It's been a heck of a decade, folks. Absolutely mind-boggling how much has happened. 10 years ago tonight I was living in a different house, proposing to marry my wife (10 minutes before 12:00 just in case Y2K caused a power outage). Her daughter was only 4 then; now she's in high school. My father was still alive. It seems like a world away. I can't believe that it's been 15 years since college graduation and 20 since high school - simply incomprehensible.

And "2010" sounds like such a futuristic time - something that I couldn't comprehend growing up in the 1980s. I also couldn't comprehend how computers and information would be at our fingertips now. Imagine if you wanted to research something in 1985 - you had to drive to the library! Now you just hit Google. Want to watch a movie back then? You were out of luck unless you owned a VCR, and few did. Now we are watching unlimited television and movies on our computers.

("SNOW UN-PREDICTED: FOILED AGAIN" - AN EARLY FORECAST BUST)

Speaking of the "good ol' days" I'm busy this vacation trying to convert a lot of "old school" media from my childhood -- pictures, audio tapes, video tapes -- to digital format to preserve those memories. I came across stacks of paper news printouts from the mid 1990's yesterday, most of which I threw away... back then the Internet was so young, nothing was archived and I thought it made sense to print out news stories for posterity. These days, you can pull articles from the 1800's on Google.

I'm now entering my 5th year of blogging for AccuWeather.com, though I have argued before that it's really my 25th year of trying to bring weather information to the masses, something I started doing in a very limited way, on paper, in 1985, but it wasn't until 1995 that I was able to reach other weather friends online. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to be a weather enthusiast, you watched the 6:00 news and subscribed to WeatherWise magazine. Tonight, I have access to over 45,000 of you through the AccuWeather.com Facebook page. I'd like to personally thank all my blog readers for sticking with me over the years; I intend to be blogging for many more.

As I did last year, I'll look at some personal electronic stats for my infoglut this year:

First, as far as blogging, I continued to decrease the number of blogs that I did in favor for of an increase in Tweets (things posted to "J's Breaking Weather News Feed" at right via my Twitter account, which echoes to my Facebook account (I post a few additional things on Facebook but not enough to make a difference in the stats here).

Because of the Tweets, I also got rid of my rule that I had to blog every day, and although there's no easy way to count this year due to a change in databases, I'd estimate I only blogged around 330 of the last 365 days. The total number of Tweets is actually hard to determine because I also tweet for BreakingWeather; I have estimated a slight addition this year because of that. I have also continued to decrease the number of images because my blogs have become less complex, and most tweets aren't associated with images, though the total number of images is probably underestimated because I'm not counting images that I make exclusively for, and post in, Tweets.

As far as emails... 2009 was a down year in every category for email, my slowest year since 2006. I think (hope?) this indicates that I am working more independently.

I have, however, sent 46,558 emails since 2005. I added an "unknown" category this year because I realized I may have not been counting things correctly in years past. That number breaks down into Received, Spam and Auto though I'm not sure in what percentages (Auto is automatically-generated emails that I receive, but don't always look at).

I also added a new category this year called "Photos". I took 5,055 pictures and videos with my digital cameras this year, up from last year but down from the year before. I also uploaded more photos than ever before, submitting 1,318 photos to the AccuWeather.com Photo Gallery. I have now taken nearly 20,000 photos/videos since 2006 (can you tell I'm a big of a photobug??)

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