2009 In Retrospect

In General

• ithought total revenue didn't double, but revenue from yearly hosting customers doubled which is currently the most important area for growth to me.
• ithought got a little more legit by becoming a registered Sole Proprietorship in Atlanta
• Saved 22% of my post-tax income
• Continued getting rid of things that I don't need by selling, donating, and giving away
• Almost finished furnishing my house, all that really remains is a mattress
• Switched from Linux+Chander+RAID for keeping things organized to Mac+Drobo+Things
• 69,527 visits to ckdake.com

Photography

• Started shooting in RAW on my DSLR, and started using Adobe Lightroom to process and upload things.
• Successfully completed "Project 365" - a photo a day, every day, for a year: ckdake 365
• 1995 photos uploaded to ckdake.com/gallery

Biking

• Got in the habit of eating a lot better which got my cholesterol levels from high to normal
• Full season of bike racing: Velodrome, SERC, GSC, and Snake Creek Gap. (Head to my bikes page and click on "Click here for 2009 Race Results" for the full season results.)
• 4 days of mountain biking in Santa Fe
• Lots of mountain biking including 18 new places, some listed here and a writeup of one weekend of riding
• Completed Six Gap Century, the "hardest" Century in Georgia, with over 11,000ft of climbing.
• Didn't ride more miles than 2008, but I rode almost 5x as much at the Velodrome and almost twice as much in the mountains compared to 2008.
• Got a bike fit at 55Nine on my old mountain bike to get measurements for a new mountain bike, and got fit on my track bike to squeeze a tiny bit more performance out of it.
• Ran the final (and highly successful) FM24 and afterwards, co-wrote the goodbye letter at 24.fastermustache.org
• Finally got a hard tail mountain bike, the likes of which have been on my mind for years: 2009 Independent Fabrication Steel Deluxe and sold my full-suspension bike.
• First 200k ride, on the Silver Comet with Jim and Paul

SugarCRM

• Second full year down!
• Spent a week in California going to SugarCON and Lake Tahoe
• Converted systems from VMWare to OpenVZ and built a management system for OpenVZ Containers, saving money in licensing and fitting more services on less hardware. writeup on VLANs in OpenVZ, HOWTO for moving MySQL slaves into OpenVZ containers
• Built out a new cluster in London using the provisioning system in California over a site-to-site VPN, and running fault-tolerant replicated LDAP and DNS
• Converted loadbalancers from NetScalers to clustered nginx servers using wackamole, saving money in needed upgrades and allowing much greater monitoring insight and tuning capabilities. Monitoring nginx with ZenOSS.
• Lead moving all private web allocations from the public internet to internal names and addresses, including lab testing of network device configurations including Hairpinning with a Cisco ASA.
• Attended no:sql(east) 2009 and learned some cool stuff that I've been tinkering with for data analysis (using Apache Pig).
• Ported my personal phone number to Sugar's account and consolidated from a work Blackberry and a Personal iPhone with 2 separate numbers to one iPhone 3GS with one phone number.