This has been a year full of changes, so I'll try to make a short summary of the most relevant points.
Related to work, after some months continuing doing .NET consulting services and development and a bit of training, the opportunity to start developing Windows Live Agents arised and I took it, so I switched to WLA development.
.NET is still there (actually I'be been continued developing some things at the office and at home), and my plan for the 2008 is to "update" my certifications (this year I haven't achieved not a single one... I'm still .NET 1.1 MCAD), and I'm learning about .NET 3.5 (focusing the most on ASP.NET and Silverlight), but I wan't to hit hard with the Agents, because now that the learning phase is mostly over, comes the experience phase, where I can start to focus on "what can I do with this?" instead of "how do I do that?" and I like it :)
I gave just one speech about XNA (to the Madrid dotNetClubs), but next year I'll try to be more active in that aspect too. For start, we've got a small dotNetclubs weekend event and in march I'll give a 2h speech about XNA 2.0 with Vicente and Flipper86 (at my old university :_)
I jumped into having my own blog community, at least to unify my blogs (I had four: Blogger, dotText, WLSpaces, custom ASP 3.0 webapp), and right now it has 14 blogs. Some are a bit dead but others are not only constant but fantastic, with lots of fresh info and cool stuff. I've also separated more my blogging into them (and by using Twitter for personal matters).
Managing a Community Server site was difficult at first, but now I'm even developing some custom modules, fine-tunning it and thinking about doing some more hard internal customizations.
Recently I added Google Apps for Domain so now I try not to offer only a blog, but a set of tools and a "community" where we can share ideas not only via emails. Let's see if it becomes useful.
I've tried a lot of web 2.0 services and, although some "didn't pass the exam", I'm actually using some, like Twitter, Last.fm or LinkedIn. I've also focused more on using web apps than desktop ones, or joining the desktop ones in as few as possible (for example, why having a FTP client if I can use FireFTP).
I've got tons of freeware or opensource programs (I've got less than 10 commercial software apps, including Windows), and I stick to my "don't mind if it's old, mind if it acomplishes what you want from it", so I'm still using "legacy" apps like Winamp 2.x or VNC.
I've finally joined my two mobile phones into one (and being a Windows Mobile PDA-Phone, with "addons"), and have at last unified my address books (into gmail's contact manager, which I export and then import from my PDA into PocketOutlook), I've done some rounds of Messenger contact cleaning, and I've updated my PC network at home and have expanded it to 4 pcs (one even with Linux, but I don't have much time to play with it).
I need more time management refination, but somedays the improvement is noticeable, and I don't feel as much pressure as before when I can't acomplish "so much at once". And all that going out with friends, watching a lot of films per week and finishing a videogame each 1-2 weeks :)
And in the personal subject... too many things have happened.
Let's simply point that I'm trying to get fit again (at least lose some weight and clean my lungs now that I've quit smoking) and that finally in less than two months I'll have my own house. It will make a really big change in my life (mostly in my economy!).
Let's hope next year I can post tons of interesting and geeky stuff, that we get bigger and better and that software development continues being as fun as it is :)
Happy new year!!!
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