I was inspired by CC Chapman’s 2009 in Pictures post to document this year… and what a year it has been.

This year included:

• 3 trips to Mexico – one paid for by Amateur Traveler, one blogger trip and one volunteer trip
• Conferences like Blog World, MacWorld and TBEX
• Trips to Arizona, Chicago, Colorado and Las Vegas
• A Trip to Paris, Geneva, Berlin and Prague
• A new podcast – This Week in Travel – bringing the total to 4
• A great niece
• A 30 year high school reunion
• A decision to start my own company

It has been quite a year

Happy New Year and my best wishes for an awe inspiring 2010!

An old saying is “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”

Now at last that question can be answered.

I loved this video of comedian Louis C.K. on Conan O’Brian’s show. He talks about the technology that I grew up with (you had to dial the phone and you had to stand right next to it) and how much cooler the new technology is. But, as he points out, people seem less happy now than they were then. You are holding a phone that is talking to space but you are impatient with how long it takes to get a signal.

Are we becoming less patient? Sure this is comedy but it does seem like there is some truth to it.

I can google with the best of them… at least that’s what I thought before I saw this interview by Patrick Norton of Google’s Matt Cutts.

I knew how to:

• do a phrase match – use quotes
• exclude specific words – use minus
• do spell checking
• get around spell check – use plus
• do currency conversion – convert 20 dollars to yen
• limit the search to a single site – paris site:amateurtraveler.com

I did not know how to:

• use a fill in the blank type search – mt everest is * feet high
• search only in the .gov domain – site:gov
• do a search for a number in a range between two numbers – 12..30
• get flight numbers
• get the time in zurich
• look up words in a dictionary – define:
• look for specific file types – filetype:
• look up local movies – movies 95129

So if you already have your bachelor’s degree in google search but you want to earn your master’s degree check out this video.

Thanks to Jim Karter at Earn Money Online who brought this to my attention.

There may have been some confusion when speaker Aubrey de Grey came to the stage at the TED conference for the talk Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it. The British researcher on aging declared that aging can be avoided or at least slowed down. Although de Grey sports a Gandolf-like beard and has a name that sounds like it would fit comfortably in the late middle ages there is no truth to the rumor that de Grey was speaking of himself when he said that he is confident that individuals that may live to 1000 years old have already been born.

In a shocking challenge to conventional wisdom, Cambridge researcher Aubrey de Grey argues that the process of aging is merely a disease — and a curable one at that. De Grey, a computer scientist and biogerontologist, believes humans could live for centuries, if only we approach the aging process as “an engineering problem.” He outlines the seven basic ways people age, and how to “solve” each one. And if we get to work now, he says, humans alive today could live to be 1,000.

Neil Howe is one of the two authors of the book Millennials Rising. He spoke yesterday at the Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference 2008. He is an interesting speaker but the topic itself, the difference between baby boomers, gen x-ers and millennials is fascinating. He argues that millennials have gotten criticized for how they are different but not valued for how they are different. He also asserts that time makes the generations and that the millennial generation is shaping the technology rather than the other way around.

His talk awkwardly starts 50 minutes into this video:

and concludes in this video:

Sadly those video taping this presentation never show what the speaker is displaying on the screen.

A funny video that considers how your “big boned” PC laptop will feel when the MacBook Air is getting all that attention.

When I showed my co-workers the video from CES of Bill Gates last day one of them was reminded of a similar short video from Bill Clinton’s last days in office.

A friend in Argentina sent me this video of a young man in Hong Kong giving out free hugs. Maybe this world is not so far apart after all.

The thought occurred to me that the NSA is intercepting cell phone conversations anyway, they could so make money in the process. This was based on an audio recording originally made for Buzz Out Loud.