I hoped that 2009 would be a less stressfull year. It actually became the busiest in my working life: I was a technical project leader of an extremly complex project, which would be run besides a lot of other smaller projects. I literally did not have any time unaccounted for in terms of chargeability. Benefit was that a lot of these projects were located near my home, making the work-life balance a little bit easier to maintain.

Travel was cut down to the extreme: besides the trips that were already planned, I hardly made any trips in person. Teleconferences were much more popular: it saves both in time and in cost. Most international travel was done by train, which is much more comfortable and relaxed than airtravel. In fact, I've spend more time in international trains than in airplanes.

Personally, 2009 was a year with a lot of hardware issues: my trustworthy TabletPC died, got repaired and died again from the same issue 8 months later, without any warranty on the repair from HP. HP dissapointed me a lot in their repair process anyway: their sloppy repairs had my MiniNote under repair for about 7 times and my TabletPC about 5 times. Especially my TabletPC hurt me a lot, because due to the logistics involved you lose your laptop for a week for each repair. It did prove the value of a good netbook as primary machine, fallback (twice) or back-up machine during travel. All in all, my Mininote has proven to be a great investment, just because my primairy laptop did not perform as it should.

2009 will probably go down as the year when airtravel changed, again. I do not have any practical experience yet, but the bodyscans are ordered for Schiphol, so it will be a different experience in the future. We'll have to see what the real permanent impact will be, but it will have some impact.

Jaap van Ekris
in Life on the road
Posted at 22:13:48 UTC