Gone is the initial love affair I had with the web. Those early days when I believed that Google actually could do no evil and when the web was an open frontier of boundless potential built by those who naively and bravely toiled to further the plight of humanity are in the past.

Replaced, are they, by the grey (OK, pastel) reality of commercial silos that grant users varying degrees of access to their own data while trying to gleam as much information about them as they can to sell to their advertisers and other interested third parties. And what freedoms remain are under grave threat from legislation like SOPA and PROTECT IP.

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Since reading the news that Yahoo! have hired PayPal's president, I no longer want anything to do with them.

The only things I had left on my 12-year-old Yahoo! account were a few contacts from the days I used Messenger and email and the photos on my Flickr account. I exported the former easily and I'm in the process of backing up the photos and their metadata from Flickr now.

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2011 was a busy year. I had a host of speaking engagements, including presenting opening and closing keynotes on User Experience and the future of web and mobile design and development at conferences like Future of Web Design, NSConference in the UK, Fronteers in the Netherlands, Login in Lithuania. I hosted the Brand Perfect Tour for Monotype Imaging in London and Berlin, taught my iOS Development and Mobile User Experience workshops multiple times in Brighton, Oslo, and Stockholm, hosted a Geek Ninja Battle and created my own conference, Update 2011 (watch the videos here), and, as part of the steering committee, I helped realise the inaugural Brighton Digital Festival. As part of the Brighton Digital Festival, Anna Debenham from Mozilla’s Hackasaurus project and I also visited two schools in Brighton to teach the kids to code and I also gave a new talk on augmented reality at the Improving Reality conference. Additionally, I presented sessions at the Norwegian Developers Conference, The Big M, and Be Bettr, mentored designers at Design Jam London 2, was interviewed as part of the Insites Tour, wrote a few opinion pieces for .net magazine, and helped judge the .net awards.

No more eating animals

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Following my talks at the LOGIN, The Big M, NSConference, and Tweakers.net Developer Summit last month, .net magazine asked if I'd like to be the subject of their Reader Q&A section in their next issue and answer questions sent in via Twitter on life, UX, mobile, and everything. I informed them that yes, I'd be delighted to, and this whole adventure eventually resulted in a lovely email from Tanya at .net magazine with the questions that were tweeted in.

(Welcome if you're reading this from the link in the .net article, by the way. I hope you enjoyed it.)

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I have an HSBC Advance account. It's a premium personal current account (ok, you can stop looking at me like I'm a fool – I get travel insurance and stuff. OK, OK, and I'm gullible!) You would think that one feature of a current account in this day and age, whether premium or not, would be the ability download previous statements in a data format or some sort.

In fact, for some inexplicable reason which must make perfect sense to you if you're a fat cat making billions after being bailed out by taxpayer's – i.e., our – money, HSBC allows you to do download statements in a variety of formats but only for recent transactions. As of this writing, my recent transactions only go as far back as the start of January, 2011. I also have access to "previous statements" that date back to the start of last year but – and it's a big but – I can't download them. I can print them but that's about it. WTF indeed.

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