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2010 Things

December 31, 2010 • life • 425 words • about a 2 minute read

Personal Stuff

  1. Spent our first year in the house we bought last year.
  2. Finally started buying cool art to hang on our walls.
  3. Hit a new weight low of 205.5 pounds.
  4. Ran the Terrapin 5k, Bucktown 5k, Hot Chocolate 5k, and the Turkey Trot 8k.
  5. Ran my best recorded 5k at 28:23/9:08.
  6. Ran the 8k in under 50 minutes and made plans to run a half-marathon in 2011.
  7. Visited Wichita twice, the farm once and had lots of fun.
  8. Visited Hong Kong which was awesome.
  9. Went on our 3rd annual December trip to NYC.
  10. Bought my first suit: a bespoke grey herringbone two-piece suit by WWChan of Hong Kong. Also had two bespoke dress shirts made by the same tailors.
  11. Got my first truly nice pair of glasses, Dita Grand Reserves.
  12. Purchased my first “real” nice hat, a Renaissance by Tomaz & Williamson.
  13. Paid off a significant number of of my student loans in 2010 (!!)

Work stuff

  1. We wrote an iPad application—which involved a lot of sub-projects to support it that most people will never see, but take advantage of in day-to-day reading. These include a content API and user authentication system for the iPad app, as well as a content styling/munging service that lets us deliver optimized content for different platforms (iPad, HTML, RSS, mobile).
  2. Pushed out a whole new forums system—which has been a resounding success, judging from all the praise I hear from our hardcore forums users.
  3. Upgraded the commenting experience on Ars.
  4. Talked with the readers about keeping our comments sane and respectful.
  5. Had a fairly productive conversation with our readers about ad blocking, how ad supported new works, the future of how online journalism will be supported, and of course whitelisting sites you enjoy.
  6. Did a whole-site design refresh
  7. We surveyed the Ars readers about the type and quality of our coverage and released the results (part 2).
  8. Launched a month-to-month $5 subscription option.
  9. Broke 130,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 30,000 fans on Facebook.
  10. Published a lot of really awesome content.
  11. More and more people—increasingly in the mainstream—are discovering Ars and learning what heaps of people already know, that Ars is the best place for tech news, with a great community and writers who are just as nerdy and passionate as the readers. And that’s really cool ;)

Have a happy new year! 2011 is going to be so rad I can’t stand it ;)