Eclectic Brain Salad

Today was a fairly - no, very - sedate day. After getting up and going to the main mall in Cairns to buy a spare memory card for Kirsty's camera, we headed down to the Cairns Lagoon again, and spent about four to five hours there! Australia constantly blows me away - the fact that this place is available to the public for free in the first place is amazing, but there was also a band playing rock covers playing next to the pool, and we had lovely hot chocolate! And we got boatloads of Japanese tourists taking photos of our kids ;-)

What a great day.

We rounded off the day with a lovely wood-fired pizza from the nearby Grill/Pizzeria, and the evening got better when I realised the beer pitchers were on special offer... ;-)

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, it's a Saturday.

Today was a fine day for a beach trip, so the plan was to go to Manly and check out some sand. First of all I caught up on some e-mail, then we headed out and had a most awesome breakfast at the cafe just down the street.

Then was the travel. I've decided that Sydney is one of the coolest areas in the world for public transport (apart from the occasional miserable bus driver). The buses are reliable, and the ferries - although not that cheap - are just an awesome way to get around and see the beautiful Sydney dock areas.

We got to Manly a little after lunchtime, but pretty much totally skipped lunch - we found a nice place on the beach and got busy. Kirsty and Gabriel spent about 4 hours digging two big holes and then attempting to connect the two together to form a tunnel. This proved mostly unsuccessful, as the tunnel kept collapsing, but eventually they managed to form a small tunnel and Gabriel successfully crawled through it a few times!



I spent most of my day walking Elva about so she could splash in the sea, look at shells and eat sand. Not quite sure how much she ate in the end ;-)

In the evening we went and had dinner at a nice little place near the sea front, then got ferry and bus back to Lis and Lach's house. We sat down, drank a few beers, and watched the dreadful-but-hilarious 60's Batman move adaptation (mainly doe Gabriel's benefit, but we kinda enjoyed it too!) After we'd put Gabriel (and Kirsty!) to bed, I introduced Lis and Lach to the delights of the Mighty Boosh, and more beer was drunk.

Eels up inside ya, finding an entrance where they can...

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.

Saturday and Sunday proved to be just as much of a blast as the first couple of days. I actually managed to make a couple of sessions on Sunday.

Jon Gruber and Michael Lopp - Blood, Sweat and Fear; Good Design Hurts.

This was a fantastic presentation; Michael Lopp indulged in lots of swearing, but lots of good commentary on design, and fear of blue and ponies, and how Apple do things. Jon Gruber then took over, talking about design, and how great design has got to be risky, and sometimes maligned...you need these things to evolve, and innovate.

Andy Olio - Worst. Website. ever.

This was one of the funniest talks I've ever seen. A web designer and a VC introducing various speakers to come up on stage to talk about their web site ideas - the worst, most inane/amoral/derivative ideas they could come up with.

Andy first listed some of the biggest web site failures in history.

* kozmo.com - $280 million burned through in 3 years
* pets.com $130 million
* boo.com 188 million in 6 months

He then listed the categories the sites would be judged by, and gave examples:

* inane ideas
- digiscents - savor the world - web pages that send you smells
- 3D mailbox - makes your inbox look like miami beach. ludicrous.

* derivative ideas
- look at techcrunch for a week, eg facebook for senior citizens

* just plain evil
- goto.com - let people bid for top search results, text ad links
- Jigsaw - buy and trade business cards

Some of my favorite ideas presented:

* babiesandpuppiesforrent.com - the only people that wanted to rent the children are people who should never be allowed access to children, and puppies think children are delicious
* thinkwidow.com - dating site for newly widowed people
* Image search for the blind - providing voice overs to describe images on the web...for the blind people.
* Mommerce. The future of the future of commerce. MMOs. Take world of warcraft and add e-commerce shops to it, to ensure that players never have to stop playing. Ever. Turn bricks and mortar into clicks and mordor

In the evening, I popped over to Ms Jen's wine and cheese party, talked to Rob Weychert, Jon Hicks, saw the new generation of flathicks, and then went over to the Austin Barcamp with my Opera cohorts Phillip, David and Lawrence, to present a talk on Opera technologies and future standards, which went down pretty well. Phillip then did the first ever presentation ever in the USA, of the upcoming Opera 9.5 release. Stay tuned! The talks were made infinitely more fun by free beer, and a senior W3C guy playing blues guitar while we spoke.

After speaking, we watched the live band at the Barcamp for a while, drank more free beer, and then met up with the rest of the Opera possee. After driving around for ages trying to find a party, I got bored and led us over to a different bar. I had a "couple more light ales", and remember talking to a whole load of lovely people, including John Resig, Glenn Jones, Tristan Turpin, and PPK...after that, it got a bit hazy... ;-)

Sunday was hard work.

I got up, manned the Opera booth for a while, talking to some really nice people, then I had lunch with Phillip and David in a sleazy dive bar with blacked out windows and Van Halen on the stereo. The food was beautiful!

I then headed over to the booth again for a while, then went over to the Fire Eagle party. It was nice to talk to Tom Coates and the other guys about how Opera can do cool things with Fire Eagle...I then started to feel very tired, and went back to the hotel for a 39 minute power nap, before bowling started.

Our bowling team sucked, but hey, it was fun! Norm, Alun Rowe, Ben Ward, Lloydi, Aslan and Myself didn't win. We didn't get close to winning ;-)

We did have fun though. My team mates managed to enrage me enough to do better by plastering me with IE7 and Silverlight stickers ;-)

I also had some wonderful conversations with people about my web standards curriculum, including WaSP EduTF folk like Steph, Gareth and Aaron. We're taking web standards education to the masses! If anyone knows a university, or any other institution or company that needs some web standards education material, get in touch! I'm creating the definitive web standards training course, and it's getting some backing from big hitters! Mail us if you want more info, and keep checking http://dev.opera.com for more updates.

After the bowling fun was over, I went to bed for 9 hours. Hot damn I needed that!