Remembering 2008

So time to look back at this year - not least as viewed from this blog. It's been a mixed year, on the negative side I've had friends who have been ill, Beth lost her job and still doesn't have another, and my health as ever, has been up and down with partials in August and December meaning that I can't drive at the moment and another big migraine cluster in October/November.

That shouldn't take away from the good bits though. I think my personal high point was sailing up the east coast with Jenny from Grimsby to the Firth of Forth as part of her voyage around the UK.

Sadly this year's extended sailing trip with Hugo was scuppered by the August partials but we did manage an excellent outing around the Isle of Sheppy which was another first as I'd not been up The Swale before. We also had an excellent sunset at Harty Ferry which I recorded using my phone camera.

We had a number of good holidays including Easter at Fawber in the snow, and a camping holiday on Islay, Jura, and Mull where we both climbed a Corbett and Beth climbed a Munro.

We had two outings to Wales with the Outdoors Magic crew. The first, to Snowdonia in April was a tad moist and we failed to climb Snowdon but we did have a much better walk the following day. For the second, to the Brecon Beacons in October, we were much luckier with the weather and had an excellent walk around Talybont Reservoir and a hard slog up Pen y Fan the following day (the second tallest mountain I've even walked up).

We celebrated my parents' golden wedding anniversary in March and although I wasn't well that day it was great to see my vast extended family gathered in one place.

On the geek front I've blogged every day this year as promised on 1st January and as a side effect Opus has been enhanced somewhat in support of better blogging: improved code for adding comments and the ability to tag articles.

I've also taken the next step in moving the milton-news mailing list on from being a mailman mailing list. It's now done as an HTML email, which is a first for me, with the mails being generated automatically by Opus based on any new postings to news.milton.org.uk.

My GPS track/route mapping site was fun to write and has proved a minor hit with walkers around the UK.

New geek toys this year included a Nokia N800 to replace my Nokia 770 and then a pair of Logitech Squeezeboxes, first a Classic and then a Boom which I bought myself for Christmas.

Milton Country Park was handed over to Cambridge Sport Lakes Trust at the end of March, which means it's safe ... for now at least.

Meanwhile in the wider world Barack Obama is now President Elect of the USA and having followed his progress since January it's been something I've enjoyed watching happen.

So all in all it's not been too bad a year and there's already things to look forward to in 2009.