Happy holidays, and Happy New Year! 2003 was one of those "big years," both in terms of my personal life and the grander stage of world events as well. On the personal front, I got engaged, found and fell in love with a staff job at a really cool company, produced several video projects of larger-than-ever scope, traveled to Florida, California, Minnesota, and Salt Lake City, and learned some valuable lessons about life. My brother graduated from college and moved back to New York, my friend Jordan bought an apartment right down the street from mine, and Clara started a new job and graduate school classes. And those are just the highlights that have come to mind in a few moments.

America saw another Space Shuttle disaster, a war in Iraq, loud and continued internal political discord, the beginning of a heated presidential election, the end of Saddam Hussein... Again, that's just off the top of my head.

Mac users were treated to the G5 processor; newer and cooler iPods, PowerBooks, iBooks, and iMacs; Mac OS X 10.3; iChat AV; Safari... The iTunes Music Store fired the first, loudest, and (in my humble opinion) best-aimed shot in the new online music war. Cell phones got smaller, color screens and cameras became common features. Wireless access points spouted up in households, Starbucks, airports, McDonald's... On-demand digital movies streamed to cable boxes... DVD burners everywhere... Broadband galore... The Matrix (bad) and The Lord of the Rings (good) concluded their trilogies... Linux kernel 2.6.

For Windows fans, Microsoft... scrambled to fix an endless parade of security problems, released no new version of its desktop operating system (nor had it done so in 2002), and proudly announced that- get excited- the next version of Windows will likely not ship until 2006, at the earliest. That's 5 years- best case scenario- between Windows XP and Windows "Longhorn." That's an awfully long time, considering all of the progress that most other, non-Microsoft, non-"they're forced to use our software, so why should we continue to improve it now that we've locked them in?" companies will be making.

Macworld San Francisco is coming up shortly. I am grinning with excitement, and thankful that my favorite computer company knows that to keep me happy, to keep me coming back, to keep me in love with their stuff, they've got to keep inventing new stuff, improving old stuff, and making great stuff.

We're back at orange alert now. Several Air France flights have been cancelled- certain passengers failed to show up (one of them possibly a pilot)... A terror plot on a Saudi Arabian runway was averted... Pakistan's president has survived two recent assassination attempts... Each of these acts (and many more) would have been MULTI-COLUMN FRONT PAGE NEWS if they'd succeeded, but instead have been eclipsed by Michael Jackson (innocent, probably, IMO) and Mad Cow hysteria (overblown). Funny how the "losses" in the "War on Terror" are given more attention than the "victories." Say what you want about our government's response to September 11 (and I'm not sure exactly what I want to say, at the moment). Criticize the profiling and the wiretapping and the spying and the prying. Condemn the unilateral actions of war and reconstruction. But praise, too, the valiant efforts of those who work every day at jobs more important than our own, and who have given their lives so that we don't have to. Those people, and their leaders, are doing a lot of things RIGHT, too.

2003 was a big year. It was a hard year. It was a good year.