This has been a very busy year for Diane and I (to put it mildly). Any year that you get married or move to another country or score a decisive victory for computers against humans is bound to be a pretty busy year ... but these were just a sampling of some of the things that happened to us during the past twelve months. This is my year in review. (You can find my year in review from last year here and Diane's here). The outlook on 2008 was pretty exciting. Diane and I had become engaged in May of 2007 and our wedding date was setup as the June 7, 2008. So one thing we would be spending a bunch of time working on for the first half of the year was planning that. I was still working at the university for the computer poker research group. Having come so close to beating some very good poker players the year before in Vancouver, we were itching for a rematch. Finally, two people I knew were already working in a company in Ireland, and I had started to consider what it would be like to do the same.

So lets get started, shall we? Early on in January, a group of us ended up at the museum to do some photographing. With how the busy the year would become, I'm sad that we didn't get more outings like this because it was a lot of fun! Later on in the month, the annual department ski trip to Jasper was once again a highlight of the year. The people from the CS department at the UofA are a lot of fun to hang out with, and at this point I definitely suspected that this would be my last trip to join the department for the forseeable future.

In February, Sonata Arctica -- one of my favourite bands, came to town so I was ecstatic to check that out. Later on that month, we went on a ski trip to Lake Louise and Sunshine with a couple of friends. That was a great trip, and filled with many good photographs.

In March, my grandparents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary and my grandpa turned 80. To help celebrate, we went down to Rimbey to surprise my grandfather with a big party. My sister played her harp, and it was a lovely time.

April's big event was going to Dublin to interview at PocketKings. The company generously flew both of us out to Dublin to meet the team I would eventually join. It was a packed 5 days, with two of those days being travel. I spent two days in the office and a third wandering around Dublin with Darse, Xan, Mike, MK, and Aaron. We were out for dinner all three nights we were there, met quite a few people, and saw a lot of things. Not long after we returned home, I was offered a job with them and pretty soon we were not only planning a wedding, but planning moving our lives across the Atlantic ocean to Dublin, Ireland.

In May, we had a packed social schedule which combined with getting ready for the wedding made it a busy month! Nightwish, another one of my favourite bands came to town, we attended dinner parties, brithday parties, and got out on another photoshoot this time in Edmonton's river valley. I also attended a meetup of Edmonton Flickr people, as well as a separate outing with Edmonton Twitter members. May was a very busy month!

The big highlight of June was our wedding day on the 7th. Thanks to the help of many, many people, we were able to put together a pretty good day I would have to say. Diane was radiant all day, and we both managed to get through the day with no bigger mishaps than us forgetting to write a speech for the dinner. Highlights from the day are in this post, but really the highlight of the whole thing was of course being married to such a wonderful person in Diane.

Because of the computer poker research group's efforts to have a rematch against some top human players in July, work prevented us from leaving on a honeymoon right away. Instead, we settled in and attempted to get some of the details for moving to Ireland sorted out. We also attempted to see as many people as we could, which meant that one thing we had to do was go see my grandparents in Rimbey. As always, it was quite a pleasant trip. Lots of food, games and good company. I really don't see them enough!

On July 1st, we left for Las Vegas, where for the next several days we would prepare, run, and eventually win the match against several very good human players including one of the best in the world: Matt "Hoss_TBF" Hawrilenko. It was a lot of work building up to that point, but it was a wonderful bit of closure to get before I left the group. A week after we arrived in Vegas, the work portion of our trip had ended and the vacation/honeymoon part of it started. We spent a few days hanging out with some of the research group members in Las Vegas before flying to San Diego where we spent a day at the San Diego Zoo before getting on our honeymoon cruise.

The cruise was a 5 day affair starting from San Diego and stopping in Cabo San Lucas on the way down the west coast and then in Ensenada on the way back. The highlight of the trip was the excursions, where we did a zipline and climbing wall excursion down a canyon in Cabo, and a kayaking trip in Ensenada. The food on board was pretty good too...

We returned to Edmonton where we had just a week left to pack up all our belongings and spend as much time with our families as we could before heading off to Dublin. It was a pretty surreal experience packing all our stuff up and saying goodbye to everyone. Late in the week we had a party at my parent's place where we had a huge number of friends and family over to say goodbye to. It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad so many people turned out! Before we knew it, we were packed up and on a plane to Dublin, Ireland!

In our first weeks in Dublin, in late July and early August, we had a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to get the required documents to stay in the country, and find a place to live so we could get a bank account and all those other little details. Thanks to a bunch of help from Darse who had recently made the transition, we got everything sorted through in record time. Within two weeks of our arrival we had an apartment, internet, a bank account, and immigration cleared for our first year.

Also in August, we went on our first road trip with Darse and Xan who took us to the Powerscourt gardens. We would do several more trips with them including exploring Killiney hill right here in Dublin, going to county Wicklow in September, the Southern coast of Ireland and the Irish National Stud in October.

Work got busy in November, which made me feel like not doing too much on the weekends other than relax. But December was an eventful month! It started off with our friend JR coming to visit us for a couple of days. We showed as much of Dublin as we could while he was here, and hope he enjoyed it! Just after he left, we were off to Kilkenny where the company held one heck of a Christmas party. A couple weeks later, Diane and I were at the Dublin airport crazy early for a holiday in Austria. We spent 10 days there over Christmas, and enjoyed ourselves immensely (the posts for the rest of our trip are coming still, I promise!).

This year has been amazing, and it's hard to imagine that 2009 will top it. I closed one chapter of my life (working at the university), and opened several more (getting hitched, moving to a new country, starting a new job). That said, Diane and I have the opportunity to explore Europe while we're young and we're sure planning on doing as much of that as we can in the coming year. Work is going well, and I'm happy with how much I've been able to contribute. So we're excited to see what 2009 will offer us!

To close out, here's some maybe interesting numbers from this year:

I took around 10,000 photographs with my camera this year, far surpassing the previous year's total of less than 7,000. From that selection of photographs, I uploaded 1448 to Flickr for your enjoyment. I hope you've gotten a chance to take a look at my work.
Despite having not had much time to play poker this year, I still did better than 2007 in terms of total profit. I earned $6300 in online poker in 2008, bringing my lifetime earnings to over $12,000.
My passport has been stamped 11 times, 8 of which happened in 2008.
We've posted 55 times (not including this one) to this blog, and these posts have accrued 33 comments. All but two of those posts happened in 2008.
Number of countries I've been in this year: 6... four of which were knew to me: Mexico, Ireland, Austria, and England (albeit only in the London airport).
Number of months living abroad: 5.

Any other numbers you can think of that might be interesting that I might be able to rattle off without too much counting? If I get some good suggestions I'll add them to the post.

Lastly, here's some of my favourite photos from 2008: