For quite a while now, I've had my website and DNS hosted with DreamHost for $9.95/mo. They give me unlimited disk space, unlimited transfer, and unlimited domains hosted. However, I miss having the full control over a server and being able to add/remove software, add/remove accounts, and so forth. I'm in the market for a cheap co-location, VPS, or unmanaged hosting of some sort. If anybody has any ideas, please let me know. I'd rather it be FreeBSD or Linux based.

After I find a new home for my website, I'd like to redo the whole thing. I'm thinking about moving my blog out of LiveJournal and putting it into something like Drupal or WordPress. I want to have my blog as well as other content such as my resume, any projects I'm working on, about me, and so forth all on one site. I'd like to somehow tie it into my Flickr, last.fm, twitter, and other feeds as well. In other words, I want to modernize and go "Web 2.0."

Another thing I haven't done much of in the last two years or so is any sort of programming, hacking, or technology-related project. I'm beginning to feel as if my brain is losing knowledge it used to have and also a new sort of intellectual boredom setting in. I'd like to get back into hacking and programming, but I need a project and the hardware to do it with. Since I've gone all OS X, I really don't have any x86 hardware to put FreeBSD or Linux on at home anymore. I might end up building something. Maybe something powerful enough to put ESXi on so I can run several OSes at once. This boredom is another reason I'm looking for a sort of VPS hosting for my website. I've lost a place to test and play with new things in the open source world and I really miss that.

With all that said, here are some things I'd like to get accomplished in 2009:
- Get a FreeBSD, Linux, or ESXi machine at home for hacking on
- Redo the carpets, cabinets, and counters in my condo
- Start or contribute to some open source project to sharpen my coding skills
- Run GigE in my condo since WI-FI sucks (18 SSIDs spread across channels 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11)
- Get a Boston Keratoprosthesis in my left eye with hopes of being able to restore decent vision

Finally, here's hoping that 2009 turns out to be a much better year than 2008. I don't think I can take another year like 2008.