The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Well, the year 2007 has definitely been an interesting one. There have been plenty of great things that happened this year, and lots of bad things that happened this year, so my overall outlook on this year is pretty much a neutral one. I also did much more blogging during the year 2007 than I have before, with almost 270 posts spanning January-December. But now, as it is New Year’s Eve, December 31st, it’s time for me to close out the year 2007 with my Year in Review.

January
On the first day of January, the news broke that Webmacster87.info was back. You’ll recall that my blog had been on WordPress.com for a few months at this point, and I had given it the dumb name Webmacster87 @ WordPress.com. Well, courtesy of WP.com’s Domain Mapping feature, I was able to assign the Webmacster87.info domain name to the blog, so even though it was still hosted at WordPress.com, the name Webmacster87.info was back (and I was so happy!).
On January 4th, I announced that I would be launching phpBB Weekly, my new live podcast. The first episode was recorded the next day, and phpBB Weekly has significantly grown since then, which I’ll talk more about later on.
Of course, Macworld brought the announcement of the iPhone, and I suffered some initial shock from the announcement, but eventually got ahold of myself. Two days later, I went with a group from Aragon to Macworld, which was fun, except that my brother’s video camera got stolen (he still hasn’t forgiven me for it). I did get to meet Leo Laporte, though, which I detail in my Macworld Visit Recap.
Towards the end of January, I discovered the miracle called Twitter and became addicted to it. The addiction continues to this day.
On January 27th, I did a one-day trek to Los Angeles and back to receive the California Teachers Association Peace & Justice Caucus Youth Activism Award at a small ceremony at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, which was an interesting experience.
And, on January 30th, I got my braces off. I had had those suckers on since November 2004, and they finally came off that day. I can’t tell you how happy I was!

February
February has consistently been a bad month for me, but this one (so far) takes the cake as being the most chaotic of my life, so far.
During the Super Bowl, I did lots of Twittering as I responded to the game, but mostly to the ads. I broke Twitterrific and annoyed a bunch of other people with the hundreds of tweets that I posted during the game.
On February 6th-7th, I took the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), which was kind of dumb (I only missed one question on the entire test), but it caused me to miss many of my classes during that week. February 8th was a very stressful day, in which I had to wake up at 3:30 AM to finish things, spent a 15 hour day at school so I could set up for that evening’s Club Expo, and (courtesy of the pouring rain) I slipped and broke my right big toe. After finishing the expo that evening, going to the doctor the next day and getting my big toe ace bandaged to the toe next to it (as it would be for the next month), I promptly got sick with the flu just hours after getting home from the doctor’s with the toe. Along with the flu came my first fever in over three years, headache, stomachache, sore throat, the works. I lived in bed for three and a half days, and towards the end of my bout, the rest of my family got sick with it.
Luckily, by midday February 13th, I felt semi-well enough to go to the 17th District PTA Founder’s Day luncheon, and to my surprise I was awarded an Honorary Service Award from them, plus a Commendation from the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. That certainly brightened up the end of a bad week! I have a much longer and more thorough first half of February rant that I wrote at the time.
The rest of February consisted mostly of me catching up on everything that I missed during my miscellaneous illnesses, dealing with my continuing sinus symptoms, and quietly sanitizing deep-fried pickle hearts.

March
In March, I started to get much more active regarding Aragon PTSA. The members of the board were trying to disband it, and publishing false truths about PTA to accomplish their goal. Dissatisfied with them, I announced that I would run for PTSA president, and later on in the month, responding to some of the crooked methods, I wrote a long letter responding to everything happening in the fiasco.
During Saint Patrick’s Day weekend I attended three anti-war/peace events in the Bay Area, which were a lot of fun to be a part of. It was also during this weekend that the new phpBB.com was unveiled.

April
The first week of April was Spring Break, and I occupied myself during Spring Break with website work. I bought myself some actual web hosting, moved Webmacster87.info off WordPress.com, and designed dedicated websites for phpBB Weekly and my MODs.
It was during April that my iBook stopped working right, which prompted me to get my new MacBook 2 GHz Core 2 Duo. My parents paid for half, and I’m paying them back in installments for the other half. Just a few days after getting the MacBook, I went with the Aragon group to a half-day visit at the Googleplex (photos). I covered both of these in PreviewCast #031.
Also in April, I learned that I had been accepted to be a student representative on the California State PTA Board of Managers for the 2007-08 school year.

May
May started off with the California State PTA Convention in Sacramento, which could probably be considered the point when I got “inducted” for the student representative position (even though it didn’t officially start until July). Right after I got back, on Tuesday, May 8th, I took the AP Statistics exam, which was kind of stressful, but I ended up getting a 4 on it, which was good. After that, school started winding down, and I began to turn my attentions to Webmacster87.info and desiring a new theme. It was shortly afterwards that I made the announcement of the upcoming Webmacster87.info 5. School ended on May 31st.

June
Not much happened during the majority of June, other than iPhone hype that increased by the day. I actually began to believe that the craziness over the iPhone would cause the world to end during the weekend of June 29th. However, I spent much of the month following WWDC, developing W87.info 5, doing PreviewCast, etc. On June 27th, after much fanfare, I released Webmacster87.info 5 to an adoring crowd. On June 23rd, David Lewis (Highway of Life) first appeared on phpBB Weekly–he would become the co-host in July and completely rejuvenated the show. And of course, June 29th was the iPhone launch date, a very stressful day for me in which I gave out iPhone shirts, recorded two live (and windy) PreviewCast episodes, made a boring YouTube video, and accumulated lots of photos. But I didn’t actually touch the iPhone until a week later as I waited for the chaos to calm down. That was the month of June in a nutshell.

July
July began with a four day meeting in Sacramento–my very first State PTA board meeting as Student Representative. The following weekend was WordCamp 2007, which Daniel Brusilovsky and I trolled with microphones. PreviewCast #040 was the result of my foraging, along with plenty of photos on Flickr. WordCamp was definitely a lot of fun (and having it two-days long was much better than last year’s one day) and a pleasure to attend, even if I did spend a lot of money on public transit.

August
On Webmacster87.info, August was the Month of Reviews. From July 30-September 2, I posted 35 comprehensive reviews of various products: hardware, software, and Web 2.0 services that I had tried out and used. During August 2007, I also did two guest blog articles for Lorelle on WordPress.
August also saw the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year which started out bumpy at first, but eventually calmed down.
During August 24-26, my mom and I went to PTA University, a district training located at UCLA.

September
September was a busy month which I dedicated (mostly Labor Day weekend was dedicated) to cleaning my room. We also got a brand new work desk for my room. According to the pictures, I did a pretty good job. The only problem is that my room is a mess again and needs to get cleaned up this week before school on January 8th. September also featured one more guest article for Lorelle. Also in September, I did an excellent interview with Lorelle for PreviewCast that has been very popular. Its release was timed to coordinate almost exactly with the release of WordPress 2.3.
And, September 28th was my 16th birthday, which was celebrated appropriately.

October
October saw a bad resurgence of my allergies, which I ranted about in this post. Between that and business of school, the beginning of October was rather silent. However, I did participate in Blog Action Day with a post called How Bloggers Can Help the Environmental Debate.
However, October brought the release of Leopard, which I covered extensively between my first thought on the announcement to my five-part Tiger-to-Leopard series.
October 24-26 was my second CAPTA board meeting of the school year, which was held in smoky Long Beach, CA. My official rant detailed how badly my sinuses reacted to the smoke, plus the seven hour delay I suffered on Virgin America which caused me to have to delay my Leopard installation to the next day. Between all of that, I was too busy to do anything special for Halloween this year, though quite frankly, we only got two trick-or-treaters anyway.

November
On Webmacster87.info, November was my Leopard Feature Presentation, and almost everything on my blog revolved around Leopard. (The month culminated with my review and final recap of Leopard on December 1st.) Though quite frankly, November also was a very busy school month which included me playing a perpetual catch-up game, the highlight of which was the Rube Goldberg project for Physics. We didn’t have enough time to do it, and my teams’ was pretty bad, although given how much work we were able to put in on it, it was probably average. We got a decent grade for it, anyway.
November 26-30 was Peace Club’s Cards for Soldiers Week, which was very successful as we sent 203 holiday cards made by Aragon students to soldiers overseas.

December
December was both enjoyable but difficult at the same time. Courtesy of issues with my webhost, Webmacster87.info and phpBBWeekly.net were both down during December 4th-21st, and were also down intermittently during December 28th-30th as well. However, along with closing out the semester and studying for finals (including stressing over my oral and written finals for Spanish, the only one which would have a lasting impact on my semester grade), I was a busy little bee attending too many holiday events. There was the PTA Council holiday potluck on December 3rd and the PTA District holiday potluck on December 12th. Peace Club/Interact Club had a holiday party/card stuffing meeting on December 4th, and the orchestra concert (I am in orchestra this year) was the evening of December 4th, and ran until 10 PM. I went to the Downtown San Mateo Tree Lighting (their first annual) on December 7th, and the Caltrain Holiday Train at the San Mateo Transit Center on December 9th. On December 15th, I was one of the selected Aragon orchestra students to play with the Masterworks Chorale for their annual sing-along Messiah. On December 16th, Peace Action of San Mateo County awarded me with their first ever Student Peace Activist Scholarship, including a $1,000 scholarship that is going towards my Sojourn Trip in February. Finals were December 17-20, and after the last final on the 20th I did my annual holiday shopping bout.

Anyway, without a doubt, it has been a very, very busy and eventful year, and what I’ve just typed up probably doesn’t fully cover everything that happened for me in 2007. There have been lots of good times and a number of bad times, but overall, I’m just pleased to be able to close the books on 2007 as a year with numerous ups and downs.

What’s in store for 2008? Plenty. Probably the biggest thing is that 2008 is going to be the year that I start seriously planning for college, including searching for colleges, visiting colleges, taking SAT and ACT exams, and (in fall) applying to colleges. That probably will be the defining aspect of 2008.
However, during 2008 I will be continuing my commitments with PTA (and evaluating if I want to do it again in 2008-09), including a couple of workshops that I am co-presenting at the 2008 California State PTA Convention in Long Beach. In February I will be going on the Sojourn to the Past trip (and you can expect thorough coverage of that trip on my blog, albeit with a time delay), and in June I’m going with the Aragon Orchestra on a pre-Olympics tour of China. Plus continuing to produce PreviewCast and phpBB Weekly in amidst all of that. I probably have too much on my plate, but I’m willing to give it a go.

Anyway, here’s to the year 2007, and to the beginning of 2008! I’m off now to party with the family and have Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider with deep-fried pickle hearts. See you all on the other side of the new year!