December 30, 2004 | Category:

End Of Year 2004, Part Three: Refraction

Forewarning: This is largely a personal post. If you avoid those posts (as I normally do), then stop reading now.

  1. Not sure if it has been a good year or a bad year. Certainly an odd year. Some of the ups and downs, and general occurences:
  • Finishing my third year university team project. Though TwentyFour24 is now defunct, it’s the best distributed, topic-driven web crawler (I’ve worked on).
  • Some excellent nights out. Evidence of some can be found on Derek’s gallery, evidence of others is buried and should stay that way. Of note were the CompSoc Karaoke, last years end of term, Jill’s 21st in the middle of nowhere, and the trip to Camden.
  • My summer in Nottingham. Working for a great company, meeting new friends, seeing a fine city, going to some excellent clubs, doing some things I’m not proud of, enjoying some independence. Sure, it was supposed to be a year, but for various reasons the summer was what I wanted. A good time, in general.
  • Pub Friday. The celebration every Friday of all things pub (or an excuse to drink). Also known as Chip Friday, Quiz Friday, No Hidden Weapons Friday, Queen Friday, and other things.
  • The friends I keep. Made a lot of new friends (my phonebook has literally doubled in size this year), lost touch with several (for better and worse), and got to know most of my friends better.
  • Recreating the charge of the light brigade the other night using only beer bottles and glasses with Derek while Matt looked on.
  • Films. Great year for cinema and I enjoyed a lot.
  • Some recent news about my future which I’ll not go into here, but perked me up.
  • Joining a band again. How I missed drumming, and am enjoying getting better at it once more.

There are things missing from here, some more poignant and affecting than those listed, some more trivial from an outside perspective.

  1. A year shaped by lots of changes.