, tackle Design Patterns and hook up Flex/Flash applications, which are client-side apps, with a server- side database using WebOrb or BlazeDS. WebOrb and BlazeDS are frameworks for reading/writing to a database from client-side apps.

First on the list? Design patterns. It turns out that a lot of programming problems are solved in a generally similar way. It's not so simple as a cookie-cutter solution that can be solved once and applied to everything, but design patterns are general concepts of how a given set of problems are often solved. Using these patterns, a developer can more quickly and productively create software of such awsomeness, angels stop to sing over the computers on which it runs.

I currently have a blog template (it's not functional yet) set up on this site using ASP.NET and an XML file to store the entries. Since I'm going to allow for users to leave comments, track when/who left them, those are going to have to reference somewhere the comment they're related to. This could be done with XML, but it's ugly and not very fast. I'm going to design a simple database for my blog, and I'm going to create a new blog (that will look suspiciously similar to the old blog, which is currently my new blog... dammit! Don't distract me!) using Flex, and within that, I'm going to use the MVC, Singleton, Observer and Factory Design Patterns. Kill several pigeons with one set of code.