This isn’t a year in review article, it’s more of an article I’m writing to encourage myself to blog a bit more than every 6 months. However, I might as well share a few things about 2025. For the critical reader, I didn’t write this article with any AI assistance but there are em-dashes used because that’s how I write!
I finally visited Sydney, Australia for a week during springtime! I mostly stayed in the city except for a short ferry ride to Manly Beach for a quick walk. It’s a beautiful and clean city. I’d visit again (and may indeed have to for the day job, especially since I was overdue for this trip by a couple years anyway).
Overall, I didn’t travel as much as I did in 2024, though, but still managed to get 1K status on United Airlines for a second year in a row. The card spend helped add quite a few PQPs. It looks like this will be mostly my final summary for 2025:
The requirement for 1K in 2024 was 24,000 PQPs and it was raised to 28,000 for 2025, so I just made it. I haven’t heard what the number will be for 2026, yet. I don’t really use most of the 1K (or card) benefits but preboarding is nice. PlusPoints are good for upgrades, although they’re not guarantted to go through unless you have the option to “Skip Waitlist” but then you run the risk of losing those PlusPoints with an itinerary change. This did happen to me once and United’s policy is they are non-refundable in this situation but oddly enough I did get a refund about a month later (the Internets say there could be a couple reasons for this and one of them is a goodwill gesture from United—I think I just got lucky!).
I did travel to Dublin four times (3x with United, and 1x with Aer Lingus, since United doesn’t fly IAD to DUB in January), which was a little unusual.
Summary of personal travel:
- SFO to Napa, CA, USA
- LGA: New York, NY, USA
- EWR to North Brunswick, NJ, USA (2x)
- CLT to York, SC, USA
- TPA to Sarasota, FL, USA
- LAX to Manhattan Beach, CA, USA
Summary of business-related travel:
- SEA to Seattle, WA, USA (2x)
- SYD to Sydney, Australia
- DUB to Dublin, Ireland (4x)
While I flew into SFO for the Napa trip, this was the first year in awhile that I didn’t visit the Bay Area for business.
After Henry passed away late in 2024 I wanted to stick with one dog (Wesley) for at least a year but my wife had different plans. We got Percy in July. And, yes, I have too many dog domains now.
As a result, over the last 5 months my body has mostly acclimated to many fewer hours of sleep. There are also still some accidents.
The day job is still going but there have been lots of changes in the 2nd half of 2025 and there will be more in 2026. I won’t comment further.
As far as personal technology, I still host most of my own stuff and partially document it poorly. AS395460 is still running strong but I haven’t added any additional connections or peers this year. I am on a 2-year cycle for phones and waited until iOS 26 had progressed to only being half-broken (hey Apple, please stop calling whimsical UI changes “upgrades”) before getting the iPhone 17 Pro, which I just setup over this weekend. I’ll upgrade my Galaxy S24 to the S26 in 2026. Since I don’t bother with my dSLR camera anymore, my wife also got me two Moment T-series lenses (the Tele 58mm and Wide 18mm), shown below on the 15 Pro (I need a new case for the 17 Pro):
At 116.5g it adds some weight to the phone. I was worried that the Moment cases would be annoying in some way but they actually seem pretty nice. I don’t think I’ll mind using it exclusively so I can pop the lens on & off (it’s an easy 90° rotate to attach & detach). The results are what you’d expect, a little bit of a zoom assist:
iPhone 15 Pro telephoto lens:
iPhone 15 Pro telephoto lens with the T-series 58mm Moment lens attached:
It’s not bad, overall. It’s obviously nothing compared to a dSLR (I have the Canon 400mm L lens, which is super nice), but it’s just annoying to carry those around nowadays, especially since I’m less into photography than I used to be (my old Flickr page still exists, though!).
That’s it for now, I guess. Happy New Year!