It's nearly been six months and already this year has been quite eventful. So much to tell, however, one of the things I've realized this year is to be more private about my life.

Oddly enough, people have come to know me as a stickler for privacy especially by posting plenty of articles about Facebook's practices. To me, it's amazing how much information people stick on Facebook even with the latest privacy problems. I've actually got rid of my account and I have to say it feels quite relieving. So you should all delete your Facebook accounts!

Over the months, I've had plenty of things I've wanted to write about but just haven't had the time to do so, perhaps in the next portion of the year I'll do so. I'll try at least, but I don't know, I'll probably be just as busy.

Until the next blog post... have a good year!

Happy New Year and Happy New Decade!

That's right, it's 2010 folks. 10 years ago everyone was stressing about the infamous Windows y2k bug and many thought the world was going to end. A decade has passed and we're still here alive and kicking. It amazes me how fast time seems to travel as each year passes.

I did a lot during the 2000's, sometimes it amazes me at some of the projects I worked on and the people I met, the friends I have made. Sure, I had my ups and downs in life, but who's life doesn't? Now it's 2010 and the new decade starts I look into it and ask myself, "What's next?" I have my list of goals and I've already been working hard on the path to fulfill them. What's exciting though is that now that the year has rolled over my goals are for this year.

2010 will be a big year for the life of Davinder Mahal and it shall be interesting.

The last time I wrote I said I was going to be a lot more social and interact on my site and blog. I have been absent for the past nine months in what seems to be a very strange year.

I became very busy at Yahoo! while working on Delicious. I have a passion for mobile and I started working extra time on my own mobile design that I prototyped, designed and built. Due to things out of my control this work will never see the light of day. In the short months afterwards, I started to realize another calling and was mentally starting to depart from Delicious. I love the product but I knew it was time for a change. As I was preparing myself to quit, Yahoo! made the layoffs announcements so I decided to wait and see what happens, and what do you know, I was laid off! Although I was saddened to leave my team that I enjoyed working with but I was also very happy for the change.

I enjoyed my time at Yahoo! working specifically on Delicious. Both with the knowledge that I gained from helping to build the system, and also from learning about such a powerful and useful web service. I hope to write more about Delicious and how you - whether a newbie or a power-user - can use Delicious to enhance your web browsing and retrieval. Thank you Yahoo! for the one year and 7 months of employment. It was rocky at times, but wonderful nevertheless.

I took some time off, made a few trips including a vacation to Hawaii with Sonu, one of my college buddies- see my flickr photos - and Seattle. I came back and started to organize the next phase in my life. I also worked on projects I'd been putting off for a while, including creating my sister's wedding albums. I did that using Apple's Aperture which was another learning experience. I've still got a lot of photo organizing to do, including posting more photos on flickr but I'll get to that sometime later.

I'm working on a project at the moment which is actually quite exciting. It's a fairly large e-commerce project which might sound a little boring but it is not. In the process of working on this, I've been trying to setup the most ideal web development setup. That hasn't gone exactly to plan, as I had a few hard drives fail on me and that always takes time dealing with that aftermath. At times, it was definitely one thing after another.

Right now, I've been sick for the past week or so, thus I haven't been able to work properly but this has given me time to think about things, which is also good.

Today, not only I am writing this blog entry, I've written a quick "how-to" article on how to create an Aperture Vault on a NAS drive. I haven't written an article in a while, but I do hope to write more, specially as mentioned on Delicious and of course other things. I've got lots of quirks and bugs to handle on this site, including some styling issues with the most recent article I just wrote.

Hopefully, this is a start to something more frequent. Happy Labor Day Weekend!

It has always been my goal to write more on my blog. I enjoy writing but I have not had a chance to really spend the time to sit down and write. Of course, one thing that has always stopped me is knowing that my blog doesn't look the way I want it to, but this has now changed.

I've been off from work for the holidays and during most of this time I've been in front of my Mac coding away. My first major change on the site was switching the markup and css to use YUI - Yahoo's User Interface libraries.

YUI is brilliant library that helps to speed up the development of any web site by providing code that can just be inserted into your site and will work on any of the main browsers out there. As a developer, I don't need to worry - for the most part - about differences in which IE6 will render a page than Firefox 3.

So, I've done the YUI switch by going in each of my templates on my site and changing the markup and css to create a much more markup efficient site.

As you'll also notice the blog looks considerably different. I went through and overrode nearly every template (and some actions) in the blog engine to create the custom look I desire. This took a long time.

After that, I've been adding a lot more social features onto the site with the automatic inclusion of my twitter and flickr feeds, with plenty more features to come.

Overall, this the the first phase complete. This is my second week off from work for the winter holidays and I've spent most of it in front of the Mac coding away. I'm going to relax the reminder of my time off and will now work on new features and my writing in the future. I've got plenty of ideas of things to write about including how to use Delicious more effectively.

I'm signing off now, but please let me know if you find any bugs in the site. I already know of at least one on the About page with a gap in the images, but I'm sure there will be a few more.

I love the candid captures and editing.