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After seeing Ben’s excellent post wrapping up 2009 with some photos and links to some awesome happenings in his life, I’m just going to have to do the same as we chill this afternoon with some bowl games, pre-NYE dinner.

I started off ‘09 by getting (well, until the wedding) out of my “old” debt that had been racked up over the years, and parted ways (well, officially) with what had been my most successful blog to date, The Media Drop. Soon after, I found myself contributing to Google’s bottom line, getting a column with PRWeek online, and complaining about my car getting broken into again.

May and June were frantic months, as I headed out to LA for the MTV Movie Awards (huge shout outs to the MTV crew – miss you all!), which was just amazing, followed by leading the press charge on the launch of MTV’s “It’s On with Alexa Chung,” my first live, daily show that I got to be a part of, and the cause of my addiction to the Overheard in the Control Room Facebook group.

Lara and I got married on June 20, had a great time at Whistler in Canada, and had to come back to a home state that didn’t have pitchers of Kokanee Gold for our beer-drinking pleasure. Oh, and Lara made this impromptu “commercial” for the Fairmont in Seattle before we headed home from the honeymoon. I realized that I had a sports talk radio addiction, one that has carried forth to my time in Seattle, got to see a ton of my favorite artists on “It’s On” over the summer, including the Silversun Pickups. Prepping for the VMAs was a little crazy as we knew that the move to the Emerald City was coming in just a few months, and summer was coming to a close. I got my VMAs on, Phoenix put a great spin on a Cadillac commercial (sorry, I miss writing AdJab), and we shared the news that Seattle was on the horizon at the end of October.

Drinking like “Mad Men” characters was proven impossible, we drove across the country and saw some awesomeness in a lot of states, including South Dakota, and I realized that my brand new iPhone 3Gs was pretty much the same size as the cellphone I had in 1998.

This past month or so, I finished a year of taking a daily photo of myself and started a new one, Nike put some ads on TV that rivaled, at least in my head, those awesome “nothing but net” commercials that McDonald’s did in the early 90’s, and I certainly verified that my musical tastes are a little random.

There’s lots of awesomeness to look forward to in 2010, as my new employer has given me an amazing opportunity to hit the ground running here in Seattle, Lara and I are both getting used to the West Coast, and Molly the Super Puppy Face has decided that she wanted to hang around and torment Riff the Cat, so we’ll see how that goes.

And since I have no shame and just have to follow Ben Wagner’s lead on this – he has, after all, led the crew that’s turned MTV News into a visitor and pageview power in our digital age – here are some of my favorite photos from this past year, for your viewing pleasure.

Mount Rushmore at night

Lara and I meeting Tom Douglas in Seattle

Hanging our first picture in the new place

Riding the Peak 2 Peak in Whistler, BC

Picking up my second VMA

Our wedding in June

Seeing some awesome bands (Snowglobe, pictured) at SXSW in Austin

Working with Craig Brewer on MTV’s $5 Cover and going to Sundance

Going to (almost) the top of Mount Washington

Seeing Kings of Leon rehearse before the Movie Awards

Ruining multiple corkscrews of @jonsel’s parents’ on the 4th of July

Molly at Camano Island State Park

It’s almost 2010 (wow!), and here’s my links you need to click for the day. Enjoy!

• Congrats to Ben and Abbi Wagner on the news of Abbi’s pregnancy. Of course, Ben writes it up in his news-guy style, keeping you waiting until the end, even if you did look at the photo first.
• After Dave busted on me for my top 25-played tracks that were born in the year of our lord 2009, I just had to link to this. Rex points to what last.fm sez are the most unwanted scrobbles – that is, the ones most deleted from last.fm users’ scrobble lists – for 2009. Let’s just say you’re probably not going to be surprised.
• For those of you that aren’t so into the cult of the blog, this post from Wil Wheaton is a perfect example of why it’s awesome that they exist in the first place. Just replace Mr. Wheaton (or don’t, if TNG does it for you) with a musician, actor, politician of your choice, and imagine that they were side-commenting their own career or history, and you’ll see what I mean.
• A couple of weeks back, Twitter released a list of the Top Twitter Trends of 2009. Those of you who get annoyed at my non-100% support of hashtags for all things on Twitter will note that beyond the hashtag-specific category, only 7 made the charts, overall, with real-text taking the cake for the most part. Again, this isn’t to say that they don’t work, only that the “average” user tends to stick to talking in actual words. Just sayin’.
• Check out Brand New’s Best and Worst Identities for 2009 here.
• Did you know that you could use multiple aliases for a given email address on your iPhone? But yes, you can. Here’s the solution for this very request, via Gruber.

Just caught Fred Wilson’s list of top-played tracks of 2009, and I’ll bite on this one with my own.

• Al Kapone – “Gettin’ Mine” – $5 Cover: Memphis
• Asher Roth – “I Love College” – Asleep In The Bread Aisle
• Al Kapone – “We On Deck” – $5 Cover: Memphis
• Phoenix – “1901″ – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
• Jay-Z – “When The Money Goes”
• Phoenix – “Lisztomania” – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Dull Life” – It’s Blitz
• ATB – “A New Day” – Future Memories
• David Guetta feat. Kelly Rowland – “When Love Takes Over”
• Depeche Mode – “Hole To Feed” – Sounds Of The Universe
• Drake – “Forever”
• The Golden Filter – “Solid Gold”
• Jay-Z – “Hate Jay-Z” – The Blueprint 3
• White Lies – “A Place To Hide” – To Lose My Life
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Zero” – It’s Blitz
• The Dream – “Rockin That Shit” – Love Vs. Money
• Kylie Minogue – “Slow” – Boombox
• LMFAO – “La La La” – Party Rock
• Paramore – “Ignorance” – brand new eyes
• Pearl Jam – “Got Some” – Backspacer
• 3OH!3 w/ Katy Perry – “Starstrukk” – Want
• 311 – “Golden Sunlight” – Uplifter
• Amanda Blank – “Make It Take It” – I Love You
• Amy LaVere – “Killing Him” – $5 Cover: Memphis
• La Roux – “In For The Kill” – La Roux

Fan of Christmas (or Nike, for that matter) or not, you’ve gotta love the Christmas-themed spots featuring the MVPuppets that Nike’s currently running on TV right now. Check out the series, which kicks off with Blitzen (or Lupe Fiasco) throwing some beef Santa’s way, followed by Santa’s response (via the ever-awesome KRS-One), and finally Kobe and LeBron dunkin’ on some reindeer (dunk…dunk…dunkin’ on some reindeer).

Here’s the whole series:

Some awesome tidbits: “Santa lookin’ shook, Kobe lookin’ shook, LeBron lookin’ shook, I threw your ball on the roof.” Check for Santa’s “NP” jacket and LeBron’s “rap” around 1:30 in the third vid, too.

Here’s today’s batch of links you need to click, including some I’ve sat on for a little bit.

• Over at bats:both, I shared some thoughts on the passing of sportscaster George Michael.
• Time Out New York published some link bait for the entire universe by publishing their list of top movies of the decade. I’ll save the wrath of pen (or keyboard) for some of my blogger colleagues, but there’s some brutal choices on there. The “Donnie Darko” fan club will not be happy.
• If they had Facebook in the “Star Wars” universe, it might look something like this.
• I must admit, I spent a ton of time looking over these pager messages from 9/11/01. [via reddit]

This has apparently been around for a couple of months, but I’m just catching it. Check out the team-up of Katy Perry and 3OH!3 for the band’s “Starstrukk” single, with a twist. It’s part of the soundtrack for the upcoming “When In Rome” flick that stars Kristen Bell.

Last week, I headed out to the Apple Store to purchase the mophie juice pack air to give my phone significantly more battery than my iPhone 3Gs offers up. The mophie products had come highly recommended by iJustine when I’d had a conversation with her earlier this year in LA, and a few others have chimed in with similar thoughts on the subject.

But after picking it up, I noticed that the size and heft of my iPhone wearing the juice pack air had a similar resemblance to something else I once owned — my first cellphone, back in 1998. That phone, which ran on the Cellular One network in central New Jersey, was the Philips Spark. The Spark was about 5″ tall by 2.2″ wide by .9″ deep. My iPhone 3Gs is now 4.9″ x 2.59″ x .75″. Amusingly, the Spark, which I thought was mega heavy at the time, weighed 129 grams, or about 4.55 ounces. My 3Gs, without the mophie, weighs about 4.76 ounces, and with it weighs about 7.42 ounces. Back in ‘98, I was pulling in 6 hours of talk time and 350 hours of standby on the standard GSM network, as opposed to 5 hours of talk time on the 3G and 300 hours of standby, or somewhere around 7-9 of talk time with the mophie.

WTF.

Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my iPhone and wouldn’t trade it in for anything at this point, but at the time, I had friends ragging the hell out of me for choosing that as my first phone. I had no problem with its heft or size – I actually liked it more that way. Soon after, I traded up for various Nokia, Motorola, or Samsung models, which got progressively smaller as time went on. But here I am, 11 years later, having spent the last two years rocking the iPhone, which absolutely slays the technology in my first phone, and obviously wins on form factor, but still takes up the same space in my pocket. Oh, and I’m paying A LOT more out of pocket to use it, and it’s become a part of my existence in some ways — as opposed to something that was helpful to have but wasn’t exactly getting abused, considering what it cost to have minutes every month.

So I guess the question is, where are priorities right now — size (or is thickness the only real measurement of importance?), cost, or straight up abilities that your phone offers? Should I be surprised that one of the parts of the phone decision-making process has come full circle, and that Apple and others aren’t worried a lick about it? What about you? What kind of cellphones did you start off with?

Well, I heard some funny things on Twitter last night from friends on the East Coast who’d already caught SNL, and figured I’d share something that I got a kick out of with the rest of you, if you haven’t already seen it. Oh, it’s prolly not safe for work… Get ready for Andy Samberg and ummm “Reba McEntire” like you’ve never seen.

Woke up in South Dakota this morning, and I’m pretty sure that it’s Tuesday, which is a good thing. That whole “I’m not really working this week” thing kind of throws you off, I suppose.

In any case, we’re going to be leaving Rapid City, South Dakota shortly, and will be heading through Wyoming, plan on stopping at some General Custer-related things, seeing Devil’s Tower (I’ll let you know if Richard Dreyfuss is seen in the area, or if any mashed potato-related incidents happen), and getting into Montana later today. We’ve gotten a ton of suggestions of things to stop at here in South Dakota throughout the Black Hills and such (Thanks Emily, Brett, Bob, and I could go on!), and are kind of taking a good pace from here on in as our goal is to hit Seattle sometime on Thursday afternoon.

In the meantime, we’ve got a few hundred photos of our trip up on Flickr so far, with a stack to come later on today, including some crazy shots at Mount Rushmore. Missing all of our friends and fam in NYC, and a huge shout to my MTV fam – definitely missing you guys on a daily basis! More to come as we cross further into the West.

Rick Klau just tweeted about a Mashable story that there was no chance I would avoid here on the blog. Yep, that’s right, another “balloon boy” spoof, this time going the “I’m On A Boat” route. It’s NSFW. Without further ado, here’s “I’m In A Box”

Enjoy that.