So what have I done in the past year.  <summary>@media ajax, @media 2008, learned jquery, started playing golf again, rekindled friendships with old college buddies, seen my team play in a european final, been to Barcelona, drank loads of WooWoos (my new and favorite drink)</summary>

Anyway onto the reason behind this creative burst.  I am off to pastures new in my career,  leaving Tesco Personal Finance in 2 weeks time for the position of senior web developer at STV.  I must admit I am disappointed to be leaving TPF as the people I work with are great and the job can be very challenging, however the opportunity my new role presents me is very exciting and looks like theirs is a lot to get my teeth into.  I am really looking forward to the challenges ahead, learning loads of new stuff and the extra time in bed each morning.

See you next year! 

It’s Web Standards conference season again and a time when my own faith in the web development profession is reinstalled just when its taking a post Winter dip. This is the time of year when loads of new techniques are brought to my attention and you get to meet a load of Geeks who enjoy the same things you do. I always leave these conferences thinking “Man I love what I do”

My yearly highlight is a trip to London for @Media in June, its a brilliant couple of days with plenty of interesting talks and lots of boozing afterwards. I have attended the previous 2 years @Media’s and I thought @Media 2005 was better than @Media 2006 because it was more intimate and I like to see the white of the speakers eyes. 2006 was huge and had 2 streams to choose from which always leaves me with some last minute decision making.

The most recent conference I attended was The Highland Fling, it reminded me of @Media 2005, very intimate and had some excellent speakers. I am also slightly biased as the conference was arranged by my friend and former colleague Alan White who is getting his just rewards for some hard work (and hard drinking) over the last few years. @Media 2007 will have a lot to live up to.

Here the way I see my @media day panning out, though to be honest this will likely change on the day:

@media 2007 day 1

• Jesse James Garrett: Beyond Ajax
• Molly E. Holzschlag: The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All
• Nate Koechle: High Performance Web Pages
• Richard Ishida: Designing for International Users: Practical Tips
• Dan Webb: The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu
• Joe Clark: When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem

@media 2007 day 2

• Jon Hicks: How to be a Creative Sponge
• Jeremy Keith: Bulletproof Ajax
• Shawn Lawton Henry: Advancing Web Accessibility
• Tantek Çelik: Microformats, Building Blocks, and You
• Hot Topics Panel

As a Web developer I feel it is important to have my hand in many pies so blogging is something I should definitely be doing. I have taken the route of combining my blog with a site that I intend to develop for drumming up some business so  I will need to watch this closely and see if that’s a good move or not.