I started this year with a grand plan: travel out of country 12 times, once for each month in the year. It didn't quite work out that way, but I got close, so I guess I'll start this Great Big Annual Post with the sightseeing:

Travel

Copenhagen, Denmark

Following what would appear to be an unfortunate pattern, Christina and I went North in winter, and did a weekend in Copenhagen. We saw Cirque du Soleil, wandered around the city a bit and ate as many danishes as we possibly could.

Honestly, I'd go back just for the danishes. Maybe we will in 2014.

Photos from our trip can be found in my image gallery.

Brussels, Belgium

It was my first FOSDEM conference, and knowing basically nothing about it other than the fact that it was about Free software and didn't cost anything to attend, I booked a train and a hotel for the weekend. I had such an amazing time, I'm already booked to go back for this year's conference.

FOSDEM is a big deal in the Free software world, and it's probably the biggest conference of its kind in Europe. I met some of the developers of my favourite Linux distribution and bought one of them dinner. I got to publicly thank the GNOME developers for all of their hard work while they were battling a mountain of user backlash, and got some stickers, which was pretty awesome.

Gibraltar, UK

Stephanie loves to travel, and so do I, so when she's in the neighbourhood (ie. within a few hours flight) we usually try to meet up and go somewhere interesting. After much deliberation over Skype, (and some scoffing from Christina regarding our decided destination) we settled on Gibraltar... and it was awesome.

Incredible views from the top of the rock, fascinating military history, and beautiful caves. Oh, and did I mention the super-crafty monkeys? If you've got the time, and don't mind potentially getting stuck there an extra day when the plane refuses to come due to weather, Gibraltar is pretty amazing. If you don't feel like making the trip though, there are some photos in case you're curious.

Edinburgh, Scottland

At last, Christina was able to share her love of Edinburgh with me. She'd been going on about its fabulousness ever since we met, so it was time that I saw it with my own eyes.

Truth be told, Edinburgh is quite beautiful, with a diverse surrounding landscape influencing the local architecture. We hiked to the top of Arthur's Seat and the crags, saw a choral concert and toured the underground with a guide I'm reasonably confident was high at the time. Oh! and I also got to eat a deep fried Mars bar. Not at tasty as you might think. Ew.

Photos are on my image gallery if you're curious.

Warsaw, Kraków, and Auschwitz, Poland

I'd hoped to do more travelling into the old Eastern block countries this year, but unfortunately I was only able to visit Poland in 2013. Fortunately, since DjagoCon EU was based there, I managed to bookend the conference with some personal time and save on airfare in the process. Before settling down to the conference, I toured Warsaw and Kraków, and saw the remnants of the horrors of Auschwitz. I'm still deeply effected by what I saw there.

There's photos from my entire Poland trip in my image gallery if you'd like to see what I saw.

Athens & Santorini, Greece

This was apparently my Greek year. Christina and I visited in June: first Athens (Αθήνα), and then the Island of Santorini (Σαντορίνη). The weather was hot, but not beyond my capacity, due mostly to the dryness of the climate. The food was wonderful, and the people both friendly and accommodating. Christina's family took us to the Acropolis (Ακρόπολις), and the Temple of Poseidon (Aκρωτήριο Σούνιο). I also got to meet the extended family, and Eat All The Foodz. With the exception of one horrific boat ride from Santorini to Athens, the trip was wonderful.

Here are the pictures if you're into that.

London, UK

Theresa made the trip to her favourite city in the world, and we arranged it so I could meet her one weekend while she was in town. We didn't have a lot of time, but we got the important part in: actually seeing each other and catching up on what's going on in our lives. We toured a cemetery, wandered through Hyde Park, and spent an unfortunate amount of time looking for a good steak house.

It's funny, but every time I go to London my opinion of it changes. After some trips I despise it, and after others, I can actually see myself choosing to live there.

Athens, Greece (again)

I didn't expect it, but my company chose to send me back to Athens for RIPE 67, so that I could help out for a workshop about the RESTful API I helped write for our ATLAS project. It was an exhausting trip, that saw me rarely leave the hotel, but there were a few evenings that I managed to get out and explore. I took a few hours one evening to visit Plaka (Πλακα), met Christina's father for a tour through a local museum, and for dinner at their house, and on my last night in Athens, Vesna and I hit the beach with a couple of her friends, had dinner there, and then headed across town to the local hackerspace, closing the night with drinks at the foot of the Acropolis. That was a really good time.

Paris, France

Christina took a work-related trip to Paris, and I decided to surprise her for her trip home. We didn't have a lot of time for sightseeing (we'd already been a few times each, so this wasn't all that high a priority). We actually spent most of the night looking for a good place to eat and eventually found ourselves disappointed at a place I thought would be good. It's the thought that counts though right?

Vancouver, Canada

Finally, this was the year of Christina's first trip to Canada. We set off at the tail end of November to see Vancouver and Kelowna, and gauging her reaction, she seems to really like my country :-)

We met some of my friends, and most of my family, wandered through Stanley Park, and I ate as much food as I possibly could. Seriously, I nearly broke into tears biting into a proper cheeseburger (oh how I've missed those!) We drove over the Rockies up to Kelowna where we did a little sightseeing and a lot of just hanging with my family.

Photos from both Vancouver and Kelowna are available in my image gallery. Bonus: there's a shot in there of my fabulous Movember mo.

I'm hoping that 2014 will see us make a trip to Eastern Canada, maybe a road trip form St. John's to Toronto? We'll see.

Personal

Joined Houses

On the personal front, the big news of the year was Christina and I moving in together. This is only the second time that I've managed to get this far in a relationship, and the last time we sort of fell into it, after having moved from Vancouver to Ottawa. I'm hoping this time works out better.

Christmas in Amsterdam

Having a home of our own meant playing host to the Angelopoulos family over Christmas. Christina's sister is in the UK, her cousin in Belgium, and her parents in Athens. This made our place a logical destination for the big dinner shindig. Her parents were here for roughly two weeks, while her sister and cousin were crashing for only a few days. It was nice to have someone to spend Christmas with, given that my family was thousands of kilometres away, and I even learnt a few new Greek words in the process.

I also took a few pictures that week.

My Health

The big cloud over my life this year has been an as-yet-undefined illness that makes me dizzy at times throughout the day. I assumed that this all started after that horrible boat ride from Santorini, but it's impossible to tell at this point. Since August I've had regular dizziness spells, and even fainted once. It generally doesn't get in the way of my day, but it's still rather disturbing. My ENT assures me that there's nothing wrong with me, which is both encouraging and disheartening: a person knows when something isn't right, and when their doctor just smiles at you like you're wasting their time, it tends to get under your skin.

I've had blood tests, an ECG, and an MRI, all of which returned with "all clear" results, so I can see where Dr. Smiley is coming from, but the symptoms are real, so I don't know where to go from here. Christina and I talked about it and we're going to wait a few months to see if things get better on their own. If they don't I'll be asking for a referral to a dizziness clinic in the hopes that they can figure this out.

I'm also getting fatter, which obviously sucks. At 34 years old, I've never actually had to work at maintaining an appropriate weight, and the realisation of this new reality is not a happy experience. We did just move into a building with a gym though, and I've just started making use of it. Hopefully by this time next year I'll be able to report that I've lost about 10kg and holding comfortably.

This Blog

This was also the year of version 5 of this site's software going live, as well as another big milestone: 10 years of blogging. I don't post here as often as I used to (it takes a good chunk of your day let me tell you), but I do enjoy going back over this thing to see how my life has been, so this is a labour I intend to continue. Thank you, for sharing this with me :-)

Corporate

Started on Spirithunter (again)

You know those people who have a great idea, who tell you all about how amazing their idea is, and how one day this amazing idea will be amazing? Well I've been one of those guys now for three years. This past few months have seen a renewed interest in the Spirithunter project, what we me having an actual desk to write code on now, and I'm actually starting to see traction on that front. It'll still be a while before there's anything I can show you people, but I think it's worth noting that things are coming back on track now.

My Father's Project

I've also got another, much smaller project going to hopefully help my family out with a website for their own business. It's on a tight deadline though: I started on it not long after I returned from Canada in December, and it has to be finished and ready by February. I'm about 30% done at this point though, so it's time to knuckle down.

RIPE: 1year

Lastly, I hit my 1 year mark at RIPE back in August, and strangely, this is the first company I've worked for ever where I'm not already bored after 1 year. Sure, RIPE isn't perfect, and the code doesn't look anything like what I'd like it to, but the environment is interesting, the field actually important, and not evil. And they fly me to Athens and Warsaw to do work related stuff. Seriously, this is a pretty good gig. You should work there.

Conclusion

I started 2014 with a goal of more travel, and despite missing the quantitative mark, I look back on all the things I've seen and done this year and I'm pretty happy with it. For next year: even more travel, this time to more Eastern block countries like Romania and the Czech Republic would be nice, and a public beta of Spirithunter would make for a good grade. Keep checking back here to see how I do on that front.

The "Golden Circle", Iceland

The Vimy Ridge Memorial

Melanie on the Millenium Bridge

The Millenium Bridge

Douglas Adams' resting place

Spider-man and @travellingjack in London!

A former church turned book store in Maastricht

The most delightful waffles I've ever had. These were in Luxembourg.

The cathedral in Cologne

My parents in the Sacre Cour

My parents at the Keukenhoff

Stonehenge

My new employer

Christina

Me and Violet

For a moment there, I thought that I might actually skip this one. We are, after all, 29 days into 2013 and I'm only now getting to the 2012 recap. I'd been putting it off, mostly because in my looking back over the year, I couldn't really remember much. This is to say that 2012 itself didn't feel all that memorable: what had I achieved this past year? How have I grown, and what did I learn in 2012?

The truth is that 2012 wasn't a year of epic change like 2011. Rather it was a year of "settling in" and getting comfortable with the life I have here. I'm not sure that that's actually a positive thing, but, there it is.

Objectively speaking though, 2012 has been pretty awesome for me in the three key areas of Personal, Professional, and Travel. It wasn't until I sat down and went over my year via G+ that I realised how busy I've been.

Travel

I always said that 2012 would be for travel in and around Europe. I didn't manage to do as much as I initially wanted, but then again, Europe is really big and there's a lot of things to see & do here.

The year started out early with a weekend trip to Bad Bentheim with my friend Hannah where we enjoyed a lovely train ride, a castle tour, and a fabulous steak. It's really not a very interesting town, but so far it was the best steak I've had in mainland Europe.

Lara's birthday was at the end of January, so I decided to hop a plane to York to say hello and see how life there was treating her. It's a lovely little town, and I was offered a tour through the older parts of the city. Her apartment was pretty cool too, though also in the literal sense, it was pretty damned cold :-)

March saw Christina and I visit Iceland thanks to some amazing discount rates from IcelandAir. I saw the Northern Lights you guys. It's really as awe-inspiring as people say it is.

Not long after Iceland, Hannah invited me to go for a drive to Cologne, which turned into a trip to Luxembourg when we were faced with the red-tape of driving a car in Germany. The trip took all day and most of the night, but we had a really good time just touring.

In April, my parents made the trip across the Atlantic and spent three weeks here: One week with me in Amsterdam, another in Barcelona without me, and the three of us spread the final week across Paris, London, and Dublin. It was quite the experience, intoducing my parents to the life I'd started to make for myself on the other side of the world. They were happy to see me adapting so well, and I hope they come back again soon.

In May, my friend Sue and I took a weekend trip to Cologne. The only reason I could come up with for going was that my father wanted a fridge magnet there, but when we arrived, Sue pointed out the Lindt Chocolate Factory, and suddenly our trip had new purpose.

In June, Melanie came to visit me and we spent a week in London & Belfast. We got a cab tour of the "Troubles" neighbourhoods in Belfast, ate steak in London, wandered through Highgate Cemetery, saw the Elgin Marbles (give them back!), a Shakesperean play at the Globe Theatre, and even chatted with a cosplay flash mob. It was a crazy week.

In July, I finally made time to visit The Vimy Ridge Memorial near Arras, France. Experiences like that help you come to terms with how insane war really is.

Apparently, a lack of travel in August made me a little stir-crazy, so I took two separate trips with Stephanie in September: one to Bristol & Bath, and another to Antwerp. The Antwerp trip turned out to be a bit of a bust, since the tour of the sewers we signed up for (so awesome!) turned out to be available only to Dutch-speakers, but the Bristol & Bath trip was nice. Bristol especially is a lovely little town that doesn't get nearly enough credit.

With the exception of my trip home for Christmas, the last trip of the year was a weekender in Hamburg, to meet Christina after she'd spent a week working in a special library for her PhD. We took the opportunity to sample some of the local Glu Wine, and visit the super-awesome Miniatur Wunderland! Also, I bought a hat :-)

It turns out that after actually sitting down and counting it all out, 2012 was a crazy travel year for me. I guess that the key for 2013 for me, will be to direct some of that travel energy to the East. DjangoCon is in Warsaw this year, I'd like to revisit Berlin, and maybe Zurich on a weekend trip. If my mom is interested, I'd also like to do Romania, but probably not this year. Christina and I are definitely planning a trip to Greece in the summer (gods help me), and hopefully a reciprocal trip to Toronto in the Fall. I'll be sure to post here when things are more solid.

Professional

This was kind of a big year for me professionally.

While working at Oxyor, I launched a major site that manages the learning experiences of thousands of users. The site features streaming two-way video communication, user groups, trading simulators, multiple themes and feature sets dictated by the domain, and a complete internal economy. I handled pretty much everything for the site, with the exception of the external trading simulators, and it was a massive undertaking. I learnt a lot, wrote a lot of reusable code that I'm proud of, and did so while often working with a team of 1: just me.

This process of working alone really got to me over time though. I felt like I was falling behind the curve, not learning anything new because there was no one from which to learn. After a while, I decided to start looking, and after a number of interviews with companies like Google (wow!) and big-time trading firms, I finally found my current employer, the RIPE NCC.

At RIPE I'm now working on an exciting project called Atlas, that's attempting to literally measure the effecitveness of the Internet's infrastructure. We're building tools to help the people that build networks actually build networks better and it's pretty exciting stuff. At the moment, I'm working to try to make the site more user-friendly and make the data accessible, so keep an eye on the site for changes if this is the sort of thing that turns your crank.

I think it's also worth noting here that this is the first time I've worked for a company that isn't a purely profit-driven organisation, and it feels really good. Non-profit work is different though, and I'm finding the internal politics often difficult to deal with. Compared to my previous work though: financial investment, advertising, porn, gambling, and spam, at least this is a product I'm happy to produce for the world.

I also gave my first official developers talk on How Not to Code, at the Utrecht Designers and Developers Meetup. As a first experience in this sort of thing, it was pretty awesome, and I've been thinking about maintaining a site (or just section of this site?) with a list of do's & don't's in this vein. At the very least it might help as therapy :-)

One last note on the "professional" front. I've been feeling very out of the loop wrt politics since I left Canada. It's hard to get involved in the politics of a country where you (a) don't speak the language, and (b) don't really care about most of the issues the locals face since you're not a permanent resident yourself. I tried joining the Dutch Pirates, but found the language barrier to be too much, and I've shown up to a few Amnesty International socials, but nothing has really "stuck" yet. I'm not sure where I need to go on this.

Personal

The big deal in my personal life this past year has been Christina. We got back together in January, and she has put up with me for an entire year, even after I dragged her to Iceland to trapse through the cold and dark. She has been so supportive and patient with me, as I try to manage my emotional handicap, ours has evolved into an actual adult relationship. It's not perfect, these things never are, but for the first time things actually feel "solid" in my life.

Another big part of that "solid"-ness is the fact that I started therapy this year. It started back in October and it's been really good for my own sense of self-understanding. Some days we just talk about the things that are making me crazy right now, and other days we go backward to figure out how who I was then affects who I am now.

To my friends who have been suggesting I go for years, thank you, it helped. To those who pushed for it: that didn't help so much. And to those who think that it might be right for you, I can't recommend it enough. You've got nothing to lose, and a whole lot to gain.

Family

2012 was also a big year for the Quinn family because we grew for the first time in a long while. My family (and extended family for that matter) has always been small, so when Violet was born, it was kind of a big deal for everyone. I managed to fly home to see her for Christmas which was pretty great, and one day I hope she'll be able to do the same for me, maybe come hang out at Uncle Dan's place for a week in Toronto, Zurich, or London... Time will tell.

And that was 2012. I got my head shunk, managed to keep a girl, and travelled all over the place (again). Also, the world didn't end, so that's pretty awesome. In the coming year, I hope to finally rebuild this site (it's been like this a long time and it's due), so keep checking back over the next month or so and you'll see.