Eclectic Brain Salad

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.

I did a talk on Opera, future web standards and how to get hired in the web industry at Manchester Metropolitan University on Friday Feruary 29th 2008. I was fairly pleased with how it went, considering that it was my first ever talk to an external crowd (ie outside Opera!) and everything that could have gone wrong did so, pretty much! The projector unit would not recognise my Mac at all, for no apparent reason, and the default computer attached to the projector wouldn't let me install any files on it or download Opera. In the end I had to put my slides up on my blog and show them using IE - oh the irony! And of course they looked crappy because my Opera Show format wouldn't work on IE, and IE wouldn't run any of the examples hardly, being that they were CSS3, SVG, and other interesting stuff.

Anyhow this is making me sound horribly bitter and ungrateful, so I'd like to say that it still seemed to go down fairly well, and give a big thankyou to everyone who attended, especially Martin Stanton, who organized the do.

E-mail me if you'd like a copy of the slides - cmills [at] opera [dot] com.