The year's been good to me I'd say. It's funny to think I've had this site for some six years and I've actually managed to keep the design down to one per year or so. Since around this time of year I like to look back briefly, I can think of several highlights of the year.
January: Okay, so there wasn't any highlights here.
February: I started working for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. First full-time job I had, complete with benefits and assorted other perks. The project was fun, although the people were all quite a bit older than me. I felt like the young-hip-tech-guy- which is disturbing given the word "hip" was just used. Was also the month I asked Tessa out.
March: Completed NetProject for my Senior Capstone. It felt very good to finish that. At this point, I was cleared to graduate.
April: Easy sailing. Also the month I officially joined Gaia Online's web site at the urging of Tessa.
May: Graduation came and went, and it was pretty good. I felt like I successfully jumped through one of those hoops you are supposed to jump through in life. I associate the feeling with HS graduation and when I got my Eagle Rank; that feeling when you know you did something important. May was also the month of Fanime, where I worked Dealer's Room, Masquerade Staff, and hung out with several people from RECCA. Aside from a minor room incident, the con went great. At Fanime, I also helped volunteer and do crowd control for the Gaia Online panel, where I met Usaku, Syko, and a few others, as well as all the Admins for the first time. At the social I spent an amazing amount of time talking with darknrgy about SQL stuff.
June: The job at Naval Postgraduate School switched from part time to full time, and I got a pay increase to accommodate for Beth's departure from the team. Also started redoing my costumes for AX.
July: The month of Anime Expo brought another Gaia Online panel (thank you Kender for coming with me to Costco!) and another con of fun and things to do. Hyacynth finally met her "hawt zoro", and overall things went well. Went well aside from a roommate issue that is. While that put an annoying twist on the convention, it was still fun, and our room party rocked. Was offered a mod position for Gaia. (I had no idea what I was getting myself into.)
August: Nothing exciting to report here.
September: Took a few trips up to the Gaia Office to work on some code stuff to make modding a bit easier. Little did I know that towards the end of the month, Lanzer would offer me a job. Those that I called the day of the offer probably remember quite well my squealing. It had always been my dream since I was in High School to work for an Internet startup.
October: Started working officially for Gaia Interactive. This is the best career move I ever made. I get to apply my problem solving skills, I get to tackle unique problems, every day has a new set of challenges to face, and it's everything I could have ever wanted in a job. At this point, my life really began to accelerate. My birthday was also this month, so yay for that too.
November: Life now going at Mach 6, I spent a lot of the month working. Gaia by this point had become an extension of my life. Not only do I love working on it, but I am actively working on things seen by 20,000 or more people at a time. For those on Gaia, this was also the month the first gold glitch was fixed.
December: No slowing down here! Things are still crazy, and I just finished testing some stuff on Christmas Eve. About my only regret is that I don't have the time I used to for my web site, etc. The solution to this of course is to sit down and force myself to blog every few days. Long time readers of Felocity know how well that tends to work.
I've got some presents to wrap, some PMs to answer, and a bit more testing to do. The "Hello Project", a welcome package and tutorial has been tabled while I invest time in redeveloping the entire PM system's core. Rewrote about 3,000 lines of code down to 1,800. Once it passes the initial tests, I can then optimize it much easier using 72squared's DAO code. We can also add forwarding, reporting, and a bunch of other features easily. We're also planning on improving methods of user moderation, so that users are empowered to handle spam threads and things like that. As if that wasn't enough, this will also be using a new permission model that will be developed site-wide, eliminating the need for phpbb's "groups". This is a wonderful thing since it provides a much finer granularity of control than we need or want. We simply want to give a user some base permissions and then protect things they don't need to access. Since Gaia's permission model is currently linear while stacking anyway, this will be a much better fit.
Now, off to take care of those gifts. I hope out there everyone else's holidays are pleasant, no matter the holiday you are celebrating.
In response to "Looking Back on the Year":
Glad to see and hear that you had a great year last year. Ditto here, especially after the doldrums of 2001 and 2002, definitely my low points.
I look forward to ‘05 and the rest of the future, and I hope to remain your friend and business associate.