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.

I've just witnessed an amazing and historical event in United States history, Mr. Barack Obama has become the first African-American man to become President of the United States of America.

I'm so proud to be an American at this moment for this achievement. 

I'm a democrat and over these past 8 years I've become more wary about our nation's politics and most definitely have not liked the direction it's been going in. As a nation, we need change and today we're going to get it. 

I've been quite worried over the past few months about this election. I was afraid it would end up being like the last two plagued with 'machine errors' that allowed the Republicans to steal the election, but I'm so happy that that didn't happen tonight. Instead, people voted and the machines counted correctly giving the people of America the man they want to lead us, Mr. Barack Obama. 

I'm looking forward to at least the next 4 years as Obama as our President. His science and technology plans do excite me as finally we have a President who understands that we need to embrace technology for our every day use and not just to create more efficient weapons of mass destruction.  

Who will be the first CTO of the government? That's something I wondered when I voted for Obama in the California primaries. I hope that as a country we'll be able to raise the speed of broadband from 256kpbs to something that's faster than a 3G network, perhaps 10Mbps is broadband. Why do we settle for 6Mbps being the Ultimate connection when countries in Asia are riding on 30 or even 60Mbps connections.

I'm excited. It was amazing watching the results come in tonight. Unfortunately I was working as 8pm rolled around in California and I missed out on the statements that Obama is the projected winner. I started truly watching during McCain's speech.  

I have to say I believe McCain is a nice guy who truly believes in the goodness of America but just clearly didn't know where to take it. Of course, I couldn't stand the thought of an uneducated beauty queen being next in line to the Presidency. That was just a stupid and dangerous appointment by McCain. 

Watching TV of the crowds in Chicago, the people in Times Square, the people in the streets just watching, the excitement was all around. America wants a change and Barack Obama as our new President will give us that change. I'm relieved today went well for America and world. The world wanted Obama. To me, that's also amazing. People in all countries were following this election, they all wanted Obama to win to give America a new breath of life within the world. To bring hope to the world that America isn't a warmongering nation.  

To Mr. McCain, thank you for your contributions during your career. I wish you the very best in Washington as you continue to be a Senator and now help to bridge the gap between party lines.

And Sir, Mr Obama, our new President elect. I congratulate you on your successful campaign and your victory to the Whitehouse. I wish your Grandmother was able to have been with you to watch this historic event.

Congratulations to everyone, to every American lets pull this country back up.