We have less than a single day left until the clock rolls over to 2013. For some readers, the year has already rolled over. One of the traditions of a new year is to make resolutions of things you want to accomplish. Some of the favorites are dieting, quitting smoking or some other way of bettering your health. I encourage you all to do something to improve your health.

But as I thought about resolutions, I turned back to one of my favorite things and one of the men who made a great impression in that area. Most loyal readers probably know that I am a huge college basketball fan. One of the most colorful coaches of the game was Jim Valvano and a speech he made in 1993 was very inspirational.

For those who aren’t familiar, Coach Valvano was dying of cancer and lived only eight more weeks after the speech. We barely had the energy to go up the few stairs to the stage and then he was filled with energy as he gave the speech. If you want the whole speech, you can watch it on YouTube. I want to share one small quote from that speech.

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

If you want a great resolution, Coach Valvano has given us an amazing blueprint. There might be days when I write something that makes you laugh or cry though I want to focus on thinking and doing what you can to better your knowledge. While many of you know that much of my training focuses on CorelDRAW, I get more questions related to what I think are very basic functions of Windows.

So I’ll throw out a resolution for each of you to try and attain. How about learning to do one new thing in Windows each day? For a beginning, I think this should be pretty easy. If you are a more advanced user, it may be a little more difficult. Yet I think we can all successfully complete this resolution and we will all improve from it.

I will also try to help all of us with learning new things in Windows by sharing some of the things I’ve learn in future posts as well as some of the basic functions it is important for all of us to know.

May 2013 be a wonderful year for all of you!