2 Jan 2015

A review of the year 2014

I am not much of a believer in “new years”. It’s just an arbitrary point in time which happens to be a round number (01/01). But, I like the fact you can think of this round number as a new beginning. Counting your blessings is a good thing, they say. I’m going to start this year by reminiscing on 2014 a bit.

If 2013 was when we bought a new car for our family, 2014 was the year when a car became my primary means of transportation. When I had to buy a car, the first thing I wanted was a BMW X3. Though I changed my mind later on after finding out the cost, I ended up getting an X3. Turns out, used cars are considerably cheaper. :-)

Getting this X3 was one of the good decisions of 2014
Before getting the X3, and for a while after getting it, I thought the X3 looked really nice. In a few months, I learned that irrespective of what car you have, you’d think of some other car to be nicer/better. I still wish I had gotten a Jeep Cherokee even though I know deep down that the Cherokee won’t be as refined as the X3, and the X3 is a better match for my needs.

By around the same time, I upgraded from Canon PowerShot S5, which had been my camera for about 6 years. I upgraded to Sony Nex-6 and got two prime lenses, thanks to guidance by +Karthik Nagaraj. I am so pleased with the quality of the images I took 3 to 5 times more pictures this year than the past 5 years. After a few years, I took pictures that I myself liked.
When I moved from Sydney, the most important goal I had in mind was to travel more. I started living outside India with the desire to travel, but I hadn’t travelled much when I was in Sydney. I wanted to change that with the move to California. Armed with my new Nex-6 and the X3, I travelled to a lot more places than I had originally planned.

2014 was my “year of broke” after having lived wealthy for several years. Often in 2014, I had much less money than I needed. It was all due to bad planning from my part, which made it easy to fix the issue. I can say I have a good hold on my monthly expenses now. 2015 might actually get better monetarily. Good times are ahead.

This was the year I bought my first non-Nexus Android phone. This was the year my much loved Toshiba Z830 laptop felt inadequate. It’s underpowered for running things like Android Studio. Has a 1366×768 screen, which is not pleasant to look at anymore. Sadly though, I just haven’t found a laptop in the market that’s worth upgrading to. Hopefully System76 will introduce a successor to their Galago Pro with a 4k display.

Here’s to a great 2015!