Happy New Year everyone!

It is a tradition to look at the year that is about to pass, isn't it? So I figured I would bombard you with some statistics...

• I exercised over 200 times this year. Not that it made me particularly fit but at least I am in better shape then ever before.
• I worked approx. 2 extra work months this year. Will I never become wiser?
• I finished 28 book. This is a record low and I blame the two items above.
• I read books from 13 countries. 16 written by men, 12 by women. And there I just exposed one of my obsessions...
• I visited 11 countries this year, 5 new ones, and Asia for the first time. Thumbs up for that one!
• I flew at least 73,859 km. I will go to environmental hell for sure!
• I got upgraded to business class three times (+ one upgraded hotel room) and made my "friends" hate me.
• I was away from home because of travel approx 68 days.
• I only passed 4 out of 10 New Year's Resolution.

But life isn't just statistics. To really figure out what I have been doing this year I decided to go through my Facebook profile and look at what I was doing when I wasn't working, exercising, or reading. This is what I found:

I started the year with "big" plans. In January I stated I had a new mission in life. Become rich enough to afford a personal shopper to take care of annoying clothes shopping! In February my plans grew into starting some evil money-making religion since the government seemed eager to protect religion from any criticism. In March it really took off and I decided to say yes to everything and wait for exciting things to happen. Oh man did that one come and bite me later...

April was quiet but I learned two important lessons: to not place my coffee cup under the automatic antibacterial soap dispenser and to always check the content of the web pages you use in a demo. Otherwise you might send out stuff about "man boobies" and such...

In May, saying yes to everything got me a trip to San Fransisco where I spent most of my time eating cold medicines and becoming addicted to Starbucks. In June I finished my exercise New Year's Resolution to exercise on average twice a week and got nickname together with the boyfriend at the gym as "the Sporty couple". How tacky is that?

In July, the "yes" thing really went downhill and July's Facebook status messages were mostly bitching about late night marathon telcos and not seeing the summer. Not that I learned from this. In August I said yet another yes which brought me to Japan. There I got to know gadget toilets, cubicle meeting rooms and girls that all wore shoes they couldn't walk on. Very interesting cultural experience.

In September, another yes brought me to Korea where I discovered the wonders of Korean cuisine and how frustrating it is that you can't easily scrape your plate with chopsticks. October was spent in a windy country where the waterfall would go upwards because of crazy weather and in room at a seminar with 500 other geeks and not feeling particularly unique. November was then spent joking about the swine flu which had spread like wildfire among all those geeks.

In December I was just cold. So cold that I contemplated risking burning to death rather then going outside when the fire alarm went off...

Eventful year huh? :)

And now I am gonna work on my New Year's Resolution! Stay tuned for the silly idea I got to keep myself insanely busy in 2010...

To try to kick start my blogging again I will use the opportunity of blogging about what I have been working out lately.

First of all now you can download a new modern beta version of Opera Mini 5 with a shiny new user interface. Or watch the video to get a preview.

Second of all you can watch a video of a widget demo for TVs that I also worked on. Just to make sure you start fantasizing about browsing on your
TV!

And then lets see if I manage to put something out here that doesn't involve work :) .

Ever tried to browse on a phone with a touch screen and felt the urge to use a pencil sharpener on you finger to be able to click links? Or wanted to throw your phone out the window when you realized that you yet again managed to click the wrong link despite carefully aiming with that one nail that is a millimeter longer than the others? Opera has now introduced a feature called Opera
Fingertouch that will take all your frustrations away.

In short, it grows links that you tap close to if there are multiple links nearby. You can then easily tap the link you wanted to open. It also makes form controls bigger and easier to interact with. So to sum up more user friendly browsing on touch devices.

But I might be a little biased so see for yourself :). If you have an UIQ phone you will find a beta version available for download. For the ones without a UIQ device there is a YouTube video you can take a look at.

I had to link to this blog post of Eskil where he posted a copy of the speech he made for the Opera ladies at last years Christmas party.



I love analogies and this one was just at a perfect level of nerdiness, comparing women with the different browsers out there:-). Just beware that you need to know a little about browsers to understand all the jokes.



Speech

Opera 8.0 for Series 60 is finally out. Something I and lots of other people at Opera have been working hard on for a long time.



The browser has a brand new machine (rendering engine) under the hood which will make your general browsing experience a lot smoother.



It also has some changes which will in general increase usability. Color Small-Screen Rendering (CSSR) is introduced, which keeps more of the looks and colors from the desktop version of the site. This makes it easier to know where you are in the page. There are also significant improvements to navigation, scrolling, and form usability.