End of year ramblings...

It's that time of the year again... the end of another year! And what an eventful year it has been.

In many ways, it could be described as the year of the disasters:
- Christchurch September 4th Earthquake (whose aftereffects are still being felt today - quite literally) and Haiti's January earthquake
- Worldwide air traffic brought to a standstill twice (the Finnish volcanic eruption and now heavy snow)
- Miners being trapped in mines around the world, including the 33 Chilean Miners who were successfully rescued after several months underground, and the 29 Pike River Miners here in Greymouth whose bodies sadly still lie within the mine

But, this has also been a year of great new heights:
- Sintel, the third Open Movie Project was finally completed and released
- Blender 2.5 moves ever closer towards being a stable release (including a little bugsquash sprint effort by yours truly this afternoon to bring the bugcount back down towards 50)
- Bullet Rigid Body physics can now be set up within Blender's viewport and run in realtime, with control using "effector" force fields - at least in a branch, thanks to my GSoC work this year
- The birth of several new open source projects, including Duality SVN (which you'll hear about a bit more in the new year!)
- Me learning a bit more about photography, culminating in buying a DSLR, and thus spelling the start of the end for all the neighbourhood birds!

Well, that was 2010. Now bring on 2011!

Happy New Year all!