On Thursday evening (2007-01-25), at the Web Standards Group meeting in Sydney, I’ll be doing a presentation about the future of HTML. It will be an overview of the new features in HTML5. So, if you’re in Sydney and interested learning more about HTML5, or the other 3 topics being presented, send in your RSVP and come along!
For those of you who can’t make it on the night, the slides, and hopefully a podcast of the event, will be made available afterwards.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking for a new place to live, somewhere around Sydney. My current flatmate is going overseas and there’s no way I could afford this place on my own.
So here’s the deal. I need a place to live and move into by 2007-01-26 at the latest. I need a reasonably big room to fit at least a bed and large computer desk, or space to put the computer elsewhere in the house. I require a broadband connection, or at least availability of ADSL2+ in the area to which I can relocate connection.
Alternatively, there’s a possibility that someone looking for a place to live could move in with me to my current residence; though I’d need to contact my real estate agent fairly soon to organise that, before they give the place to someone else. I mostly work from home doing contract work, though occasionally some jobs require me to go into the office.
If you’re somewhere in Sydney and can help me out a little, contact me.
It was an absolutely phenomenal experience! Everything from the workshops and presentations to the people, and the after parties were just fantastic!
On Wednesday, 2006-09-27, I went to Derek Featherstone’s workshop on accessibility. It was very informative and interesting to see many of the issues demonstrated. Throughout the day, he demonstrated the use of various assistive technologies, including a screen reader and voice recognition, showing just how badly common mistakes can affect the usability and accessibility of a site. Although I had previously read about several of the issues discussed, some were new to me and it was great to see the practical demonstrations.
Thursday, 2006-09-28, was day 1 of the conference. The most enjoyable presentations for me were Jeremy Keith’s Explaining Ajax (featuring a sexy, and rather hairy, topless photo of Cameron Adams) and John Allsopp’s Microformats. Derek also presented on accessibility, which was also good, but it was almost a subset of the topics addressed in his workshop, with only a few new points.
Friday, 2006-09-29, was the second and final day of the conference. At the beginning of the day, John Allsopp awarded prizes for cool and/or funny photos posted to flickr and blog posts about the conference. I was lucky enough to receive some prizes for my photo of Ben Buchanan in is Web 2.0MFG shirt. I won a SitePoint shirt that reads “Eat, Sleep, Code” and two books: The CSS Anthology and Deliver First Class Websites.
Andy Clarke’s presentation, Creating Inspired Design, was extremely interesting. As I’m a coder, not a designer, it was good to learn about web design from a designer’s perspective. Without showing any code at all, he illustrated ways to think about design and how to look for inspiration in the real world. He showed how, with just a little creativity, we can start to break out of the common 2 or 3 column layouts and into more interesting concepts.
However, the highlight of the day was Cameron Adams getting his revenge with a topless photo of Jeremy. But, according to Jeremy, that photo was actually photoshopped.
Despite all the great presentations and workshops, the most exciting part of the conference was getting to meet so many wonderful people. It was an absolute pleasure to meet the likes of Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Jeremy Keith and James Edwards (Brother Cake), as well as catching up with people I’d met before like Russ Weakley, Cameron Adams, John Allsopp and many others.
I got plenty of great photos over the 3 days I was there. In particular, the Lachlan³ photo featuring myself, Lachlan Hardy and Lachlan Donald, and myself with a bunch of fairly hot chicks.
Finally, the t-shirt slogan competition to come up with a Web 2.0 slogan is yet to be announced, but I’m hoping to win for my “Wake Me for Web 3.14” shirt. Of all the shirts I saw at the conference and those on Flickr, I’m predicting the major prize of a Sony MYLO will be awarded to either myself or Anson Parker for “Wallet Inspectr Nigerian Division”. John told me it would be announced on the Web Directions blog some time this week.