When I first thought about bidding farewell to another year, I thought that this one really was not my favorite year.  I’ve never really had any health troubles in my whole life, and I had a few this year, which were hard for me and my family – so my knee-jerk reaction was to think along the lines of Good Riddance to 2007.

After just a short think about it though, I know that’s a wrong reaction.  I think the outstanding thing about 2007 for me is that it taught me a whole lot.  It’s been a while since I probably had my eyes / mind open enough to let myself learn anything major – but sometimes a bit of a kick in the arse will open your mind real quick.  That’s how this year was for me.  Here’s some stuff I learned:

– That saying about how you find out who your true friends are when times are not so good, is true – and I found that I’m very, very lucky and have some great friends.  I also found that some ‘virtual friends’ or web friends or whatever the right term is, can also be great and true friends.  I’d never really considered web friendships to be much above casual acquaintance level, but Brandon, Doug, Charlie, and others have shown me that was a serious underestimation. That was a very cool thing to learn, and I owe all of them, and a lot of my not virtual friends a ton of gratitude for just tons of help and support this year.

– Learned that my wife is the strongest person on the planet, by a long margin.  Don’t know where I’d be without her, don’t know how I got along before I met her, and haven’t the slightest clue how she does what she does every single day.

– Some downtime also made me realize that no job is worth doing 80 hours a week, in manic, pressured situations – my work arrangements and commitment level has changed a great deal, and I’m very glad of it.

– Not so much a brand new thing this one, but found a new level of appreciation for lots of small things – like being able to pick my daughter up from school, and taking long afternoon walks with her and my dopey dog, that I never previously had time for, never even got home from work in time for!  And like how beautiful Austin and all of Texas are.  Big skies and big -hearted people.  I’ve only been in  Austin 7 years, and have lived a bunch of different places, but have never felt more at home than I do now in Texas.

– That working on this site, talking about and learning about mobile stuff, is still big, big fun to me.  I’ve been involved in tech jobs and network roles for many years, but by now mobile tech is my real favorite area to learn about, play with, and write about.

– That Football Manager 2008 is *much* tougher than previous editions!  A little more downtime this year gave me a lot of time to play my favorite game.  I’ve never been big on Shoot “Em Ups or console games – just give me a Premiership club, or a Primera Liga team, and bit of transfer budget – and lookout, I’m obsessed for hours on end with winning the league, winning the Champions League, and all the rest of it.  Great to see the game is that much more challenging this year.

So … those are really basic, simple things, nothing really clever.  It just took them a while to get into my thick skull. And sorry – I’m not usually one for soppy messages – but that’s a few of the things that 2007 taught me.  I’m looking forward to 2008 and learning some more.  I hope all of you learned something good in 2007, and that 2008 is great for all of us.  Happy New Year ….