Goodbye 2005

Although the whole "end of one year beginning of another" is basically a contrivance of convenience, let's go with it and agree now is as good a time as any to look back on the last 365 days.

Things I learned this year:

You can put stuff besides nuts in peanut butter:
Although I'm not sure how good Peanut Butter with Sun-dried Tomato is, I do know how good Peanut Butter with Raspberry White Chocolate is! (yum)

You can still buy Absinthe, and only alcoholics see green fairies :
I found a bottle of Absente in the LCBO recently as a housewarming gift (it's not kewl to show up empty handed they tell me), and it got me wondering if you could get the real thing anywhere. Apparently you pretty much can. It's not exactly the same, but is probably very close.. and given the number of people alive who've had the real (pre-1920) stuff - there aren't a lot to argue.

London, Toronto, New York = Yes ... Vancouver, Amsterdam = No :
I re-affirmed this year that I'm a big city guy. Not that I go out so much or do so much, but just the density of a large city is somehow comfortable. Whenever I'm in a place like Vancouver or Amsterdam it just feels wrong. Great places to visit - could never call them "Home". This is a good thing to know about yourself I think.

After enough years, even video games can become boring :
Perhaps most shockingly of all... I now find most video games boring. This will undoubtedly mean more to people who've known me longer. I think it's just because the gaming industry has run out of new ideas... I just can't remember the last time I bought a new game without feeling like I've already played it before. Maybe I need to get out and try more radical games like Katamari Damacy. For now, I've gone back to more traditional games, and am glad for it.

I should have gotten a Digital SLR in 2004 :
Getting my dSLR in June totally changed my outlook on digital photography. I wasn't even that fond of SLRs before, preferring my rangefinder... but the ease of use and power of a modern dSLR is just amazing. Something that was really bugging me about my Coolpix 990 was staring at that little tiny screen to take pictures. It felt like I was taking pictures of that LCD. Now I actually feel connected back to the subject, and photography is fun again. Of course it helps to have people to go shooting with.

Trust my instincts, until someone can give me proof I'm wrong :
It's hard sometimes when you just feel something, but everyone around you is in a bubble so it's like trying to .. well it's like trying to convince people that things like RSS really aren't that popular. By which I specifically mean subscribing to an RSS feed and using a newsreader. The fact that MyYahoo! now uses RSS instead of something else is meaningless, because any number of technologies have and will feed that same chunk of information. Even when I see an RSS feed I prefer to go to the website - I don't need more information that looks like Outlook, I get more than enough of that as it is. RSS is neat the way Java and XML are neat.. sure on the back-end they probably make life a lot simpler, but from an average users perspective they mean nothing.

When you think something is smart, put your money on it :
11.5 months ago I heard a summary of Steve Job's speech at MacWorld and I liked everything I heard, so I immediately went out and bought some Apple stock. Since then.. well.. you can see for yourself: AAPL has done really well. My only regret is I didn't have more cash floating around. As far as I can tell, as long as Jobs is at the helm AAPL will be worth owning. Intel-based Macs! Crap I may just have to get one.

47 films is too many! :
Yes, I know I only saw like 42, but I had planned (!) on seeing 47. Next year I will probably just get a nice book of 40 tickets and spend a little bit longer choosing my films. When you're seeing 6 films in a day there is just no way you can process that much information, either mentally or emotionally (assuming you're seeing the right films). Maybe it goes against the spirit of the festival, but I'd rather see 30 films and really have some time to think about them than 42 and be scrambling from one to the next.

Oh and yes I learned a few other things... nothing I'd write in my BLOG however.

Here's to 2006! and... Happy Birthday to Me!

Posted at 12:06 AM to Personal By: John Fairley