Eclectic Brain Salad

This was a slightly more challenging day than the last one, work-wise, as Lisa and Lach are having troubles with their connectivity at home. So after getting some editing done offline of various articles and suchlike, I joined my family in walking into Annandale to find a place to lunch, and a place to get Kirsty's hair done.

I ate a really gorgeous meal involving corn fritters, bacon and haloumi cheese, then it was off to the hair dressers to get Kirsty pampered. At this point, the day kicked into life - John Allsopp phoned me to say that I had a guest lecture slot at UTS at 4pm. By this point it was 1pm, so I had three hours to work out what I was talking about, and get to where I needed to be! I love spontaneity, but this is kind of ridiculous! Still, major props to John and Yiying for helping me set this up - it was very nice to get another uni talk sorted out at such short notice (about 2 days from me sending them a request for help!)

So, off to the coffee shop to drink coffee, eat cake and check e-mail! I got my plans for later on that night sorted out, and caught a rather convenient bus to right outside the university. After figuring out the rather confusing building layout, I got to the right floor, and found the university contacts.

I ended up presenting a slightly abridged version of my Ukranian university tour slides, and they seemed to go down pretty well - I threw in some open web philosophy to start off with, then talked about SVG, CSS 3 and HTML 5, accessibility, mobile web, and a few other web 3.0 love nuggets. the students asked some great questions, and I was impressed with their knowledge and enthusiasm.

After a quick chat with the UTS folk, I made my way to the Ruby Oceania meetup, to listen to some interesting Ruby talks and drink some beer. I know very little about server-side programming, so it proved to be a very interesting learning experience! It was also nice to catch up with Lach, Toolmantim, and Ben Buchanan, and meet some cool new people.

I was rather amused that the very first talk was all about how we should just implement all our functionality in JavaScript and do things on the client-side, and sod Ruby...that guy had balls of steel ;-)

Other notable talks were Tim talking about how he implemented Tweeps (the Web Directions South Twitter aggregator app), and his fellow Agency Rainford cohort Miles talking about his new Unit Testing library.

After the talks were done, the beer started to flow very freely, and there was much rejoicing! On the way home Lach showed me the delights of eating a drunken doner kebab, Australian style...which is pretty much the same as eating a drunken doner kebab, English style.

It is always nice to head off to a conference, knowing that for once I won't be away from home for a week, and won't have to travel for an entire day to get there!

I'm currently in a functional-but-pleasent hotel room, getting ready for a great day at the European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt

. I'll be speaking on a panel about web standards and accessibility in higher education, talking about what the problem is teaching these subjects at schools and universities, and what we are doing about it in the industry.

the speaker's dinner was great last night, and I had the chance to have some great conversations with some old friends (such as Martin Kliehm, Henny Swan, Chris Heilmann, Niqui Merret), and some new (Steve Faulkner, Marco Zehe, Saqib Shaikh).

So let's get on with the day! I've got a good feeing about this...

Download my conference slides - Opera Show format, created using HTML, CSS, and a little SVG. Download the zip, unzip, then double click the HTML file. If you are using Opera, select View > Full Screen to view the presentation in all it's multislide glory.