About eighteen months ago I migrated my academic web pages away from a self hosted solution on a Linux box in my living room to Google Sites. Mainly this was done because I was applying for jobs and wanted to make sure that the site would be reliable. But although I came for the reliability, I stayed for the features.

It’s become the in-vogue thing for experts on various issues to pontificate on events for the coming year.  As I’m now a Dr. and I received my doctorate for studying the socio-technical aspects of software engineering communities, I feel like I’m legitimately qualified to put forth predictions about Open Source, Free Software, and web technologies. Putting a prediction in this list does not necessarily mean that I want it to happen, merely that I think there is a significant chance it will happen.   I’m not an insider on any of these issues, but here’s what I think will happen in 2010, in rough order of likelihood:

On Christmas day a young Nigerian man boarded a flight from Lagos to Amsterdam and then later boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.  About an hour outside of Detroit, as the plane was descending over Canadian airspace he decided that his religion would martyr him if he blew up the plane using a slab of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (aka PETN) taped to his crotch.  Unfortunately for him and fortunately for the plane’s passengers the igniter failed and he merely started his crotch on fire and probably blew up his testicles.

When I laid out my 2010 running goals I said that I wanted to run in two different half marathons this year and have at least one of those half marathons with a sub 1:50:00 time.  At the time I made the post, I was unaware of the New York Road Runners Manhattan Half Marathon — two and a half gruelling laps up and down the hills of Central Park at the end of January.  Naturally, I registered for the race.

As I’ve mentioned before, I train primarily in New York City, but also spend a lot of time in Minneapolis. While the snow in New York tends to disappear pretty quickly, once it snows in Minneapolis it generally sticks around all winter. Unfortunately, because most of the running paths along the river and through the park do not get enough use, they’ll keep a nice layer of ice on them all winter long.

As is customary around the world, here’s a summary of my running for 2009 and what I hope to do in 2010: