So it has been a few days into the year 2008. Many things in my life have changed, yet still more changes need to be done. But I’m happy for the what has happened over the year.

The biggest event of the year for me was definitely the arrival of our lovely baby daughter in April. When I first saw her, I was amazed at how beautiful and perfect she was and I kinda wondered how someone like me could produce an angel like her. Me & wife were so scared before her birth. A lot of things went through our minds, like how many things could go wrong during delivery. I also had this crazy fear that I wouldn’t love the baby as much as a parent should. Anyways, everything went fine. The delivery was normal and without problems, and the baby was healthy except for a bit of newborn jaundice. She also brought joy to the whole household and our whole family love her to bits!

I started my new job in December 2006. So far, it has been very good. I managed to learn many new things in the IT industry, in both technical and business aspects. I also learnt a lot on the IT side of the aviation industry. Tender proposals took most of my working time, but they were interesting because those aren’t the usual government IT projects that I had been doing a lot at my previous company. I also did some travelling which was cool except that it took a lot of time away from my family.

In May I went to Jakarta for 2 weeks to get some hands-on overview of the airport IT system that my company developed. Sadly I didn’t get to be a tourist/shopper very much due to the fact that I followed a night shift schedule at the airport. Also, a trip to Jakarta city would consist of 4 hours in the car and about 2 hours of walking around. From what I was told, that’s typical of Jakarta traffic jams.

On my birthday in September, I was sent to Boston, US for almost a month. I was there to implement a test environment of the airport IT system. The main system is already there, but there were no testing system where patches and upgrades would be tested prior to deployment to the main production servers. Boston is quite a pleasant place to live. It was one of the earliest colonized area in the US, so a lot of the architecture styles were British-influenced. At that time, the Boston Red Sox were winning and it provided me a glimpse of this baseball-mad nation. The trip also reminded me of my student days, because I had to walk for 15 minutes, then take a train for about 10 minutes, and ride a bus for another 5 minutes to get from the house to the airport where I worked. The temperature was also quite unpredictable. One day it could be 12 Degrees Celcius, and the next day it could climb to 27! I also went for a walk in the Harvard university compound. The environment was similar to most British unis, with old buildings and lots of greens. I managed to do some shopping while I was in Boston, but they were mostly for my baby daughter. The baby stuffs over there are damn cheap! Also, I got an iPod Nano to be shared between me and the wife.

On December, I got sent to Bandung to deliver a huge Sun server. I checked-in the server together with my bags which was a very risky thing to do. But that was the direction I got from the company, and that was what I did. Upon arrival in Jakarta airport, I got held by the custom guys (which I had expected). I told them that the server will be used to demonstrate some new systems to the airport officials. My company implemented Jakarta airport’s IT and Flight Display systems, so that sounded like a valid reason. The custom guys babbled on about needing to leave some sort of ‘assurance’ money with them, and to collect the money from them when the server leaves for KL again after the demonstration ends. So without even asking how much they wanted, I told them that I’m gonna call one of the airport bosses. I took out my phone and started dialling, when suddenly one of the custom guys told me that since the server was for the airport bosses, I can just pass through without having to pay anything. Bloody conmen. On the next day, I went to Bandung to deliver the server. Bandung was nice… lots of pretty girls. There were many descendants of Dutch-Indonesian mixture. I had not time to shop on this trip too. Or maybe it’s because I never make the time to go shopping anyway. This time I came back empty-handed.

Many more things happened, but the ones above are the highlights of the year for me. Let’s see what 2008 holds…