Eclectic Brain Salad

I was a bit worse for wear on the morning of day 4, thanks to the "high" gleaned from speaking at Web Jam 10, and the resulting beers and Chinese food. I got up and did some e-mailing, then had a quick breakfast and sauntered down to the convention centre along with my family (who said their goodbyes and then went on to the Sydney aquarium, lucky things!) I quickly met up with a few familiar faces, including Ben Buchanan, Ash, Daniel Davis, Mark Boulton, and more. We had a coffee and then sat down for the keynote. John made some opening remarks, and at one point embarrassed me (only slightly, mind) by announcing "Chris Mills is here at the conference" in big letters on a slide, and urging people to come talk to me about education. I was very happy with the mention (I had a few people approach me that day saying about how they were using the Web Standards Curriculum to teach their classes, which is great!) but the way he did it was rather amusing ;-)

Matt Webb - Escalante

Matt Webb was up first, giving your usual inspirational, high level, fluffy, slightly waffly talk to give the attendees and nice fuzzy feeling and then prepare them for the day. I might sound demeaning by saying this, but that's not what I intend - Matt's talk served its purpose well, he is a great presenter, and he gave out some great design ideas, and lots of good sci-fi references ;-)

Mark Boulton - Font embedding and typography

I got the change to introduce the next couple of talks and act as the track chair, which was great for injecting a bit more Opera love into the room, and reiterating the education mission. After ironing out some technical difficulties, Mark took to the stage, and delivered a great talk about improving typography on the Web. It wasn't just concerned with @font-face syntax, or ranting about font licensing inadequacies wrt the Web (although these featured a little bit) - he talked about all the elements that are needed for good typography (colour, layout, etc - it goes way beyond fonts), how using fonts appropriately designed for the screen is needed (this is why the new Microsoft vista font set is actually really good), and how Comic Sans is not necessarily that evil, but just misused a lot ;-)

Ben Galbraith

It was nice to intro Ben, especially given that I'd talked to him quite a lot earlier on in the week. His talk was a very detailed rundown of how the Web is improving as a platform because there are a lot more good developer tools available than there used to be, and then gave a detailed rundown of the best ones. He gave a lot of good Opera mentions while he was at it

Lunch

Lunch was very tasty, and I spent most of it talking to Lachlan and Daniel, and having a laugh with Leslie, Shaun, John, and anyone else who speed up to the table. I took a bit of time out in the afternoon to check some mails and have some good education chats with Helen from Brisbane.

Nick Galvin - The state of the Web as a platform

I went to the state of the web as a platform panel, featuring our own Lachy Hunt, plus Ben G, Doug, and a couple of really marketing-y guys from MS and Adobe. It was basically a fairly business-oriented discussion on where the web is going in the future, as a platform. Some of it was good, but I got the impression that Doug, Lachy and Ben were acting as FUD-busters against the other two. Next up, we three wise men of Opera did a Sitepoint podcast interview with Kevin Yank. Kevin seems like a really nice, interesting guy, and he asked some good questions about Opera's developer outreach strategy.

Cameron Adams - Making Waves

Last up was Cam Adam's keynote, mainly talking about Google Wave - very good indeed. He is a really charismatic presenter, and really funny. The Macfarlane prize presentation followed, and proved to be interesting. It was ace to see Dmitry Baranovskiy win a Macfarlane medal for his work on the Raphaël JS library.

Ignite

Next we went back to the Waterside hotel for some free drinks, and for Ignite Sydney! I had a really good chat to Gian Wild and Kevin Yank, and then Mark Boulton and Lisa Herrod. My talk went really well - I had a lot of wordage to fit in, so I needed to talk quite fast, but I still got a great reaction, with lots of good comments afterwards. Check it out: After I'd finished the jet lag had started to creep back with a vengeance, so I went home and got a nice early night (unheard of for a conference! I felt like a right wuss, but hey...)