That was the year that was ... 2011.

If 2011 was anything, it was the year I submitted my PhD dissertation, and my dissertation was my focus essentially throughout. Long days and hard work involving coding, verifying outputs, making last-minute awkward bug fixes, reading text, re-reading text, and lots of coffee. Ultimately, a year featuring two publications (one presented, one to present in early 2012), and a dissertation suitable for submission.

I did manage some travel, mostly work-related: * Lerwick, Shetland, for Up Helly Aa. Indeed, my first vacation in some time, and the last I’d have prior to submitting. * Shanghai. * Prague. * San Francisco. * Abingdon, of course. * Dublin.

On photography, not so much this year. A minor disaster: I accidentally dropped my shallow depth of field lens (Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II) only to watch it fall into pieces on contact with the floor. Fortunately, the lens itself is fine! But after reassembly, it’s clear the motor unit has been knackered. Still, some of my favourite shots from the last year or so:

Finally some bloggy introspection: I modified my blog this year. I simplified the CSS for the wordpress theme to reduce it to one left-hand column with links, and one right-hand column for text. Only one blog post is shown at a time (many of my posts are long-form), and comments are only enabled on new posts for a short time before being closed off completely. This tidies this blog considerably, though I’d prefer something less heavyweight than wordpress to run the show. One day, I’ll swap out the back-end.