Out of the way

A bunch of upcoming travel. SxSW where I get to watch my sister's new film, Azerbaijan and Mozambique (two new countries in a week), Boston, and a brief stop at home. That's what the rest of March looks like...

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While I am travelling, I generally need to be working. I also try to keep up with my friends, at least a bit (I have to admit I am not always good at it)...

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Trying to cook a meal a week can be hard when travelling...

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Err, that's meant to be Bangalore, the first place I have ever been in India.

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Demain je prends un vol pour le Maroc. Pour moi, ce sera ma deuxième visite - c'est le seul pays en Afrique que j'ai visité. J'y vais pour une réunion W3C que j'ai organisé là-bas, mais après 12 ans de s'appeler "World-wide blabla" c'est la première reéunion qui aura lieu en Afrique. Eh, beh. C'est mieux d'arriver tard que ne jamais arriver. Je suis bien content que ce se passera enfin, et aussi qu'il y en aura une autre cette année.

Je passerai 5 jours à Rabat, et apart la reéunion je participerai dans un mini-conference à l'Université Mohammed V des Ingénieurs (avec mon ami Robin Berjon, et peut-être des autres).

Et si on trouve des utilisateurs d'Opera ou de My.Opera là-bas, ils sont aussi invités à une soirée de discussion, peut-etre prendre un verre ou quelque chose à manger, et discuter Opera. (La technologie - au niveau musical je suis malheureusement presque nul).

Pour moi, c'est une éspéce d'aventure, car je ne sais pas beaucoup de comment les gens utilise le Web au Maroc. Je sais qu'il y a des telecabines et des cybers, mais est-ce que tout le monde ont des portables avec Opera déjà installé, ou veulent quelque chose comme opera mini, ou s'interesse pas trop au Web, ou construisent leurs propres browsers?? Y-a-t-il miliers de bloggeurs là-bas, ou millions, ou des dizaines?

Alors, si vous êtes de Maroc et peut me dire quelque chose d'utile, ecrivez-moi SVP (en me tutoyant, je ne suis pas un type formel d'habitude). Si vous serez à Rabat Mercredi ou Jeudi soir et veux parler et prendre un verre avec quelqu'un qui travaille pour Opera, pareil... (Vous trouverez mon addresse email facilement en cherchant).

Estoy al punto de partir de nuevo. Esta vez, voy al congreso Dublin Core, que se celebrará en Mexico. Si tengo el tiempo, voy a intentar hacer algo el 6 en la Ciudad de Mexico tambien (al menos espero que voy a tener un poco de "swag" para si encuentro algun usuario...).

Ademas, el grupo que escribe las pautas "Practicas mejores para la Web Movil" se encontraran en Gijon, el 25-29 Octubre, entonces yo tambien voy alli. Estaré bastante ocupado ya, pero si hay una possibilidad de encontrar gente, por qué no aprovecharla?

(No sé cuanta gente leen mis mensajes en español. Se puede ver, tambien, dónde estaré en el mundo hispanohablante en el foro...)

I've been offline for a while.

I went to Finland for Assembly. I went with friends to Estonia for a few days. I came back to Finland. I met up with more friends here. Gorm, Velmu, p01, Cooper's, Anna, Yitzhaq, Georgi, Detroit, Chou, Antti, Mediumgeek, Balder, thanks.

I ate raw cloudberries, drank them in cider, and in a strong liquor. I have only ever had them as a sweet liqueur before. I saw Suomenlinna, Tallinn's old town, three cemeteries in two countries. I realised I had never consciously looked through an islamic section in a cemetery before, and wondered why have a road between orthodox and other christian graves. I never quite made it to several beaches, but did dip my toes in various bits of the Baltic. I drank at an Australian bar, an "Australian-like" (how??) bar, and didn't bother paying to go into another one. I ate at an African restaurant and drank tonic in the Depeche Mode bar, spoke french in a finnish kebab house, bought a new Astérix (well, two - they were cheaper than I had dreamed of) and read old stories. I lit a candle in a hole in a rock, and was gladdened by one on top of a rock. I travelled by plane, train and car, by hydrofoil and ferry-boat, by tram and on foot.

I came here to sit in a yard in the countryside by a piece of rock, with a couple of friends and a few words. To pay a debt never contracted with a couple of coins, to have a quiet drink and see some flowers and trees.

I came here to see a place I never saw before, to find something new, to look for something I may have lost, to search for answers to questions left unasked.

I came here to work, to sleep, to wake up and talk to people and work until I slept again.

I've been busy for a while. Time to return.

I am going to Finland for Assembly '06 at the start of August. The event sounds like fun, like the Gathering (the one in Norway, not the medieval event in Australia). It will be hard, just a few of us have to man a stand 24 hours a day, as well as give talks and maybe an online workshop or two, but hopefully we will get to meet a bunch more Opera users and community members, see some cool new widgets developed, and enjoy ourselves enough to cope with the stress

Afterwards I will get to see a new country - we have planned to spend a couple of days in Talinn, Estonia, to make up for our lost weekend. So I should find some time to resurrect my SVG map that let you interactively say where you have been. (The code is the easy part. The hard bit is gettting the data in the first place).

At some point I am also going to visit a friend's grave in Finland. It's not quite so much fun as geeking out and having drinks with people, but it is important to me (and some other close friends of his who are going). I don't go to a lot of graves or anything, although cemeteries are pretty relaxing places. But this involves some important unfinished business.

Anyway, if you're passing through Helsinki at that time and interested in the gathering, come and say hello (Opera is a sponsor and will have a stand, so we should be easy enough to find). Likewise if you're interested in a chat over a beer in Talinn on the 7th or 8th of August, or have a recommendation for where to do that, please let me know (search engines know my email address). I have never been there before, so I am looking forward to it.

I'm at The Gathering, an event where 5000 mostly norwegian folks (maybe 500 come from overseas), mostly 15-21, get together with their computers and geek on...

Actually a big part of what people do is gaming. Fair enough, there are a lot of people who like gaming. But Opera came here as a sponsor playing an active part. Some people came and ran games competitions. We came and ran a competition for making widgets. Which are not that much of a stretch, but are cool. And put up a heavy-duty games machine for the best one that gets done this weekend.

I've slept for two nights on a shelf, been up to see the sunrise, given a talk about standards and an online tutorial from 2am, eaten only junk food for two days, written a few widgets (most are rubbish for playing around, but I like my SVG clock), given away t-shirts and squeeze-balls, cleaned up around something close to a shanty-town (but in a real shanty-town there are people who care more about keeping it clean), and even been outside a couple of times.

A few people here have done some really cool stuff (apart from the crew who put the event on - they have actually done a really great job. The only thing I can fault them on is the food available here - not a piece of fruit to be seen without walking a mile). Some neat widgets, people doing standard geek stuff (world record for making a picture, playing huge multi-player games, sleeping on their keyboards, sitting until teir eyes are falling out of their heads and they are seeing triple), lots of people being helpful in almost anything you can think of, and Arne.

Arne is a tradition. Maybe it started in 2001 when Arne forgot his lunch, and his mum came in to give it to him walking around yelling "Arne", since it is hard to find someone if you don't get teh systems that are used to organise places. Maybe it was because he was underage and being told off for something. (That's not hard in Norway). Maybe it was because he had run off with some other girl, and his poor distraught girlfriend was wailing for him, back in '97. (But I don't think so. It isn't that kind of gig. There are maybe 15% women here, which is high, and they are generally girlfriends, but they are generally unlikely to have to chase their boyfriends down).

So somehow or other, as is the way, the gathring got a tradition. Calling for Arne. Which happens throughout the day and more particularly the night, as 5000 people call out. There are t-shirts. There are official announcements about him.

One day I'll come to the gathering, in a decade or two, saying "Hi, I want to get in free. I deserve to, I am Arne".

In the meantime it's fun. And there are nice people here. If I hae to work overtime, it isn't a bad way to do it.

The nice thing about a blog is that I get to control exactly what is in it. I also take the blame for anything stupid I say, which makes sense. I resisted writing a blog for a long time. I tried it briefly a couple of times in the late 90's, when there were no real tools, but then spent so much of my time writing for work that I stopped doing it for pleasure. But it's nice to write things when I feel like it. Sadly, I often don't for a lack of time (too many oother things to do) or because I am far away from the computer. I guess that means that people aren't overburdened by reading it.

I'm trying to write some articles. It takes time, which is why I am still doing it late on Saturday night. They're fun, but hard work. And then I hand them in and they get edited. On rare occasions something I write gets published where other people read it. Most recently an article on the mobile web was published by .Net, an english magazine that the general public can actually read.

I got a copy from a friend who had seen it. Naturally, it had been edited a little by the magazine. It may have contained a spelling error, or some tortured sentece they wanted to simplify. Mostly they did a good job, actually improving the way things were said. But a couple of the changes rankled a bit with me. One of them was a question of style - I had written about a scruffy guy looking for a cheap bed on his mobile, which they left alone, and then

the girl with the heavy make-up and the cute little phone could actually be cursing the Web site that won't let her change her river cruise ticket for a Trabant hire-car in Budapest.

It came through the editing process as a girl looking at celebrity gossip in some magazine. It might be true that English readers weren't going to know what a Trabant is, or that the example seemed crazy. But the net effect was to drive a stereotype that I actively tried to avoid. My writing is not free of stereotypes, But I try to avoid some of them for one reason or another.

The other was more serious, and the sense of the edited version was almost directly opposite to what I had written, and something I was very unhappy to see. I immediately asked for a correction, and was told that they would indeed provide one in issue 150, for which I am grateful.

But they could have shown me the text before publishing it. As I said when I submitted the article, I would have liked to review any changes - precisely for this reason. Instead, some number of people will see my name (and picture) next to something that I regard as a stupid thing for anyone to say, and of those people I suspect a good number won't actualy read the correction. If I didn't know that there is quite a lot of confusing or even sloppy journalism around, and people are used to it happening, I would be more upset. But there is not a lot I can do about it.

In theory I can take legal action, pointing out that associating some statement with me is detrimental to my reputation. Since they published text that made it seem like I think Internet Explorer is a good browser, it is probably an easy enough case to make. But it probably isn't that important, and a published correction given rapidly and in good grace is probably better than arguing about it. And arguing about things in court that don't have some clear material importance is only good for lawyers.

So, back to writing some more pieces. One is on the mobile web, again. But they ask for camera-ready copy, in other words presumably all errors are my fault, and they aren't planning to sub-edit it. The other one will probably get sub-edited - I hope that if they make changes I get to see them this time.