2004 Summary

Well, it's a week before New Years' and a couple days from Christmas. Time for navel gazing and reflection.

What did 2004 involve?

The conference kicked the year off and was a huge success. We followed up with a week down at Christies Beach to veg - and boy did I need that! It took me more than 2 months to recover from LCA2004, and more than 6 months to tidy up all the loose ends. I was still feeling the effects later in the year, so we took another holiday, this time driving to Melbourne for what seems to be an annual pilgrimage.

I really came to appreciate lots of LinuxSAers more than ever (due to their conference involvement) - G and L - you are amazing!

I ended up going to the USA twice for work - for 3 weeks initially and later for 6 months bringing the whole family.

I sat on the Linux Australia committee and saw lots of cool things get achieved. I've been to Sydney (Media training), Melbourne (Committee meeting) and Canberra (Ghosts of Conference Past) for Linux Australia this year.

I said goodbye to many friends due to a downsizing workforce, and saw lots of hard work not rewarded.

I moved shadowfax from running Red Hat / Fedora to Ubuntu. This was not a small change - I've been running RH since 5.0. I started to run my own server at home.

I made submissions to our government on the farce that is the AUSFTA.

I wrote and was published in Australian Developer Magazine and IDM.

I've taken up photography as another hobby.

I probably wrote more lines of code this year than last, but I still felt like I wanted to write more. I spent a lot of time playing with C# under the .NET CLR (at work) as well as Mono (at home). I didn't make any real progress in trying to transition to paid open-source development as a day job.

We bought an iPod - which meant having to think about free software ethics as applied to music distribution.

Got to visit Willow Creek which was an eye-opener. Didn't get around to visiting Moody Bible so that's delayed until early next year. We've settled at Harvest for our time in Illinois.

It's been a very busy, but very worthwhile year. Goal setting for 2005 coming soon.

tech/misc | 23 Dec 2004 | #

World's Best Chocolate

In my mind, there is now a change in the world's best chocolate - Haigh's Mandarin Creams (item 237) have been replaced by Harry and David's fruit chocolates - especially the raspberries. Yummmmmm :-)

travel/chicago | 23 Dec 2004 | #