2008 was a pretty eventful year, overall, and I wanted to go back through and put things in perspective.

As I started writing this yesterday, my initial thought was to fit three months per post, but so far the first two months have grown longer than I expected. So it may end up being a six-post retrospective! At the same time it’s interesting to go back through my blogs, email, pictures, etc., to piece together the various things that happened throughout the year. I keep running across something else to note—and I’m only two months in!

January

Even though my posting here on chuggnutt.com has really slacked off over the past couple of years (due mostly to the time and effort I’ve been putting into my other blogs), I did manage to get this site redesigned and activated on the first of January. Unfortunately, except for a few tweaks here and there, the state the site was in on 1/1 remained about the same throughout the year.

On the 15th I attended the Abyss launch party at Deschutes Brewery, which was exciting both for the fact that I was there as a blogger, taking some (crappy) pictures and writing about it afterward; and because I really love The Abyss and I was able to score a case of it on opening night (I wasn’t taking any chances that it would sell out).

The second half of the month, I drank a lot of cheap beer for a Theme Week on The Brew Site. It sounds frivolous but believe it or not it was the first time that beer blogging actually felt like work; I was drinking two (sometimes three) cans of American Macro beer a day for about a week and a half, and writing up two (sometimes three) reviews of those beers each day for a week’s time. So, yeah, like work.

On the other hand, it was kind of fun hunting down those big cans of cheap beer around town.

January was the month when I finally jumped about the twitter bandwagon. I don’t know that it’s all that important a milestone for 2008 (or my life in general), but everyone else seems to be ga-ga over it, so there you go.

And, a parenting milestone: January marks the first time that I had to stay home from work with a sick kid. This may not seem like a big deal, but until my wife went back to work the previous September, she was the at-home parent who dealt with such issues. Of course I’ve taken care of the kids myself many times—what makes this time standout is that it was the first time we had to deal with it as "working parents"; when my wife went back to work full time this was a big unknown to us.

February

The highlight of the month was the trip to Portland we took during the long President’s Day weekend. We went shopping, then to OMSI and checked out the cool dinosaur exhibit they were running, and had lunch at the Lucky Lab—I wrote about it, of course. I also wheedled a trip to John’s Marketplace and scored a bunch of specialty beer.

On the 21st there was a blogger meetup at the Blacksmith Restaurant. It was the first "real" Bend blogger meetup in ages, and my first visit to the Blacksmith since they renovated and re-opened as a premier beer bar. I didn’t get to stay for the entire time, but even for the short time I attended I was incredibly impressed with how the number of local bloggers has grown. Something like 30 people ultimately ended up coming.

On The Brew Site I did another Theme Week devoted to Canned Beers. In and of itself this isn’t really all that notable except for one thing: I interviewed a the lead PR guy for a brewery noted for their canned beers in an "official" capacity. For basically doing this blogging thing in my free time, that’s taking it to the next level.

Oh, and it was a leap year, so February had 29 days. Nothing big happened that I remember on the 29th, I just wanted to point it out.

Astute readers know (or can probably guess) that the software running my various blogs isn’t your standard blog software; in fact, it’s all PHP code that I wrote myself, and have gradually refined over the years.

Truth be told, though, I’m getting sick of it and I’m considering switch everything over to WordPress. Why? Here are some of my reasons:

• My own software is horribly out of date. It might have been cutting edge three or four years ago, but I just haven’t had time to keep up with the Joneses, as it were.
• To that end, I’m just one person with limited time; I can’t compete with an internet-wide community of open source developers contributing to the most popular free blogging platform around.
• The latest version, 2.7, is a major update and it’s really solid—and has all the administrative features I’d want in my own software anyway.
• It’s just time to get with the program.

Needless to say, I have a number of pros and cons as I’m thinking about this.

Pros:

• WordPress is PHP/MySQL, which is what I do. I’m enormously comfortable with it.
• I can still develop blogging tools in PHP in my spare time—just develop/release them for WordPress as plugins.
• My blogging will be much more efficient—one of the problems now is the admin tools on my current software are quirky—essentially I’m spending more effort managing data rather than writing.
• Automatic upgrades to the software (see the "community of open source developers" reason above).
• Ajax-y auto saving of blog posts—this is huge. I don’t have it in my homegrown software, and I’ve lost more than one post and cursed myself for not having an autosave feature.
• There are tons and tons of neat plugins that I’d love to have instant access to, which I would with WordPress. (Trying to get rid of my own "not invented here" attitude.)

Cons:

• It’s going to be a huge pain to migrate all the blogging data from my database tables to the WordPress tables. I have it all backed up, of course, but mapping from one schema to another is work.
• To that end, I may end up losing URL/path info (hello 404 errors!), tagging data, and years’ worth of other massaged data formatting or content. (The major stuff will be fine, of course.)
• Time to do and fix all of those issues, of course. As in, I don’t have that much time at hand.
• Image handling; I know WP likes to put everything under its "wp-content" directory, but I prefer storing images in an "images" directory. I don’t want to move them, and I’m unsure how configurable WP is in regards to it.

I’m thinking it’s going to happen, regardless. And no, I’m not considering any other blogging platforms; WordPress is the only one in consideration.

My wife made commented on yesterday’s post that I should "describe" the ornaments I received as gifts this year. Even better, here’s a picture of two:

Probably the best way I would "describe" them is "tongue in cheek".

Yep, time for the lame blog post about what I received for my birthday and Christmas. "Lame" because it’s kind of a blogging cliché, and mostly it feels like bragging. But something is better than nothing—especially around this blog lately.

Let’s see…

• Birthday and Christmas money and a gift certificate
• Christmas ornaments
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Just After Sunset by Stephen King
• A couple of PS2 games
• A growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale
• A beer of the month club subscription (3 months worth)
• A nifty sampler-sized English-style pint glass
• A custom-embroidered handkerchief
• An Acer Aspire One netbook computer
• The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray
• Handmade gifts from the kids
• A Food Saver vacuum sealer (more of a household gift)

I think that about covers it.

We had been planning a New Year’s Eve party at our place relatively early on; we’d had one the past several years and they’re always fun, especially for the kids (who get to stay up until midnight). This year, it was going to be a smaller party, as a number of people dropped out, for various reasons, but we still had a nice time planned and a decent-size group coming.

That was how it was supposed to work. The reality, though, is that both kids ended up getting sick—the seven year-old Sunday night (while at my parents’ house), and the nine year-old Tuesday night—so we ended up canceling the party.

(And by "sick", I don’t mean the kids came down with sniffly colds, or even just fevers; no, I’m talking full-on vomiting-all-over-the-place sick. The kind that you have to use nearly an entire roll of paper towels to mop up, gagging and breathing shallowly through your mouth the whole time.)

So, we canceled and had a very low-key New Year’s Eve instead. It was actually kind of nice. Our friends Paul and Sandi came over anyway (they don’t have kids and aren’t afraid of catching anything), brought cheese and beer, and it was a beery evening for three of us—my wife drank Margaritaville Frozen Concoctions. The kids were in bed by 9 o’clock (they got to see the ball drop in New York in realtime), with nary a peep, and we watched Sex and the City for the evening movie.

(I know, I know; it was a toss up between The Dark Knight, Hancock, and Sex and the City.)

Today was even lower-key, which is nice, too. I did have a bit of a headache this morning, but not a raging hangover like I had several years ago. I was able to get some work done and just enjoy the day (helped along, of course, by beer).

Hope everyone else’s 2009 started out just as well as mine.

CSI:Miami is a pretty ridiculous TV show, and one of the things that makes it so is the opening one-liner. Often I will watch just long enough for this before leaving. They’re really cheesy and ballsy—Law & Order usually has the one-liner, but CSI:M really outdoes it. I blame David Caruso.

For a while now I’ve wished that someone would compile just the one-liners—I’d watch an hour of those—and it seems someone has. Without further ado, I present… the Endless Caruso One Liners:

Best thing I’ve seen this week.

Looking at the title of this post, that’s a geeky way of saying how old I am today.

Yes, it’s another birthday. I’m 36 today (in case you don’t want to do the math—which, incidentally, should account for leap years. Told you it was geeky).

Even though I had to work today—first time in a few years I haven’t taken my birthday off—it’s been a good day. Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday online—of course, having social networking apps that remind people of your birthday helps!

And for the beer geeks out there—right now as I write this, I’m enjoying a 2005 Mirror Mirror barleywine from Deschutes Brewery.

I’ve been enjoying Once Upon a Win lately (the cousin to FAIL Blog) and the one thing that’s lacking so far is the Commodore 64. Tonight, though, I came across something even more epic: the Commodore Christmas Demo. Dave writes:

Commodore wrote their famous Christmas Demo in 1982 to demonstrate the capabilities of their new Commodore 64 computer and the upcoming Executive 64 (SX-64) portable. It was included with the test/demo disk that shipped with every SX-64 so dealers could introduce customers to the machines’ advanced (for the time) sound and graphics. Though its character graphics and SID sound seem quaint by today’s standards, the Christmas Demo reminds many Commodore fans of the morning they woke to find a computer under their tree.

1982. I never knew of this before. Click through and watch it.

Best thing I’ve seen online all week. Hands down.

I’m writing this blog post on our new computer. Yep, finally; we order a Dell from a really good online Black Friday deal and it arrived yesterday. Replacing the six-year-old eMachine.

This new computer is running Microsoft Vista, which I was really leery about, but so far there’ve been none of the problem with Vista I’d been fearing from past experience. Some other observations though…

• "Windows Easy Transfer" isn’t. In fact, it rather sucks. I tried it twice, each time it failed. but not before copying over some data. The problem? It copied over stuff and simply re-created the folder structure as on the old computer, which really is not what I wanted. So I ended up scrapping that and copying over stuff myself.
• This computer is quiet. Really, really quiet. It actually bothers me a little that it’s so quiet.
• Browsing the internet in general seems quite a bit faster.
• This Vista is the 64-bit version of the OS, which apparently our Canon scanner refuses to work with. That’s a bit frustrating, and makes me wonder what else isn’t going to run because of 64-bit issues?

In other computer news, I’m being sorely tempted by the Acer Aspire One netbook they have at Costco. Only $350. It’s tiny! But seems like a good price for what you get, and it’s more powerful than the other comparable netbooks out there right now.

Rounding out this holiday weekend, it seemed only appropriate that I do this type of post. So, things that I’m thankful for:

Family and friends – It goes without saying yet it’s never said enough. I have terrific family and terrific friends and you couldn’t ask for more.

A good job – After spending the summer "off" (involuntarily, of course), I’m really grateful that I was fortunate enough to get a job, especially one that I like.

My blogs, and blogging – You might not know it the way I’ve been slacking on this blog, but between this and my two other blogs I’m thankful I have the opportunity and outlet to write and participate in this grand experiment. So far it’s been good to me.

The holidays – I really enjoy this time of year (despite how I complain about hanging lights, or things that go against my own personal sense of tradition) and I’m thankful for everything the holidays bring: vacation, good food, family get-togethers, gift giving, re-living the holidays vicariously through the kids.

Little things, like beer (which I even get to write about and earn a little money for), books (I’ll never run out of things to read), the internet (which I have some ability to tap into), health (not such a little thing, but something I take for granted far too much I suspect).

And of course, I’m thankful for these most interesting times we’re living in.