If, like me, you have been caught up in the buzz and excitement of Twitter, you can follow me here.

If you aren’t on Twitter yet don’t worry, you will be on soon…my prediction for 2009 is that at the end of this year Twitter will be where Facebook is now. Time will tell.

With the New Year comes New Year’s resolutions. Not all are kept, but it is still fun to hear what people wish they would achieve during the coming year.

So, do you have any resolutions?

Mine is to wear orange socks as often as I can. One, because orange is my favourite colour. And two, to act as a simple reminder to me to stand out, be different, be creative, and don’t follow the crowd.

I bought myself 12 pairs of orange socks on-line, and just received them yesterday. Very funky, don’t you think?

First of all, Happy New Year! Hope you had a great night on NYE, and are ready to take on 2009 with plenty of gusto.

Secondly, thank you to everyone who commented and emailed me suggestions for what I should try and complete in January. I have now developed a new plan, for how to tackle the remaining goals. And I am confident that it will help me get this project back on track.

I took a step back and thought ‘I have 140-odd goals to go, and 50 months to do them’. So really, if I can complete three a month here on out, I will be successful.

So at the start of each month, from here on out, I will pick four goals from the list (three plus a back-up), and put all of my focus on them.

On top of this, I will work on half a dozen ‘progress goals’, which require more than a month to complete (for example, I have on this list that I need to read the first Harry Potter book, for goal 103).

This list then gets printed off, and stuck to my wall, for me to cross off during the month.

So, what is on January’s list?

- Goal 167 - Have acupuncture

- Goal 68 - Drink two litres of water every day for a month

- Goal 114 - Go to a public place in my pyjamas (this will be done on Jan 10 at Piccadilly Circus, for anyone interested)

- Goal 78 - See 10 live performances (I have seen nine so far, so one live gig this month would make it ten)

Feel free to make nominations for February - some of the nominations already in will be in my February list, but feel free to keep suggesting away.

I NEED YOUR HELP!

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted much of recent times. I guess given this is a six-year project, there will be slow times. This is one of them.

I could keep blaming my new surroundings, and the late hours at work. But I have been doing that for a couple of months now, and it doesn’t do much good.

So I need your help to get me going again, and blow the cobwebs away.

All you have to do is look at the list of goals I have left, and nominate one (or two, or three) for me to complete in January. Then I will do my best to complete it in January, and dedicate the goal’s completion to you.

So, nominate away!

I was just looking through some draft posts, and I found one that I was planning to write, showing a picture of the price of petrol in Melbourne.

At the time (just a few months ago), the price was hovering around 183 cents a litre, but everytime it was there, I didn’t have my camera handy. So I never got the picture.

Anyway, having a look at Melbourne’s petrol prices today, I realise just how much has happened in a few months.

The latest price I see is 112 cents a litre. A fair drop, no doubt caused by the credit crunch and other global factors.

Just shows how much things can change, in a relatively short space of time.

So conversely, this must therefore also show how much YOU or I can change in the same relatively short space of time.

Just think, if you started something new today, like surfing, and gave it a red-hot go for six months, imagine how good you would be at the end of six months.

Most would say this is an easy goal. But any time I enter the kitchen and my meal doesn’t involve a microwave, I am filled with trepidation.

And I have heard that fish is a tricky one to get right. So that is why it was on my list.

I cooked these fish with my brother Nicholas. We choose a couple of beautiful barramundi, and bought all the ingredients for a great beer batter. The plan - beer-battered fish and chips.

The most important ingredient in any good beer batter is the beer. So we choose Coopers Original Pale Ale. Highly recommended.

And I learnt to cook fish.

Doesn’t this look restaurant-quality!

It probably doesn’t look like it, but I actually enjoyed it. I even made it again a week later, and impressed Nat.

Just discovered that my train journey back in June has inspired a Facebook group to do the same, but on a much bigger scale. If you are on Facebook, check it out.

Named the Great Victorian Rail Adventure, here is their description of the journey, which happened in October:

Watch as we avoid sleep, wholesome meals and South Australia, travelling the entire V/Line and Connex serviced Victorian Rail network in 96 Hours.

293 Stations
42 Strategic Changeovers
And enough legal documentation to be worthy of a staple.

I am very happy not to be the only person crazy enough to want to catch the train for an extreme length of time.

Trev sent me this picture, of a K183 steam locomotive.

Here’s his description:

About an hour and a half east of Melbourne in the small town of Yarragon is a steam locomotive in the park, driven past it heaps of times but have just noticed its engine number K183…

K class steam engines were not designed for high speed Passenger trains although they could do it if the need arrived, mostly they were used as general purpose locos….

so no need to hurry with your project as like the K class engine given time the job will be done

Although I am occasionally concerned that I won’t finish Project 183 in time, perhaps I should take a leaf out of the book of the K183, and be the tortoise, rather than the hare!

Thanks Trev, for both the image and the tip.

While settling in London, looking for a place to live, a place to work, planning mini-holidays, and generally getting used to a new way of life, Project 183 has been put on the backburner a little.

Today, I am kick-starting it again.

And I will be doing that by achieving goal 114, by going to a public place in the middle of the day in my pyjamas. Stay tuned for all the embarassing photos shortly.

Not sure whether this counts as a failure or not, but it is a situation where I had a chance to achieve a goal and didn’t. So you can decide for yourself.

I have recently been on the search for a job in London. My search was focused primarily on getting a job at an ad agency (which happens to be goal 17).

I had reached the second round of interviews with two agencies, and performed really well in the first of them. Then I was offered a job as online marketing manager at a company called Truphone. Not an agency job, but an opportunity too good to pass up.

So I took up the offer, over the two potential agency jobs. It was tough to do, because ever since I arrived in London, I was thinking ‘agency job, agency job, agency job’.

But as much as I would have liked to knock goal 17 off my list, it wouldn’t have been the smartest move. As important as Project 183 is, I still have to remain open-minded and willing to make decisions that will impact on my ability to achieve a goal, if the overall benefit is better for me. In this case, it is.

So that is my take-out - always be open-minded to new opportunities, even if they mean heading in a different direction to the one you had planned.