Andy Fitzsimon

Well, its only hours to go and soon all Aussies will be saying G’day to 2007.

I thought id quickly blog post and summarize how 2006 has been for me and what I expect for 2007.

Travel:

This year was the most I have traveled within a 12 month period. 5 countries in 10 months :America, China(&Tibet), France, Singapore, & NewZealand.

It started with Linux.conf.au in Dunedin NZ (the best one yet) I was honoured to speak there and score a best of talk followed by a helicopter ride over the city.

France for the Libre Graphics Meeting where cross project developers and artists got to meet for the first time and discuss our future. That gave me the chance to visit Paris and finally see some galleries I had studied as a child.

Singapore for Red Hat related things. An awesome time chilling with colleagues and drinking sugar cane juice in the humidity.

Then the 4 personal weeks in China and Tibet that let me witness things larger than life and really get to know some of the nicest locals in both the smallest towns and even the biggest cities. You know who you are. Thankyou for the brilliant time and perspective. China and Tibet both gave me a lot to think about.

Coming back from china I flew into Brisbane with only a few hours to shower in the airport and switch suitcases with Karla so that I had warm clothes for the Boston Summit. Great to see the familiar faces and meet the people I hadn’t previously had the fortune to meet.

Work:

At some point this year I was asked to leave my graphical services business and help Shadowman on his quest for sexy i18n and content engineering over at Red Hat.

I was actually very happy with my career at FITC but this was really one offer I couldn’t turn down.
I went to Red Hat for these reasons and more:

• Working intimately with free graphics software is mandatory and not “nice to do if you can convince your client for this project (which is pretty easy..but)”
• Red Hat APAC is located in my home city, which I love for its population, geographical location, friends and family.
• Red Hat Linux 8 was my first serious use of a distro and the first thing that made me realise that there are seriously sane professionals working on this stuff (mostly it was the fact that it was the first really branded representation of free software). It convinced me to trail exclusive use of free graphics software for my occupation and sparked my interest in free software.
• I’m passionate about internationalization in design even though I only translate between english and bad english myself.
• I love an uphill fight and the Oracle attention was christmas come early.

Projects:

I’ve been kept pretty busy with work related projects in 2006 but here’s some amazing things that we’ve witnessed in projects I love in 06:

Inkscape - Blur filter!!!, speed optimisations, node tool enhancements, hundreds of extensions.

open clipart - Sadly, we saw not enough. and I’d say that I’m also at fault for a lack of recent contributions and design work for the website. However one important change was made . The move to ccHost. that introduces the concept of remixing other peoples work Its inspired me to do some mockups for new look. should be easy enough to get this design into css and xhtml (before LCA i hope)

Gnome - the year we saw Compiz/Beryl make gnome look so much more sexy (I’m a huge fan of the aggressively forked projects ) the beryl guys seriously rock for their efforts in taking something great and making it even better for their users.

Blender: I actually have a disstaste for the animation games industries especially when it comes to working status of the actual developers(in the real world). So blender gets neglected by me because I haven’t picked up a mesh, spline or nurb since my adventures using 3dsmax3 in 2001. But! the open movie Elephants dream was released this year and it marks a major high for the quality that can be created from exclusively free software. so now I’m proud to own at least one of the too few DVD’s you can buy and actually own the rights to screen publicly. Watching it at 1920×1200 on a 24″ monitor blows peoples minds and keeps the kids inspired

Relationship:

Karla and I are still living in Toowong (Brisbane) and 2006 presented to us the greatest challenges and rewards in a relationship that I have ever known. It’s brilliant to feel alive and to have a loving and beautiful person like her by my side.
Subtitle: even if we fight, it’s like Italian opera but with an enormous sense of humor.

2007 looks like the same crazy show for us this time I get the chance to take Karla to both Linux.conf.au and then we holiday to NewYork and Canada in April.

Personal tech Goals - 2007 is:

the year I start publicly video blogging some Inkscape tutorials (promise )
the year openclipart gets sexy and feature full ( consider this a high goal ).
the year of our second Libre Graphics Meeting held on Montreal.
the year fedora gets all my Desktop design attention.

See you next year

I can say without any doubt 2006 has been the best one in my life. 2005 was pretty decent effort also so here’s hoping the trend continues.

Wishing everyone all the best for the new year and all the excitement it brings.