January is the start of hibernation, but there were some significant events.
The biggest news story was a 7.0 earthquake very near the capital of Haiti which decimated the country. Haiti is very poor to begin with and this is the anvil that broke the camel’s back. NOLA was poor so the situation was bad, but at least they were part of USA. This is an entire country that collapsed. There was a lot of death, from the earthquake and the aftermath. A lot of fundraising was performed and donated but it doesn’t seem like the country can just pick itself up and rebuild.
The second big news story was Google doing battle with China. After Google discovering that unauthorized access to some GMail accounts were part of a larger, systematic attack from somewhere in China; Google threatened to stop doing business in China unless they were allowed to stopped filtering the Internet. The US government stepped in to say a few words, but didn’t make any meaningful action, and then eventually the news died down. Actually I don’t know what the result is, maybe Google is going to pull out.
This month I also decided to map out the restaurants participating in Winterlicious on a Google Map. What started out as a little project ended up garnering more attention that I thought (I also got linked from Sweetspot which I had never heard of before)!
Less exciting things were that I got my review for last year at work, we had a nice balmy week of above 0°C temperatures, and that was about it. On to February, and another month of hibernation!
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