Notes to self

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Amazon's position

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.