• Paul Downey :: A Vision of The Web in 2008
  Paul has a very nice writeup of what the web holds for us in 2008. With a bit of sarcasm and a load of humor he wrote the best prediction I’ve seen so far.
  (tags: 2008 predictions web web2.0 socialnetworking lifestream)
• DataPortability.org - Share and remix data using open standards
  This initiative is fairly new, and I first heard Ian talk about it during BarcampLondon3. The site is now up and i will be keeping an eye on it.
  (tags: standards openid microformats rss oauth data)
• Microsoft Silverlight: The Dark Side Of The Moon
  Interesting piece by a Mozilla hacker that quickly explains why even though solutions like Moonlight (Silverlight for BSD) exist, this isn’t any good unless MS really opens up.
  (tags: linux microsoft opensource silverlight moonlight)
• 2007: The Year in Photos: Vanityfair
  Very nice photos depicting the most influential people of 2007, including Stephen Colbert and Barack Obama
  (tags: photography vanityfair 2007 photos)
• iWorkCommunity: Template Exchange
  As I switched to iWork for all my documenting, I was happy to see this community around iWork that even exchanges templates.
  (tags: iwork mac apple templates pages osx software)

[lang_en]
Playing around with the statistics of the last year on the exchange rate between the £ and € I noticed something I already kind of knew but was surprised to see visualized: life became cheaper last year!
[/lang_en]

[lang_nl]
Na wat zitten spelen met de statistieken over de koers tussen de Euro en de Engelse Pond van het afgelopen jaar viel mij iets op wat ik al een tijdje wist: het leven is het afgelopen jaar ietswat goedkoper geworden voor ons.
[/lang_nl]

[lang_en]
As our money is still on Dutch (and therefore in €) bank accounts, the drop in exchange rate above was simply ideal. In the last year the £ dropped from €1.55 to about €1.34, which is a drop of about 13%. To make this a more concrete example: it saves us €125 a month in rent. Obviously this still means we pay a lot of rent because London is expensive, but at least it now is a bit less painful.

Hopefully this drop will continue in 2008.
[/lang_en]

[lang_nl]
Aangezien ons geld nogsteeds in Euros op Nederlandse rekeningen staat, was de bovenstaande daling dus perfect. In het laatste jaar is de Engelse Pond gedaald van €1.55 naar €1.34, wat een daling is van ongeveer 13%! Om wat duidelijker te maken wat dit betekent zal ik zeggen dat ons dat alleen al €125 per maand aan huur scheelt. Nu betalen we natuurlijk dus nogsteeds belachelijk veel huur, want London is duur, maar het is in ieder geval iets minder pijnlijk.

Hopelijk zet deze daling zich voort in 2008.
[/lang_nl]

• Runner’s World - Beginnersschema 1
  My starters schedule for jogging the next 12 weeks. Hoping this will “work” for me.
  (tags: running, schedule, tips)

So I stumbled across this handy tip on MacOSXHints.com describing how you can use the Stocks Widget to give you the current exchange rates between for example the Euro and the Dollar. The cool thing is that this widget comes with Leopard, Tiger and best of all the iPhone, which means that this hack works even when you are on the road!

Just add codes like these below to your widget and they will be recognized:

GBPUSD=X (for £UK to $USD rate)
GBPEUR=X (for £UK to €EUR rate)
EURUSD=X (for €EURto $USD rate)

This works because the Stock Quote widget uses the Yahoo! Finance site in the backend. Go there for more currency codes.

[More hacks for the Stocks Widget]

After reading Melinda’s and Ian’s New Year’s resolutions on their blogs, I decided that it might be interesting for me to document my resolutions too. If not for your interest, at least for my personal motivation.

• Get my MSc Degree: I should have gotten my degree by now, but somehow London has kept me to busy last year.
• Work on my health: I haven’t gained weight in the last year, but this doesn’t mean I feel better. I will have to start eating healthier, although I don’t think that’s the main problem, which actually is: sport. I really need to get my ass moving and away from my laptop. I bought some running shoes and had my first 1.5km run today. Did it in 9 minutes and was completely dead after it. Let’s see if I can keep this up and do this twice a week, and so slowly increase the distance to maybe 3km and beyond.
• Organize events: Since arriving in London almost a year ago (yes, it’s almost a year now) I have been going to Barcamps, GeekDinners, GirlGeekDinners, all organized by great people with too much of a philanthropic nature. So this year I want to go and help people organize events, starting with helping Ian with the GeekDinners, and maybe even eventually help/organize a Barcamp-like-event.
• Read more books: I love reading books, but somehow I never get to doing it. I am not a very fast reader (especially not in comparison to Melinda), but recently I discovered Audiobooks on the iPhone. Especially the option to speedup the audio s simply brilliant. On my list to read for now are Freakonomics, Fooled by Randomness, Wheel of Time - Part 6 to 12, I am Legend, and many more.
• Wake up earlier and more regularly: This goes partly together with my plan to sport, but it is also simply more handy to wake up at regular times. Yesterday I was up until 4am, which meant I didn’t really wake up before 12pm.