Merry Christmas everyone!

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and all the best for 2009! Here’s the Definition Christmas card (my small web design agency).

Definition: a very merry Christmas - with cartoon Christmas tree

Also available as a free desktop wallpaper.

This year has been a great one for many reasons, aside from the momentous victory of the USA’s first black president:

Professionally

The small web design agency I started over 5 years ago has gone from strength to strength, and particularly this year seems to have been even better than the previous ones. My clients seem to have gone a bit global, working on websites for folks as far afield as Greenland, Australia and the Middle East, as well as for high profile clients within the NHS and education.

I’m thoroughly enjoying more than ever the role I’ve worked so hard to forge for myself these last few years. I certainly barely remember being a teacher now, seems so long ago.

My personal skillset has increased a great deal too, taking time to really get to grips with jQuery and develop some advanced ninja ExpressionEngine skills. I’ve been using EE since 2004 and am very much looking forward to v2.0.

Personally

It’s been more ‘all work and no play’ than ever before this year, which I intend to get to grips with next year. Having said that, I’ve been loving getting back into recording again recently, having invested in Logic, some decent-ish monitors and the muchos funos Toneport UX2.

I’ve fulfilled a long-standing ambition to take singing lessons too, and am really starting to see results, as well as cranking up the songwriting too, after a good long break. It feels good.

Social media blah blah blah

The biggest change personally has been the effect social media has had on my relationships. I’d always resisted the lure of Twitter and Facebook strongly, to my regret. Twitter has become a constant source of amusement, humour, assistance with web development problems, and new friendships, while Facebook has brought me back in contact and kept me in touch with more people than I could possibly imagine.

In that sense, social media has made 2008 a great year all round.

Read this book

Best book I’ve read this year: hands down, it’s Wasted by Mark Johnson. I urge you to grab a copy as fast as you can, you won’t regret it. I rarely have the experience of simply not being able to put a book down, but to say this one affected me deeply would be an understatement. You can thank me later.

Apple

The Apple Mac is such an integral part of everything I do it’s hard to ignore how excited I’ve been about some developments this year. The iPhone continues to shine, of course.

Dropbox has been a very recent revelation, leading me to ditch using Jungle Disk and my own Amazon S3 bucket, at least for now. The ability to have shared app databases (e.g. iPhoto, Things, etc.) across all my machines is nothing short of miraculous.

Speaking of Things: that application continues to take pride of place as THE master piece of software that keeps my world organised and under control. I still cannot praise it enough.

I haven’t been as impressed in a long time as I have been with Spotify over the last week or so. I’ll be writing more on it soon, but just to say for now that I truly think it’s the internet music revolution we’ve all been waiting for. It truly makes my head spin.