For some reason, the nice folks at Opera deemed Seattle Traffic, a widget that I created, special enough to win a contest. This mildly amused me because I didn’t realize that there was a contest ongoing. They sent me a bag chock full of goodies including a t-shirt with the words Opera + Widgets inside a drawing of a heart.

Opera T-shirt

In addition to the t-shirt, the people at Opera sent me a lanyard, a couple of pens, and a handwritten note penned by Espen André Øverdahl. To be honest, the cheap quality of the swag disappointed me. But the handwritten note thanking me was a nice touch.

Opera Swag

For a time, Opera fulfilled my daily browsing needs instead of the much-beloved Firefox. Drawn into its snappiness and very slick page zoom, I could not bear fiddling with the dysfunctional text zoom in Firefox on my high-resolution monitor. But soon aftewards, Mozilla released Firefox 3 Beta 1 to recapture my heart. It features the long-anticipated page zoom, and does one on Opera better by remembering zoom levels for each hostname. So Firefox remains my primary browser. But Opera still commands my respect.