Just like the last four years, the beginning of a new year on Vacant Nebula is marked by a look back at the posts of the previous year. I’m not sure if anyone else gets anything out of these posts, but I enjoy making them because there are so many things that I forget about. So let’s see what all we have been posting about.
Early in the year I made several small changes to this site. Then we got some snow. On Valentine’s Day I left Stephanie at home and went to Mexico. While I was gone Emma walked for the first time. Emma continued to get older, eventually celebrating her first birthday.
Two days before Emma’s birthday, though, I was laid off from my job at Dassault Systemés. Which meant I had to do some job hunting, and I had to figure out what to do with my old business cards. Fortunately I found a new job and started after only five weeks of unemployment.
During those five weeks, I started tweeting and went to the beach. I am very thankful that things worked out so well, especially as the unemployment rate continued to rise all year.
As spring turned to summer, I commented on pickup-truck-bed meat dealers and wrote a program to resize desktop wallpapers. I posted a conversation I had with someone at Sprint, who may or may not be a terminator. I also read the best book I’ve ever read.
As autumn arrived, I poked fun at a lady I heard on the radio. (She actually e-mailed me to defend herself, but what she said really reinforced my point.) I told you where to hide your cash, but I guess I should have come up with a place to hide ideas because Coca-Cola stole my idea.
The last few months of the year have been very busy at work, and as a result this blog wasn’t very busy. I did manage to post about Emma’s first Halloween outing, as well as my own aging. To finish out the year I posted some good bad writing and a high-quality video from my new digital camera.
Throughout the year, I reviewed a few things: Prince of Persia, Shadow of the Colossus, Netflix/Blockbuster (part 2), Anathem, and a SumoLounge bean bag chair. I also gave out some free code: PHP code to create a gradient PNG, Java code to handle arbitrarily large fractions, and (if you don’t mind extracting it from a JAR file) Java code to resize images.
I hope everyone has had a great year and looks forward to twenty-ten!
January 1, 8:36 am
Surprisingly, we didn’t post on the upcoming addition to our family!! I’m not up on my posting, so I’ll tell you now. We found out just before Thanksgiving that another little person would be joining our happy little band. Sometime in mid-July, “Popcorn” will be born and welcomed into the family! He/She is already welcome, but we haven’t met him/her yet, and we are looking forward to having the opportunity. I’m sure you’ll hear more about him/her when we find out if he/she will be a he or a she!
Happy New Year!