Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash.
It's already 2009—time sure flies! I thought I'd pick out some personal highlights of the passed year, in no particular order.
Spotify
Spotify music streaming service was launched. This is clearly a major step forward for online music distribution. I hope more and more record companies will join the service—actually, these companies have no choice but to adapt to the new business model in order to survive. Spotify is currently invite-only, with free accounts available only in some European countries (currently UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France). Spotify Premium (not free) is available in many more countries, including Belgium. You can have your charts sent to last.fm. too.
Web stuff
Foxmarks Firefox add-on that syncs and backs up your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers. I can now access all my bookmarks and add new ones from any computer. It's perfect, just what I need.
Ubuntu Linux with VirtualBox and Wine. In 2008, I made a transition from Windows XP to Ubuntu (before that, I had Gentoo Linux and Ubuntu installed on separate machines for testing and learning). If I ever have to use Windows anymore, for any reason, I use it virtually, using VirtualBox. I also have Wine installed on Ubuntu for Windows-only software. My 12' PowerBook is used only occasionally. This setup works very well for me.
Music
La Monnaie production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck. A fantastic performance, this is ageless stuff.
Work
At work, 2008 was an interesting year. I had the pleasure to work for three different employers, participating in various projects, learning plenty of new things about web industry. Looking forward to learning and contributing even more this year!
Extras
I don't have so much time to write long posts anymore, so lately I've been concentrating more on micro-blogging instead, posting short random thoughts, mainly on Twitter. I have continued uploading photos to Flickr, and checked microformats, JavaScript libraries (mainly JQuery), and more.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year 2009! See you in cyberspace.