It has been a long time since I wrote anything on here, I am still alive and kicking! 2012 was another roller coaster of a year, with many good and bad things happening. Louise and I got our green cards early on in the year (massive thanks to my employer), which was great after having lived in the US for over five years now. We started house hunting a few months after that, which was an adventure and a half.

As we were in the process of looking for a house I was promoted to technical leader at Kitware, and I continue to work on our Open Chemistry project. We ended up falling in love with the first house we found, and found a great realtor who took us back there for a second look. We then learned how different buying a house in the US versus England, but after several rounds of negotiations came to an agreement. We had a very long wait for completion, but that all proceeded well in the end.

As we moved out of the place we had been renting for the last three years we found out just how bad some landlords can be about returning security deposits…that is still ongoing and has not been a fun process. We never rented in England, but many friends have assured us that this isn’t that unusual. Our move actually went very smoothly though, and we have some great friends who helped us with some of the heavy lifting. We have been learning what it is like to own a home in the country, with a well, septic, large garden etc. The learning curve has been a little steep at times! We attended two weddings (I was a groomsman in one) with two amazing groups of friends – it was a pleasure to be part of the day for two great friends.

I made a few guest blog posts, which I will link to in another post, and attended some great conferences including the ACS, Semantic Physical Science and Supercomputing. Our Avogadro paper was published, and was recently published in final form (I will write more about this too). I finally cancelled my dedicated server (an old Gentoo box), which I originally took when I was consulting in England, this was very disruptive in the end and I didn’t have a complete backup of all data when it was taken offline. This caused lots of disruption to email (sorry if I never got back to you). I moved to a cloud server with Rackspace in the end, after playing with a few alternatives. I was retired as a Gentoo developer too (totally missed those emails), it was a great experience being a developer and I still value many of the friendships formed during that time. My passion for packaging has wained in recent years, and I tend to use Arch Linux more now (although still love lots of things about Gentoo).

Just before Xmas our ten year old German Shepherd developed a sudden paralysis in his back legs and had to be put down. It was pretty devastating, after having him from when he was 12 weeks old. He joined our little family just after we got our own place in England, he had five great years in England and another five in the US. He was with me for so much of my life (a degree, loss of my brother, marriage, loss of my sister, moving to another country, birth of our first child, getting a “real” job). We had family over for the holidays as we call them over here (Xmas and New Year back home), which was great but we may not have been the best of company after having just lost our dog.

I think I skipped lots of stuff too, but it was quite a year! Hoping for more of a steady ride this year to say the least.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE