As the calendar turns a page to reveal the blank wall behind December, I thought it would be a good idea to update the look of the blog and reflect on the last decade.

While celebrating at Tim and Jessica’s house and watching Dick Clark struggle through another New Years Rockin’ Eve (time to hang up the mic Dick, I know it’s difficult when the heir to your throne is Ryan Seacrest, but it’s time) to start 2010 and put last decade behind us, I started to reflect on the decade known as “The Aughts”.

A few things in the last 10 years include terrorist attacks in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania that killed almost 3,000 people and changed air travel forever. Those actions directly triggered two wars Afghanistan and Iraq, one which led to the death of Saddam Hussein. Scientists completed the human genome project, discovering the DNA on which humans are built, the Euro became a world currency, SARS caused a worldwide panic, the Space Shuttle broke up over Texas, we put rovers on Mars that sent back amazing pictures of the Red Planet, Pope John Paul II died, Katrina became a cursed name in the Gulf, the United States elected the first African-American president, two recessions beat up on the economy, the second of which we’re still recovering from and almost caused another Great Depression, swine flu made SARS look like child’s play as the first global pandemic in 40 years, Michael Jackson died, and the Olympic games provided a return to Athens and a look at the Chinese culture.

Since I’m a technogeek, I’m more aware of all the advancements in technology that have occurred in the last 10 years. Some of the pieces of technology that we use every day weren’t around in 2000 as we were all concerned that the Y2K bug would end the industrial world, sending us all into darkness and to the days of horses and carriages. Email has become a widespread business tool, and may even kill the US Postal Service. The World Wide Web was slow and didn’t have much of a purpose. Text messaging was just catching on as people were finally giving up their pager messages and cell phones were still an expensive luxury, rather than a must have commodity. Social networking had not entered our lexicon, as Facebook and Twitter had not even been thought of. DVDs just won the format war after killing off LaserDisc, and VHS tapes were still the preferred home movie watching medium. Nobody had HDTVs or televisions that hung on the wall, 300 channels to choose from or TiVo, which changed the way people watched television. No more rushing home by 8pm to catch your favorite show or miss it forever and commercials are skipped with the push of a button. When you needed to go somewhere new, you asked for directions and a scrap of paper to write them down on. Phone numbers at the club were scribbled on the back of matchbook covers or cocktail napkins. People still bought albums, peer to peer downloading was something that young people did on college campuses with their high speed connections to Napster. The iPod hadn’t yet saved Apple from extinction and taken over the world. If you had a question, you asked someone. Now you ask things like Google and Wikipedia. If you needed to save a file, you used a floppy disk. Good luck finding one of those now. Broadband internet access changed the world. You can view news, videos and pictures in seconds. Things that used to take minutes on dial-up connections. The digital world has lead to the 24/7 news cycle, where breaking news is immediately transmitted around the world, and has lead to the decline of newspapers and magazines, which are being replaced by things called Kindles and Nooks. Everything you could possibly want to know is available almost immediately and right at your fingertips.

As much as things change, some things stay the same. As I turn the calendar from 2009 to 2010, much like I did in 1999 to 2000, I’m still a college student, hoping the economy rebounds before I graduate so I can find a new job and start a new career. At least this time around I don’t live at my parents house, and my job pays more than $8.25 an hour. Nobody knows what the next 10 years will hold, but I’m hoping for some more personal achievements in this decade. I’ll have my masters degree soon, I hope to be married and have a family, be a homeowner, and have traveled abroad. I think all of those goals are achievable, and maybe in 10 years I’ll be blogging about it. Or maybe you’ll all be plugged into my thoughts wirelessly through some new technology that has yet to be invented.