I had occasion to practice making moulded chocolates for a birthday party. It was a lot of work for the occasion, but was good practice. My previous attempt at making these chocolates was less than successful. The chocolate was tempered, but lost its temper either because of the instructions I followed to warm the mould, or to refrigerate to help set the shell, made worse when I had to rewarm it in the mould when it set too much.

I've received a few holiday letters and thought maybe it was time for me to do my own. I apologize that I'm not a reliable correspondent, but at least this way I can catch people up with the main things going on. Of course snail mail is très passé and I'd probably miss a lot of people, so I'm doing it as a Web page.

As my airline miles card shows, I've done a fair bit of traveling this year (even though less than most of my colleagues).

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 was published as an official standard December 11, 2008. I've been involved with this work indirectly for 10 years, and directly for 6 years, so this represents the culmination of a lot of energy and focus. For the past few years we've just been processing the thousands of comments we've received. This year alone we pushed out three stages of the document, each of which required certain formal work to be done.

I've been experimenting with how to make chocolate covered cherries for a couple years now. I'm getting better at it, but still get a lot of them leaking the juice from inside. I thought I'd write about what I've learned to date, to record what I've learned and for the benefit of anybody else interested in the topic. I should say that I have no training in chocolate work, so some of my mistakes may seem amateurish - they are. But, I believe amateurs should be able to do cool things and I've tried to learn how to do it with an eye to how a hobbyist would go about it.