The year end is usually the time to reflect back on the year gone by and make resolutions for the new year. And though I have not been making my new year resolutions public, I don't mind talking about good and not-so-good things of the previous year:
The HI-LITES of Year 2004
- Publications: No, I didn't write another book. Year 2004 was the year of small articles in trade journals: JMX Best Practices in JavaPro, Evolving JMX in WebServices Journal, JMX and WSDM at DRC developer's corner and few others. As you can see, I have been getting more and more engaged with my day job.
- HP Software Group announces its blog and I join as a blogger: Not much there yet, but keep watching ;-)
- Akriti's school makes us feel proud: by scoring perfect 1000 in 2004 API ranking.
- Delivered a product: The never ending re-orgs of past few years had deprived me of something that every engineer cherishes -- a real product delivery. But delivery of WLI-SPI changed that and allowed me to have first hand expereince with OpenView technologies and customers.
The LO-LITES of Year 2004
- Incomplete personal projects: I exited year 2004 with a number of home/holiday projects incomplete: (a) transferring video recordings to DVD; (b) migrating homepage to another web hosting company; (c) furnishing the home; and few others. These will probably keep me busy for other few weeks.
- Not-so-great performance of my book at stores: Well, I never planned to retire on royalties but was still dismayed by the meager sale figures. I guess, part of the problem is that Google has obviated the need for certain category of books and other part is that it was a one-off thing for me. Most people write books to promote their consulting or training business and people buy their books because they consider them authority on the subject. It wasn't so for me. The fact that HP bailed out from J2EE based App Servers business and I joined the OpenView group was not very helpful.
- The financial aspects of owning a house: Mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, gardening, incidental expenses (first, the heating system broke down, then the geyser and we also had a couple of drainage clogging instances) kept our finances strained. And though the house is great, I wonder if it was a financially wise decision to purchase the house. The only consolation is that, as per statistics, the real estate prices still seem to be headed north.
Besides these, life continued as usual. A number of trivia worth mentioning:
- We visited San Diego for few days in the month of August and had a great time there. Akriti and Unnati were excited to see a real Panda in the San Diego Zoo.
- Our wireless home network functioned quite well most of the time and allowed Akriti and Unnati to play the neopet, barbie and numerous other games from their room without the ungainly sight of Cat5 cables. I could also use my laptop while watching TV.
- Unnati was so fascinated by the picture on my monitor of zooming down from sky to her school campus using a trial download of keyhole that she still asks for "the earth" whenver in my home office.
- With all the hype around GMail, Google Suggest and rich web applications in the technical blogsphere, I learnt enough of CSS and JavaScript to write simple utilities on my own. To complement this for writing web based apps, I also learnt a bit of Perl.