Apart from the tsunami disaster and the london bombing attack, 2005 was a dramatic year for me as well. I left an big insurnace company and joined a sh!tty small company hoping that I could have more responsibilities and learn from .NET development. It turned out the small co was in financial trouble and couldn’t pay wages on time. I had a job offer doing coldfusion devlopment at a stock photo company and I did the worst thing possible. I rejected them just the week before I was about to start when I’ve already signed contracts and stuff… I took up the contract work back at the insurance company. Then first week into it I broke my hand during a bball game. I was in the cast for 6 weeks and was typing with my right hand only… I stopped bball for 6 months and haven’t been back in the competition.

During the year, I’ve been looking out for part time freelance work as well and luckily I had some offers and got pretty busy in the 2nd half of the year. Worked every single day of the month during September. I went to Cairns with my gf for a week in June. I was ready to resign from my contract as well, but I got put onto an interesting project. So I stayed on for another 6 months until it finished. I got some freelance offer from this advertising agency doing flash work. I’m not so sure if I want to keep doing small flash games, abit pointless to me, but the money is there.

I had another contract offer as well at a startup. I wasn’t quite sure about the setup, it just didn’t convince me even though the money was quite good. Following my principle of ‘learning to say no’, I did. It was hard but I’m proud I did it. Just before Christmas, I resigned from my contract anyway and hopefully I’ll get to work on my own projects using ruby on rails.

Here I am in 2006, working at home, having time to blog. I’ll be taking some time off to holiday and look at the world. Not having been out of the country for three years gives me the impulse to just pack my backs and get on a plane to whereever it goes. Looks like 2006 will be a good year. Australia is in the world cup. Rails has a 1.0 stable release. Flashlite2 will be released. Web2.0 maturing. And I saw the first sunrise this year!