Hypercritical

Highlights from 2011

January 7, 2012 at 3:32 PM by John Siracusa

This past year was an eventful one for someone like me who has already passed most of the common milestones of adulthood (college, marriage, home ownership, children). The highlights:

I started a weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin, named after this blog (which, in turn, was named after something I wrote for Ars Technica in 2009). I’ve been amazed by the popularity of the show and the quality of the listener feedback and participation. Special thanks to Jeremy Mack, creator of showbot.me, and Justin Michael, creator of 5by5illustrated.com.

I’ve also become a devoted fan of several other podcasts on the 5by5 network, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin: Back to Work with Merlin Mann, Build and Analyze with Marco Arment, The Ihnatko Almanac with Andy Ihnatko, and The Talk Show with John Gruber. And for dessert, Roderick on the Line with John Roderick and Merlin Mann.
Though it started in 2010, The Incomparable, a geek ensemble podcast on which I’m proud to be a semi-regular guest, really hit its stride in 2011, with some great episodes about Star Wars (ANH part 1 and part 2; ESB part 1 and part 2), Pixar (part 1 and part 2), giant fantasy novels (The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear), plus a bushel of episodes about Dr. Who and other TV shows and movies.

I enjoy being on this podcast all out of proportion to the number of listeners it’s managed to gather. If you have even a fraction of the fun listening as I do recording this show, you should definitely give it a try. (And if you’re already a listener, why not rate it or write a review in iTunes?)
In June, I made my first trip to WWDC in San Francisco, which was also my first trip farther west than Colorado. Ostensibly, I made the trip because I was afraid that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion would be released after WWDC but before Apple published videos of the sessions for non-attendees. (I rely on the information presented at WWDC when writing my Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica.) But really, going to WWDC is something I’d always wanted to do.

The trip was expensive, and I had to take time off work to do it, but it was so worth it. I saw what turned out to be Steve Jobs’s final keynote presentation. I met tons of people in person that I’d known for years online, and made several new friends. I also got to talk to a handful of famous (well, “nerd famous”) people in the Apple community that I’d never imagined I’d ever have any contact with. I refuse to name-drop them, lest it cheapen the experience (and no, sadly, Steve Jobs was not one of them), but the suffice it to say that it exceeded all my expectations. I’m not sure when or if I’ll make it to WWDC again, but it’ll be extremely hard to top my first time.
Apple’s release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in July meant that my trip to WWDC was indeed a wise choice. In the two years since my last Mac OS X review at Ars Technica, the site has grown tremendously. Amazing feature stories on all sorts of subjects were pulling in huge traffic numbers, well beyond what my past Mac OS X reviews had drawn. I worried that the audience for my brand of tech writing was no longer significant enough to matter.

When my Lion review was published, I was grateful to be proven wrong. Thanks to everyone who continues to read what I write. Thanks for indulging my idiosyncrasies and continuing to hold me to the same high standards that I demand of the things I write about. And thanks to everyone at Ars for so many years of loyalty and for building an amazing publication that I’m proud to be even a small part of.
Steve Jobs died in October, and it affected me more than I’d expected it to. I wrote about it on Ars, talked about it on my podcast, and still think about it pretty regularly.

Some smaller 2011 milestones:

My seven-year-old son finished Ico, his first three Zelda games (Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess) and is deep into his fourth (Skyward Sword), with only a little help from dad on the harder bosses. His gaming education is coming along nicely.
Hardware upgrades: MacBook Pro 15-inch replaced with a 13-inch MacBook Air and a 27" Thunderbolt display; 4th generation iPod touch replaced with an iPhone 4S; Canon PowerShot S3-IS replaced with a Canon PowerShot S100. Hardware firsts: first SSD, first camera that can shoot RAW, first iPhone. (Note: the iPhone is my wife’s, not mine.)
I almost posted more than one thing to this blog.