It appears that IT job satisfaction is on an all time low.

Article here.

The iMac has now been flagged as shipped.

I am reticent to say “my” iMac has been shipped as I’ve yet to get it, yet to check it and yet to actually make sure it doesn’t seem to be suffering from any known issues.

I am however very excited.

On Christmas day, Emma and I snapped up an online bargain – a 5 Series Samsung 32″ LCD 1080P. It arrived on NYE at 7.05am. Both Emma and I were more than a little excited to have a good screen for watching DVDs, playing Xbox and view HD video content on.

Later that day, about the same time Emma and I returned from a run, Bailey showed up for a 4 day stop off at Castle Cosh-Ross.

NYE involved some drinks, home made pizza, Star Trek on DVD, some Dark Knight on bluray, Modern Warfare 2 SpecOps, and going to the beach at 11.45pm to partake in the fireworks and Chinese lanterns. When I say partake, I mean go drink on the beach whilst everyone else does the actual work. I decided to hastily snap a number of photos on the beach with my phone, it was quite cold so apologies for the poor photos.

You can see more photos here.

On New Years Day, we generally played on the xbox, geeked out and then headed to the Ginger Pig for a delicious meal. Over the weekend we ate well, drank not too much, went swimming, played more xbox, watched District 9 and chatted a lot. Bailey left on Sunday morning as Emma and I headed to an indoor cycling class at Coral. The weekend was finished with a Thai takeaway watching about 6 episodes of series 7 of the West Wing.

All in all very good.

As you can see, on the 23rd December last year, I ordered my new computer. I ordered a quad core i7 27″ iMac, with 8Gb ram and 2Tb disk space.

The wait is very painful especially as someone from the Apple store noted that I should even receive my iMac order by 8th as the estimated dates are often out.

There is some hope though, there are known issues within the 27″ range that Apple are trying to fix and should hopefully be resolved by the time my Build-To-Order machine has been built and shipped.

Still. I’m very excited.

I can haz none?

I’ve no intention of having resolutions so to speak. I’m already fairly fit and healthy, I eat well – both healthy and tasty – so the regular ones are already covered.

Instead I have more of what I’d call goals:

I.) Ride the 100 mile South Downs Way Randonee mountain bike ride in June. Going to be savage but a good target to aim for, what I’d say is the mountain biking equivalent of a marathon.

2.) Finally land a Flat3. Last summer I finally got to unhooking, in Rodrigues I played at static handle passes, this year I shall land a Flat3. (There are other tricks I want to improve, try and have fun doing but a Flat3 is the main aim)

3.) Learn OpenGL ES to the point of being able to publish a small Open GL based game to the iPhone app store.

There is a goal for each area of hobby interest: kiting, biking and programming.

Lets see how things go.

The last 10 years were a great roller coaster ride:

I got married, took up kiting and mountain biking, got a 1st Class w/ Honours degree, I did three years of a PhD. I invented a programming language, have worked at the same company for over 4 years now on and with said language. I spent 8 years in Birmingham and almost 2 years in Hove. I’ve had my heart broken, my hand broken but all is mended now. I made some great friends, I lost touch with some but endeavour to make up those relationships this decade. I’ve gained a step-father and a step-mother and 4 circumstantial siblings. I now have friends with kids.

Life has been really good.

I am really excited about the next 10 years and what adventures might be brought to the table. It might involve paragliding, learning to fly a plane.

Have a great new year and enjoy life!