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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

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1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

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2008 in Review

By Nick Hodge | December 31, 2008

Inspired by the Del­ic­ate Genius’ Year in Review 2008

Firstly, what did I say last year

from Per­sonal and Pro­fes­sional Res­ol­u­tions for 2008

1. The home matters
2. Weigh Less than 2008 FAIL! no change
3. Geeks Who Care mat­ters presen­ted at vari­ous Senior Cit­izen groups
4. Think simple, be social

I have really only suc­ceeded on #1 #3 and #4. On the home front, I spent many more days not trav­el­ling and work­ing from home.

Think­ing simple, being social: fail, I think. Whilst I added 1000 twit­ter fol­low­ers; mainly from Aus­tralia – this whole area needs more work on my part. I think.

So, what did hap­pen in 2008? I’d like to say the theme of 2008 was black and white. No grey. Pure Black and White (yes, Neil Finn always says it best)

Other for­ward think­ing posts:

Two posts from early 2008 have returned with a ven­geance: And this early 2008 post (oh the irony): Our Bene­vol­ent Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment should Fil­ter More and Aus­tralia is going to be stu­pider in 2008. I think I called these two issues correctly!

2008 was char­ac­ter­ised by:

• Our fam­ily lost my Nana, Edna Dutschke.
• Other sig­ni­fic­ant people from my past have also gone
• Avril and Liam went to Mel­bourne a few times.
• Avril totally hot­ted up Megan: she is almost as power­ful as Scar­lett. And sounds throatier.
• Avril organ­ised and has nearly com­pleted some needed home renov­a­tions for the kit­chen and bath­room.
• The whole Hodge fam­ily becomes fam­ous in the Sydney Morn­ing Herald
• I have found out more about the paternal side of my fam­ily; going back over 300 years.
• Apart from what has been dia­gnosed as gout, been pretty func­tional. Oh, and I had a cyst out.
• The Geek Stor­ies: com­pleted 40 videos and put into hiatus for second half of 2008
• The best story from 2008: Email to the Future, where I saw ori­ginal Lady Ada Lovelace doc­u­ments!
• Aus­tralian ReMIX 2008: Mark Pesce, Only Con­nect: Mark intro­duces the hyper­con­nec­ted world
• Designed and Built my Dream Machine, Gen­eral Melchett: with three intense on10.net post­ings of which I am quite proud
• A post­ive, mid 2008 change in dir­ec­tion for me at Microsoft
• Spent 10 days in the US where the AU-US exchange rate was almost parity!
• Ray Ozzie: by Steven Levy: I saw Microsoft’s cloud future exposed, first hand.
• Start blog­ging code on http://blogs.msdn.com/nickhodge/ my first “code” post whilst at Microsoft is PHP.
• Work­ing more with Jorkeo. He’s the host­ing god.
• Oh, met and intro­duced Jorke to his per­sonal hero: Larry Wall
• F#/IronPython/Threads post. My per­sonal msdn favour­ite post
• Microsoft’s TechEd 2008: more behind-the-scenes organ­ising: Women in IT, Blogger’s Lunch, Live Frame­work (thanks for the help, Paul!)
• Presen­ted at AIMIA, AIBC, Bar­campSydney 3 and 4, atten­ded Bar­camp­Mel­bourne (with a last minute sneaky LOLCODE presentation)
• More present­a­tions at Edge of the Web, Open Source Developer Con­fer­ence: Demos, demos, demos. No slideware!
• Adding in Present­a­tions at vari­ous user groups, presen­ted to about ~1600 people
• Learnt a new lan­guage (F#) enough to present at user groups and Bar­campSydney 4. Thanks to Secret­Geek and Joel Pobar for the prompting.
• Inves­ted some time on the Pro­posed Aus­tralian Fil­ters. I still don’t think that the pro­posed fil­ters will work, and the Gov­ern­ment is miss­ing the point of edu­cat­ing all Aus­trali­ans over inter­net security.
• The Great Dan Fernan­dez invited me onto his weekly show “This Week on Chan­nel 9” Apart from a good couple of hours of fun, he made me fam­ous for 30 minutes. nearly 60,000 views of this video, alone.
• Some radio PR: on Microsoft World­wide Telescope
• Our Win­dows Home Server just keeps on work­ing. We share many more files now that the Tran­quil is here. Stor­age capa­city is 2.75 tera­bytes; but know­ing the PCs and Laptops in the house are backed-up is priceless.
• Met Matt Bai, and assisted the Microsoft team behind-the-scenes.
• The Thing that is Twit­ter: 1500 fol­low­ers, 8000 tweets dur­ing the year. 1000 twit­ter friends added.
• Over all the con­tent I pro­duce: over 600,000 views. Which is a darn lot for a single con­tent producer.
• Guest blogged over at http://gizmodo.com.au for a month (June)
• Star­ted to come over all Micro­formatty at the end of the year.

Topics: 2008, personal | No Comments »