As we enter a new year, 2016 seems to have been tarnished it the closing month by events around the world. Far be it for me to to talk about world events here, I’d like to focus on the good - at least from my perspective. 2016 was a great year for me. It was the year in which I managed to:

• Moved house
• Upgraded from a late 1980’s to a late 1990’German station wagon (“estate” for those who speak real English)
• Moved from Blackberry 10 to Android - blech - but I’ll admit my HTC 10 is a fantastic piece of hardware
• Decided that I no longer revere Apple products as I once did - before any harsh words, I am writing this on a Macbook Pro Retina…and I have a veritable museum of Apple kit at home
• Took my first steps to learn about machine learning frameworks like Caffe, Tensorflow - yes I’ve been tinkering with Caffe on one of my ARM developer boards
• Stuck with Linux for my work laptop even with the tantalizing choice of a shiny new Macbook with OS X
• Entrusted the security of my home internet to the Turris Omnia

• because using a router that hasn’t been patched in years is well - silly, to put it politely

• Finally got myself an OpenPOWER t-shirt at ISC High-Performance - which I wear proudly because OpenPOWER rocks!
• Understood that getting the future generations interested in technology is key - and did my part by giving an intro to High-Performance Computing talk at a local school
• Successfully launched IBM Spectrum LSF 10.1 with the help of my many great peers. And yes, it does run on Linux on Arm v7&v8 and Linux on POWER8 Little Endian :)

And that’s just what I can think of as I write this blog…so for me, 2016 has an aura rather than a tarnish to it.

So as we enter the year of Canada’s 150th birthday with a full head of steam, I’m looking forward to hitchin' my wagon to some of cool things coming up including:

• Exploring the wonderful national parks of Canada at no charge with my Parks Canada pass
• OpenPOWER and IBM POWER9
• Building up of my home ARMy with a pre-ordered Armada 8040 Community Board, which should help to speed up the machine learning I’ve been tinkering with

And that’s just for starters. What’s your plan?