Top 10 Google Queries
1. northlands park, edmonton
2. alberta downs race track, lacombe, ab
3. evergreen park, grande prairie
4. Rocky Mountain Turf Club, Lethbridge, Alberta
5. peggy’s footwerks
6. google analytics
7. peggysfootwerks
8. made in frame
9. peggys footwerks
10. peggy’sfootwerks

The top four results are work related for the Horse Racing Alberta website I managed. I have no idea why they were ranked so high amongst everything else. I also can’t explain why I needed to search for “northlands park, edmonton” as frequently as I did.

The rest of the search results were all related to a side business and seeing how high Peggy’s Footwerks was ranking on Google. In the end I was able to add the site to Google and have it hit on keywords so I no longer receive phone calls asking “why they can’t find the site in Google”.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in August with 1,667 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 864. These numbers are up from last year but June returned as my least active search month, which is a bizarre trend.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.google.com
3. www.imdb.com
4. answers.yahoo.com
5. www.amazon.com
6. www.ehow.com
7. androidforums.com
8. forum.xda-developers.com
9. market.android.com
10. twitter.com

Wikipedia dominates my top sites again. I honestly don’t think I go there that often but I guess every article about someone or something leads me to Wikipedia so I imagine that adds up over time. I like that Android sites appeared in this list, even though before September the notion of leaving iOS seemed crazy to me.

Top 10 Artists
1. The White Stripes (695 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard (631 plays)
3. The Beatles (542 plays)
4. Tegan and Sara (541 plays)
5. Michael Giacchino 482 plays)
6. U2 (411 plays)
7. Coldplay (357 plays)
8. Daft Punk (338 plays)
9. Rob Costlow (335 plays)
10. Ludovico Einaudi (329 plays)

Standard affair with this list: White Stripes, soundtrack or orchestral…plus a few other bands thrown in for good measure. Rob Costlow was a newcomer this year, but Daft Punk is stuck in there solely for the Tron Legacy soundtrack. I listened to the soundtrack for months before I saw the movie, and when I saw the movie all I focused on was the music.

What I don’t understand is how I listen to The Beatles that much. I like their music but I rarely say “Yes, I want to listen to all of The White Album”, but somehow they claimed the third most listened to artist this year. Sadly, there was no Bear McCreary. Battlestar Galactica is getting a lot of play time, especially the Solo Piano albums, but McCreary didn’t perform those songs so any plays for that were credited to Joohyun Park.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Dark Knight (29 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Bank Robbery (Prologue) (27 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Buyer Beware (26 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Halfway to Hong Kong (26 plays)
5. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Decent Men In An Indecent Time (25 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (24 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You’re Gonna Love Me (23 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Chance (22 plays)
9. The White Stripes – Astro (21 plays)
9. Rob Costlow – Bliss (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You Complete Me (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – We Are Tonight’s Entertainment (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – The Ferries (21 plays)

There are 13 songs listed here because of the five way tie for ninth spot. Last year “Inception” lead the way in music, and this year it was “The Dark Knight”. Odds are good that next year Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard will lead the way with “The Dark Knight Rises”.

With regards to air travel 2011 was the lowest in recent years with a pretty painless extended weekend trip to San Diego amassing 3200 miles covered. I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 13,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times (the same number last year). I have gone two calendar years in a row without completing a police report, and I received no speeding tickets or anything incriminating like that against me.

My decline in blogging continued this year. Including this post there have been 23 entries made in 2011. The majority of those were reviewing my experience with Telus TV and my switch to Android. There hasn’t been much to report on, or anything worth updating about, which is apparent because I made a third less tweets this year with 188. I also made 41 posts on Tumblr. As expected there were no Facebook status updates either.

I like social networking but I also don’t want to bother people with hourly updates or useless tweets containing song lyrics or writing about how much food I ate. I think my decrease in Tweets was related to not posting every time I updated my Project 365. If people want to see the photos they know how to find them, and spamming them doesn’t do anything more than get a few more image views.

I sent roughly 407 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 52 from my @hotmail.com address. My @gmail.com and @seangursky.com usage increased a bit compared to last year but @hotmail.com dropped a bit. What I did write from @hotmail.com was mostly Kijiji related, so maybe the shift is related to using Gmail for more communication.

I made one order with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one with monoprice.com and none with Deal Extreme or amazon.co.uk.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 5,200 photos with my Canon 5D this year. There was a few week period where the camera was in for repair but any photos I took with the iPhone or backup Pentax Optio were inconsequential. 5,200 is fewer photos than I took last year (7,850) but there was no two week long vacation to soak up a thousand odd photos.

All in all 2011 seems pretty quiet. Even when we tell people what we were up to the usual answer is “house stuff”. You add in a few months of Ice Dragons summer hockey, a couple trips to the cabin at Lac la Biche and you have the year in review.

2011 is in the books, I have a few things I’m looking forward to in 2012 and I’m sure the numbers will reflect that (I predict exceeding 9,000 photos taken) but we’ll see how it all shakes down in 366 days.

My energy levels leading up to the June 1 U2 concert in Edmonton was lower than I would have liked to admit. June 1 was game one of the Stanley Cup Final between Vancouver and Boston and the transportation to and from the Stadium was a concern, but when we returned home from the concert every doubt I had about going to the show was erased by another fantastic U2 experience.

This was my fourth time seeing U2, and had it been my first I would have been more excited, but to me this was just another U2 show, thankfully there is nothing as routine as a U2 show and the delay in the North American tour was the best thing to happen to this tour. The band was able to distance themselves from songs on their new album that weren’t resonating with the crowd, bring out some old favorites and play with the setlist.

U2 doesn’t vary their setlist night to night so when I saw some favorites appearing in Denver, Salt Lake City and Winnipeg I got excited, but it wasn’t until the opening chords of those songs began that I started to celebrate.

Main Set: Even Better Than The Real Thing, I Will Follow, Get On Your Boots, Magnificent, Mysterious Ways, Elevation, Until the End of the World, All I Want Is You – Needle and the Damage Done, Stay, Beautiful Day – Heart of Gold, Pride, Miss Sarajevo, Zooropa, City of Blinding Lights – Singin’ In The Rain, Vertigo – Rocking in the Free World, I Can’t Stand the Rain – I’ll Go Crazy (remix) – Discotheque – Life During Wartime – Please, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Scarlet, Walk On – You’ll Never Walk Alone

Encore(s): One, Will You Love Me Tomorrow – Where the Streets Have No Name, Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me, With or Without You, Moment of Surrender

Having seen U2 three times before (Calgary [2001], Vancouver [2005], Las Vegas [2009]) it’s impressive that there are still songs they add which I haven’t heard. Every tour always had a vintage song or a gem from their experimental 90′s and this show had four new songs in Miss Sarajevo, Zooropa, Scarlet and Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me. I was also incredibly happy to have one of my favorite U2 songs in All I Want Is You added to the set. The show in Edmonton had a lot of things going for it and it will stand out as the best setlist I have heard.

Like in 2009 I thought U2 may have lost some energy of the fans (in 2009 it was the transition from Elevation to In A Little While) and this time it was the one-two punch of Miss Sarajevo and Zooropa. Both are great songs, and while I never thought I’d hear Miss Sarajevo it is an ambitious song to play.

I would have liked more from Achtung Baby (specifically Zoo Station or The Fly) but Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me was incredible and got my biggest reaction.

Unlike past shows I didn’t bring my recording gear to this show. I wasn’t keen on gearing up for a show I had little excitement for, and being free of the microphones allowed me to share a few words between Jenna and the other U2 fans around me during the show. Perhaps foolishly, I expected someone else in the audience of 65,000 to be recording, but so far no recording has surfaced from the show.

The Claw was still a sight to see, and as the night came in it brought rain clouds and the light show was able to begin. It’s unfortunate there is no way to have an outdoor show in Edmonton where the sun sets early but the band made the most of the day and night they had. The rain clouds sparred us and only lightly sprinkled on everything and U2 played until 11:30, clocking in a set close to 2 1/2 hours long.

The political message of past shows was dropped; there was no urge to call Harper or write our MP about refugees but there was still anecdotes, and one included a member of the Edmonton Oilers picking up a hitchhiking Bono in Vancouver. As a nice touch Bono dedicated the final song of the night to the people of Slave Lake. At this time people were urged to take out their cellphones (to act as the 21st century version of the lighter) and the Stadium looked like thousands of firefly’s floating about and the band left under thunderous applause leaving everyone completely satisfied.

There was a gigapixel fan camera at the show and Jenna and I can be seen. I am on my phone, probably trying to get an update on the hockey score before the overloaded cell towers bring the network to a halt. Thankfully I’m not making a stupid face or eating a hot dog.

Until an Edmonton recording is available I will rely on Salt Lake City recording to remember the night, so here is Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me from that May 24 show.

U2 – Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me (May 24, 2011) by leche99.

Jack White was my inspiration on guitar. The music of The White Stripes is simple, but how he executed it is what made him unlike any other. He would play a plastic guitar, run it through a Sears brand amp and use every defect and imperfection to make something beautiful.

They were my favorite live act, where on any night the audience could get something new. Nothing was prepared. Nothing was written down. It all happened based on the mood and crowd interactions. Their free flying, anything was possible attitude made them stand out amongst other successful commercial acts. Over the years the music industry would change how they were perceived but they remained true to giving it their all, never making it easy on themselves and always being creative.

Perhaps that is why it makes it so hard to come to terms of their break up. They could have carried on making records and going through the motions, instead they took the road less travelled and ended the journey before it ruined what they had.

It is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve What is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way.

I often think back to the road trips with friends in 2005 and 2007, or how Astro will always raise my spirits, regardless of how tired or what mood I am in. The memories I have associated with The White Stripes really will last a life time and I’m grateful for what I have, and with anything good, I just wanted a little more.

I will remember The White Stripes for a lot of antics with the media, a self perpetuated mystery, and interesting music videos. When all that is taken away it is easy to forget how much emotion a simple song can carry and I think the performance of White Moon in the last scene from the 2009 documentary (The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights) is a fitting scene to have your career fade to black on.

Farewell Jack and Meg and thank you for allowing us to join you on this trip.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. lost season 6 soundtrack
2. *
3. from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347
4. corkhole poster
5. ups 1ZY511176793770653
6. london luton
7. google translate
8. 1Z8F73V8D900199952
9. usps CP684389748US
10. apple trailers

I really, really wanted to know when the sixth season of Lost soundtrack was going to be released. And when I found out there was a second release for “The Last Episodes” I used the same search query later in the year.

I don’t understand what * and from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347 are doing there, perhaps * is a blank query but I can’t see it happening that much to claim the second result on my query.

The third entry are longitude and latitude coordinates for near the Timms Centre for Arts on University Campus, which makes no sense to me. In July the World Wide Photo Walk was held there but I can’t understand how I searched directions to and from the same location for a one day event enough times to make it the third result.

I searched for the arrival of three packages enough to make them in my top ten, I guess it’s hard not to be compulsive when you track something travel across the country.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in December with 1,320 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 628.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. answers.yahoo.com
3. wwwapps.ups.com
4. www.google.com
5. epguides.com
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.imdb.com
8. www.ehow.com
9. mbradyclark.bigcartel.com
10. maps.google.com

Wikipedia was my top site in 2009 and it holds strong this year, and there were three other results that stayed in the top ten from last year. The combination of answers.yahoo.com and ehow.com appeared because they were a resource when it came to home improvement questions that came up in the condo and house. The rest are my compulsive nature to rename TV show episode titles and checking IMDB to answer the question “Where do I know that guy from?”.

Top 10 Artists
1. Michael Giacchino (1,827 plays)
2. The White Stripes (882 plays)
3. Philip Glass (698 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (637 plays)
5. Bear McCreary (571 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer (530 plays)
7. Ludovico Einaudi (501 plays)
8. U2 (374 plays)
9. Matthew Good (296 plays)
10. Florence + the Machine (290 plays)

Bear McCreary is knocked off the top spot in place of Lost composer Giacchino. Like my search queries above indicated, I really wanted to listen to the season six soundtrack of Lost and listen to it I did. The first season six album was released in August and the second was released in October so there wasn’t much time to shoot it up to the top of the charts.

Overall the number of plays in my “Top 10 Artists” are down from 2009 but I think those plays were distributed to other artists outside of the top 10. I found it difficult to see how many tracks I listened to within the calendar year so I wasn’t easily able to verify this but my listening habits at home, work and on the iPhone all stayed consistent so I would suspect the tracks played stayed similar too.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Michael Giacchino – Life And Death (47 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer – Time (46 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer – Waiting For A Train (44 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Half Remembered Dream (43 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Paradox (43 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer – Radical Notion (39 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer – Dream is Collapsing (38 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – We Built Our Own World (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – 528491 (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Mombasa (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Dream Within A Dream (34 plays)

There are 12 songs listed here but with a five way tie for eighth I had to include the extras. Guess which soundtrack I listened to a lot this year? The non-Inception Zimmer song was from the second disc of The Dark Knight soundtrack, which got a lot of plays when I discovered its existence in February.

There weren’t as many flights in 2010 as there were in 2009, but there were passport stamps in England, Paris and Iceland.

I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 14,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times. I didn’t file a single police report this year but I did have someone threaten civil action against me.

Including this entry I wrote 42 blog posts in 2010, I made 610 tweets and one Facebook status update. In July 2008 I talked about my fears of using Twitter and the decline in blogging, and I think you can be active on both…if you make the effort to do so. Unfortunately, I rarely tweet and I rarely blog.

I don’t think my lack of tweets and blog updates are related, I think it’s just that I have been busy and don’t have enough time to fill a 140 character space with my thoughts let alone write a several hundred word update. I wrote a few posts in December to catch up on what I had been meaning to write in November so if I can write a few posts a month in 2011 I’ll consider myself active.

I sent roughly 420 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 70 from my @hotmail.com address. I made two orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com none from amazon.co.uk and two with monoprice.com. I thought I ordered more online this year but I guess they were through other methods besides Amazon.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 7,850 photos with two different cameras this year. 7.65% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,350 actuations and the Canon 5D had 2,500 actuations.

2010 is in the books, 365 days until I count it down all over again.

Over the last year I have noticed my musical preferences change. I still enjoy my top artists but instrumental music was becoming more popular. I became more dependant on soundtrack scores from Zimmer, McCreary or Giacchino. I went deeper into Philip Glass’ discography finding great enjoyment in Mishima.

When I wanted a change of pace and listened to something with lyrics I went folk with The Rural Alberta Advantage, The Wooden Sky, The Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons but I was becoming more dependant on music without words.

After taking up Wendy’s advice on Fabrizio Paterlini I would spend days at work listening to music and not listen to a single song with words in it. Paterlini was a logical step to where I ended up last week, but I got there for an unrelated reason.

I haven’t been in a musical funk, I enjoy what I have but I didn’t know what was missing until Taylor sent me a link to Ludovico Einaudi. He came across Einaudi while listening to the last.fm radio and thought I would like the song. The song was “Fly” and it had a “Metamorphosis One” (Philip Glass) and “Everyday” (Carly Comando) feel to it and I was in love.

I got Einaudi’s two most recent albums, but when I heard the first seventy seconds of “Lady Labryinth” everything stopped. This song spoke to me on some other dimension and I knew I loved it. There was no hesitation in rating the song five and submitting a “Love” to last.fm before the song even ended, I just knew.

The next few days I jumped between Einaudi’s Divenire and Nightbook, slowly expanding out to his earlier work. There were some beautiful solo piano pieces, earlier work may be a little more unpolished and less engaging but still amazing all the same. Taylor continued exploring on last.fm and exposed me to Roberto Cacciapaglia by way of “Oceano“.

In a few short days I had narrowed in on minimalist piano and string quartet Italian composers that made some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard and I’m sure this will carry me further on my piano listening adventures.

Since Christopher Nolan finished work on The Dark Knight I have been patiently waiting to see what he would do next and while the details for this movie were slow to emerge last summer I was excited at the prospect of something. Now that trailers and plot summaries are released I’m full throttle looking forward to this.

As if I needed more convincing, the soundtrack is being scored by Hans Zimmer, who is one half of the dynamic duo that has done Nolan’s two previous Batman films.

If I don’t put this link somewhere I’ll forget it. This is the from Zack Hemsey who composed, recorded, and mixed the song used in the third Inception trailer. It’s amazing and if it’s an indication as to what the full soundtrack will sound like then this movie will be even more incredible.

Still, I was using an instrument way out of my league and only reinforced the adage that the musician makes the guitar, not the other way around. This is something I have had to remind myself when I look at cameras with a several thousand dollar price tag.

I had been contemplating selling the guitar since the middle of 2008, and when I was unable to find anyone I knew to buy it the guitar was posted on Kijiji. Perhaps as a way of saying I shouldn’t sell it, it took some time to find a serious buyer.

I had several offers for a trade but only had two people show actual interest in buying it for money. The ad was on Kijiji for thirteen, maybe fourteen months, maybe more. Every three months I would get an ad expiration notice and I would repost it, bumping the ad to the top of the pages, receive the random email of interest here or there but that was it. Selling a $2,000 instrument in Edmonton was quite a challenge, but it’s a high end instrument that has a niche market so I understand that it took a while for the right buyer to come along.

I didn’t need to sell the guitar, but I wasn’t playing it and I could put the money towards other areas. I originally wanted to sell the guitar to buy a DSLR and a Playstation 3. Both of those items sorted themselves out before the end of 2008 so the sale of the guitar would go towards paying their purchase off or other bills.

The gentleman who bought the guitar gave the H-550 a workout, something it has been deprived of for too long, and it sounded amazing. Hearing a guitar you love perform a swan song was incredibly bittersweet. I thought that I had made the wrong decision, but in the last year and a half the Heritage never sounded as good as it did then. It is going to a better place and to an owner who knew the level of craftsmanship the instrument had and treat the guitar right.

When I closed the Kijiji ad I noticed that I had 1337 views, which felt like a nice way to end the sale.

I have seen the Under Great White Northern Lights documentary several times now and there is something powerful and haunting about how the movie concludes. Ben Blackwell tells Jack and Meg that after a decade together they can still pick up their original instruments and be as if nothing has changed. Then Jack looks over to Meg who returns the look, they share a glance and then Meg looks away and fade to white, the interview is over.

The piano performance of White Moon to close the documentary is amazing. The story goes that after their 10th anniversary show in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, after the celebrations and after parties Jack found a piano and started playing it. I was amazed at the passion that came across and how the song ends. It was a surprise to me and I certainly don’t want to spoil anything, but after a powerful, loud and intense 90 minute movie this quiet and intimate end was stunning.

On my re-watch of the documentary I continued watching through the credits and when they got to the ‘thank you’ all but four cities from the 2007 tour were thanked, including Edmonton.

I was a big fan of the Under Nova Scotia Lights concert. I had listened to the audio rip of the DVD prior to watching the video so I knew what to expect, but this just goes to show that seeing is believing. What I thought were average performances of songs on the audio were elevated to another level when I saw the video. The several minute tease of Death Letter made more sense when you saw Jack tuning the Kay guitar. I will never tire of seeing Jack and Meg interact on stage, the glances and nods signalling when one song changes into another.

A nice moment happened between the person doing bagpipes on Prickly Thorn was after his solo he looked at Jack as if to say “I’m good, your turn” and Jack gave him an approving look back. The subtleties, the things that an audio recording can never show made this concert really special. If a show has Astro, Death Letter, Black Math and Boll Weevil it is guaranteed to be good, but when you include Aluminum, Brick House Wood House and Lafayette Blues then it goes into a different category of awesome.

Enough of that, let’s talk packaging! The way this boxset is put together deserves a Grammy in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category. Everything about this is top notch and puts my Battlestar Galactica boxset to incredible shame. The 208 page hardcover photography book is amazing and captured the on-stage and off-stage moments so well.

One thing is obvious: the amount of vinyl I have I need to add a record player to the stereo system as soon as we relocate into a house so I can experience all of this in a new way again.

I paid my $3USD one-time fee for a months access and immediately downloaded my “Tag Tube”.

It looked neat on the surface, but I was a little disappointed to see what it only went back as far as April 2008. Still, there are ebbs and flows with my listening habits and this map does a good job of representing that. See the last twenty months of my last.fm tags in Underground Tube format here.

There is not much to glean from this, but it looks like the tagging system is a little off because Matthew Good appears under “Alternative Rock” and “Canadian”. Both are accurate tags but I feel that if they had went with one over the other then MG would have had a more consistent presence in my Tubes.

Otherwise the information is pretty accurate. The White Stripes usually dominated my listening in any given month, but there were occasional binges with soundtrack scores (as “My Aught Nine Numerical Review” showed). I will investigate the other features of being a Last.fm subscriber, and since listening to their radio does not interest me, I will see if this was a worth while purchase. If not, then I may consider buying again in another 12 months to see how my Tube Tags look.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. google analytics
2. wct
3. weather Edmonton
4. wcf
5. canada post tracking
6. ack attack
7. sean gursky
8. whois seagurs.com
9. virgin festival 2009 calgary
10. petro points

I have two Gmail accounts, one for work and one for personal but my work account does not have Web History enabled so everything that did go through my query appeared above. My busiest month for searching was in January with 489 queries recorded, and my least active month was in July with 117.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.imdb.com
3. www.seagurs.com
4. www.worldcurlingtour.com
5. www.php.net
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.google.com
8. answers.yahoo.com
9. www.youtube.com
10. www.tv.com

I guess these results tell me I was obsessed with the status of seagurs.com (when it was in Redemption Period with 1&1 and waiting to take ownership back) and could never be bothered with bookmarking the Analytics site, or even learning how to spell it correctly. No idea how Virgin Festival made it into my top ten, especially since I did not even consider attending, but it stands as a testament to the year that was.

Top 10 Artists
1. Bear McCreary (2,587 plays)
2. The White Stripes (1,434 plays)
3. U2 (1,387 plays)
4. Matthew Good (877 plays)
5. Philip Glass (777 plays)
6. Bad Religion (726 plays)
7. The Beatles (684 plays)
8. Coldplay (680 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (668 plays)
10. Michael Giacchino (520 plays)

No surprise by this, but maybe the sheer volume that Bear McCreary beat everyone else in the last twelve months is worth mentioning. Not counting the occasional song on Battlestar Galactica that contains lyrics, four of my top ten artists were instrumental and three of those were purely from soundtracks.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis One (124 plays)
2. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Five (123 plays)
3. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Two (111 plays)
4. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Three (104 plays)
5. Regina Spektor – Man of a Thousand Faces (97 plays)
5. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Four (97 plays)
7. Bear McCreary – All Along The Watchtower (77 plays)
8. Bear McCreary – Heeding the Call (74 plays)
9. Bear McCreary – Sonatica (72 plays)
10. Bear McCreary – Passacaglia (65 plays)

Pianos and Bear charge the way. I really enjoy Man of a Thousand Faces, it’s a beautiful song but I didn’t realize that I had listened to it over 3.5 times a week (“Far” was released in June, halfway through the year).

I boarded eight different flights in 2009, flying to London, Marseille, Calgary and Las Vegas. Those eights flights spanned the same number of weeks. Roughly thirty hours of flight time equated to covering a distance of 22,242 kilometres. I drove my VW Jetta TDI 11,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicles 16 times and filed a single police report.

In 2009 I wrote 81 blog posts and I sent roughly 350 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 110 from my @hotmail.com address. I made fifteen orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one from amazon.co.uk and three with monoprice.com.

My rough estimates lead me to believe that I took nearly 7,500 photos with six different cameras. 17% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,300 actuations.

We shall see what 2010 holds, and if my past numbers will continue into the New Year or not. 364 days remain…