My soon-to-be-colleague, Gareth, reminded me via props that I haven't mentioned that I'm switching jobs. From Monday, I'm going to work for the government!

Having been impressed with alphagov earlier this year, I was more than happy to get onboard when the offer came up to work on the next phase of the project with a bunch of people I've known for years (and still apparently want to work with me), and a few new ones. We're being housed within a new department, to be known as the Government Digital Service.

Colour me excited (but maybe not orange?).

I rhetorically asked on Twitter yesterday if there was a better way to manage my todo lists of scraps of paper, my moleskine, jira and basecamp.  I'm not sure that I made it clear: I'm not looking for a replacement for those. They're not going away. I need a master-something that can manage the fact that my todos are spread over many mediums and systems (by necessity, rather than choice).  I can't manage a 5th system that I'd need to manually synchronise.

So. This is my "in a magical world of unicorns and rainbows" wishlist for a ToDo application:

• Has a web, desktop (not just osx) and mobile client.  If I can't get at it wherever I am, I won't use it.
• Pulls in and syncs assigned tickets from bug trackers - like Jira, Trac.
• Pulls in and syncs todos from shared workspaces - like Basecamp.
• Needs to be able to pull in tickets/lists from *insert future system a company I will work for will assume is the answer to all their problems*.
• Needs to be free-form enough to add items that don't have dates.
• If they do have dates, I want to show them on my google calendar.
• Needs to be as quick to throw an item onto the end of the list as it is to scrawl it on a post-it note.
• Have a public sharable view and also private items.  Bonus for levels of access to certain friend/colleague/family groups.
• Sets fire to any project manager who thinks sending me an excel spreadsheet of brightly coloured items copied out of Jira will help my day go more smoothly.
• Super dream world: should be able to OCR a photo of scrawled notes from my notebook/hand (ala Evernote) taken by the new shiny.
• Super bonus extra dream world: should offer to make me a cup of tea when it notices a complete nightmare of todos all happening at once.

I'm beginning to think that this was the most accurate response I received:

@phae Personal assistant?

by Paul Haine

Films (at the cinema, in seen order):

1. Daybreakers
2. The Road
3. A Single Man
4. The Wolfman
5. The Crazies
6. Alice in Wonderland
7. Ponyo
8. Shutter Island
9. Perrier's Bounty
10. Kick Ass
11. Psycho
12. I Am Love
13. Double Take
14. Dogtooth
15. Four Lions
16. The White Ribbon
17. The Bad Lieutenant
18. Rec 2
19. Inception
20. Splice
21. Down Terrace
22. The Illustionist
23. Mother
24. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
25. The Maid
26. Certified Copy
27. Cyrus
28. Winter's Bone
29. Made in Dagenham
30. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
31. Let Me In
32. The Light Thief
33. Black Swan
34. Womb
35. Octubre
36. Monsters
37. We Are What We Are
38. Tron: Legacy
39. The Town
40. Love and Other Drugs
41. The Way Back

Again, they're OO5ed

Best

Again, super lucky to get to put some sci-fi in the top of my list. The Road is captivating, if in an entirely bleak, looking at your pets and wondering if you'd eat them in a crisis, kind of way. My favourite was Monsters. It felt like an antidote to all those silly explosion, chase driven, gun-ho monster movies. It's delicate and subtle, and looks frankly amazing and ultra-detailed, and it doesn't treat the viewer like a complete idiot. It's just lovely. I guess Inception is the big one for everyone else - I liked it a lot, but I've kind of forgotten it already.

I had anticipated Splice as being a winner this year, but it totally missed the mark - Womb turned out to be the much more interesting, in depth, film about cloning and genetics (and it's got Matt Smith in it - what's not to go crazy for?). Tron should have been a massive disappointment, but I managed to keep expectations deliriously low and came out entertained. The film I failed to not get excited about before I saw it was Scott Pilgrim, given the sentimental place that I hold the graphic novels in, and fortunately it is really excellent fun.

I also loved The Illusionist and Ponyo. The former is beautiful, and although it's French it doesn't matter - they hardly utter a word, and when they do it sounds like a Sim - it's totally carried by the perfect animation style. And Ponyo is just adorable (sing the Ponyo song!).

The big marmite film for 2011 is definitely going to be Black Swan. It's a ballet drama? Really? Yeah. It is entirely a must-see film. It's an intensely paced psychological thriller and the ballet bit really shouldn't put anyone off. It's probably one of the best crafted films I've seen this year, if not for a few years.

Also loved lots of others, particularly Down Terrace, Dogtooth and Winter's Bone - all share the commonality of being a bit bleak (or, actually, totally screwed up - don't watch Dogtooth with your family, okay?).

Worst

It's only when compiling this list that I'm reminded of all the complete movie mishaps I've suffered this year. Not least, Alice in Wonderland. I'm a massive fan of the story, as many people know, and I was a fool to even think that a new film would capture everything I love about it. Oh, so disappointed. I rated it more highly at the time than I feel about it now. Damn you, Burton.

Other let downs include a whole slew of films that have brilliant concepts, but they were just half-heartedly or plainly executed - The Crazies springs to mind, as does Four Lions (controversial, I know, but it's a bit meh, to be honest - Chris Morris has a long way to go before he's back in "paedophile dressed as a school" territory), We Are What We Are and Daybreakers.

Mostly this year, there has been some severely pretentious nonsense. I Am Love, Certified Copy, The Light Thief, Double Take and A Single Man - all fairly decent concepts, but unfortunately completely boring. I struggled to stay awake in a couple of those. Mostly designed as fodder for film reviewers to fawn over, but actually, totally ridiculous and unwatchable.

Books

I've given up any semblance of attempting to record what I read. I did, however, buy a 3rd edition Kindle 3G, which I love. Surprisingly. Digital books completely lack everything I love about a beaten-up old paperback, particularly the digging through a dusty bookshop and finding random left-overs of previous owner' lives (ticket stubs, receipts... postcards are my particular favourite), but the convenience and the form factor of this thing is amazing. It's also caused me to re-read or find a bunch of classics, for free from manybooks (released through Project Gutenberg), that I would otherwise never have given the time to. I've read the complete Sherlock Holmes adventures, almost all of Robert Louis Stevenson, a bunch of H.G.Wells, and all sorts of other odds and ends. Metamorphosis struck me as an instant favourite of the classic selection.

Of non-ebooks, I read Philip Pullman's newest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, early in the year. Thoroughly disappointing. More hype than substance, in my mind, and felt a little like a cash-in on his controversial position (I enjoyed the His Dark Materials trilogy). I also read my usual fill of science fiction and re-read some favourites. I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road after seeing it at the start of the year - which is unusual, since I'll generally rush to read a book before I see the film - but it's pretty much identical. Definitely recommend it if you're lacking that stark, miserable, hopeless feeling at the beginning of your new year. :)

So, I wrote a little article for this year's 24ways on documentation. It's based heavily on the processes we used to develop BBC Glow, so I hope someone finds it useful.

If you're feeling charitable, this year you can buy my article and the other brilliant 23 as an annual from Five Simple Steps: 24ways 2010 Annual, with the proceeds going to UNICEF. Yay!

It is that time of year again: SXSWi panel pimpage! I've put together a somewhat vague panel proposal on behalf of microformats.org and I would appreciate it if you could give it a vote.

Apparently voting only counts towards a relatively small percentage (30%) of whether or not it will be selected, but with 2346 proposals in the system, I suspect it counts a lot more than that.

The session is rather vaguely defined because I'm not really sure right now what'll still be interesting in a few months. I also want to garner as many opinions from the community as they can about what they want to know more about, see speak or show off - so do make your voice heard in the comments.

SXSW submissions are a bit nuts, really.

The mega-conference happens in March every year. By the time you're done clearing your credit card bill and the fuss on twitter has died down a few weeks after the event, it's already time to submit proposals for the coming year with the deadline at the start of July.

That means you need to think about your proposal a good 9 or 10 months before the next event.

In my mind, it's incredibly difficult to predict what will be a hot topic or really relevant 10 months down the line in an industry like ours. Things move incredibly quickly. I also find it very difficult to know what to vote for - I may find at the beginning of next year that actually, I really could have done with knowing more about The Latest Technique, but right now I don't know what it is to vote for it.

I also worry that interesting topics that I don't know about yet don't have the community around it to rally support and get the votes. Inevitably, the topics that are most trendy or have the most well-known organisers/panelists will be the topics that get the most votes. They tend not to be the panels I've enjoyed the most, though. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly hard to figure out which sessions are going to be great and which aren't, since SXSW is just so big now - I think it has become quantity over quality. </ complain>

Anyway, not a lot I can do about that other than play along and attempt to include a session that I will attempt to put together at a level that I deem acceptable quality. I do want to see microformats.org have a representation there, so help me out, huh?

p.s. The spelling of the tag "microformats" as "micoformats" is not mine. It's theirs. And I asked to have it corrected, but apparently their system doesn't easily allow for that at the moment. WTF?