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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Dec
21
(2005)
I’m packing it in until the new year, so officially signing off (yeah, right) for a little while. I hope everyone has a great [INSERT REASON HERE] holiday season!
It’s been a big year for me. Lots of ups and downs, but I think I came out of this one ahead. Trying not to make a self-absorbed self-congratulatory post, but wanted to document some of the highlights. I usually forget the lowlights as part of my coping mechanism…
Big events for me this year (rough chronological order):
- Moved blog to my own domain at darcynorman.net
- Northern Voice 2005 (posts from the conference)
- Fun with podcasting
- Fun with tagging/folksonomies
- “launch” of weblogs.ucalgary.ca
- “launch” of wiki.ucalgary.ca
- Pachyderm development (including the weeklong Summit of Geeks at Sonoma State University)
- Museums and the Web 2005 Conference in Vancouver notes
- WWDC 2005 in San Francisco
- NMC 2005 Summer Conference in Honolulu (and family vacation)
- ADCE and PlanetADCE
- Enjoying some miniscule local celebrity with the TV and press appearances
- Dad’s 70th birthday
- Mom’s 65th birthday
- Workshops on campus on blogging and wiki
- Pachyderm 2.0 release
- Mavericks almost-release
- Starting to see this whole “Web 2.0″ and “Semantic Web” stuff start to come together
- Winning an EduBlogger award for darcynorman.net
- Realizing that I’ve taken the leap to make the blog an integral part of what I do (~20,000 words written per month, professional + personal, etc…)
One thing that struck me as I crawled through this year’s posts, is how fast things are happening. I was remembering things as happening months ago, when they were actually very recent. Things like the Peak Oil posts – it feels like I blogged it a long time ago, when it was only a month ago!
Things I plan/hope to do in the next year (not new year’s resolutions, just a basic guideline):
- Spend more time with the family – without the damned computer mining RSS feeds in the background
- Become a better photographer. Maybe/hopefully pick up a real camera. Maybe take a course or something…
- Restart my Master’s program. Get any last coursework out of the way, and finally pick a damned thesis topic.
- Do more writing. Not just blog posts, but more carefully constructed articles etc…
- Actually spend some time playing with cool new stuff. Ruby on Rails, ferinstance.
- Spend more time working with faculty etc. – workshops, presentations, etc…
- Spend more time in Open Source land, perhaps hacking Drupal or WordPress, or Moodle, or our own LC code, etc…
- Breathe. Don’t let this crap bother me so much
Thanks, Josie. I’ll pass it on to my family
Not sure I’ll have time to finish everything on my list either – it’s a starting point, though!
Have a great Christmas break!
- D
Congratulations on a year of many, many fine achievements! As for the oncoming year – how are you going to find enough hours in the day? Good luck though and thanks to your family for all the time they’ve already put up with your absence.
Ho! Ho! Ho!