Goodbye 2008, hello 2009!

2008 is over. Almost. I don´t think, that the last few days will change it. At least i hope so. But … i don´t see any game-changing development for the last few hours of this years. One of the big headlines of this year was “loss”: The biggest loss at first. I´ve lost my grandma at the beginning of this year. My grandma was already in an age of 60 when i was born. That´s an age where the death starts to take away our grand parents. So the additional 34 years were a gift. Each year. In the middle of the year i´ve lost a friendship … at least i thought she was a good friend. But errors are human and i´m just a human. I really thought that that this loss would hurt me. I don´t make friendship easily. But at the end the exact circumstances of this situation created opposite feelings. At the end it´s better that way: Friendship is something mutual … and if one person think of a relation as a friendship and one other as a loose acquaitance it´s better to keep it the second way. I still do not fully understand the dynamics of that situation but i stopped thinking about it a while ago. You can´t look into the brain of other people. At the end of the year I´ve lost another friendship to a large heap of misunderstandings. But without trust there is no friendship … and at the end there was no trust. It´s just a very loose acquaintence now from my point of view. It was my fault as well as the the fault of this friend. But well … this happens. Shit happens. The other big headline was “win”: I´ve won new friends. Albeit i never met Marianne, we have developed a strange kind of friendship in the mean time. I´ve met other great persons this year. I would call them friends right at this moment, but they are already important to me. Additionally i thought, i´ve lost the very special relation to another person, but the end of this year proved otherwise. There are very rare persons in your life who are so special, that even not seeing them for a while and huge hassles in both lifes doesn´t change a thing. Personal targets? The last two years weren´t good ones in regard of my weight. Too much work, too much frustrations, less sports. This has to change, but i started to do more sports. So this will be just a matter of months after. Christmas is over, so no further problematic days in sight. Want back to my old weight. The blog got more and more important to me this year. Personally and professionally. My objectives for this year were 5000 Visits per day , 750 subscribers und 600.000 Pageviews. The results of this year: Up to 10000 visits per day (with large variances the, at the weekend the visit count drops to 1000, monday and friday are the best days), 1175 subscribers (right before cristmas) and 750.000 page views and 15 million served requests by the webserver. Objectives for the next year? Well … up to 20000 vists, 2000 subscribers and 1.5 million page views. I know … very high targets but targets have to be hard to be challenging. The “Less known Solaris features” series was a large success. 15.000 downloads of the pdf versions. The web log versions of the document´s articles were loaded 105.859 times in the last year. My plans for the next year? I´m already working on a german version. I will publish it as a book as planed at first. I will publish it as a free .pdf-book again. In the next few weeks i will publish a revised version (with the help of Ceri Davis, who helped with the english grammar and typo checking) of the english version. I hope i can iron out all the tex warnings in the next few weeks. Such a tedious job… Professionally i will plan my next steps in the next few weeks: I´m member of the ´09 SEED mentoring programme as mentee and i was one of the first ones matched to a mentor. I think i had luck with my mentor. I plan to talk more often on public conferences (hope my papers are accepted, one is a live LKSF session, another a talk about my view to virtualisation and some additional smaller sessions) and i´m planing for a new career step (I´m staying at Sun, at least when Sun doesn´t think, i should be part of the 6000 people, so it´s something internal to Sun) but it´s much to early to talk about that. I wish you all a good start in the next year. May all your hopes for 2009 come true. May all your fears in 2009 turn out as unnescessary over the course of the year.