Out of the way

I'm in Bishkek because Opera sponsored BarCamp Central Asia. So I got to come and give a talk about standards. To make it more interesting, I used our new experimental build to talk about standards for video, (Yay - Firefox is implementing Ogg too!), and graphics - canvas and 3D experiments, SVG, and even dear old PNG (and APNG). Maybe tomorrow I will do a 20/Twenty or lightning talk on Dragonfly, but it depends on what gets into the schedule.

It's been good to be here. I don't speak enough Russian to understand most of what is going on, but from time to time I go to a session and try to understand something... It is a very well-organised BarCamp - they got good sponsorship to cover the bar bit and have a flexible approach to the schedule that actually works - about 300 people are wandering around 3 full tracks, and there is also free wifi that works as we wander around...

Bishkek itself is a nice place. Huge open sqaures of concrete for the government centre, and pretty much everywhere else there are trees. Important in summer, because the temperature here is in the mid to high 30s every day this week (when we arrived it was about 30, and that was 5am). The food here is good, the people are friendly, and it is pretty relaxed. (Of course, at 35ºC it should be...)

We have a couple more days here, to see what we can, do some more BarCamping, see if we can find some souvenirs (I am hopeless at buying souvenirs usually - a couple of magnets or postcards in the airport and I think I am doing a good job), and so on. And then ten hours spent sitting in Moscow airport, unless we find a Russian consular service that is not miserable to deal with

But still, my visited countries map has a bit more red. I really have to dig out the SVG stuff I had, and make a new version. And I hope I can come back here for another event soon.