A couple of days late, but I still manage to do a quick birthday update. So, 2009. A pretty big year.
Getting engaged while travelling through Europe for a month, that’s got to be the highlight. Still can’t believe how beautiful Tuscany is, not too mention my fiancee. I can honestly say that this is a paragraph I did not think I would be writing. It’s amazing how things change.
Beautiful Tuscany
Changed jobs and, in doing so, dodged redundancy by a matter of days. It’s been good to start from the bottom again, plenty of new stuff to learn which is what keeps me going but it’s also hard work just keeping things moving when everything is quite new. It’s going to be a different workplace next year, with a lot of challenges to contend with.
It’s funny looking back at this same post just one year ago, wondering where I was heading in 2009. Relationships, work, all that stuff has worked out perfectly. One lucky year, I guess. And still haven’t had a smoke for two years – feeling much, much better for it. It’s great to be able to look back over the birthday posts from this blog for the last five years, things have decidedly been improving all the way along. Plenty coming up in the next twelve months too – engagement party in January, wedding to plan for 2011, work travel throughout the year (including Singapore and New Zealand), the new job to keep improving at, turning 30 (!) plus any number of surprises that are sure to appear.
Here’s a sample of Google now tracking my movements, via Google Location History and Latitude. Who would’ve thought that it would come to this a few years ago, back when they were just a cool new search engine?
I’m sure this will shortly prompt a slew of articles about privacy and how much personal information Google stores about you, even though this is very much an opt-in services. Not to mention the dramatic increase in transparency that (also recently released) Google Dashboard now offers. Personally, I’m not too concerned.
On a related theme, this is also a great way to track exactly how much time I spend on motionless trains between Flinders St and Richmond or North Melbourne. Thanks again Connex!
Google Latitude tracking my travels
Note that this is from the Blackberry Bold app, which is able to run and update my location in the background. For things to really get useful, my iPhone needs to come up with a way to do this too. To be honest though, I think that this is the only point so far that has been awarded to the Blackberry – it’s pretty hopeless at everything else.