Happy New Year 2008

I hoped that 2007 has been good to you all both in your professional and personal lives. 2007 has been eventful and lots of stuff happening. We are now almost just 2 years away from the 2010 Olympics (Feb 2010) and construction of the various venues and transportation systems are chugging along full steam. In my own suburb, Richmond, we have the Canada Line (a light rail system linking the airport with downtown Vancouver) and the Speed Skating Oval being constructed and both are scheduled for completion in 2009.

Some of my memories of 2007 includes:

• We had a light airplane crashed into a highrise right in downtown Richmond in early October dregging up memories of 9/11.
• Attending Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando, Florida instead of Oracle Open World in San Francisco
• Purchasing a new vehicle replacing my old 14 year Honda Accord
• Taser death of a newly arrived Polish immigrant to Canada at the Vancouver airport captured on video
• Guilty verdict and life penalty of Canada's most prolific serial murderer
• Gang wars with a number of shootings in restuarants, on the streets, in vehicles, etc. resulting in a creation of a joint task force from various law enforcement agencies.
  
• An acquintance who got his face and story pasted front and center in Business 2.0 citing his net worth of $300 million dollar in the domain name industry.
• A friend's child being discriminated against in trying to play in a youth soccer league because she was handicapped. Thankfully the news media picked up on the story and she now has her own league to play in and got to meet David Beckham personally when he came up to play with the LA Galaxy team against the Vancouver Whitecaps.
• My second daughter in her first Nutcracker role as one of the kids in the first party scene and her ballet scholarship award.
• Oracle Open World inviting selected bloggers to the event as "press".
  

I am sure that there are more but that was all that I could think of right off the top of my head. Moving to 2008, here are some of the things that I am looking forward to:

• my youngest daughter starting pre-school this coming September.
• more plays/concerts for my second daughter. She really loves doing ballet.
• our Order Management system going live (end of the month) with our web storefront following two weeks later.
• getting the team adjusted and transitioned to the new approach to supporting the business & organization.
• hopefully attending Oracle Open World again although there are talks to attending the IOUG Colloborate event instead.

Here's to a successful 2008 for you and your family and I look forward to another year of good health and fun. Salute!