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Date published: 1/1/2005

FEW PEOPLE know it, but newspaper columnists are required by law to make their first column of the year about the resolutions they've made. Those of us who fail to write about this theme are temporarily reassigned to fact-check the residential phone numbers in the phone book the company prints.

So here it goes: my list of technology resolutions for 2005!

I've resolved to buy fewer computer games this year. I have this habit of reading about new games online and thinking, "Hey, that sounds like fun." I buy the games and they end up sitting on the shelf mainly because my 7-month-old hasn't gotten the hang of using a joystick or keyboard yet. In fact, I've got three games at the house that I've not even opened yet. Fewer games means more money for Beech-Nut and Fisher-Price. (On a completely unrelated side note, this was my first holiday season to deal with opening baby toys produced by Fisher-Price. I've decided the packaging department there must undergo a training program designed by the Marquis de Sade. I was untangling wire twist ties and yards of wide plastic tape all morning on Christmas day. But I digress)

I've noticed that I tend to not practice what I preach a lot of times when it comes to computer maintenance. I'm considering getting a new laptop this year, for instance, and I've realized that it's been forever since I've backed up my existing laptop hard drive. If I had been doing regular backups, I could just sell my computer and load up the backups on a new one. But now I'm faced with a lengthy backup process or data transfer operation to move all of my stuff to a new machine. This year, I resolve to do backups at least monthly.

2005 will be the year that I try to clear my house of my computer museum, as well. I've slowly gotten rid of the vast fleet of old Macintosh computers in my house, but I still have two Macs and one Windows machine that sit unused in our guest bedroom. I had great visions of installing Linux on one of the Macs and trying out Windows software on that box and reliving my Macintosh youth on the little compact Mac. But they're just sitting around cold and alone, so I'm planning to evict them all.

Date published: 1/1/2005