2012 was the first year that I tried writing weekly (although they often turned out to be fortnightly) “week notes” posts. This is a summary of what happened during the year.
Blogging
I’ve been a disastrous blogger this year. If you ignore the week notes and classic album posts I’ve written about thirty blog posts. I should be aiming at three or four times that number.
I’m still pleased with some of the posts I’ve written though. The three blog posts on Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s bizarre attack on marriage equality were pretty good. I liked my explanation of why you should never give your password to a third-party web site. And who can forget my battle with SeeTickets.
In July I celebrated the tenth anniversary of this blog and between March and September I resurrected Wasted Inches, one of my earliest experiments in blogging.
So, not a complete disaster. But nowhere near as successful as I’d hoped. I’ll definitely try harder this year.
Health
My health has been dominated by two stories in 2012. Firstly, right at the start of the year I slipped and broke my leg. I was in plaster for six weeks. And secondly there was my attempt to get fit and lose some weight. That was actually pretty successful. I took up jogging and carefully watched what I was eating. And over a period of a few months I lost over two stone. Over the last few months I stopped being quite so careful, with the result that I put about half a stone back on. But, hey, it’s now a new year so I’ll be trying again with renewed enthusiasm.
If I can repeat last year’s success and lose another two pounds then I’ll be really happy.
Training and Speaking
2012 feels like the year that my training business really started to take off. I’ve run a number of training courses for various companies. It makes a nice chance from the programming work that takes up most of my time. I’ve also run three successful Perl School sessions, with more planned for the future.
I haven’t been speaking as much as I have recent years. That’s partly because I skipped a couple of conferences that I usually attend. I’ll be aiming to go to more conferences this year.
Travel
I’ve seen more of the UK than I usually do in a year. That’s often been because of training courses. But I haven’t done that much foreign travel. I had a weekend in Berlin in August. And I’ve just got back from two weeks in South Africa.
I have nothing firm planned for this year yet, but I’m hoping to get to Kiev in August and we have vague plans to go to San Francisco at some point in the summer.
Gigs
I haven’t done a final count yet, but I suspect I saw fewer gigs in 2012 than I did in 2011. That’s partly because of the six weeks I spent with my leg in a cast, largely unable to get myself to the venues. I had to sell a few tickets to gigs that I couldn’t get to.
I’ll write another post summarising the best and worst gigs I saw in 2012.
Summary
A pretty good year all in all. And the week notes have been a really interesting and useful way to track what has been going on. I feel sure that I’ll continue the experiment during 2013.
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