A Year in Review: 2007

The year is done, so it is time for a compilation of my favorite memories from the past year, especially those posted here in the blog.

January followed the Christmas where I received a fantastic camera, so I was excited to use it when snow fell in Lincoln and during a ski trip with my dad.


February was a month between design and construction phases of design studio where my team put together a music video, "Code Monkey." Later, this video became a featured video on YouTube.


March was dominated by the trip to Japan for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, with surprising results. After the contest, we traveled to Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Sapporo. There are some other pictures including our stop in a capsule hotel.


April was rather uneventful, outside of entering the Catholic church and getting engaged to my beautiful fiancée, Katie Thomasset. Also, we visited Tom doing his racewalking thing, I finished my thesis, and decided to attend graduate school at UNL for Mathematics.


May featured my graduation, which was really a transition from on-campus to off-campus. As summer started, so did my travels, starting with a trip to Canada to renovate the Annex. I then took some qualification exams to get a head start on my graduate studies.


June saw my mother and I overseas again, this time in Africa to build homes for AIDS orphans. This was the second trip for the year where I doubled the number of continents where I had been, adding Africa and Europe to North America and Asia.

July included frequent travel to Kansas City to visit Katie, but also a family reunion up in Canada. Katie survived meeting the Stolees well enough. As it was, there was very little blog material.

August completed my travels with a canoe trip in the boudary waters with Dad and a trip to Estes Park with Katie's parents. Then, I moved back to Lincoln into my new apartment near the stadium with my old roommate and prepared for classes to begin at the end of the month.

September and October were dominated by several math jokes, due to temporary insanity in my overload of math courses. Overload is a poor choice of word, since it was just enough to make me go nuts but not enough to make me dislike what I'm doing.

November's most excited happenings were the releases of two DVD movies for my favorite series: Battlestar Galactica and Futurama. The Futurama post got me a lot of hits for people wondering about the code, but currently I am the very first hit for a Google search for "piecosahedron." I also replaced my PowerBook of four and a half years with a shiny new MacBook.

December signaled the end of the fall semester with a grueling finals week and Christmas travels. Katie and I went to her parents' house for Christmas, and then up to the great white north for the Bakken Christmas and seeing my high school friends. We stayed out to ring in the new year, in old fashioned style: with wild game cooked by Luke's mom and watching TV until we are tired enough to go home.

This year was a good one. The next is also promising, with Katie's graduation and our wedding steadily approaching. MMVIII is sure to be full of bloggable material, so thanks for reading and I look forward to your readings in the future.