As we approach the Christmas break, most technology blogs are publishing their personal lists of what really mattered in 2011. I just tweeted TechCrunch’s Top 20 iOS Apps, where I fully agree on the first position given to Flipboard and I decided to give Snapseed a try.

That’s the essence of it: end-of-the-year lists give you a chance to appreciate the good things you got and to catch up with what you missed.

However, I believe it’s also important to look back at the lessons one has learnt the hard way. Perhaps 2011 will be remembered as the year when people started truly realizing the unsustainability of an economic system where Asia buys the debt of Western countries to keep them consuming beyond their means and purchasing products made in Asia, in a meaningless race that is trashing the world and making us feel increasingly unfulfilled.

I don’t know if we’ll still have a Euro currency in one year’s time, but either way I hope we’ll be able to start tossing out the unhealthy excesses that globalization has brought to us.

I’ve written about The Story of Stuff before. Today I’d like to follow up by pre-embedding The Story of Technology, focused on the market I love and where so much could be done to protect our only world… without missing any of the great fun we’re having!

As a teenager I briefly entered the world of competitive swimming with relatively little success. Most notably, I quit without breaking the wall of 1 minute on the 100 freestyle and I then rarely swam in a pool for the following ten years.

That’s why the assessment of my last five years of Master Swimming (2006 – 2011) goes beyond any expectation: I haven’t simply broken all my previous personal records and swum 100 freestyle in 56 seconds. More importantly, I’ve found the experience of being a late achiever incredibly rewarding and motivating.

Triathlon is the next challenge I want to take up.

It’s a far tougher one, with two disciplines (especially cycling) sitting completely out of my comfort zone. The fact that I’d like to progressively move all the way up to long distance events doesn’t help either, because even in swimming my best performances have always been in the area of 100 / 200 meters. I need to completely reset myself as an athlete… or perhaps to turn into an actual one. I can’t help myself though: I’ve got the bug!

A brand-new Tumblr blog called “The Tri Bug” will be my online mirror of this new path. Its latest posts are shown in the right column of this web site, some more are hosted on this page of my web site and the complete archive is accessible at TriBug.tumblr.com.