2014: The Uneventful Year

2014 was nothing compared to my 2013. Really, not much happened; I don't think I did anything new.

Work/life

I started the year unemployed, and remained that way for quite a few months. It was just an extended vacation. And I sure did enjoy it. Honestly, I don't understand people who say that doing nothing drive them crazy; it's the best! Although, I did worry that a prolonged vacation would lessen my coding & interviewing abilities and then I'd be in trouble in getting new jobs.

So, I decided to be more active on GitHub and created my personal website. Since I don't have any cool projects to showcase, the website is mostly (yet another) personal/professional blog. I seem to be splitting this blog once again, and posting even less on each. I just realized that even after a whole year, I haven't done any cool programming project I can show people. I should work on this...

I'm also slacking on my writing. I see decreasing number of blog posts and I think I've only written about 5 short stories this year. It's quite disappointing as I really wanted to practice my writing and become a better writer. I don't see it happening any time soon though.

Lack of traveling

This has got to be the most disappointing thing in 2014. I really thought I'd spend some time traveling. But I got lazy and comfortable, and just stayed home for months. Now that I have a new(ish) job, it's unlikely that I'd have time to travel. The only cool place I went to in 2014 is Sydney, for just a handful of days, for a job interview. I really loved it out there; shame I didn't get the job. I'd definitely try again though.

I'd also try applying for jobs in other countries. I'm not exactly sure where, other than Australia, US, and Canada. I'd probably just apply to any English-speaking country out there; no harm in trying.

TV, Movies, Music

Looking at the Google Spreadsheet of movies I've watched, there was a significant increase compared to last year. I watched 65 movies with the total running time of 125 hours and 15 minutes. Pretty decent, I'd say!


I should find a better way of keeping track of things I watch. I also wanted to make pretty charts on this, but I haven't found the time to do it. In 2015, if I haven't found a better tracker, I'm changing my ratings system. 1-10 here doesn't really work because I don't have a preset definition, instead going by my feeling of what each movie should be ranked. What's a 7 on one day might be an 8 on a different day.

On the TV front, it's similar to last year's. The only show that I'm following week to week is Agents of SHIELD. The other show that I really enjoyed was The Newsroom, which now has ended. I watched The Good Wife, but finding it hard to continue, and I finally watched the entire run of House. Instead of watching something new, I just kept coming back to old favorites like Buffy, Friends, and Sports Night.

As for music, I use last.fm to keep track of things I listened to. It's not really for 2014 since I only created the account some time in August, so this is actually my 9 most listened album for the second half of 2014:

Lots of JT, as expected. I don't think it changed much since 2013. I wish I had a way to track how many songs I listen to each day, or what time of day do I listen to music the most. That would be interesting to see.

What's for 2015?

As I've mentioned, I would try to apply for overseas jobs. Hopefully I can be elsewhere in 2015. Or at least I hope I'd travel somewhere new this year. In any case, 2015 better be more exciting!