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2015-01-21: For a Purposeful Life in 2015! (short version)

The Thoeny Family (2014-12-24)

Address: 1022 Belvedere Ln, San Jose, CA 95129, USA Map       Phone: +1-408-255-1477

From Peter

We are very late with this year's seasons greetings - again. Better late than not at all.

2014 was an eventful year again. Ladina is in her second year studying linguistics at the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong. Alexis is in his last year of high school. Gosh, it looks like from next summer on we will be empty-nesters! Alexis decided to study aerospace engineering. He applied to a number of universities in the USA. His first choice is University of Colorado Boulder - because of skiing he said. Alexis continued with his archery. In summer we went to Ohio to the U.S. National Target Championships. Besides launching rockets he also likes to keep up with golf.

My passion is TWiki for 16 years now. My main source of income is consulting on enterprise collaboration, mainly using the TWiki platform. I have two long term clients, as well as other clients on an as-needed basis. We could handle (and need) more clients, the cost of living in the Silicon Valley is very high. TWiki.org has a lot of traffic, we get leads via the open source website. However, the contacts are usually developers and system administrators who like to help themselves. The challenge is to get introduced to management, where we can communicate a higher level message on organizational development and productivity of employees.

The open source TWiki.org community is still relatively small. We have around 100 source code check-ins per month in average. The primary focus continues to be usability and quality. We had a new TWiki-6.0.1 release in October. The dashboard add-on is a popular feature that lets teams create appealing and useful dashboards. We are working on a packaging standard for TWiki applications. My vision is to create a marketplace for TWiki app developers so that we can grow the whole open source ecosystem of TWiki. I invite you to join us!

I am getting more and more hooked on HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. "Quality HDR Photography" is the brand I am building up for my HDR work. Read my photo blog "What is High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing?" if interested in learning how the process works. Flickr is the main site I use to publish my HDR photos - 4700 people now follow my account. If you like my work you can get beautiful HDR photos for your home or office printed on canvas, acrylic glass, or metal.

In Spring we went to the wedding of Shona's niece in Hong Kong. It was beautiful and fun, so much energy! I took many photos, some posted here, more on Flickr, and more to come.

In November I went to my hometown Schuders in the Swiss Alps to celebrate the eightieth birthday of my mom. I chose to spend a lot of time with my mom and partner in Schuders, a tiny village with 40 people. To be easy on my wallet I traveled just a bit to see friends and family in Zurich, Zug and Chur. I certainly took the opportunity to scout out many scenes for HDR photography, some posted here, more posted on Flickr.

I wish you a purposeful 2015, with personal growth, good health, lots of success, and last but not least lots of joy!

From Shona

Dear ALL,

I'm very very happy for the last Christmas and New Year 2015. Thoeny family member of 4 was together to celebrate the big holiday!

We went to San Francisco to watch the New Year Eve fireworks. It was super good this year, super good weather.

It's a wonderful year 4 me. I hope you All have one 2!

Best regards,
Shona

From Ladina (19 years)

I'm wishing everybody a good start for 2015. I'm returning to Hong Kong from spending Christmas in California with my family to finish my second year at HKU. It's been a great experience, and I cannot wait for Chinese New Year this February.

From Alexis (almost 18 years)

I wish everyone had a superb 2014, and hope for a fun-filled, exciting, and prosperous 2015 to come!

Photos from 2014

MOVED TO... Please see our 2015-01-21 letter with many photos from 2014 at http://thoeny.org/letter_2015-01-21.html

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