title: Leaving 2008 and Entering 2009: Reflections and Projections
date: 2009-01-01 00:29
tags: miro, personal, pcf, diet, foss, biking
author: Christine Lemmer-Webber
slug: 2008_to_2009
---
Well here we are, and 2008 is coming to a close. Sitting here between
one year and another... I suppose this is a good time to reflect on
things. I haven't talked enough about what I've done the last year, so I
guess now is a good time to talk about that as well as what I see
happening in this coming year. Not resolutions as much as expectations.

So, 2008 was a busy year... at the end of 2007, I proposed to Morgan,
and so 2008 involved a lot of wedding planning (admittedly, more of that
burden has been on Morgan's shoulders than on mine). Most of the
difficult bits are planned now, and at the end of June 2009, we should
be married. That's one thing which I'll be working on at the beginning
of 2009... the wedding website. I still haven't gotten to it. I have a
due date for the end of January. Well, at least I know what I'll be
spending my weekends on during that month.

Speaking of which, I project I'll be leaving the shared hosting world
and moving to my own virtual server for this website.
[Webfaction](webfaction.com) has been great... it was really refreshing
to use a shared hosting service that actually felt like it respected
developers. But I feel like my needs have outgrown that, and so I got an
account on [Linode](http://linode.com). Not sure if I'm keeping the
webfaction stuff for something else yet or not (I'd better decide soon),
but I'm really looking forward to not using a control panel any more and
to be able to put up whatever services I want, how I want, from the
command line.

This last year I've also begun working on my artwork again, after a long
hiatus during the three years in which I was both working fulltime and
going to school fulltime. There have been some stills I have been
working on, most of which I have not bothered to put up yet (I need to
really put up a nice, basic image gallery on here). But the real thing I
was hoping to work on in 2009 was a series of animations using the
animation engine I developed to propose to Morgan. I still think that's
something worth working on, but it slowly became apparent to me that I
really should get a better sense of how the rest of the software world
thinks about doing animation before I return to working on my engine.

Hence, I've had a renewed interest in [Blender](http://blender.org); I
even actually completed my first
actually-good-enough-to-be-considered-a-finished-project still image,
titled [A Fear of
Flight](http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=141124) (which
I suppose I never really mentioned in my blog... ah well). People seemed
to like it, minus the fact that I kind of skipped adding a background.
They're right... I really don't know anything about creating
backgrounds, just characters. So that's something I'll have to work on.

Probably not a big surprise to say that the next project is actually an
animation in Blender. I've decided to created an animated version
adapted from a reworking of the intro to [SuperTux](http://supertux.org)
we had talked about while I was actually still involved in that project.
I already had enough of an idea of the story and the characters, and
it's short enough of a scene that it should be possible. I've begun
planning out the project, and I've already storyboarded it. If my time
estimations are right, it should be possible for me to get it done
sometime between August and September. The wedding website has to be
done first though... meanwhile I am waiting for my copies of [Creature
Factory](http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=105)
and [Learn Character Animation Using
Blender](http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=113)
to arrive. I've benefitted a lot from the other blender training dvds,
and I think I'm finally coming to the point where I have enough skills
to pull a decent animation off, and I think after watching these I'll be
fairly ready.

In addition, last year I started paying a lot more attention to my
health. I've recently begun focusing on changing my diet quite a bit,
and I've actually come to discover that I am really enjoying the changes
that I'm making. Someone asked in the comments of my [last
post](http://dustycloud.org/blog/view_post/mushiki-love/) if I am a
vegetarian... the answer is no, since I do eat meat still, but
increasingly less so. That's both for health reasons as well as
responding to some pretty [compelling
arguments](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html)
about lowering or eliminating the amount of meat in one's diet. But
there have been more adjustments than that... I'm also generally just
eating a lot healthier. In the last couple weeks I've been weeding fried
food out of my diet, and I gave up drinking soda. But I've been eating
and drinking so many other interesting (and healthier) things that I
don't really regret it. I look forward to returning to outdoor biking
again when spring comes around, too.

Lastly, there's no way I can end this post without mentioning the shift
in my employment and programming activities. Since I began using Linux
in 2001, it has been a dream of mine to be able to work on a significant
free software project as my full time job. I didn't expect that to come
true, but in 2008 I came on full time working for the
[PCF](http://pculture.org). I came on at an exciting time... Miro's
architecture has gone through a major overhaul over these last many
months. The new release is coming so close, and now it's clear enough
how worth it all that work has been. I look forward to being part of all
that advancement in the year to come.

So, a lot has happened, and a lot is on the horizon. Life has been a lot
of things lately, but boring is not one of them. I'm anticipating that
to be the same with the coming year as well.

Goodbye 2008. Hello 2009.
