As with any year, here have been both successes and failures. There have been bridges burnt, friends lost, but there have also been great things, new prospects, new people. I wouldn’t quite say things are falling into place, but they are getting there, although like any end of year, I’m preparing myself for a massive setback.

There is however, a significance in my reasoning for this post on this date. About this time last year, I had somewhat of an unfortunate meltdown, and sadly I vented a lot of it on twitter. Thus that lead to loosing a lot of people. From that however, I’ve emerged stronger, and a little more resilient.

In March I started a new job, I also got a new car, one that has been cursed since the day I got it with more problems than I would care to list, made worse by the people I brought it from (who shall remain nameless in fear of legal ramifications, your milage may vary on this one).

Despite however the new job, I’ve also been somewhat blessed by other things happening. A month or so I was honoured and surprised to find out that I had been nominated for the Wales Blog Awards for my site, apptacious, not only that but I soon found out I had made it into the shortlist, and a mere week ago, I found out that I had made runner up for the best tech blog in Wales. Who cares if I didn’t win, that was an incredible honour to have even been nominated.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to take part in some incredible photography thanks to Gabriel Strange and his film The Casimir Effect that I had been helping with. From some incredible set photography down at the then disused Mir Steel plant in Newport, to my first work doing portraiture photography. Thankfully, despite the fact it was my first ever time taking a picture of people, I think I did rather well. I also had the honour of meeting some fantastic people including Zoé Mills, John Jenner and Peter Owen-Williams. I even got to take pictures of a celebrity, Neil Rayment, an actor from the Matrix Reloaded. All of them were a pleasure to meet.

Recently, I got the opportunity to meet and shoot Gareth David-Lloyd from Torchwood. Gareth is one of the nicest guys I’ve met, and thanks to just how approachable he is, he even helped me out, giving me some great pointers and learning tips for my photography.

All of this is fantastic, it’s why I think this year has been something of a whirlwind. It has however, been made even better, as only two days ago, I found out that I am now the photographer for Wales ComicCon next year. Okay so I’ll need to start saving hard for some photography equipment, I will get to take portrait shots of some incredibly famous people like Dave Prowse (He played the physical form of Darth Vadar in Star Wars), Hugh Mitchell (Harry Potter) and incredibly, Colin Baker (From Doctor Who, one of the Original doctors!). Ok so on this one I’m still waiting for the legal stuff to come through, so it’s not 100% certain at the moment, but to even be considered is incredible enough.

A whirlwind? Luck? I have no idea what to call it. All I know is I must be doing something right.

It’s not all about photography. I’ve been steadily developing my skill set in other areas, trying to expand my personality and my prospects. At the Wales Blog Awards I got the honour of meeting some fabulous people, and got to discuss some very in depth things.

Photography has been a dream of mine for a long time, so has IT, so have many things. I have a lot of dreams, some are lucrative, some are just personal fantasies. I’d love to record a regular podcast, I would even like to write for someone.

For me a wonderful dream would be to combine writing, photography and IT together, like a newspaper column, photographing, writing about IT as well as recording a podcast about it, alas, that will probably not happen.

I even have dreams about traveling, although some of the places I would like to visit might prove controversial, but there are hidden meanings for all of it, places like Pripyat come to mind, although I would encourage everyone to read the Kid Of Speed blog by Elena Fitalova. It’s incredible emotional, and inspiring.

This brings me on to another wonderful things thats happened. I’ve been invited to do a voiceover for someone else’s podcast series called supermarket matters thanks to Mark Chatterly, honoured isn’t the word of course.

To say I am blown away with what has been literally handed to me on a plate is an understatement. I would love to say that I have personally been responsible and achieved all of this myself, but that wouldn’t be true. I am simply lucky and I owe many of these incredible experiences to people like Gabriel Strange and Mark Chatterly to name a few.

Of course the year isn’t over, and as I’ve learnt some great things can happen in only a few days let alone a few months!

However I have one thing to thank more than anything, and this may come as a surprise. I have to thank, Twitter.

This might seem stupid to many, but it really isn’t. When I joined twitter just under two years ago, I had no idea how to work it, how to understand it, and believe it or not, I was going to give it up. I would never have met these people or been provided with any of these opportunities had I not stuck it out on twitter. I wouldn’t even own apptacious if it were not for twitter and me meeting the former owners.

2010 has been a whirlwind, despite this however, I of course have regrets. I’ve lost some very dear friends thanks to my own ineptitude and stupidity, I can only hope that I can rebuild those friendships, and build new bridges.

2009 was a year of hell, I even posted about it. I begged and prayed for 2010 to be better, and although it didn’t seem it at first, it has been. I can only hope this trend continues.

So to everyone that has been there, and helped me to achieve what I have achieved so far, Thank you, and to everyone who I have lost, I can only say I am sorry.

Thank you.

Alas most of this hasn’t happened, we’re still stuck largely where we were at the end of the 1980′s in terms of the actual world we live in. We still drive from A to B, flying is still prohibitively expensive for some and whilst advances have been made in your Television and Telephone, if you took the TV and mobile phone changes out, the most significant change over the last 20 years is the fact we no longer carry around a Sony Walkman cassette player for our music needs.

Of course I am being cynical, there have been a great number of advances in technology, I just can’t help but feel they have been significantly slower than they should have been. I once remember a child in my school, back when I was 10 or even 9 years old, saying “they would probably have flying cars by the time you learn to drive”. Whilst that might have been a bit ambitious for a 7 or 8 year time gap, if you think about it, we all really thought something like that would happen. Remember the Slug concept car? Apparently by 2001 we were all going to be driving these. Homes would be knocked down and rebuilt with new ultra modern, low cost eco friendly buildings with mountains of technology in them.

Fabulous blade runner esq high rise buildings for people rich and poor containing hi tech homes and doors that opened with speech recognition and the whole world would either be covered in a dense smog like in Blade Runner, or as clear as the air inside the dome from Logans Run.

Yet despite this, despite the hope that we would move with the advances of technology, I still come home to a sixty year old house, with the same plugs, the same wiring and even the same door locks as we had then. The technology has advanced, but not quite in the way we’ve hoped. I have a computer sat on my desk, it just happens to be more powerful. I write letters with it and play games, like most people. We did this 20 years ago with the ZX Spectrum or the Atari ST, just now we do it in richer colour and slightly faster. I pick up my iPod instead of a walkman and watch television that comes through a cable instead of an arial. Yes the advances are there, but they are all just, minor upgrades. The same as twenty years ago I could buy a cassette that was 70 or 90 minutes long. The technology is the same, but just, a little bit better, more convenient.

And so this is my problem, on coming into 2010, instead of creating new technology, instead of ploughing through and improving everything we already have, inventing new things and new technologies we’ve bumbled around with silly things. Take climate change for example. We’ve been focusing for years on how to reduce the buildup of climate change by adjusting the things we use in the home, like light bulbs. Instead of perhaps doing that, or even tearing down the old unfriendly things in favour or rebuilding it with clean new eco friendly things and then inventing a machine that cleans the air for us so that the eco change is really reversed. Why I ask, even now are we still not considering blasting things into the sun? The ultimate waste disposal and it provides our sun with fuel?

Oh I know I am being cynical and perhaps even very unfair, but if someone asked me where we would be in ten years time, I would probably say exactly where we are now. Perhaps my phone will be the size of my thumbnail or even implanted into my ear. Maybe there really will be a rapid change in technology so fast that we enter a real space age, that we start entering a massive form of silicon revolution, the same way the industrial revolution of steam changed the world in only a few years. It has happened before and it can happen again, but I have to ask why it hasn’t happened yet.

And so I leave this slightly longer than usual post aimed toward you, the readers. I ask you to be open, and honest, and to think just totally about this subject and whether it is really fair, what your thoughts are on the next year and indeed the next ten years. I invite you as the readers to indulge me in this article or brush it aside as cynicism or nonsense. But never forget, I love the technology we have now and truly admire the work that has been done, and I see huge potential for the technology we have in ways I can’t even begin to describe but I am disappointed, annoyed and even angry, that we have not pushed ourselves as a race to become more than we are and push the boundaries every day, so I ask you the readers to turn around and put me in my place, put me down, put me out, put me up but most of all just to think about the things you have already and what they have done for you.

Indulge me. I’ll be waiting.