I Post

No, the title is not some sort of obscure twist on I Robot. I have finally created a page for The Adventures of Älg some eight months after Janita and I orginally came up with the idea when we went to Baviaanskloof. My aim is to post at least one picture every night until I have posted all of them. After that we will have to go on holiday again to get some more. I think that I will also try and post one of our other photos to Flickr every night before they get dusty on the hard drive.

Janita and Älg at Doodsklip in Baviaanskloof

 

My 2008

I know that I wrote a post like this last year and I thought about looking at it before I wrote this year’s one… However, I decided that it would be more interesting to write this post and then go back and look at last year’s one after I was finished. I always wonder how I can be more creative and repeating what I did last year is certainly not a good way to do that!

Work

I received an awesome raise in October and a fantastic bonus at the end of the year. Other than that work has been very stressful and I am not happy with the way the year came to an end. I hope to be able to change things next year.

Photography

The BG-E3 battery grip has been on my wish list for well over a year now and I have finally acquired it. The camera handles like a dream and the new polariser darkens the sky evenly instead of producing very dark blue corners like the last one did. I am looking forward to taking my camera on my travels next year.

Flying

I spent very little time flying my model aircraft this year and didn’t get a single opportunity to fly in anything else. I will have to wait until I move back to Sweden to resume my pilot training. I plan to take Janita and myself gliding and paragliding next year.

Holidays

I didn’t have too much in the way of holidays this year other than a trip to Mountain Sanctuary Park for our anniversary, and our trip to Port Elizabeth to spend Christmas and New Year with my family. Janita and I plane to travel quite a bit in 2009, including a visit to the Fish River Canyon in May.

Magic

I started playing Magic again and have been slowly building up my collection. Shards of Alara is by far my favourite set. I have introduced Janita to the game and we spend quite a bit of time playing together. I entered three competitions and did quite well in the Shard of Alara pre-release. I plan to continue playing as much as possible next year and I am looking forward to the Conflux pre-release.

Masters

I have spent approximately 368 hours studying. I finally decided to go for it in May and I haven’t looked back since. For the past 6 months I have consistently studied for 10 or more hours every week except for two weeks break and one week of illness. I am even studying now during the holidays. I plan to submit my dissertation in December 2009.

TRANTOO

I decided that it was a bit arrogant to name my software after myself so I renamed it to Dragon Wings. Sourceforge has not yet accepted the request I submitted to change the Unix name but I am hoping it will happen early next year. I haven’t spent much time on the code this year but I have made some important changes and added important functionality. There is some new framework in place to handle things like user preferences which is not fully implemented and therefore not exposed to the user yet. I will only be able to polish it up enough to release version 1.0 after I have finished my masters.

And that’s it. Now I am going to celebrate the New Year with friends and family around a braai. Happy New Year and may you have a peaceful and prosperous 2009.