I am right now sitting at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London on my way outbound to a two week stint in the Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale/Mountain View) to meet with the US team. And here are the things that made me happy this morning:

• Ian Pouncey continues to put together good thought-pieces on accessibility with Web Accessibility Myths.
• Robert O’Callahan talks Video, Freedom and Mozilla and debunks some H264 myths.
• In case you feel like beeping, there is a cool online Morse Code translator
• The back side of a Mozilla business card finally reveals the truth about how websites work – I knew that there were monkeys and gerbils involved!
• The Royal Pingdom has a good roundup of The Internet 2009 in numbers – guess where most of the Internet users are from?
• Vimeo has a new HTML5 video player and you can kick its tyres.
• Liz Danzico wrote a wonderful piece called confidence for good on how making a leap of faith in your career is sometimes very necessary.
• UK House Prices, my entry to the data.gov.uk application showcase went down really well on the day of the release and got about 5000 hits on the first day. Now to pester the UK government to do more YQL and expect less SPARQL.
• Constructing a POUR web site has some very solid advice on how to build a good web site. I am tired of people shoe-horning new acronyms though. POSH was a bad idea, so was HIJAX. Not because of what they stand for but for giving a way out. Hearing sentences like “yeah the solution is bad now, but we will go for a POSH one soon” or “this will be redesign with HIJAX in mind at a later stage” make me want to scream – an I heard both several times.
• We have a winner of most inappropriate prank in a job ad – hands-down.
• ReadWriteWeb have a good open thread on Sexy Girls, Smart Women and Tech (and I am already looking forward to the referrers linking to this link)
• How programmers of different languages view each other and How a common LISP programmer views users of other languages both have poster potential for the office.

(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.