I know that some of the visitors of this blog are surprised to find personal stuff in my column every now and then. However, a blog is an online diary, and I do leave here my personal thoughts if I feel like it. This is one of those times. If you are not curious nor interested you are thus advised to visit some other physics-full post, for example this recent one here. In this post I wish to discuss my personal achievements and failures, my highs and lows of the past year.

All in all, 2010 was a good year for me, for several reasons. Let me provide some highlights in random order.

- For the first time, I was given the responsibility to hold a course in subnuclear physics, for 5th year undergraduates (2nd year of Laurea Specialistica in Physics). It took me quite some effort to manage a decent set of lessons, but  I think that I did succeed. Or rather, I like to believe I did.

- I am quite happy to have participated in the analysis, and then the publication, of one of the very first papers on collider physics produced by the CMS collaboration. I believe the internal rules of the CMS collaboration forbid me to even say what paper that was, but I am not breaking any rule if I remain as vague as in the sentence above...

- As a member of the CMS Statistics Committee, a group to which I belong with quite a bit of pride (and an ounce of scare of being inadequate for the task), I did well. My competence on statistical issues is way lower than that of a few of my colleagues, so I had to invest extra energy in this activity in order to justify my presence in the group.

- As an advisor, I followed the works of one undergraduate student and two graduate students. Here I must say I am not totally happy of myself: I could have done more to help them in their analysis. On the other hand, I have always thought that graduate students should demonstrate their capabilities as researchers by working with some independence. Then again, maybe I should have provided more input to them. We will see what happens next year.

- As far as lecturing goes, I can list a few things. I gave two invited seminars (both on Higgs physics), one in Louvain (Belgium) and one in Valencia (Spain); I gave a talk on top physics at the Tevatron in Split (Croatia); I participated in a panel discussion on "what's up with peer review" at ESOF 2010 in Turin (Italy); and I gave two public seminars on particle physics, one in Bassano and one in Tesero.

- for the CDF collaboration I have been an internal reviewer of two analyses; for the CMS collaboration I did the same for one important paper, now published. My reviewing activities actually involve reading and checking the content of each and every paper that the CDF collaboration produces for publication, as a member of the Spokespersons Publication Review Group. This one is a tough commitment, which takes a non negligible part of my working time.

As for blogging, I have summarized things in a former post yesterday. Here, however, I wish to recall that I participated in the "Blogging ICHEP 2010" site with a dozen posts, some of which only appeared there. Lately, I have been asked by a science popularization magazine to write a feature article on the LHC. This will be published in March 2011, so stay tuned if you are nosy enough to want to see what I wrote there. And then, there's a book here, waiting to see the light... I actually do not wish to publish it until my participation in one experiment comes to an end... We shall see how that goes. Ah, and I need to mention here another blogging activity I have started last September: a blog in Greek - a language I have been studying for a couple of years. I wrote about a dozen posts on particle physics there; some of them are translations but the majority can only be found there.