2008 reprise

By Hans Nowak · December 26, 2008 at 9:59 pm · Tags:

Another year went by. Much has happened. Here’s an overview.

Personal

  • Not off to a good start: In January my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. Over the course of the year she had chemo treatment and, more recently, radiation.
  • Maybe to counterbalance all the negativity, my stepdaughter gave birth to a daughter, Amari. She gives us much joy. ^_^
  • The other stepdaughter moved out. I’ve hardly seen her this year. :-(
  • Last month I also visited my parents in the Netherlands again. Much eating of good (but unhealthy) food ensued.
  • I gained a number of new (online) friends (you know who you are), and rediscovered a few old ones. (Hi, Nadia. ;-) (I can always use more; feel free to add me on Facebook.)
  • Oh yeah, and I got a new car. ^_^  Because of this I also (finally!) got my American drivers license.

Professional

  • The recession has hit here too… I am doing 20 hours a week of contracting work right now, but I’m still looking for a new job. *HINT* :-)
  • Professionally, I became acquainted with (among other things) a bit of Pylons, SQLAlchemy (not my favorite, alas), PostgreSQL, Django templates, etc. (See my resume.)
  • For fun and profit, I also looked into Adobe AIR and Flex, ActionScript, Clojure…

Technical

  • I didn’t use Chicken Scheme quite as much as I hoped (life interfered, after all), but I did learn a lot about the language, and wrote a project or two using Chicken. I also wrote a Scheme interpreter or two in Python, to get a better idea of what makes the language tick.
  • Although I’m old enough to know better, I did get two more iBook clamshells, even though they don’t run Leopard. ^_^’  But they’re so kawaii…
  • In an attempt to stay connected, I got myself a Helio Ocean, just to find that it doesn’t get much service around here. Suck.
  • Blogging-wise, it wasn’t a remarkable year, although a few of my posts did garner some attention… like this one. :-)

Recreational

  • We had a few remarkable outings this year, like Disney, Silver Springs, New Smyrna Beach, and a psychic fair.
  • I got to play a lot of good and interesting games this year: Patapon (PSP), Phoenix Wright 3 (DS), Yggdra Union (GBA), Professor Layton (DS), Okami (Wii), The Lurking Horror (Z-machine — I didn’t say these were *new* games :-), Touch Detective 2½ (DS), Civilization (DS), Odin Sphere (PS2), La Pucelle Tactics (PS2), Spore Creatures (DS)
  • It was the second time I got to watch a European Championship while in the US… the Netherlands initially did well, then choked on Guus Hiddink’s Russia. >_<

All in all, this year saw some serious ups and downs… some of the downs are not mentioned, as there’s no point in dwelling on them. In spite of the negative events, there was significant progress in some areas as well.

Onwards…

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