12.31.12

2012 Highlights

Posted in books, personal at 11:54 am by danvk

A few personal highlights from 2012:

I traveled all over the place this year. Some highlights:

• Montreal
• San Francisco (several times)
• Bovina
• South Bend/Chicago (10-year high school reunion!)
• West Coast/Portland
• Israel
• India/Thailand/Vietnam/Cambodia

I took a three-month sabbatical from work during May, June and July. Some highlights from that:

• Numerous beach trips
• Doing the Stripped 5×5
• Doing the Slow Carb Diet
• Many bike rides, including my first century!
• Playing Ultimate Frisbee

I also spent a lot of time working on personal projects this year. A few highlights:

• Puzzle+
• International Sunrise/Sunset
• Lots of work on dygraphs
• Diving into Obesity Data
• My first iOS App, Repeatables
• Transcribing my old journals
• Historical Mapping (nothing to show publicly yet!)

Books I read in 2012:

• Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
• The Big Roads by Earl Swift (about Highways in America)
• The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1) by Robert A. Caro
• Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #2) by Robert A. Caro
• The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #4) by Robert A. Caro (I read #3 in the series last year)
• Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer
• Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne (about the Comanche)
• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (about Abraham Lincoln)
• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
• What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast by Laura Vanderkam

And a few other miscellaneous things:

• The whole Hurricane Sandy / SoPo (South of Power) experience
• Watching Election 2012 on the Empire State Building
• Seeing Robert Caro speak in person
• Cocktails with Maks

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