2011 was a tumultuous year for just about everyone in the world, particularly Osama bin Laden. I’m no different than the average person on the planet and can be included in the masses thankful that an extremely stressful year has come to a close. 2012 is already shaping up to be an exciting time for myself and Diana, but more on that next year. The following is a highlight reel of my 2011.

1. January started out with me working at SimpleGeo in San Francisco, Diana in Denver, and SimpleGeo’s team still split between Boulder and San Francisco. All three of these facts would be upended by the end of the year.
2. Also in January, I went out to the UK to work with Holiday Extras for the second time. I made three more trips to Hythe, UK and have been extremely impressed with the team. It’s been a pleasure to watch passionate people reinvent many aspects of their technology stack, team, and processes in such a short period of time.
3. The beginning of the year brought more tattoo work. I’ve been slowly, but surely, working on finishing the rest of my left arm. I don’t think I planned on getting two full sleeves when I started out, but I strangely find that it’s completing me in some weird way.
4. I went to Grand Rapids, MI to talk to a local user group there about scaling, managing engineers, and general geekery. Thanks to Atomic Object for having me out!
5. In early February my dear friend Josh “Dorkboy” Lynn came out to San Francisco for a trip. We drove down HWY 1, went to a basketball game, and ate a few hundred burritos.
6. February also brought the closing of the Boulder office. A few people moved to San Francisco to join us and a few people moved on to other opportunities. The lesson learned is that startups are far too small to sustain two offices unless absolutely necessary.
7. Finally, in February, Attachments.me, a side project of mine that ended up becoming a company with two amazing founders, received $500k in seed funding from the Foundry Group. I continue to be impressed with the hustle and professionalism of Ben and Jesse.
8. In March I went to the entirety of SXSW. Diana joined me for the last day of Interactive and all of the Music portion. I nearly didn’t get out of Austin at the end due to craziness at the airport and was thoroughly burnt out on the entire event. It’s too big, too corporate, and far too hectic for my taste. I doubt I’ll be spending as much time there this year.
9. In late March, SimpleGeo launched SimpleGeo Storage, which was built entirely on top of a distributed graph database system that our team developed internally. This patent pending technology is some of the most impressive technical work I’ve seen happen in a startup and I’m proud as hell with the team and their work. In particular, it was a pleasure to watch Mike Malone challenge himself and grow into an absolutely spectacular engineer.
10. In April I went out to Denver a few times to see Diana showcase her artwork for her senior thesis. In May I once again traveled to Denver to watch Diana graduate from Metro State. We then packed up her apartment and moved her out to SF so that we could live together. This March 2nd will be two years. I can’t imagine someone filling a void in my life as completely as Diana has.
11. Also in May was a trip to Amsterdam to speak at a location related conference. I managed to visit Amsterdam three times this last year and would happily visit it three hundred more times. I’ve never felt so at home in a foreign country as I do walking the canals of Amsterdam.
12. May and June also brought the first serious interest from potential acquirers at SimpleGeo. We got pretty far down the road with one potential acquirer before walking away. This was my first foray into the dreaded M&A process and it set the tone for all future discussions with acquirers.
13. In June Diana and I went to Vegas for the Future of Web Apps conference. The Carsonified crew are, in my opinion, some of the very best in the business. I gave a talk titled Starting Your Startup, which appeared to be well received.
14. In June I started following the Four Hour Body’s Slow Carb diet. I ended up losing 35 pounds over the next five months and now weigh under 200 pounds for the first time since high school.
15. July brought a trip to Europe with Diana. We went to Paris, Amsterdam, Rome and the UK. It pretty much rained the entire time we were in Europe and we both got sick. We tried to make the best of it and managed to take in some great sites in Rome and Paris. We had a great time hanging out with friends in Amsterdam. I think Diana might share my feelings on Amsterdam after the trip.
16. In September conversations to sell SimpleGeo started to pick up steam. We talked with quite a few companies about the possibility and, at the end of October, ended up being acquired by Urban Airship. As part of the acquisition, I moved on from the company.
17. After leaving SimpleGeo, I dedicated myself full-time to Sprint.ly, a product management tool that I’ve been wanting to build for almost my entire career. We launched as an invite-only beta on the 3rd of December.
18. At the beginning of November Diana and I bought an RV with the hopes of driving around the Southwest all winter. We made it as far as San Diego before Sprint.ly and a new puppy caused us to rethink the trip. Our current plan is to head up to Seattle for a couple of months.
19. Puppy? Yes, we got a puppy. He’s a Lhasapoo and his name is Sheldon.

Another year, another ridiculous amount of travel. I flew over 110,000 miles to two different continents and visited 17 different cities throughout the year. Needless to say, jet lag is my copilot. My year in cities follows.

• San Francisco, CA
• Denver, CO
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• Chicago, IL
• Grand Rapids, MI
• Ann Arbor, MI
• East Jordan, MI
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Rome, Italy
• Hythe, UK
• London, UK
• Paris, France
• New York, New York
• Austin, TX
• Las Vegas, NV
• Orlando, FL
• Seattle, WA

This year I spent a lot of time iterating on SimpleGeo’s products, working with partners, listening to customers, recruiting employees, and trying to establish an open culture at the company. Being a founder of a startup is an extremely stressful job. I tell the people at SimpleGeo that I hope they all found a company someday so they’ll know how awesome it is and how terrible it is to be a founder.

The rest of my year was filled with travel, good friends, good food, time with Diana, and the usual insanity. A short recap follows.

1. I started the year with a trip to Singapore the Global Leaders 2010 summit. It was a pretty surreal experience debating the relevance and consequences of metadata with the former CIO of Google and the Chief Privacy Officers of Microsoft and Oracle. Extremely enlightening debates.
2. I tried to spend more time blogging. Most of it was about startups, engineering culture, and entrepreneurship: Fail fast and often, HOWTO: Recruit Rock Stars, HOWTO: Maintain a Rock Star Culture, and Why I’ll never own another server.
3. In February I met a girl on OkCupid of all places. She’s improved my life greatly and I’m happy she continues to put up with me.
4. I also went to Atlanta in February for PyCon. Mike Malone and I gave a talk on using OAuth, OpenID, and other open web technologies in Python and Django. If you’re into OAuth and use Python, check out my python-oauth2 library.
5. March brought my 30th birthday and SXSW. I spoke on a panel with a bunch of really smart people about how location and location-aware applications are going to change the face of social networking, mobile, and the internet.
6. I went out to Dublin for Funconf in April, despite it being canceled by a volcano, and ended up in Amsterdam for Queen’s Day, which is basically the Dutch version of St. Patrick’s Day.
7. SimpleGeo raised $8.2m in June of this year to ramp up operations and bring simple tools for location-aware applications to market.
8. Diana and I went to South Africa for the TECH4AFRICA conference. The trip was intense overall. We met a ton of great people, hung out in Johannesburg, saw Soweto, went to Cape Town, and visited a game reserve.
9. The Madikwe Game Reserve was one of the highlights of the trip to South Africa. Waking up to monkeys on your porch and zebras wrestling behind your cabin is a surreal experience.
10. At the beginning of September I moved back to San Francisco. I’ve given up attempting to move anywhere else at this point. San Francisco is home now and that’s fine by me.
11. September also brought my first two angel investments, which sounds really weird to be saying. I placed small bets on StyleSeat and Kiip. They’re both ramping up operations and doing well. Excited to see what Melody and Brian cook up in 2011.
12. I went back to Dublin to attend the postponed Funconf and also went to London to speak at Future of Web Apps. I’ll be speaking at the Las Vegas Future of Web Apps this summer as well.
13. We hired one of my mentors and good friends, Jay Adelson, to be CEO of SimpleGeo in November.
14. In November I made good on my promise to get a geek tattoo and to get an old school Americana tattoo by getting a single tattoo that professes my love for the Internets.
15. November also brought a happy ending for a startup I’d advised from nearly inception. ngmoco:) sold to DeNA for $400m. Huge kudos to the team over there. Incredible watching them grow from 9 employees to over 100 in two short years.
16. A project that I started over a year ago, gained steam through 2010, gained a team, and was released into private beta in early December by Jesse and Ben. attachments.me aims to give you advanced tools for mining the unstructured data locked up in your email inbox.
17. Just in time for 2010, I started work on finishing my left sleeve. It’s going to be Mechagodzilla vs. Godzilla fighting over a fictitious skyline comprised of buildings from cities I’ve lived in.

Despite thinking there was no way I could top last year’s travel schedule, I somehow managed to set a record for miles traveled, sights seen, and continents stepped on. I traveled less days this year with “only” 137 days on the road, but managed to travel 124,392 miles (200,189km), visit 10 countries, 4 continents, and 32 cities over the course of 29 trips. My year in cities is as follows.

• Boulder, CO
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Austin, TX
• Ann Arbor, MI
• Lansing, MI
• Detroit, MI
• Singapore, Singapore
• Atalanta, GA
• Johannesburg, South Africa
• Cape Town, South Africa
• London, UK
• Dublin, Ireland
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Kansas City, MO
• Toronto, Canada
• Salt Lake City, UT
• Glenwood Springs, CO

This year has been filled with amazing highs and amazing lows. I’m looking forward to what 2006 has to offer. I’m looking forward to looking forward and moving on, but let’s take a look back at what happened in 2005.

1. I started the year as a newlywed.
2. I learned a few things about my new home Seattle.
3. Lauren and I moved into a larger condo.
4. I started working for Enotes.com on a full time basis
5. After much lusting I bought a fat new plasma TV.
6. I spoke about MySQL’s FULLTEXT indexes at MySQL UC and visited Las Vegas for the first time.
7. I watched in amazement as my dog had intimate relations with my cat. I, of course, took video and posted it to my blog.
8. My first visit to Vegas ended badly.
9. Not everyone though Anthony Federov sucked as bad as I thought he did.
10. I started hacking on my condo with mostly positive results.
11. I briefly thought about returning to school, but was stopped dead in my tracks by a horrific GMAT score. More studying and another go at the GMAT is currently on my horizon.
12. My dad got a huge promotion at work.
13. Enotes.com launches the first AJAX based dictionary lookup on the web.
14. I tell the world just how badly Detroit, my former hometown, sucks. Subsequently, I am now in the top five on Google for “detroit sucks”.
15. I lost another 25lbs (11.3kg).
16. I completely renovated my kitchen.
17. Enotes.com bought a Google Search Appliance, which is possibly the ugliest box ever put in a colo facility.
18. We launched Enotes 6.0 after about 1.5 man years of work. This will go down as one of my greatest work accomplishments to date. I’m still amazed at how well it came together and how well the team worked to get this out the door.
19. Lauren and I end our marriage.

It’s amazing how much can happen in a single year isn’t it? This year I started a new job, traveled to two countries and five states, renovated my condo and ended a nine month old marriage.

Here’s to 2006!

2004 was a busy year for me. The year, sort of, started with me asking Lauren to marry me on December 23^rd. From there the year snowballed.

1. I played competitive hoops for the first time in years
2. Operation Fat Ass commenced and is still conducting maneuvers
3. Operation Kitty Poo Poo started and, eventually, failed due to Crash’s inability to poop in the toilet (though he would pee without issues)
4. I switched to VoIP and haven’t looked back since
5. I got addicted to ITMS
6. Bush and his war in Iraq continued to suck
7. Not really from this year, but use this to debate your Christrian Fundie friends
8. We visited (part 1) New York City (part 2)
9. I bought a powerbook, which I’m using to create this entry
10. I got addicted to American Idol and, as a result of my AI posts, a bunch of idiots flooded my site
11. Cameron Barrett and I worked together on a few projects
12. I learned bitmasks
13. I redesigned the site
14. I visited Brad in Seattle and Dana in San Diego
15. Lauren and I moved to Seattle
16. Lauren and I bought a condo in Seattle
17. I left independent consulting, sort of, to work for Blue Frog Mobile
18. We bought a new car, a Mazda 6i
19. We got a dog
20. I broke a bone, my first (unless you count me blowing out my knee, which wasn’t really a bone)
21. I switched out my glasses for contacts, which I affectionally refer to as my devil children
22. Went snowboarding in BC with Josh, Ali and Lauren
23. I spotted a few celebs during my travels back to Michigan
24. Lauren and I, after a year of anticipation, were married on December 18^th, 2004

All in all it was quite an exciting year for me. I’m no married, a home owner and live in Seattle. Just more proof that a LOT can happen in a mere 12 months. Hope your year was as good as mine!

No self respecting blogger would end a year without blogging a review of the previous year. The good things, the bad things, and the memorable things. So, without further ado, here is what happened in my life in the last year.

1. I moved for the fourth time in a year into the fraternity house that I lived in during my freshman year of college.
2. I spent spring break of 2003 with Lauren in Sanabel Island, Florida.
3. Upon returning from Florida it became apparent that Lauren’s father, Joel, was not winning his fight with cancer – he died in the middle of March leaving behind two daughters and his wife.
4. Shortly after Joel’s passing Lauren and I attempted to celebrate our one year anniversary.
5. In April I (finally) graduated with a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from Eastern Michigan University.
6. My cousin Gino got married to his long-time crush, who he had been pursuing since High School!
7. This last summer I took the plunge and went off on my own doing private consulting. If you are interested in a webpage contact me! (shameless plug)
8. In August I decided that, at 262 lbs (119 kg), I was too fat and went on the Atkins. I lost about 30 lbs with much fanfare. 
9. I started reading again for my own pleasure. I’ve stuck mostly with political books, but managed to read two of the years best sellers: Lovely Bones and Runnin with Scissors.
10. In late October Lauren, her mom and I all went to San Francisco. I was there to talk at PHP-Con West, while Lauren and here mom were there to shop and catch som rays.
11. This fall I launched my first major website since going into consulting. GoLoad.com offers load brokering and has been doing quite well.
12. I gained back much of the weight I lost on my diet after quitting Atkins in October.
13. On December 23rd, 2003 I popped the question to Lauren and, thankfully, she said yes.
14. On December 31st, 2003 I spent the entire night attacking the open bar at Bottoms Up of Cleveland celebrating the new year with Lauren, Linda and Marc.

Yup, it’s been a great year. I’m currently already working hard on my new years resolutions as well. For those of you who are interested, here are my new years resolutions.

1. Lauren and I are officially back on the Atkins diet. We’ve discovered a low carb store in the area that sells bread and tortilla shells, which should help keep us on the diet.
2. I’m going to refocus on getting some hosting accounts to boost monthly revenue.
3. I’m going to redouble my efforts to save up for our upcoming California move.

I hope everyone else’s year has gone as well as mine. There have been good times, bad times and in-between times, but I feel I came out on top.