I love late December. Temperatures plummet. The streets fill with Christmas shoppers. Snow falls. The blogosphere fills with year's-best lists and forecasts for next year. Year in, year out, some things never change.

In keeping with this longstanding tradition, and in conformance with the largely unwritten rules of blogging, I herewith offer my own instantiation of a longstanding year-end tradition. Yes, I'm going to recommend a New Year's resolution.

I won't advise you to lose weight, though statistically speaking, if you're American, you could probably stand to drop a few pounds. I won't suggest learning a new programming language or contributing to an open source project. Both of these will enhance your employability in these days of outsourcing and offshoring, but if you haven't started yet, my advice isn't likely to get you moving. I won't even recommend becoming more Agile, mostly because I still haven't figured out what the hell that means (and I don't entirely trust anyone who says he has).

No, my resolution – and it's one I suggest that you emulate – is much simpler. It's this: Learn something.

Higher learning is what separates human beings from the rest of the animal world. It's what transforms us from simple organisms that eat, respire, and reproduce, and into human beings capable of appreciating and creating things of lasting value. Learning is what allows us to participate in human culture, and the more we learn, the more deeply we can participate.

My New Year's resolution is to devote deliberate time to learning in 2012. You should do the same.

The time you spending keeping up-do-date on software development doesn't count. Learning a language or a framework or a new platform is all very well, but it's part of your career, not something you pursue to spend your life. I'm talking about nontechnical learning: world history, or learning to play an instrument, or auditing a literature course.

You can even do it for free, online. Here is a list of resources. It's amazing what you can find online. MIT, for example, makes materials from 2,000 of its courses available online, free, via its OpenCourseWare intitiative. The university is launching an e-learning framework and online certification program in the next few months. My alma mater, Columbia University, has more than 700 lectures available on YouTube, and Harvard has uploaded more than 500. It's easy to find educational material online, for free. And if you're willing to pay a bit, you can get certification. You can even earn a degree online if you're willing to invest some time.

So invest in your own humanity this year. Stretch yourself. Grow a little. And have a great year.

Web recommendation: I am sure you are already well-informed about the flaws in SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy bill that Hollywood is pushing through Congress. Big companies in music and motion pictures argue that the bill is necessary to prevent pirates from bankrupting them (despite the record profits they continue to bring in, year after year). In an ironic twist, the folks at YouHaveDownloaded.com are making available the results of their tracking of torrent downloads, and the results include downloads of copyrighted material from within Sony Pictures, Universal, Fox, the RIAA, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. YouHaveDownloaded even reports which movies and TV series were downloaded within those organizations. Embarrassing, no? J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. His favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, but he insists that this doesn't conclusively establish that he lacks information. He just likes vanilla, OK?