There are so many things in my daily feed that made me happy today, I had to categorise them:

Work and colleagues – education + accessibility

• Inspiring University students to have a go at hacking and using APIs to build apps that make a change in their lives
• Friend and associate Dirk Ginader publishing his blog post on the YDN blog about Making the Yahoo Currency Converter Screen Reader accessible

That new fella in the white house

• Bush street in San Francisco renamed to Obama Street – I love this city and its people
• Finding out that the new whitehouse.gov is licensed Creative Commons
  bq. Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Geek stuff

• The elecronic playground is a web site dedicated to listing cameos of arcade machines and consoles in film and TV
• YouTube Street Fighter – another YouTube annotations game/hack. Let’s hope this one stays up, not like the Laserdisc Dragon’s Lair walkthrough.

Open source good news and things

• Mozilla Labs going on with Test Pilot – a usability testing platform in Mozilla that will analyze user’s behaviours and publish the findings. No matter how this works out the logo is full of win and I had a great time at the last Mozilla Labs monthly meetup. If you are in the Valley, make sure to visit them!
• Crowbar – a powerful screen scraping library based on Mozilla used for rendering output before converting it (and a cool bar in Tottenham Court Road in London)

Misc

• The State of Georgia’s Department of Revenue asking people to download Adobe Reader in a PDF file – to be fair, it might be that version 8 is needed – still not the best place to ask
• Jay’s friends – a way to announce friends that got made redundant and get them a new job.
• How to learn any language in three months – domo arregato

Last September I was very happy to be able to pull off Scripting Enabled, an accessibility hacking event in London, England. Over two days the speakers, around 150 attendees and 40 hackers educated and learnt about accessibility barriers on the web and – in the case of the hackers – removed some of them.

The event was only possible by partnering with the right people, in this case the Metropolitan University in London, BBC backstage, the Opera Developer Network, JustGiving.com, Channel4 and last but so not the least the Yahoo Developer Network.

The presentation slides of the conference have been available and on SlideShare for quite a while now, and I am proud to announce that the Yahoo Developer Network now hosts all the videos of the talks. Opera provided the full transcriptions of the videos and I will now start publishing them one by one on Scripting Enabled.

The first video is Denise Stephens on Multiple Sclerosis and inclusive Design. Denise talks about the he effects of MS and what it means for web design. She also explains her own project, Enabled By Design which tries to bridge the gap between the design and accessibility world much like Scripting Enabled tries to bridge the gap between the developer and the accessibility world.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Dr. Dre’Ice Cube’s (damn you, sil!) It was a good day as a flow chart
• Denise Stephens talking about MS and design going live
• The idea of first writing the manual and then building the interface
• Being able to fix my twitter user detection script with an inofficial API mentioned by the API developer of twitter on a discussion group!
• My esteemed colleague Ted Drake releasing Insider Food
• A cool tutorial on integrating Django and BOSS
• Andrew Dupont going apeshit about pagination

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Wallace and Gromit’s “A matter of loaf and death” (for the Brits available on iPlayer for others on bittorrent) – I just love the amount of detail the people at Aardman put into their work. Check for example that the cardoor claims “dough to door delivery” and “flour to the people” , the car license plate is “doh nut5” , Piella’s shoes are real Poochi’s and there’s a TankTopMan shop: . All the details are listed on Wikipedia. If you have that much fun with your work, you’ve done something right!
• Braille is 200 years old – let’s celebrate accessibility
• The Videos of Scripting Enabled are ready and uploaded – I am now putting together video pages with the transcriptions and all
• A backup strategy full of win
• CSS Super Scrub a tool that analyzes CSS and removes redundant selectors
• Uncoverr is a pretty cool site uncovering all the other media around a certain book – interviews, videos and such. Doesn’t find me though, maybe it is time for another book.
• Wulffmorgenthaler showing the first ever Bimbo
• I didn’t make the list of sexiest geeks what’s with that?
• Guidedogs are just the start The NYT reports about helper monkeys, miniature horses and parrots!
• Ticket sales for UX London have started. The new event by the dconstruct team.

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.