I was quite thankful for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, both for the family time and the downtime. The downtime was especially appreciated as I had a cold from which to recover. Of course, being thankful while being miserable from a cold does not come easily, I thought it would be worthwhile and fun to list out the things in IT we should be thankful for this year:

10. Having far better cell coverage and Wi Fi connectivity in public places, unless you really need it…

9. For our legal teams, having Oracle continue to acquire companies so we can then have our lawyers keep busy and pore over those contracts and figure out how Oracle is going to take advantage

8. Still in 2011, at the typical company, that most colleagues tend to avoid using the low quality video chat screens now proliferating so they don’t wonder if we had just rolled out of bed

7. That HP’s board and CEO have avoided any more bone-headed moves the past few months

6. That we can deliver cool devices to our long suffering business colleagues through BYOD (bring your own device) and ‘sandbox’ approaches like GOOD Technology software

5. That the worst hack of the year impacted a gaming network (Sony’s playstation) rather than financial or life and death systems — though it still impacted over 70 million users and cost Sony nearly $200M

4. That Apple re-introduced simple elegance as a prominent technology feature to marketing and product teams everywhere, thus reducing the number of absurd Swiss Army knife systems requests

3. The internet for once again ensuring everyone on the planets knows all about critical news like Charlie Sheen and tiger’s blood or Premier League footballers and their girlfriends!

2. While the national unemployment rate hovers at 9% all year, that the unemployment rate for IT professionals has dropped below 4% – thank goodness we can still get a job!

1. That all those social media technologies we thought were really only for teenagers, helped usher in the Arab Spring!

Add yours to the list! I look forward to your comments.

Best, Jim