Here is again the symbolic opportunity to send love on remote by letters: the switch of the Gregorian year numbers.

Let me start with a look to the future: I wish you sincerely a worry-free 2009!
(That also means a lot of success in change management, at least for getting used to the upcoming economy changes ;-)

What concerns the passing 2008, I like to share some highlights of my 2008, and even more to know about those of yours!

The greatest change for me in 2008 was that I acquired a large living space with a wish and freedom to arrange it according to some long ago developed ideas, and be able to share moments with somewhat bigger groups of people. Therefore my living place changed in June 2008: Groningen! And indeed, I already intensively celebrated in my new home the acquaintances and friendships with a lot of people I met in these 7.5 years in the Netherlands, by having nice moments at the table and making parties already 1, 2, 3 times!

Actually this year I can see as a roof-over-the-head-year, because even before this real house, I enjoyed another long-wished roof between the skies and me: eventually after so many years, I finally made use of yet another benefit of living in the Netherlands: mastering camping skills! For the first time at the island Ameland on 3. May, then in July in Tivat-Montenegro, and in August at Bled-Slovenia.

Another big thing, inspired by the first, was access to the network of finest personalities around the world: the Couch surfing community! This is a global hospitality network of people offering to be your local guide at any place of this world you happen to be, and very often offering a shelter. But also at home there is so much to benefit of it: counsel, support, help, and a lot of nice shared moments among couch surfers in city communities - the party no. 3 was actually Groningen couch surfers' celebration of Sinterklaas. And this is my couch surfing profile: I obtained the house on 5. June, became a couch surfer on 9. June, and already on 13. June was welcomed by my first couch surfing host Päivi Mäkinen in Oulu-Finland! Then in Amsterdam, then in Brussels, eventually in Paris.

The next big thing was an instructive year in my career, which I advanced in my third year at Neopost Technologies in Drachten. I started the year by finishing my expertise in nothing less than "Time-space diagrams" - yes, no wrong wording: connecting temporal and spatial behaviours! (of paper traveling through Neopost machines) - a crucially important element in specifying the company products - and later I was promoted to company's Requirements manager. I also gave lead to five students, collaborated with other companies and universities, contributed to information ("knowledge") management, product integration and all in all, the Product Creation Process. And I managed to publish an article about some of these

On the business side, I did not miss the opportunity to be part of the first start-up of my sister in Belgrade-Serbia:

(for inspired by these photos and the policy: "Quality of Belgrade's the best for the prices of Belgrade's the cheapest" here you are data to satisfy your curiosity and possibly needs ;-) Dr. Dragica Jovanović, dentist, "Dragon" dentistry, Pere Ćetkovića 11J, 1st floor, tel. +381 (0) 63 219 437

And I was also creative with an old love of me: the wood and woodworks. I followed a 20-lessons course in manual and machine processing of wood, with a throne-chair as a case study - here it is to see how the prototype looks like at the moment  (I hope this stays a hobby, and becomes no business - but who knows ;-))

And of course, dance, dance, dance! Next to continuing styled latino-american and ballroom (at last: made first steps in slow fox - yupeee!), argentinean tango and salsa/merengue, this year I added to these last two Caribbean also bachata! And fell in love with how some people in Groningen dance boogie-woogie... this is going to be a most difficult dilemma for 2009: to join or to admit it is impossible to find time yet for that!

However, in 2008 found time to participate in shooting a music video for "Brand" ("Fire") of the Dutch salsa band Los Bomberos(http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=jrrM4tT7qPE).

So, there was a lot of lovely feelings this year. I had multiple times also those romantic feelings, caused by beautiful faces talking to me in different languages, but also this year I am not giving you one specific name ;-)
 

But this year - not a surprise, I guess - I went a couple of times over the top of my capabilities, a few times had a real energy-reset. Therefore I was catching cold much more often then in earlier years... or that must be just a real nature of living on the "extreme north" ;-P
And... my last year wish to have more unscheduled time... well, did come true at first, but given the fact that I found some new things so fascinating... I can conclude that there is a lot of room for improvement in 2009...

There were this year also quite enough opportunities to extend the charity efforts. Here it is how in July I completed my part of the "ConsumerAid" idea from the last year (but the proposal itself has not seen any success :-(). In November I helped Neopost donate used PC equipment to underprivileged talented youth in Serbia, and to my list of money contributions I added Wikipedia this year.
A missed opportunity of this year was to take the house mortgage via www.wereldhypotheek.nl - a Dutch financial organisation which creates an inhabitable object in the Third world from profit made on every single mortgage sold in the Netherlands. I just was too late to take a good offer from the Wereldhypotheek in the spring, when the interest rates were rising almost every week :-(  Please, all of you who consider taking or changing the mortgage in the Netherlands, please take a look at this provider - I will surely when it happens that I change my borrower.

For the environment this year, the least what I could do was quitting delivery of bank slips on paper - since this year obtained also the Dutch nationality, perhaps not every comma in the original documents (and therefore bank slips as well) will undergo the strict scrutiny when I will be inviting guests from outside the EU - therefore saving at least some of the wasted paper.

But I have been thinking a lot over the contradicting news how the world powers intend to save the ice on the North pole, and at the same time make firmer boundaries of their interest territories overthere... yet the fact that drilling for oil through ice gives a lot of technical difficulties, reminded me of these frames from The Matrix part I

	"I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Smith#Personality)
	Are you having a similar feeling about this statement as Morphius did? I did, until I understood that agent Smith was perfectly right!
	So, do we really need agents Smith to tell us what we are doing? You don't think we are doing anything bad? Oh yes, we are: see the report of high EU-officials Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner from March 2008 http://euobserver.com/877/25811.

But our uncontrolled spending is maybe the key to the issue as well: the significant changes caused by excessive spendings in the US are having a major impact on the way the world will have to do the economy in the future - to deal with a decline of the economic activities, to say plainly - let me wish us all that one good consequence of this be a major relief for the Earth's natural resources!

Let me finish with two URL's which gave me energy replenishments of these bad news of 2008...

• http://www.lachen-ist-gesund.de/start/index.php - simply, smiling is healthy!
• although I am claiming here that we Dutch are doing fine even for the extravagant criteria of us Serbs ;-), I could not escape waves of  giggle (at the job, of course ;-) when read some of http://www.datapage.nl/HTTTDE.htm (and some I saved for potential more glum news in 2009) - but you know mÿn Nederlanders, "waar rook is..." ;-)
  ("Where is smoke...")

And specifically to my self, for 2009. I wish...

... (again) more unscheduled time

... in that time, a longer periods of no-thought - "Sometimes I think, sometimes I am" (Paul Valéry)

... because eventually http://www.worldofselfhelp.com/ancient-wisdom-diogenusway.htm!

... and then to fulfill my promise of sharing with you more than just one "Photo of the year"... since I yet up to this moment have not taken enough time for making "The top 3", here it is one taken in October by my sister at my parent's farmhouse in Baljevac-Serbia, while preparing slava...

(Luckily, enough days off in the Netherlands,
so maybe I go through all the 2008 photos and partly fulfill the promise
- yet a week before going to the job again - huraaah :-)

With all my heart - ALL THE BEST! - yoursDJ 8-))