Is this thing on?

That should more properly be "having left Opera", as I am no longer an Opera employee, but that doesn't work as well as a title. There is nothing dramatic about the decision, and I think Opera is an excellent employer, but I had been at Opera for seven and a half years and that was long enough.

Much of my work at Opera has been with standards, and standards don't matter. Having standards does, but as long as they are reasonably sane it doesn't matter what they are. The latest standards debacle in Norway wasn't related to browsers but with office products, word processors and the like, with the competing standards called ODF and OOXML.

ODF is not a good standard. You can read through the entire spec and will find nothing clever there. Anything ODF can do HTML5 can do better. Add cursor position to HTML5 and it could have been called ODF 2.0. What it has going for it is the absence of bad. Microsoft makes good standards, much of the time. OOXML is not one of those times, what it is lacking is the absence of bad. Could it be fixed? Probably, but to me it isn't worth it.

As for Web standards I think it should be an optional for Opera. Opera should encourage the presence of standards, and follow them unless they are bad, but it shouldn't necessarily form them. Opera should do what makes its users happy.

Opera Mini makes me happy. It lets me do things I couldn't do before. This entry was intended to be typed in on Opera Mini while I was on the move, but in the end it was typed in on a PC. It wasn't written in Opera Mini because Opera Mini isn't data loss safe, without copy&paste or save I can easily lose what I write, and data loss does not make me happy.

Being unemployed makes me happy as well, for now anyway. It's been a long while since the last time, as the last few times I changed jobs I went directly from one to the next. It is almost the same elated feeling as being homeless. I haven't actually been homeless in the sense that I own one flat and rent another, but I have adapted to a mobile lifestyle and from time to time I've not known where I will spend the next night and that is a strong feeling of freedom (until nightfall) — I can go whereever I want. I have used to claim that the bag in my one hand is my office, containing my laptop and other work stuff, and the bag in my other hand is my home, containing clothes and other private stuff. For now I can move with one bag less.