2007: The year that was

2007 began with a quest. The rest of the year was probably spent questing for a suitable quest. January saw the deaths of Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, and a local police officer. It was also a productive time work wise. Beginning in January and continuing on to March I began exploring information about China online in preparation for our holiday there. I also redesigned the allrite.net home page, investigated Second Life and had to temporarily relocate from my office when the ceiling fell in

In February I also had issues with climate change doubters, celebrated the arrival of the Queen Mary 2 and Chinese New Year20 years of mobile phones in Australia and wrote about the difficulties of blogging on a Zaurus

March was the big month of the year. We spent most of it in China and Hong Kong, followed by Japan in the first week of April. On my return I was moved to a new office at Macquarie University. By May I found myself restless and bored. So I booked us a holiday in Japan with Jetstar to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was supposed to be a secret, but B soon discovered it. I started writing Javascript again, watched Crude and Air Crash Investigations on the television and ate Peruvian food at Cronulla.

June saw me waxing lyrical about iGoogle's teahouse theme, but our Japanese plans turned sour when B was refused leave over the dates I had booked the trip for. At work I wrote a paper on planning online communities and added iCalendar functionality to our intranet. I also released an iGoogle gadget to track CSIRO news, events and podcasts. Before the end of the month I had written advice on Asian transits and rebooked our Osaka holiday

The second half of the year started with a lovely walk through Kyeemagh. I noted that my Views from a Train blog was seemingly more popular than this one. There were also a couple of entries on health issues and flying – altitude sickness and the safest seat. I flew down to Canberra for a meeting on developing a Capabilities Browser and had a couple of weird days.

I rediscovered the night sky in August, enjoying a lunar eclipse. While I liked jQuery, Microsoft's SharePoint left me very unimpressed.

For the second time in a year I visited Japan and had a wonderful holiday. Later in September we also experienced the Korean Chuseok festival and ate Brazilian snacks at Darling Harbour. Still on the travelling theme we drove to Canberra for Floriade and took the dog for a swim at Kurnell.

My great achievement for October was my recipe for Thai style Lemon and Coconut Prawns. I also moved back to Marsfield and decided to end my involvement with the Capabilities Project.

In November we were seriously considering a holiday in Europe early next year. Eventually we decided to fly Jetstar to Malaysia in February instead. I mused on a creek much closer to home and prepared for Malaysian food with some satay and roti canai at Mamak.

December started off loudly with a concert of John Williams' music at the Sydney Opera House. It gradually got quieter with Christmas. We were tempted to end it with a bang at the harbour fireworks, but we left the crowds after the mostly unseen 9pm pyrotechnics. So it's back to the window and the television to see off 2007.

Happy New Year!

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