Well it is a new year and, just like the last six years, I am going to kick off the year with a look back on my last year of blogging. But first, a graph! As you will see below, I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I used to. I still haven’t gone an entire calendar month without making a post yet, but I’ve come close. At one point I planned to write something on a regular schedule—either M/W/F or M/Th or something like that. Then I had kids.
But I digress; time to recap my year of blogging. One of my first posts discussed the difficulty of teaching Emma pronouns. (She has mastered them by now). We got a few opportunities to play in the snow. I decided to say goodbye to The Simpsons, and I found a Bizarro Kip out there.
Then some big news came out when we discovered that the baby in my wife’s belly was a boy. Then we had another parenting moment when our adorable little girl entered her terrible twos. (So far they haven’t really been all that terrible.) When Stephanie and I celebrated our fifth anniversary, Stephanie posted a really long post looking back on those five years. I made a personal goal to lose some weight. I’ve pretty much kept to my plan. I quickly lost twenty pounds, but I’ve put ten of them back on. I’m planning to add some new items to the list in the new year. The biggest change, of course, was when Grayson Matthew Robinson arrived on July fifteenth.
I also gave out some random advice along the way: how to evaluate Mexican restaurants, how to better tie your shoe laces, and how to win at hangman, the Cracker Barrel peg game, and tic-tac-toe. I let you guys know what I thought of Metroid: Other M. (It wasn’t that great.) Stephanie and I went to our first high school reunions, where I realized that people lose their accents in my memories. I also discussed how my handwriting has changed since high school.
We also took Emma trick-or-treating as a bumblebee. She had a blast. I played around with my new DSLR camera, sharing pictures of the moon and a bonfire. I also made some pretty cool-looking high-resolution panoramas. The end of the year brought about an election season, and I turned the focus of this blog onto a poorly-worded campaign ad, which single-handedly destroyed a politician’s career. (And you thought blogging was a waste of time.) And of course the year ended with my first white Christmas. Maybe it makes me a racist, but I now think white Christmases are the best kind.
At various points throughout the year I used this site to give away some free code and programming tips. I gave away code to generate a collage thumbnail image, improved code to generate gradient images, a mini webapp to perform powerful search-and-replace operations, and code to update your Twitter status using OAuth in PHP. I also shared
a haiku for web developers.
And I guess that’s most everything that I talked about on this blog this year. Happy New Year everyone!