As is my way, I made Christina a calendar for Christmas again this year. This year's theme was one of those little wooden people that artists use to help them sketch poses of the human body. (Christina doesn't have any special attachment to it; I just thought it would be funny.)

I'll be sharing the pages of the calendar here over the next 12 days, so by January 13, you can make this calendar yourself if you are so inclined. (Full-size versions of the pages are available by clicking on the thumbnails below.)

"2010: Spend the year with your favorite wooden mannequin. ("Just where is that supposed to go?")"

"January: Time to take your lights down before they take you down.""

(Here's last year's letter for some context.)

Why hello there. I didn't hear you come in.

You may have heard that we had some excitement around here in late March, when we were finally able to experience the fruits of our "labor," so to speak. That's right, we re-financed our mortgage! We reset the 30-year clock that counts down our indentured servitude to Bank of America.

Also, we had a baby. Christina gave birth to a 7-pound, 11-ounce man named Henry, but we call him Gabriel for short. Now that I think about it, "Gabriel" isn't any shorter than "Henry." Why did Christina come up with that nickname in the first place?

In preparation for Gabriel's arrival, we took a 12-week birthing class. Week #1 was all about pregnancy, labor, and placenta, and the rest of the course focused on the new vocabulary we would need as parents. Just this week, I've used several of the key phrases we learned: "That is not a toy", "Take that out of your mouth", and my personal favorite, "I'm begging you, please go to sleep."

To quickly bring you up to speed on Gabriel's development, here's a handy timeline of his life. The "X" shows his current location:

|===========X===================================================>
    ^     ^     ^     ^      ^      ^       ^      ^      ^
 crawls talks reads writes cures  ends   retires  buys  age 15
              first first  cancer world           the
              novel novel         hunger         Bahamas

As you can see, he has already completed 2 out of these 9 steps and is well on his way to fame and fortune. If you'd like day-to-day updates on Gabriel's incredible progress, check out our family blog at family.efinke.com.

Our dog Pedro has had a banner year: In June, he smashed through the same screen door twice in one week. That is all.

We went camping again with Christina's family this summer; Christina and Gabriel seemed to enjoy it, but next year, I'm making a few changes: a bigger tent, softer beds, and not going camping.

Much like how the geese fly south every winter, I migrated to a new job again this year. Now, instead of working on websites from home, I work on AOL websites from home.

Not content with both my job and my hobbies involving copious amounts of time on the computer, I decided to digitize my meals as well: I started a website called FoodIRL.com. ("IRL" means "In Real Life" for those of you who are not hip like me and Christina and our BFF Jill.) I take pictures of the food I eat and then compare those pictures to the food's packaging wow this sounds lame when I type it out.

In October, Christina switched jobs too, from a full-time job working with numbers to a part-time job where she gets to work with the other numbers. This has allowed her to spend more time at home with Gabriel; Gabriel was really happy about this, because his diaper was getting awfully full since Daddy last changed him in early September.

Christina wanted to add a paragraph here in her own words: "I don't know why Chris can't write a nice normal Christmas letter like everybody else. If anything he wrote sounds like it might not be true, he's probably trying to be funny. I'm sorry."

Merry Christmas,

Chris, Christina, and Henry

Note: If you don't use or care about Twitter or browser extensions or the Web in general, you can safely skip the rest of this post.

One of the things that annoys me about Twitter is the constant "check-ins" from location apps like foursquare and Gowalla. Since I don't use these apps, I don't especially care that you're at the Starbucks in Dallas or that you're the mayor of your bus stop.

To solve this problem, I wrote a browser add-on called Twitter Filter. It adds a little "X" next to the source of each Twitter status update; if you click that X, you will never see updates from that source again (at least not on the Twitter website):

The sources you've blocked are listed in Twitter's right sidebar so that you can easily unblock them:

That's all there is to Twitter Filter, and it's a new type of browser add-on for me. It has options, but no options dialogs. There's no toolbar button, no browser sidebar - everything related to the add-on is controlled via the Twitter Web interface, so it's not so much an extension of the browser but rather an extension of Twitter itself. Go ahead and install it on a friend's computer and convince them that Twitter added the feature - it'll be fun! Be sure to come back and recount your grand prank in the comments below.

(And so are you, for using it!)

It was announced today that TwitterBar is one of the ten winners of the Mozilla Mobile Add-on Challenge:

"After reviewing a multitude of submissions and much debate around many worthy contenders, the judges from the AMO and Mobile teams have chosen ten (10) of the “best” (innovative, useful, compatible) Firefox mobile add-ons. We’re very pleased to announce our winners (and thrilled to start using their add-ons soon) and award them each with a brand new Nokia N900."

I was really pleased with how the mobile version of TwitterBar turned out; I slimmed down the interface (which was already pretty slim), and I found a great Twitter bird icon that I modified to allow TwitterBar to have its own branding separate from Twitter:

I'm planning on eventually using this same icon in the Firefox version of TwitterBar too so that there's consistent branding across the Mobile, Firefox, and Chrome versions of TwitterBar. What do you think?

I've written a new extension for Firefox, and it's called FireFound:

FireFound is an add-on for Firefox and Fennec (mobile Firefox) that helps your find your computer (or mobile phone, in the case of Fennec) if it is lost or stolen. Every time your computer's location changes, FireFound sends a secure message to a central server with its current location. You can then log into the server and see your computer's current location.

All of the location data is encrypted, so no one can find out where your computer is without your password.

If you lose your computer, you can tell FireFound to clear your personal data (saved passwords, browsing history, etc.) if anyone starts your browser before you can retrieve it.

You can even run your own FireFound server; all of the code is open-source.

FireFound was chosen as a grand prize winner of the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest; since then, more than 6,000 people have installed FireFound, resulting in over 330,000 location updates.

Just a note that I'll be at the 2nd annual Add-On-Con this week in Mountain View, CA. Add-on Con is a gathering of browser add-on developers and representatives from the browser vendors (Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft).

I'll be participating in the opening keynote discussion, which will address the question, "Do Add-ons Need a Marketplace?" The other keynote participants will be representatives from Mozilla, Microsoft, XMarks, and FoxyProxy, so I'm obviously there to even out the low end of the curve. Anyone know any good knock-knock jokes I can use?

I'll also be sitting on a Mozilla panel as a token add-on developer, talking and answering questions about how to develop a successful add-on. (On an unrelated note, if you know how to develop a successful add-on, please contact me ASAP.)

Will you be at the conference? Let me know!

If you're using Google Chrome, and you're running the developer version that allows extensions to be installed, you can now install TwitterBar for Google Chrome.

After you've installed it, just click on the Twitter icon in the toolbar bar, type your message, and press Enter to post your message to Twitter. (You'll have to authorize TwitterBar the first time you tweet, but it only takes a second.)

If your message gets too long (Twitter only allows 140 characters), the happy blue Twitter bird will turn into an angry red Twitter cardinal.

Let me know what you think; I tried to keep as much of the functionality from the Firefox version as possible.

I've started a new project that I'm calling Food In Real Life. The idea is that I take pictures of real food that I'm about to eat, compare them to the pictures on the food's packaging, and then dole out scores for the food's appearance (compared to the packaging) and taste like I'm some kind of Olympic food judge.

For example, here's a comparison I did of Antioch Farms Chicken Kiev:

Looks: While the color and texture are almost identical, the chicken kiev pictured on the box
is about 50% longer than the ones found inside. (There is no way that the sliced and unsliced
portions on the box belong to the same kiev.) The butter sauce is portrayed accurately, even
though my picture doesn’t really show it. (It’s boiling-lava hot, so slicing the chicken without
splashing butter magma everywhere was a challenge.) 4 out of 5

I'd love any feedback you have on the idea or the execution of the site.

Three years ago, I blogged about a new resume-hosting site called Emurse.com that got me an interview (and a job) at AOL-owned Netscape. Well, things have a funny way of working out, and after leaving AOL to work with an incredible development team at Mahalo, I've left Mahalo to lead development of now AOL-owned Emurse.

It's great to be working with Andy Fraley again, who designed the look and feel of the Netscape Navigator 9 browser, and is now in the designer's seat at Emurse. We've got some exciting new features planned for the next generation of online resumes, all of which will, of course, be documented here.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been getting occasional IMs and e-mails from what I can only assume are tween-age girls, asking if I work for Facebook. ("I need to talk to Facebook Team about something important, very important.") I mostly ignored the emails, assuming that some version of a "facebook employee" Google search ended up at my site, prompting these kids to think that I work there.

However, the most recent e-mail I received included this line:

"I see your email on Sezzer Gomez's photos. Are you Christopher Finke, the facebook team??"

This piqued my curiousity, so I did a search for "Sezzer Gomez," assuming it was a blogger somewhere that had posted an image that contained my email address. It turns out that "Sezzer" is short for "Selena," as in Disney tween idol Selena Gomez. My search led me to this Facebook page, for "The Official Sezzer Gomez," who, in a bid to prove that she/he is actually Selena Gomez, posted a poorly photoshopped letter from Facebook that purported to be written by me (but strangely, was signed by Mark Howitson, one of Facebook's lawyers). (The letter was photoshopped from the takedown notice I received from Facebook a couple of years ago.)

The contents of the letter are hilarious:

"We've received a complain up straight to your phone, that since you've joined Facebook, all of your accounts got either hacked or deleted for our system."

Sounds legit to me; I know that when I joined Facebook, I too had all of my accounts hacked and/or deleted from Facebook's system. Straight up to my phone!

P.S. "Straight up to my phone" is the new "Word to your mother."