Out of the way

I am sitting in a chair at 5am, writing about the last week. It isn't easy - a blur of serious jetlag, major delays, cool demos and discussions, interesting people, a typhoon, beer and karaoke. In short, a trip to Japan, although one that turned out to be rougher than almost any I have done before. As well as the jetlag, I don't have any glasses, which makes life difficult mostly by making me much more tired than I expect. In other words, it's like jetlag you can have without travelling

The conference itself was hosted by W3C at Keio University, although Opera was involved both in organisation and as major sponsor. Over four days there was the standard conference fare - presentations, panels, discussions, and demonstrations.

Some of the cool stuff was pretty smoothly timed in the end. Erik Dahlström, Opera's SVG team leader, presented the Wow! session with a bunch of neat video stuff (using an internal build similar to the experimental build for video in HTML that we released a while ago), SVG used as backgrounds (a feature of the new 9.5 alpha, and more. Some cool authoring tools, especially Xify, some interesting ideas, and an extension for Firefox that actually gives it a bit of ability to do some basic animation, were other highlights. (The lack of animation in an SVG implementation is, IMHO, a serious bug. The guys who make SVG implementations for phones manage to get it in, under much tighter resource constraints. So what gives?)

And for the first time in my life I went to a real Karaoke place (twice, in the end). Sitting with a bunch of people in our own room, singing whatever rubbish or masterpieces we came up with. It's a big improvement on doing it in a pub where you get one shot at a song, after waiting for an hour or two for it to come up.

And I have new business cards, with current information on them. And Japanese on the back. I got to thinking though. Mike™ Smith has a 2-D barcode on his card, since in Japan phones can read it. You point the phone camera at it, and it puts the information in - this is an answer to the old idea that you could not get a URI from the side of a bus into your browser without having to remember it or write it down. And while I was thinking of how that would be a cool thing to put on my cards, I started thinking about changing my name...

For thirty years, I have written my name in japanese as チャールズ - "Chyaaruzu". But being Australian, I never really say the "r" for myself. So instead of carrying on with a common transliteration that works well for Americans, I wonder if I should make it チャーズ - "Chyaazu".

I guess if I get a new lot of business cards in japanese, and you get one of those, you will find out what I decided