Out of the way

Seoul, Korea

a W3C meeting to talk about the Mobile Web Best practices. This was good, they have finally figured out how to reconcile talking about design that copes with very basic browsers on basic devices that are still all over the world with design for things like Opera mini which are taking big chunks of the market, and are far more capable, and Opera mobile which is even cooler and does even more. I gave a terribly boring talk about the huge range of new standards that are being developed in the mobile space - and got to listen to (but not understand) the simultaeous translation.

I also got to go for a drink with my ex-housemate Chang, a rare and great pleasure, and of course with some of the guys from the Opera team which is always a pleasure.

San José / Mountain View, California

This was a blast. I gave an impromptu talk to some web dev guys at Stanford, at the standing invitation of my good mate John Foliot, and got to hang out with John and talk about things we have talked about on and off for years. We also got to point out to his family that this was in fact the second time we had ever met face to face - although we have known each other virtually for years.

Austin, Texas USA

I already posted about south by...

Los Angeles, California.

(No, California is a country so I don't need to add one ).

I went to the CSUN conference on disability to give a talk. I don't think I have seen so many Microsoft people in a talk together for a while - and sadly a good friend from Microsoft was talking at the same time. I used to go to this conference every year when I worked on Accessibility at W3C - it is a pretty good conference especially because of the many people you meet there. But this time I was going to talk to people about getting Opera to work better with various kinds of assistive technology - some of them are very complex and do odd things so if you don't talk to the engineers there is no way to really figure out what is going on... Thanks also to Thomas for putting me up on his couch in LA. I had a blast.

Newark, New Jersey USA / Copenhagen, Denmark

I had a long trip back to Europe, with two red-eyes interspersed with a day in each place. In Newark I was just wiped, and since the G-man wasn't home I didn't even get to see him. In Copenhagen I got to catch up with some friends, and to watch the snow start to pile up. I still like snowstorms (of which, more later)

London, UK. POWDER event

I was here talking about some neat tagging technology. Actually, if you follow the Opera Semantic Web group here you might have noticed that we did a trial implementation of semantic tagging which you can still use in my.Opera. I basically talked about how linking that and phones could build some pretty powerful user experience.

¡¡¡Madrid, eSpain!!!

At last. For a day. Then we went to Maraña, where Facundo and Mariana, Anne, and Adriana already were, and on Friday Lili joined us. We got there and Eva was laughing about her new skis - because the sun was out, we were hanging washing on the line and raking the grass in the yard ready for planting. Although the day was beautiful, by the time Lili arrived in the evening it was raining. And then on Saturday...

It snowed. And snowed and snowed and snowed. Eva did get to go skiing, I got to play Australian football in my new boots (knee-high leather boots are good in knee-high snow - thank you miel), we had the fire going, and we did a bit of digging. And a bit more digging, and a bit more digging after that. Then the snowplow came and buried the car, so I did some more digging again. I really dug easter sunday, so I ran out of puff. This is why there are no photos of the igloo we didn't build, although with the garden eventually 3 feet deep in snow it would have been a pretty neat day to build one.

And then, back to Oslo for meetings and moving stuff. I am glad that is almost done... and the rain stayed away just long enough for the outside work not to be a wash-out. But I am looking forward to being in eSpain again on the weekend...