What?! Another year in the history books? I say this every year, but time sure does fly. Especially when you’re having fun. This year seemed like one of the busiest yet! Let’s take a look back at my photographic year in review for 2011.

See previously, my photographic year in reviews for 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Quick notes: I probably stuffed way too many events and photos in this post. Sorry! Secondly, it’s interesting to see how many square formatted photographs (courtesy of Instagram) that I have. It’s my primary way of sharing photos these days.

January 2011

I started off the year trying to take a photo per day. Here, I walked town Divisadero in our old neighborhood and shot some random photos of the store front one night. This experiment lasted about 2 days.

Street cars are one of the reasons I love San Francisco.

Speaking of rides in street cars, I kept taking pictures of them / inside them and shot this iPhone panorama.

In early January, Christmas trees are victims in San Francisco.

Kerry took me to the Tonga Room in San Francisco for my birthday. It’s a San Francisco classic. Pool in the middle of the restaurant with a boat and a band.

Our friend Christian celebrated his birthday by scheduling a Mexican party bus to take us around town! Drinks, music, and late night pinatas in the park!

Walking to and from work each day, I’m bound to stumble upon many of San Francisco’s eccentrics. And then document them with my phone’s camera (this is a trend I’ve noticed more and more — I’m using my serious cameras less and less!)

I also picked up this rad bearded beanie (because, you know, I can’t really grow a beard).

To end the month, the group of our friends took off on a chartered wine tour of Sonoma through Terrific Tours.

February 2011

The first weekend of February was Super Bowl weekend! So, we mounted up in our vehicles to head to Lake Tahoe for a winter weekend at a friend’s cabin.

This means there was also some serious Settlers of Catan games going on.

Also, the Starvin Marvin’s BBQ Team decided to help out and provide some tasty treats.

Thanks to a query from Burrito Justice, I went to the SF Library to dig up a research paper on prehistoric humans found while excavating BART in the 1960′s.

Mike Daisey came to town and gave an incredible performance on The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Here’s the setup of the stage prior to the show.

Winters in California aren’t too bad…

A friend of ours had an 80′s themed birthday. Dynamic Dave and Missouri Mike made an appearance.

Kinetic Kerry and Dynamic Dave, 80′s style.

Our cats continued to make me realize how easy they have it. Here, Tegan is thinking about all her worries.

And a tweet of mine randomly appeared on Twitter’s home page. Sweet!

March 2011

It’s been awhile since we’ve been wine tasting, so back to Sonoma we went!

Proving time and time again that we have the laziest animals in the universe.

March also means the South by Southwest festival is happening. Off to Austin, Texas!

Rachel and Kerry pose with the mascot from HootSuite.

And then pose while riding some cheesy rides…

Austin gets pretty crazy during SXSW.

The Texas State Capital Building is pretty neat at night.

The primary reason we were in Austin was for our annual gdgt live in Austin event.

While in Texas, Kerry and I apparently found one of Austin’s classic “love photo” spots.

We extended our stay a few days and had a chance to check out the world famous Salt Lick BBQ outside of Austin.

Don’t forget about all the awesome music! Here, Liam Finn sings some tunes.

After a week in Austin, we flew back home to our fair city.

With BBQ season approaching, I hung out with the Starvin Marvin’s BBQ Team while they practiced cooking some brisket.

I can’t stop taking pictures of the sky!

April 2011

Baseball season begins!

Our friends Scott and Marcie ended up getting engaged! So we hung out at a wine bar to surprise them (courtesy of Scott setting this up).

For our friend Jeff’s birthday, we went out to the East Bay and had a BBQ in the park.

Koa was there to keep us company.

In late April, I ventured out to Kennedy Space Center for one of the coolest experiences in my life — to checkout Space Shuttle Endeavour’s last flight for a NASA Tweetup! It was the experience of a lifetime.

Here is the new Orion module on display at the KSC Visitor’s Center.

An full scale mockup of the Shuttle on display at KSC:

Credentials!

The VAB! Words cannot describe how crazy huge it is. This is where they put together vehicles that take humans to SPACE. And at one point, the MOON!

I’m posing in front of the world famous count down clock.

We also got to go inside the VAB!

Sadly, due to a late thunderstorm and some technical issues that cropped up, the launch was scrubbed and I had to return home. This was the closest I ever got to seeing a Shuttle launch.

May 2011

May was a fairly inactive month for me. Went for a run down to the beach.

There was also a lot of standing around, as Off the Grid SF started up a weekly event at our office building for lunch!

June 2011

Masquerade party at our friend’s house.

Kerry and I moved to Oakland! One of the immediate and obvious differences between San Francisco and Oakland was the blue sky. That’s right! No fog in the summer, baby!

We immediately started checking out some of the neighborhood eateries. Our first stop? Homeroom! Specialty Mac n’ Cheese!

And here is some cute art on the wall at Homeroom:

I flew to New York City for a gdgt live event. I went a few days early to visit my sister, who had just moved back to New York City from Los Angeles.

Brooklyn summers:

Checking out the High Line.

It was pretty fun hanging out with my sister in NYC. I hadn’t seen her in awhile!

July 2011

In July, we went out to Yosemite National Park for a wedding for our friends, Meghan and Andy. It was a blast!

Of course, I had to go for the standard post card shot of the valley.

Our friend Marcie took an awesome photo of Kerry and I while there.

I also borrowed a new camera, the Fuji X100. I had to test it out, so I used my standard benchmarking tool: the nearest feline.

In mid-July, we went back to Austin, Texas for another wedding. This time for Jess and Adam.

We end the month with some more baseball — this time, the Oakland A’s: a minor league team pretending to be a major league team.

August 2011

August! This time, we venture to Seattle for a gdgt live event. Before all the festivities, we stopped by the Sci Fi museum to see the Battlestar Galactica exhibit!

Space Needle!

In mid-August, we ventured northward to the Russian River for a good old-fashioned canoe trip!

Seemingly millions of people flocked to the Mission to taste food from a few dozen food trucks. Street Food Fest was amazing. Amazingly crowded!

My parents and grandparents came up to visit and stayed in Napa. So we went on adventure and rode the Napa Valley Wine Train!

September 2011

We spend Labor Day weekend on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

The other reason we were in Tahoe? Rib Fest!

We managed to sneak in some hiking as well.

Off the Grid held an event in the East Bay at Golden Gate Fields. So, we went out and saw our first horse races. It was pretty fun!

Mid-September, I went off to Chicago for another gdgt live event. It’s such a pretty city!

More Oakland A’s games! (Admittedly, baseball is always fun to see, no matter who is playing.)

Random stuffed animals left around our neighborhood…

Our friends Katherine and Tony got married!

October 2011

Sadly, Steve Jobs passed away early in October. I swung by the local Apple Store to check out the memorial that fans and mourners were building.

Views from the office building: crazy people.

October means Fleet Week! Scott and I went out on a boat and watched the Blue Angels practice. We had pretty epic front row seats.

We ventured north to Sonoma for another wine tasting trip with friends.

For work, the team stopped by the SF MOMA to check out the Dieter Rams exhibit. It was pretty inspiring.

Besides Fleet Week, October also means pumpkin patches!

Dramatic mornings on public transit.

This is how we hack street signs in Oakland.

For our friend’s Halloween party, Kerry and I dressed up as friendly TSA agents.

November 2011

More wine!

And more Dave and Kerry pics after drinking wine!

December 2011

Santacon!

We took a train ride down to Southern California on the Coast Starlight. That was a blast!

The views were pretty epic, too!

Is this what being a grownup is like?

Don’t worry, I still love you, San Francisco. We’re just trying something new for a bit!

It seems like such a lovely place, doesn’t it?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately for one reason: this would make an incredible diary of my life. I’m not the first to think this (just read the Wikipedia article I linked to — people were thinking about this in the 1990′s), but it’s something I’ve found myself becoming obsessed with.

When FriendFeed was announced in 2007, I thought, “this is perfect!” It aggregates data from nearly every web service you can imagine. I happily started plugging things in and letting it archive all my data. It ended up being awesome for a number of reasons.

“Oh, man! What was that thing I tweeted about 2 years ago, about some guy bunting a home run?” Well, Twitter search goes back about 7 days, so that was useless. FriendFeed to the rescue! I could easily search for things I tweeted about (and [website-verb]ed about) from the moment I started importing things.

In August of 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed and proceeded to let the site rot. Since then, there’s been no easy way to export your data, and their search function eventually broke, making the site useless for searching archived data. To this day, FriendFeed is happily pulling in everything I do on the internet, but sadly, I have no way to search for it.

Earlier this week, I found a brilliant PHP script by Claudio Cicali. It scrapes your FriendFeed profile and saves all your data to a JSON file.

After accumulating over 3 years of data, I ran the script (which took an entire evening) and it scraped something like 300K different things I’ve done on the internet in the past few years. The resulting JSON file is over 300MB (now I need to work on a way to parse the data and feed it back into a MySQL database). Incredible!

Sadly though, I don’t think this is a tenable solution. It’s great for fetching all my past data, but who knows how long FriendFeed will remain around. I’d like something more permanent, open-source, and that I can potentially run on my own server.

Locker sounds like it may be what I’m looking for, but it still has a ways to go. Momento on the iPhone sounds exactly like what I need, but you need to manually kick it off (and it won’t pull in data too far in the past).

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on this?

“Alcoholic Eruption” – January 5th, 2011

Kerry surprised me for my birthday and took me out to the Tonga Room for dinner and drinks. It was my first time there. It was a fun little place!

One of the drinks we ordered, pictured above, was called the Lava Bowl. It was dangerous.

“Better Luck Next Time” – January 4th, 2011

It’s few and far between that I ever play this, but with $355 million up for grabs? Why not?

The results? Things went about as well as expected!

Ringing in the New Year with some simple light painting in our apartment. Here’s to hoping 2011 is awesome!

Is it that time of the year already? 2010 has absolutely flown by! One of my favorite ways to reflect on the past year is to look back on it through the photos I’ve taken.

See previously, my photographic year in reviews for 2009, 2008, and 2007.

One thing I find particularly striking is that I’ve used my iPhone and Canon S90 more and more, and my DSLR significantly less. It kind of bums me out. Something I’d like to refocus on in 2011 is getting back into using my DSLR!

Anyway, let the review begin!

January 2010

We started the year off by seeing a friend’s brother make a guest appearance during a Beats Antique show at the Independent in San Francisco. (If you haven’t heard them, do check it out. Some great tunes and a good show featuring some interesting interpretive dance!)

We also got to dog-sit for our friends Scott and Marcie. Can you say cutest dog ever?

Of course, our cats would have something to say about that. Jealous, much?

More music, please! State Radio (one of my favorites) at the Fillmore.

Also, San Francisco can have some seriously great weather, even in January! Hello, colors!

The cats were always demanding attention. This was fun to wake up to.

February 2010

Overall, a pretty mellow month! I did finally get a chance to go out and use my DSLR. A new sculpture was put up at Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley.

It’s only February, and I already feel live I’ve been taking an overwhelming amount of cat photos.

Shot some things for my friends hosting BarBot 2010. (You can also see a video I shot of this thing in action.)

March 2010

I got a new bike! Hello, beautiful!

Traveled to Austin for SXSW and gdgt live in Austin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to take many pictures. But I did snap a photo of this bacon bloody mary. Umm, yes!

Returned to the Left Coast to spot this crazy art car in the neighborhood.

Doggie Diner Heads at the Laughing Squid going away party.

Bonfires on Ocean Beach!

April 2010

Waited in line early in the morning for the iPad launch. An AP photographer snapped this photo as I picked up an iPad for the first time ever.

Might as well put the iPad to use — banana bread baking!

Explored the SF Underground Farmers’ Market. Pretty damn crazy!

Random trip to Southern California, where I stopped by Galco’s Soda Pop Shop. Crazy amounts of soda! Check out my post on Laughing Squid.

Stopped by my parents’ place and got to see Axl. It would be the last time I’d ever see him.

May 2010

My old-roommate Julie celebrated her engagement with her new fiance, Ryan. A mighty fine looking couple!

And because of this, Kerry and I got to play dress up!

Also, Bacon Camp! Went to support my friends on the Starvin Marvins BBQ team!

And here are the tasty, tasty MOINK balls they made.

Another gdgt event! This time, we visited Chicago — where I decided to use my phone to take crappy pictures with crappy toy camera apps.

gdgt live in Chicago was fun though!

June 2010

June rolls around — it’s WWDC time in San Francisco, and that means a new iPhone is coming out!

So, of course I was there for the Stevenote on behalf of gdgt. Hey, Steve!

Later that month, I hung out with the Starvin Marvins team again as they went to a BBQ competition.

Huh, it seems like I haven’t taken cat photos in awhile. Time to fix that.

New iPhone 4 finally arrived. I hear it has a pretty good camera. Time to test it out.

Also, the World Cup was going on! So, obviously we had friends over and it was time to cheer on the Red, White, and Blue. (Of course, Sanjin shows up in a Croatia jersey, but I guess it’s the thought that counts.)

Speaking of Sanjin, he got married!

July 2010

Needed to get away from the oppressive fog in the city, so we ventured up to Point Reyes, for a day of oyster shucking.

We also got ourselves a new office! No more working out of our apartments. Pretty nice. A photo from the early days.

August 2010

Camping trip season! I discovered a creepily familiar Paul Bunyan.

Sitting around a campfire…

Canoeing!

More canoeing!

And back to the city and dealing with our transit system.

I love the F line.

And another Apple event soon approaches…

September 2010

Another Apple keynote. iPods, Apple TV’s, oh my!

We went out to Sacramento to surprise and cheer on our friends in Starvin Marvins at another BBQ competition.

They won second place for their chicken!

gdgt live in Boston! This time, I’m flying out early, so I can check some things out.

MIT

Near MIT – Kendell Square

Who met the Tron Guy? This guy!

October 2010

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival arrives in town. I can’t think of a better way to spend a foggy day in the park.

It’s October. Do you know what that means? Hear that sound? “It’s the sound of freedom.” This time, I rented a gigantic, 400mm lens for the Blue Angels’ show.

There were also some pretty crazy clouds in San Francisco.

Also, a street food bonanza was happening at Off the Grid.

Working across the street from Blue Bottle Coffee was proving to be dangerous.

Kerry took me on a surprise visit to the Napa Valley Wine Train.

This thing called a World Series happened in San Francisco. Since I’m a Dodgers’ fan, I have no idea what that is.

San Francisco kept looking mighty fine, as always.

November 2010

Party in the streets, as the Giants would go on to win the World Series.

An election happened…

City Hall was bathed in orange for the Giants win.

A World Series parade…

Aubrey Huff wears his “rally thong.”

It was homecoming (for gdgt). gdgt live in San Francisco preparation resulted in tons of boxes in our office.

I don’t care what people think, I still love dogs.

Quick stop in Southern California for a wedding in Laguna Beach.

Returned to San Francisco to find this nearby. Someone had a rough night.

I also began my transition from a hipster into a yuppy.

December 2010

What can we say about December? It’s rained a lot.

My dentist apparently has a crush on me.

Prepping for some awesome things in the 2011. It results in late nights at the office.

(And the month isn’t even over, yet!)

I can say for a fact, this is something I never considered doing as a kid.

Though he stands just four feet ten—short, even for a kid who is about to turn 13—Michelito has become internationally renowned for his exploits in the ring. By his own estimate, he has already put the sword to 300 bulls. Ask him if he remembers his first kill and he says, “It was October 27, 2005, in my mother’s home state of Tabasco. I was 6 years old.” Four years later he tried to set a Guinness World Record for novice bullfighters (novilleros) by slaying six bulls in a single appearance—and succeeded, but Guinness refused to recognize it. (“We do not accept records based on the killing or harming of animals,” its website explained.) This past June, Michelito became the youngest matador ever to perform in the world’s largest bullfighting arena; he was such a hit that he was invited back in August.

[Via Daily Dish]