I started thinking about this blog post half way through December but I didn’t start writing it until a week into January.
2009 was yet another year where I was busy yet feeling like I achieved very little.
In March I bought a racing bike, and by end of the year managed to ride 8000km on it, 9000km in total for the year.
I rode in 5 of the CycloSportif rides (all except the first one) and that gave me both a team activity and an area of personal aspiration for improvement.
In October I went to Melbourne for a community bike ride, the Around the Bay in a Day ride. It was my first time in Melbourne and it was great. I managed to complete the 220km (210km event) ride in 9 hours elapsed (7 hours 22 mins riding, 30.2km/hr average).
Then at the end of October I participated in the first ever Tour de Freedom WA ride from Esperance to Perth (not the short way). I managed 850km over 5 days. That was a massive challenge and ultimately a personal victory (not without issue) which I think was both the high point to the year for me and related to the low point too. Since then I haven’t done a whole lot of riding which is bad but I just haven’t been in the mood for it.
After years of sort of trying, I managed to stop my web hosting business and cancel my colo server. Part of that exercise was to move my web stuff onto a different service, which ended up being a VPS. The move went smooth enough and at least the server setup is reproducible (I scripted it) and the backup of the box is easy, fast and complete.
In July I got a grown up couch which has both been a blessing and a curse for various reasons. The bean bag still gets plenty of use.
I managed to watch a lot of TV this year. I picked up several new shows, some got canned in season one, others were old and still going, and some even finished. Towards the end of the year I put in a huge effort to finish off Seinfeld which I bought on dvd the year before. One particular clip from The Chronicle (clip show right before The Finale) featured a montage with Greenday’s Time of your Life acoustic playing. That reminded me of my high school graduation where this song was played right at the end before leaving. The relevance of this is Seinfeld ended in May of the same year.
Notable shows that I watched this year; Breaking Bad (2 seasons), Entourage (6 seasons), Two and a Half Men (7 seasons), Chuck (season 3 just started), The Middle (season 1 still airing), Defying Gravity (cancelled in season 1), The Inbetweeners (2 seasons), Stargate Universe (please get good and don’t get cancelled), Dollhouse (pity it’s got cancelled), The Big Bang Theory (season 3 still airing), True Blood and many more which I’d started previously. Both Dexter and Weeds finished on a high, and both seasons of Top Gear (UK) were as usual, awesome. There is plenty of good TV shows out there, it’s just a pity the networks seem to air crap rather than quality AND pack too many ads into it. I even have a DVR now (well if you could call PlayTV a DVR), and I hardly ever watch live TV anyway, now I never have to.
I ended up buying Rock Band 2 from the UK, as it’s still not out locally, despite being released in October 2008 overseas. I’m yet to really finish it, as I sort of lost interest. It’s still fun, but it’s just not the same as it used to be.
I moved my storage systems from Linux (ext3) to FreeBSD (zfs (tactical solution)) and now (finally) to OpenSolaris (zfs dedupe). OpenSolaris was the original goal, even from October 2008 when I started playing with it. I just wasn’t able to boot it consistently on my hardware, and now I’m using a CF-IDE adaptor it’s far more reliable than trying to get usb booting to work 100%.
I also got my air con repaired. This was a mission and a half. It took 10 months from logging the fault to having it maybe fixed. The service agent for my area is totally incompetent and I doubt qualified to service anything. I think my letter of complaint to LG about the service agent’s lack of service was what finally got it fixed, though I never got any response from LG and it was only my continued calls to the service agent which resulted in me thinking LG did anything. I’ve been meaning to send them a follow up but haven’t bothered. The unit is still not right and if I have any further issues with it, it’s going to be removed and replaced by a unit from a company that isn’t serviced by the useless agent. Unfortunately this will cost me money, but hopefully save my sanity.
The government managed to get their internet filter legalisation through the lower house. I’ve already started writing my thoughts on this whole thing, and that might be my next blog post. Once it’s polished up and balanced and not too much rambling.
All of that happening while being busy at work. Ok so the workload comes in ebbs and tides but on the whole I’ve been very busy all year. We’ve had 2 drilling rigs on the go, planning for a large dual facility shutdown and the whole Asia Pacific LNG thing came along.
I guess in hind sight I did achieve a lot. Let’s see what 2010 can bring for me.
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