2011

Here are my highlights for the year 2011. Just want to put this on record while I am still reflecting on the year that was. After this, I will once again turn around and look straight ahead.

• I’ve been using MacBook for over a year and found my fondness for it grow. Even with continued use, the fascination has not worn off a bit. More I use my MacBook, more I like it. The model I own was discontinued this year, and is no longer available. Newer, faster, thinner MacBook Air has replaced this older plastic MacBook, but I continue to like mine better.
• The natural next step was to figure out how to program a Mac. I did something close, if not exactly the same: developed two apps for iOS, where Seema conceived the app and did the artwork. That was fun. As a side effect of developing and publishing these apps on the App Store, I had to create a website for the app which exposed to me a whole new world of web development. These apps have been downloaded more than a 1000 times, which is not a big number by most measures, but it feels good to have touched a thousand peoples’ lives in some way. Got to do more of this.
• Dabbled a little bit in Java 7 when it was released. Filed a bug in the compiler and saw it fixed in the next update. I thought that was cool.
• On the health and fitness front – my running milage peaked around mid year and then dropped off completely. At this point, I am probably in the worst shape of my last 10 years (yes, it was even worse before that, but I digress). I need to put this aspect of my life back on track.
• I continued to blog through 2011 and towards the end of the year, merged my two blogs into this one. The reason why people blog is now obvious to me. I agree that it has some sort of a healing property. Every blog post results in a great feeling even when you know there is not much of a readership out there. Journaling is known to have many benefits.
• For the first time in 15 years, I am now without a DSLR camera because I sold it off along with all the lenses. Its time to buy new but am not decided on a particular model. Interesting improvements are underway in the world of DSLRs (for e.g. mirror-less cameras which makes the camera body much thinner than the current models). I will keep watching their moves until I am ready to buy a camera that will stay with me for a long time.
• Finally, this year I am back on Twitter and am finding it more useful than Facebook or Google+. Even though I continue to use these two ‘social networks’, the one that I use regularly is twitter, even for my personal communication with the distributed family.

That was about 2011.