2005 in Review
Heh, been wanting to write one of those end of year reviews. Been wanting to write about it for the last 2 weeks or so. Now that I have some time to write it, I don’t know what I want to write about.
Was talking to a friend this afternoon, and she told me that bloggers are all narcissistic. Bloggers talk a lot about themselves, bloating their own egos. Heh, I don’t know if I talk much about myself (or do I?) but I think that’s exactly the point about blogging sometimes. You want to express your own personal opinion and sometimes you expose yourself to other people and they may have the right or wrong impression of you.
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Was thinking about writing a chronological history of events for the things that happened this year but that is quite boring indeed. Maybe I should just fulfill the idea of the narcissistic blogger and just express opinions about the things that happened this year.
On the personal front, moving from part time job holder to full time employment was sort of a big leap for me. The transition wasn’t as steep as moving here from KL to study foundation at Trinity College. Well, in 1999, one was younger and more impressionable. These days I’m quite settled in my ways, and I think this was one of the topics that kept debating itself in my brain. I’m not a person who’s very good at mingling socially with others. I guess it’s part of my upbringing, family was all I mingled with when I grew up. I don’t think we had many family friends and I never joined in many of my school activities or hung out at friend’s places much except once in a long, long while. Even when I did, I felt hesitant to mingle as I was unfamiliar with people and the surroundings, and never spoke much. Heh, even now I can be like that, alienating myself from a room full of people who are friends of my friends. Perhap I cherish friendships, and dislike the idea of just having idle chatter on various topics with people I don’t know. At times, this is the truth about meeting people that you will probably never see again, and I don’t make the effort to step up and talk.
Then again, at times it is my limited scope of knowledge that keeps me from talking to other people. Heh, I am an elitist of sorts, and if something interests me, I will try my best to learn all about it and I can discuss these things inside out. Sometimes I miss out on the more social chit chat because I don’t know what to talk about. I like listening to people talk about their experiences. I’m not a good story teller, because I just absorb things and since I’m emotionally detached from most things, I don’t describe events and things as lively as they should be.
Maybe what I’m trying to get at is that I want to mingle outside my comfort zone. One learns a lot from other people because of their different interests and expertise, and you find yourself with a larger view of the world. There was a time when that was how I picked up stuff, by mingling with other people. I’d be a sponge and take in all their experiences, so I could know more than the limited scope I could personally experience. As I grow older and more comfortable with myself, I feel less inclined to pick up new ideas. Is that why when people grow older they find it so hard to change and accept new schools of thought?
I feel that this is one of the character changes I should make about myself, to be less of an introvert and to contribute more to making a lively discussion at social events.
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The other bigger impact that I have had was finding a full time job. I started feeling the lack of time when I was selling fish, so this transition wasn’t as bad. The first few weeks of work I tried very hard to sleep 6 hours and get through a day’s work while fulfilling my social and personal “duties”. These days, I’ve let go of many of the things I used to spend quite a bit of time on. I’ve reduced the spare time to just absorbing stuff of the Internet, in the mornings with a cup of coffee before work and at night with a cup of coffee before sleep. Heh.
There has been plenty of developments in interface elements for the web and I’ve been reading up on them but never had the time to experiment with them. I bought my Shuttle cube for the very purpose of having a separate development environment to try out these new things. It was a good idea, but sometimes there is the inertia of having to turn on this separate computer to get things to run. Heh, less is more at times. I keep thinking that I want to upgrade my computer and over time you have to because of physical limitations to your hardware that running the latest software is not productive at all. With working now (and the greater financial freedom), I have the equipment that I thought would make me more productive but because you take things for granted now, you spend less time on it (tying back with work, social obligations taking up the rest of my time).
Heh, thoughts are running all over the place at the moment and this paragraph may seem a little confusing (have little time so I can’t edit for clarity and words that come up will go straight onto the sheet! No rehearsals.)
The thing is to spend less time fiddling and anticipating for new hardware. Use what you have and do a good job with it. I can think of the next dual core processor that would reduce the lag on multiple processes or that D200 that has such a good sensor that all your photos will come out nice regardless of how crappy a photographer you are (as an example, although I don’t think it quite fits). On the other hand, I’ve been making a lot of progress with my current (my only) coffee machine. I know a little of its quirks and that there are ways to coax good espresso from it. I have lost a little of that with my other hobbies, like when I worked my first Pentium MMX laptop until it literally fell apart. I had to find every conceivable trick (orthodoxed or not) to get it to do the things I needed it to do. I learnt a great deal that way.
Then again, by fiddling with the latest stuff, you learn how they work. At least I got my experience of these things by tinkering with other people’s computers or trying to help them solve a computer problem that I have a foundation of knowledge in (like building websites for someone other than myself). Funded some of my own hardware (it’s a nice achievement) and it’s good to be able to give advice you know is reliable.
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Basically 2005 has been about facing uncertainty and sticking by whatever you believe in. It got me through somehow, even if it wasn’t the best of times. Prior years were just moving on to the next semester and passing every single subject. Heh, assignments and exams can be scary, but they are miniscule problems compared to what you have to face in the real world. Like my brother said, “Everyday at work is an exam.” That is true though, at work you can’t really screw up and you are required to think hard to solve your problems. Answers will not be given at the end of it.
Heh, hope I haven’t bored you to death by the end of this post. Maybe it’s just to make up for all the things that I’ve wanted to write about (there’s still plenty of that, although those topics are more complexed in nature) but this will suffice for this year.
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New year’s eve, just plan to gorge in food. Happy new year and may 2006 be what you expect it to be, with a little hard work of course! 
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