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 :-)