Account of Learning in 2009

It has become a ritual for me to account for time well spent or wasted each year. I am going to run down everything major I can recall that I think I have learned in the past year. Over-all I don't feel like I have learned more this year then last, but it probably has to do with not moving between states. The impact of learning this year has been much less subtle. The most significant learning has probably been in electrical engineering. Here is the run-down.

*How to have circuit boards professionally made
*Better hand circuit board fabrication skills
*How to use an oscilloscope
*Better practical understanding of PNP transistor operation
*How to design high speed circuits operating in the mhz range
*Learned a lot more about low level C on Atmel microcontrollers
*Better tactics for debugging non working circuits
*Better understanding of multi layer circuit board design
*Learned how to do 120V AC work
*Learned a lot about electrical housing code
*Learned how to work with optical encoders
*Learned rules for making big Flash applications that prevent memory leaks and minimize testing
*Leaped forward in over-all Java understanding
*Can implement the old Java JMF framework to record audio and video, transcode, etc.
*Know a lot more about cryptography and how to properly implement it
*Know a boat load more about socket programming
*Know a lot more about Red5
*Know a lot more about video capture in Flash
*Know a lot more about low level video encoding/decoding
*Have a better UI design perspective
*Subtle improvements in my designers eye, ex. the ability to spot poor design and correct it.
*Concepts and practical, modern NAT and Firewall traversal
*Concepts of modern P2P functionality and distributed networks
*Working knowledge of XMPP
*More ability in Flex
*Better understanding of working with various webcams
*Better methodology for doing automated testing in programming and electrical engineering *Learned a lot more about wireless network deployment consisting of seven or more routers

Thats really all I can think of. The goal after my current project finishes will be to reduce the scope of my spare time projects. Although I learn a lot doing them, there is currently a lot of time that I waste doing things I already know how to do in order to get the projects to good enough to demo state.