Looking Back at 2005

2005 was a very mixed year for me, it had some memorable high spots and a couple of tear jerking moments.

The year started off with me moving all my sites, email and everything else I put online from a shared machine to my own bytemark box after the shared host I was using got cracked through someones broken web app install. Digging through my backups and verifying nothing had been tampered with was a fun way to spend my hols.

February bought a small traffic spike when I got a book review on the front page of Slashdot. All the comments were actually pretty friendly. After this triggered my “love” of nearly getting heckled (and John Southerns ability to blindside me) I “volunteered” to organise a GLLUG meeting in March. It was the first meeting I’ve ever organised and it went pretty well in the end. It also saw GLLUG go back to the big crowds we used to get.

April wasn’t as much fun. A small event I liked the idea of, a London CodeBrew never happened due to a complete lack of interest. From them and me. I then got sent to the middle of nowhere on a very painful training course in the middle of nowhere. After being deflated enough to not post at all in May I managed to one up myself and put on a June GLLUG.

July was a tragic month for a lot of people in London. I thought long and hard about whether I should post on the London bombings and in the end I did. This city is very much a part of who I am and I couldn’t not say something.

The rest of a subdued July included the excellent one day OpenTech and me changing jobs. I picked up a lot about medical companies and how they like to do things in that role. It was an interesting job with nice people but it wasn’t for me anymore. In August I spent way too much time playing with the ever cool Greasemonkey, went to a UKUUG event in Swansea and then screwed up a potential relationship. This was my most off-topic ever post and it generated a fair amount of email from people who knew me; and almost all of them guessed the wrong person which was amusing. It also proved too many of my friends don’t have lives :)

September saw me get voted on to the UKUUG council (which I’ve been very lax in getting involved with) and the set up of PlanetGLLUG. I missed the Nordic Perl Workshop (in Sweden) after I made last minute plans to attend EuroOSCON. The highlight of which involved a funny as hell “tourist trip” around the back-streets of Amsterdam at gone midnight with a group of nearly professional piss-takers. And an advertising pitch from the owner of Orgasmatones…

The merry month of October bought the Linux World Expo in London, the first UK FUDCon and my third GLLUG, with the incredible Jeff Waugh speaking at GLLUG as part of his BadgerBadgerBadger tour. The initial Web frameworks night post went out. And nothing visible really happened. I also got to see an advanced screening (one day early!) of Serenity. Which was memorable for both the film and the fact that a large number of the audience seemed to be Browncoats who wanted a sing-song.

November was my month of stress, the Web Frameworks Night was a roaring success (after nearly not happening at all) and was my accomplishment of the year. It’s the community aspect of events like this, the speakers, the contacts at the venue and the audience, that makes me love working in the OpenSource and Free Software worlds.