Eclectic Brain Salad

We awoke with another great day in store for us at Byron Bay. After some nice breakfast and a good deal of faffing about, I caught up on writing the last couple of day's blog posts while Kirsty and Gabriel headed to the beach, then walked down to the local record shop with Elva asleep to take a look. I had a great time in there chatting to a couple of locals about music, then I bought CDs by a couple of Aussie bands - Karnivool and Cog.

I then headed up to the Wifi-enabled Cafe to do some work mail and post the last couple of day's blog posts, and met Gabriel and Kirsty to go to lunch.

The afternoon was awesome! We spent the whole afternoon on the beach - I walked Elva round the beach for a while, then went in the water for ages with Gabriel, swimming in the waves and pretending to be X-men, then we built a castle out of sand with four turrets, walls and a moat.

The last part of the day involved getting home, cooking some great dinner, then chilling before bed. I also checked out the two CDs I bought earlier, and both are really cool. Cog are kinda like Tool crossed with Porcupine Tree, not quite as heavy as either but really proggy and interesting, and Karnivool play good quality heavy rock - I heard a bit of Queensryche here and there...

On Sunday we had a lovely chillout - we all got up and took the dogs down to the park for a good run about. We dropped Lis, Kirsty, Gabriel, Elva and the kids off, and then Lach and I went off to play hunter gatherers - we men, we bring women and children food! Well, we did have a cafe and a cake shop to help us out, but yah know...

We got back to the park and ate breakfast, then we spent ages chatting to various other dog owners that were out walking. We also saw some jellyfish in the river, and a dead possum (the park ranger seemed very displeased by being summoned to clear it up!), and Gabriel also impressed us by not falling in the river (he seems to have an unerring ability to fall into pretty much any body of water that he gets close to). I really loved the way that the local community around the park seemed so friendly.

After groovin' in the park, Lisa had the great idea of taking Kirsty to a market to have a look round, and Lach decided that a BBQ would be a good idea so we again went into hunter gatherer mode, and forraged around the badlands of Sydney for loads of meat and loads of beer.

We then went to the market to pick the ladies up and have a look ourselves - I was very pleased to come across some dodgy old prog vinyl (Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Mahavishnu Orchestra).

Then the rock and roll BBQ began! We went home to get salads and dips sorted, started drinking beer, cooked loads of amazing meat, talked complete nonsense for ages, listened to some very bizarre eclectic music (and bird calls) thanks to DJ Lisa, then watched more Mighty Boosh and Primus videos. CSS guru Lindsay Evans also came over for a while to share in the jollity - good to chat to him again (hint: follow Lindsay on Twitter - he is bloody hilarious, and spot on). Pretty much the last thing I remember is Lach deciding to fry sausages at 2am, then eating them with tonnes of hot English Mustard. Mmmmmm, firey! after the beer ran out, we stole Scenario Grrrrl's vodka. I think it is fair to say that we were pretty drunk by that point ;-)

I was looking forward to today a great deal - we were heading off to John and Sarah's house for an industrial-sized Aussie BBQ, which promised to be a lot of fun.

We chilled out in the morning with some breakfast, then Lach gave us a lift over to the hotel, where a coach was coming to pick most of us johnny foreigners up and take us there (several more people were coming via their own transport).

The journey over was absolutely beautiful, and really brought it home what an amazing country this is. It is amazing that in sydney and the surrounding area you can have so many different types of townage and terrain, from high-tech skyscrapers, beautiful docks and harbours, old carefully-architected buildings, and then in not so many miles, stunning rainforests and dry deserts.

It was lovely to talk to ex-Microsoftie Will Mason and his partner on the coach. Will has now got a bit of free time on his hands, and wants to help out with the web education effort, which is just great!

We got there and were immediately shown around by John and Sarah. The catering was lovely, and the beer was plentiful, and my kids had a whole bunch of other kids to play with, which was a bonus! It was lovely to meet Emma and Alys Boulton (I've met Mark quite a few times now), and chat to Emma about their publishing ventures and how I can help. I also had a great time talking to Doug Schepers and W3C cohort Laurent Lefort, Yiying Lu (Failwhale artist), Brit-turned Aussie technology journalist Nick Galvin, Dmitry Baranovsky and Deb Schultz.

As the day drew to a close, we were tired but very happy. We got back into Sydney, went out for a nice pub meal with Lisa and Lach, drank a few more beers, and then had a relatively early night. I'm told that Tuesday and Friday and liable to be carnage, so I need to conserve my strength for then ;-)

One great fact I'd like to share with you. Lisa and Lach have a chair in their living room that was actually used in the set of Neo's apartment in the first Matrix movie - see the pic below, of my daughter sitting on it!

Up again bright and early, and scooting down to the conference just in time to see John's quite hilarious introduction for Kelly Goto's keynote, involving coming over for the conference while leaving her 4 month oold daughter at home, expressing breastmilk and shipping it back to the US...

Kelly Goto - WorkFLOW

When she first started, I kinda though that it seemed a bit stale trawling out Kelly to talk about workflow again. I mean, her infamous book came out 8 years ago now, and she has been talking about this subject for a long time. However, the talk still seemed pretty fresh, useful and entertaining, and you really can't deny that her charisma shines through. I really enjoyed this session.

Gian Wild - WCAG 2

Having talked to Gian about her presentation the night before, I was really looking forward to getting another take on accessibility testing, legislation, etc. from another country's point of view. However I think at least a part of her talk went about things the wrong way. She covered some interesting points about WCAG 2, but I think the way she looked at the thickness of all the documents, and the complexity of finding information kind of make accessibility look a bit scarier than it is, which might scare people off a bit (I'm certainly not saying her points were wrong, but I think it could've been presented in somewhat of a more positive light). Her section at the end covering the differences between WCAG 1 and WCAG 2 was really useful and interesting.

Elliot Jay Stocks - Progressive Enhancement

I've known Elliot for a couple years now, but amazingly never had a chance to hear him speak before. I'm glad I did, because this designer's view of progressive enhancement was very useful, and was delivered very well. Elliot has a lot of charisma, and just enough bile and fire to create a bit of contension and get people thinking.

I agree with him that a lot of web design is really boring, and we should be trying to push the boundries of what we are doing. He also made the point that validation is irrelevant. Just at the point where Doug Schepers and I were about to start throwing things, he qualified his point ;-) He was really trying to say that validation is good for ensuring a valid DOM, debugging, etc., but when you are playing with experimental CSS 3 features, etc., and working with complex data-driven applications that feature a lot fo user-generated content, trying to make sites absolutely validate is not worth your while.

He also make a great point about web sites not needing to look the same across all browsers. I really appreciate this, after hearing too many designers go on about pixel-perfect designs, and their precous control. It is only natural that experiences should differ across different devices, as the context is different, and there are so many variables to consider (screen size, CPU power nd so many more). To try to enforce the same experience across different devices would be a really bad thing.

Lunchtime at Google

I had to run out of Elliot's session a few minutes early because I was meeting up with Pamela Fox to go and have lunch at the Google offices. They were very plush, as you may expect! She came to meet me and walked me over there, and we had a really good chat about developer evangelism and outreach techniques (she kind of does the same thing as I do, only for Google). The real crux of our conversation was talking about open standards education. She was really interested in getting involved with the Open Web Education Alliance efforts, as education is a real passion of hers. I was really interested in following up with her because I think Google has a lot to offer the open education movement, and her interests and background make her an ideal person to get involved.

I also had a chance to meet the Google Wave team, and chat to them about Opera support.

Christian Crumlish - Designing social interfaces

I managed to get back to the venue in time to see about half of Xian's talk. It was a really well-delivered look at patterns that work when designing web sites (with a slant towards social networks) and conversely, anti-patterns that really suck and don't work at all well. For example, breaking the purpose of e-mail by using it for notifications that don't allow you to reply is a really bad thing.

Lachlan Hardy - The open web

Lach was great - he presented a great look at the open web. including what constitutes an open standard (eg regulated by a standards body, not controlled by one company, spec is open, and anyone can contribute), some great ways in which you can use open standards, and some advice to the audience in how they can help to make the web more open. This last section included making sure all of their data is presented as HTML, not PDF or some other non-manipulable format, giving your site an API, making your URLs hackable, and using Microformats. I though it was great how he took a very dry, complicated subject with loads of politics surrounding it, and made it down to earth and accessible.

Slides please Lach!

Dan Hill - 15 years in

I've not come across Dan before, but my god he made my career sound boring ;-) He first gave us a potted history of him, from helping to create the BBC's web presence, designing dodgy band sites in the late nineties, and then more recently creating amazing digital architecture experiences with Arup. He made some really nice points about ubiquity and intelligent uses of connectivity in the urban space.

Evening

After the conference was over, I went back to collect my family from the hotel, and we headed over to the end of event party. It was in a venue that doesn't allow kids in, so I went to find some people to eat with, and we went off for a lovely seafood dinner with Leslie, Shaun, Daniel from Opera, and Doug Schepers. Incredibly nice, and we had great conversation, but the jetlag again got the better of me, and I was falling asleep by about 9.30!

I was a bit gutted about missing the after show party, but I still had a really great time! Thanks to you all for making it such a special conference.

Another fine day in Paradise!

Day 3 in Sydney was fabulous - I had a good night's sleep beforehand, and the morning was spent having a nice chill out (after doing a few hours of e-mail to keep things ticking over). I had a nice breakfast, then went swimming with my family. We happened to be in the hotel pool at the same time as John Allsopp's wife Sara and their kids, and had a lovely chat.

Anyway, moving on to the order of the day.

The first event I spoke at was Web Futures, a chance to speak to a nice gathering of students at Sydney university. I spoke along with Ben Galbraith (formerly of Mozilla, now heading up developer relations at Palm) and my OWEA colleague, the W3C's Doug Schepers. It was a great event, and the students asked some great questions afterwards.

• Ben gave an awesome presentation about the future of web applications, talking about Canvas, Mobile and the open web platform, developer tools, SVG, fast JavaScript engines, and more. He obviously gave a lot of plugs for Mozilla technology, but mentioned Opera favourably several times too.
  
• I gave a series of practical tips on good web development practice, aimed at varying levels of student ability, from mobile optimization to accessibility to good netiquette. I thought it went ok, but it somehow didn't flow as well as I'd hoped, and I wasn't sure if the target audience was quite right (it was pretty hard to predict).
  
• Doug talked about how the W3C works, and gave some great insights into future web standards.
  

You can download my slides for Web Futures.

After this event finished, it was back to the hotel for some dinner with my family, and then on to Web Jam 10!

I must say, this was one of the most fun events I have ever spoken at - the format of 3 minute presentations means that it never gets boring, even if you don't like a particular talk. I met some really great people, including Lisa Herrod's sister, and Raphael creator Dmitry Baranovskiy. There was a lot of Opera love in the room, as we had three presenters - myself, Daniel "Croutons" Davis, and Lachy Hunt. I went first, showing off some of the great new showcases my team wrote to support the Opera 10 release. Lachy showed off a nice CSS 3 transitions example using an experimental internal Opera build, and Daniel showed of Opera Unite. I think my favourite talks overall were the paper scanning/recycling service, PaperFree, and Sylvia Pfeiffer's HTML 5 Video Accessibility ideas.

"A few light ales" were drunk, much silly conversation was had, and I ended up in a rather nice Chinese place, eating far too much food. Perfect!

(download my slides for Web Jam 10)