Year Update: The good, better and the best, switch to KDE

Couple of days to go in 2008. It's not my style to write year end reviews in public. However I am going to do it this time. This year has all been about the good, better and the best in my life. I don't write diaries, so I would better log it somewhere where I can find it tomorrow, day after and years after...

First up, major highlights:

• Graduation: I completed my under-graduate studies (from Haldia Institute of Technology) with major in Computer Science and Engineering. I did perform well too, finishing with a overall 8.58/10 score. Thanks to all my teachers/professors who allowed me to bunk classes (I had barely 30 % attendance, but I still managed to pass :-) ).
• Sun Microsystems: I joined Sun Microsystems, India immediately after my studies. Boy! That is wha you call- Dream Come True
• Moved to Bangalore from West Bengal
  
• Featured on Sun Developer Network, South Asia: I was featured on the SDN South Asia page in November, 2007
• First Foreign Trip: Yippie! I went to Riga in Latvia (Western Europe) during September, 2008
• Go Karting: The most non-geeky fun thing I did this year

Miscellaneous stuffs worth mentioning:

• I took over BOJUG, a enthusiastic community of Java developers in Bangalore. This is a great experience to run a community
  
• I am a NetBeans comitter now
• I started learning Lisp
• I am coding more in Python and helping the Python support in NetBeans project
• I blogged a LOT at this blog and http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha
• I have credit cards now :-)
  
• I have been reading pretty well this year
• I ate at a LOT of different places in Bangalore. I know more about cuisines than I knew 6 months back. I haven't repeated ANY restaurant, so far, courtesy Sayantini (No. She doesn't have a blog yet)
  

Turning point:

The year also proved to be a turning point in a small way (might turn out to be bigger). I was all set to pursue a research career in Parallel Computing/Artificial Intelligence having worked under Prof. Kumar Sankar Ray, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. An offer from Sun Microsystems and other compulsions left me with no choices, however. Its good so far. But my heart still yearns for the scientific community and folks like the Late Randy Pausch makes it all the more attractive.

I am not expecting anything more dramatic to happen this year to merit a update to this post.

(This isn't dramatic, but a very significant happening)

UPDATE: Couple of things I forgot to mention:

• I have switched from GNOME to KDE full-time. Its a switch for the better. I found KDE too much "cluttered", so I was happily a GNOME user. Thanks to the constant GNOME bashing of my colleague, Kunal I made a switch to KDE, gave it sometime and I think GNOME is for nannies and the newbies to Linux. GNOME is simple, but underpowered
• I also made the switch to OpenSUSE from Ubuntu, full time after 4 years, mainly because KDE doesn't rock on Ubuntu and I wanted to try KDE.
  

How did your year go? Do I have any reader? :-)