2011
In Review

 

A year of change

2011 has been an incredible year; professionally, academically, and privately. Life has changed vastly more than I could have imagined this time last year.

I started the year as an undergrad at The University of Nottingham studying Computer Science and Management Studies; lived in Lenton, just to the west side of the City of Nottingham; owned a ten year old Daewoo Matiz; and was dating my then girlfriend of three years, Jess.

All of that has since changed.

Glancing back on 2011

In January I attended the fantastic New Adventures Conference where I was offered a job at the web design agency I'd then been working for on a sessional basis for eighteen months.

Towards the middle of 2011, I moved across the city to a flat in the Sherwood area of Nottingham, ending the string of car breakins that seemed to plauge me in Lenton.

The summer also saw me celebrate my 21st birthday as well as the purchase of my second car, a 1.4 ltr Ford Fiesta.

As summer came to an end I started at diffuse four days a week and later into September Jess and I got engaged. We posted the photos of our engagement from Seville (south Spain) on our wedding site; chrisandjessgetmarried.co.uk.

As 2011 began to draw to a close I travelled to Leeds to see Owl City with Jess and a month or so later to London with Dan Eade to see Switchfoot at the 02 Empire, both of which were amazing gigs.

To close out the year Jess and I made the run to the south coast to visit family twice in the space of two months, including spending much of Christmas down there.

Looking forward to 2012

2012 will hopefully be another amazing year, I intend to remain at diffuse and am excited to be getting married in April. Whilst I've never published a list of ‘goals’ in previous years there are a few things I plan to get around to in 2012:

• I want to blog on a semi-regular basis, with each post having it's own theme and styling, this is the first.
• I intend to read a book a month (I tried a slightly more ambious version in 2011 and failed, so here goes).
• I would like to do more design work — mainly just spending a bit more time in photoshop, both for fun and to keep me learning.
• I may make this the year I finally do something with iOS, nothing native but spine.js and phonegap look pretty promising at the moment.

Since I'm committing to doing more it only seems sensible to also commit to doing less, so with varying degrees of sadness:

• 2011 heralded my final Alpha course — I've served on team for the past three years and it's been amazing but all good things must come to an end.
• 2012 will see a dialing down of the number of weddings I run cameras for, 2011 went slightly overboard.
• I'll not be at the Vineyard NLC this year, and will only be at one Soul Survivor summer conference — I just won't have the annual leave to do any more. Ok, so maybe I will, I'll be working on the media team for the week and they asked nicely…
• My habit of shopping every day for food, rather than weekly, has been kicked; it takes up far more time than I realised when I could just be a bit more organised.

Finally, it seems only right to wish you all the best in the new year, where-ever you may be and what-ever you find yourself doing.

Happy 2012,

Chris

 

2011 by the numbers

For no other reason than I thought it somewhat amusing:

Owl City
My most listened to band of the year.

4 hours
The hours acidentally spent queing for my iPhone 4S.

157 students
The number of students at my graduation.

1,095 cups
The number of coffees consumed this year.

684 tweets
The number of times I tweeted in 2011.