Things that made me happy this morning:

• Finally being home and online again (blackberry helps, but also hurts)
• Getting £750 payback from Scottish Power as I have used much less gas than they anticipated (well, I am hardly at home)
• Todd Kloots from Yahoo explaining in detail how to set up a screen reader testing environment
• Steve Souders explaing all about coupling asynchronous scripts
• John Resig asking developers to file browser bugs – as it is their responsibility
• Tech Crunch seriously considering a buggy Doogie Howser Twitter skin/app newsworthy – it means I don’t have to feel bad for not finding much.
• Scoring awesome tickets for Monkey – journey to the west this Sunday (while suffering terrible usability issues on the ticketmaster site, seriously, this is borderline unacceptable!)
• Furthermore I can has Cheezburger is pronouncing that we are all doomed:

Time to go to the gym to work on those lazy bones.

(Normally I tend not to write any personal posts here, but hey, why not?)
It is the end of the year and time for new year’s resolutions. Luckily I had a great year and did most of the things I planned to do (the classics like losing weight, cleaning up the flat, changing my work and so on) worked out swimmingly. I gave a lot of talks, trained a lot of people, re-invented my job and organized my own event. All in all I am very happy about all that.

So then, for the coming year I’ve just written an article for Digital Web that will be released in the new year that covers a lot of my thoughts on what I want to do. Generally I am seeing harsh times ahead – people are spooked out by the financial recession and the short time fixes (yes, layoffs). This means to me that I am planning to do a few things differently to give myself space to work with colleagues and contacts to get through this.

My laundry list for the year:

• be more moderate – I can get very cross about things that in the big picture are not of that much importance (this has improved constantly over the last few years though)
• concentrate my work on markets and environments I hadn’t covered much this year – specifically universities as environments and South East Asia as markets (I am already scheduled for 3 university hack days in the US and India and plan to find more Hong Kong/China/Signapore/Australia/Taiwan/Korea assignments)
• finish my work for the Opera Web Standard Curriculum (sorry Chris, I have delayed a lot)
• write (or at least start) another book – this time for O’Reilly
• look closer at my finances (I am terrible at that)
• turn my flat into more of a home than a place to change suitcases
• take Scripting Enabled more on the road. Somehow the “go forth and do it” doesn’t work that well…
• clean out icant.co.uk ;)

Let’s see how I will succeed.

I am currently in the German countryside to see my family and old school friends. My brother’s internet connection is actually trained weasels carrying the things I type on 5.1/4” floppy disk to the next internet hub and I need to write everything in their beautiful but hard language.

Therefore I am not answering emails, will only twitter from Blackberry and generally try out this offline “life” thing for a few days.

Merry Christmas ya’ll!

cheers
Chris

Things that made me happy this morning (evening, afternoon? what do I know, jetlagged and confused):

• The Videos of Paris Web talks are now available – most of them in French, but two in English. In any case awesome content, check them out! Amazing “bang for your buck” conference, that one.
• Opera’s “Mother” Henny Swan talks about the state of the accessible web 2008
• One of the cooler thinks Henny talks about is Project:Possibility, an Open Source initiative to build accessible software. Check out the awesome favicon on that one! 5.1/4” floppy with wheelchair FTW!
• While “us Brits” (well, I can play now, can’t I?) had a good insight into who represents us in parliament via they work for you for quite a while now, the New York Times hackers brought the same convenience to the unwashed masses via Represent. I love the clear look of it!
• I’ve been to my first Mozilla Labs Meetup and it was great – especially after the Manhattan mixed by Brendan Eich…
• To round things up, I am very happy that someone set a record for Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute so I don’t have to.

Paris Web – one of my favourite conferences last year – just released all the videos of the presentations. Most of the presentations are in French, but mine is in English:

• Download and watch the presentation on SlideShare

In the talk I advocated re-using components and systems we already have to work faster, deliver better and have less hardware and software overhead in doing so.

These are:

• Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
• CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
• Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
• Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
• Page widgets (things that HTML doesn’t have): YUI, jQuery UI
• Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
• YouTube API
• Amazon S3 for storage
• Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
• Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
• Mechanical Turk