I've been tagged! The meme is to find photos of yourself from Web Directions... Although I escaped WE05 relatively unsnapped, there are still a few photos of me from that year. WD06 was a different matter. I usually tend to be a bit camera-shy (I'd rather take a photo than be in one), but frankly I had to get over that or I'd have had a meltdown.
As friends gathered the photos started and Amit used me to test stage lighting as a sort of speaker stunt double. The workshops were a bit of a blur, but I can say for sure that I ate muffins and lunch.
At the speaker dinner we made Molly a little worried but thankfully we didn't scare her away. Recursive photos ensued and apparently I nearly ate the man in blue during yum-cha. Then in the lift we proved that at Web Directions, you can't turn around without seeing a camera.
On Day One the Web2.0MFG levels started to pick up, as did the drinks. On day two, my nerves reached their peak and after some magic spells were cast Cheryl and I finally spoke. Then it was all over and we were at the Pump House. Beers, photos and hand gestures were flying and there was even some chimping to be observed. It appears that eventually my brain started glowing and somehow more yum cha was involved.
Last but not least there was a quiet after party and while saying farewell may be sad, people had to go home - all good things come to an end.
...now, I'm supposed to tag three people. However I think it's more fun to say anyone who took or appeared in one of the photos above - particularly if you were drunk - should consider themselves tagged! That includes Andrew K, who's been tagged already but won't get around to it if we don't all hassle him :)
Labels: meme, wd06, wds07, we05, web directions, web directions south, web essentials
As Andrew has already noted, a proper rundown of WE05 presentations is yet to come after we compare notes. Still, I have a bunch of things written down which won't be included there yet haven't been posted yet. Hence, random informal observations from WE05. They include some timeline/social stuff and random notes scribbled down between the notes from the presentations.
day zero
- At early registration, Maxine caught me by surprise when she immediately recognised my name and referred to a comment I'd made on Derek's blog. You mean people read the interweb? :)
- Head back to the hotel with my WE05 swag and kill some time on the net... very very easy to kill time at 28.8k ;)
- Andrew arrives and we head out for food, then alcohol and shooting pool...
- By the time we crash, we've already become obsessed with the saying "Don't be that guy."
- Did I say crash? HAH! A fire alarm next door to The Vulcan kept some of us awake for hours.
day one
- Stagger out with only a couple of hours' sleep. Breakfast picks up my spirits
with surprisingly good coffee from the Vulcan.
- The WE05 experience seems to involve noise and fire alarms.... Tantek Çelik's question time was cut off just before I could ask my question,
when the building evacuation alarm kicked in. Cue an evacuation out to the driveway in front
of the ABC, dust flying everywhere. Turns out a demolition site nearby had kicked
up an enormous amount of dust and set off the alarms.
- A room full of coughing and sneezing geeks (all that dust!) was quickly sorted out by the unflappable WE05 organisers, who sprang into action and supplied water to anyone who needed it. Nice work!
- Lucky seating on return from the fire alarm had us right at the back of the
room, allowing us to bolt for lunch and avoid the huge lines. Spend the rest
of the time trying - without success - to get the wifi access to work.
- During lunch we spot Steve Faulkner doing a remarkable Jeffrey Zeldman impression.
- Find seats within laptop power cord range. Dive on them like deranged fiends ("my baby needs power!").
Discover the flip up desktops aren't even close to level and experience the joy of typing downhill.
- Question for the gallery: why are macheads so completely obsessed with making everything look like OSX?
- I'm having to swap between laptop and paper because I can't keep using either
one the entire time...! These presentations are too interesting to stop for a second.
- At the day one drinks I meet and catch up with a huge number of people. I'll have to collate all the names and URLs later on ;)
day two
- Considering there are really only three rendering engines in play at the moment,
it seems weird that Opera barely gets mentioned. Are we really cross-browser developers, or are many "standards-compliant developers" just infatuated with Firefox? Are people just falling into a new version of an trap
- only testing in Firefox instead of only testing in IE?
- The on campus cafe barista actually knows how to make a decent coffee. I'm
shocked!
- Holy crap, nearly everyone in this room has heard a screen reader!!!!! I have the urge to stand up and yell "I have found my people!" (with a nod to Colin for that line... it's such a perfect way to express the moment).
- During a presentation, text zoom is used... Firefox scales the radio button, but not the selected widget! Geek hilarity ensues.
- Here's a modern moment: I post on my blog, Chaals comments on my blog, I run into Dean Jackson in the lunch line and pass on Chaals' "say hello to dino"... :)
- Dean initially thinks my domain is zoook.com.au... yes, my handwriting
really needs work. Plus I need to remember to cross stroke my zeros.
- We really need some guru to come up with a keyboard replacement for drag and
drop.
- Interface designers... quit labelling buttons B and I and start labelling them STRONG and EM. Especially when they insert STRONG and EM!
- Cameron Adams just got pwned by his own presentation after he forgot he had disabled
javascript....
- Tantek is so used to WE running behind, he was in his hotel room when the
organisers were looking for him before his second presentation.
- How can we resolve styling tables? I've found you often need to set widths according to each
usage across a large site; yet we can't include attributes in the table's tags; and we should avoid
style-based classes. Plus it's technically incorrect to insert
border="1" even though tables become nearly unreadable without styles.
- Geeks might care that something is not new, but the users couldn't care less so long as it's easier to download stuff.
- Ajax/XMLhttprequest.... it's just like little framesets. But they're so damn useful.
- Web 2.0.... basically harnessing the power of that one geek in Prague who went crazy
on a caffeine bender and built something really good. Why the hell would you spend time and money
creating it yourself, all over again, if the end result is the same?
PS. Yes, in case you're wondering, I do plan to eventually return to non-WE05 content ;) Give me a break, I'm on holidays! :)
Labels: we05
Another quick post in an attempt to talk about day two. Realistically, I can't
do it justice while full of pizza and alcohol (I highly recommend Zia Pina pizzeria
at The Rocks); but I don't want to wait another day before posting :)
day two quotable quotes
- Eric Meyer
Tip: [When trying to get design signoff,] schedule the meeting right
before lunch, you'll get a decision!
Anyone support IE6.0? (Hands go up) Anyone not want to support IE6.0?
(Hands stay up) Ahh, my people!
[Gives crap to Dave Winer] Oh, this is podcast! ... He's in America
and I'm in Australia - can get asylum?
[Typos "right" into "roight") Border roight...
I'm localising!
- Steve Faulkner
Day to day, what I do is criticise other peoples' work...
- John Allsopp
- Introducting Tantek Celik:
Tantek is so busy he makes me feel like
a sloth!
- After showing the sad state of corporate websites:
Keep fighting
the good fight!
- Tantek Çelik
- On the box model hack:
I didn't think it was a big deal...
- On meta-data like 'keywords':
Invisible meta-data doesn't work!
(I nearly cheered. Now I can
go back to my organisation with some hope they'll listen to me on this
point ;)
- Cameron Adams
Coolness is overrated. ... Now the first real reason to
do this...
Not a big deal, Tantek? :) Let's visit that in a little more detail. (Note that
this is more paraphrased than quoted - I'll get into the podcast and
quote it properly once I am back home with broadband. Still, I hope this is a reasonable re-telling of the tale...)
I happened to have the ear, or email, of Jeffrey Zeldman. Jeffrey was saying he couldn't stop using tables for layout because of this bug... he mused that it would be great if he could send a different rule to two different browsers.
I said "Is that all? That'll be easy!"
"He looked at me... well he didn't really since it was email... and said 'easy'?"
So, using a test suite, I set out to find an error that screwed up in exactly where he needed it. After a short time hacking around I got back to him with this hack.
Suddenly Jeffrey decided he could move to using CSS instead of tables.
So what would be a big deal? :)
day two notable moments
- Molly referred to Instant Messaging, blogs etc as
the traditional ways
of communicating.
- A show of hands during Eric's session revealed that very few people are
working to a formal browser support profile!
- Derek Featherstone casually asking the crowd whether anyone could find him
a ticket to the NRL Grand Final. Certainly a novel approach to the "sold
out game" issue...
- The Mac freaking out at the end of Derek's presentation, allowing me to
goob the old "get a Mac!" advert. "Get a PC!" ...I was
probably lucky to get out alive.
- Cameron Adams managed to explain the DOM in a way that makes it seem almost
trivially simple to understand. Why didn't anyone just tell me it
just makes a tree out of your document? :)
- Andrew's observation is definitely correct: Cam Adams wins Most
Smartarse Jokes Slipped Into A Presentation. Just wait until Russ
hears about the "snoozefest" comment. It'll might look like the
Eric vs. Doug animation....
- What is it with crazed mac heads? Cam Adams has reproduced the OSX desktop
within a browser. If viewed on a mac, would it create a singularity? Your
machine might reach some kind of Apple event horizon and turn into an iPod.
- Tantek managed to use the word "folksonomies" without making me
want to scream.
- Jeff Veen reminded us that
Your web site is a tiny piece of a much larger
experience.
- Jeff also introduced us to the term and formalised concept of the Culture
of Generosity; which explains many of the web's current success stories. Give
plenty, maybe take just a little, everyone benefits.
I also think it's kind of a notable moment - or at least very cool - that my
non-geek fiance came to the after-party and didn't get driven insane by geek
talk :) Maybe we're not quite as bad as we think we are ;)
See also: we05 day one - quick post, eric meyer on mobile computing (that photo :)), we05 - random informal observations and all over, bar the shouting.
Labels: we05
Posted by popular demand...
Yes, that's Eric Meyer crouched on a footpath in Sydney with his laptop... after a fire alarm caused an evacuation of WE05. He later claimed he wasn't desperately trying to get back onto wifi :)
You can also check out Eric's thoughts on the matter :) Eric's Archived Thoughts: Doth He Protest Too Much?
Labels: eric meyer, mobile computing, we05
Never name drop. De Nero told me that.
Attributed to Reverend Horton Heat
WE05 is done... although I hear there are some extremely inebriated web geeks somewhere in some club, possibly still in Sydney, definitely depleting the world's supply of booze :)
It's hard to convey the Web Essentials experience without turning into a truly horrific name dropper, but the fact is that not only have I been lucky enough to see so many big names speak... I got to meet lots of them. I think the only thing better than hearing their words of wisdom was discovering that they are fantastic people as well :)
I tried to list the things I now Get or Get Better Than Before; but it started turning into a session-by-session report. I'll be doing something along those lines, just not tonight.
Suffice it to say that I wish everyone on my team could have attended and I wonder how on earth Andrew and I can do it justice when we report back (at the next Griffith Systems Design and Development Community of Practice meeting, for those of you playing at home; and I think we might doing WSG Brisbane as well).
Can I recommend this event highly enough? No :)
Labels: we05
The wifi has turned out to be a bust: to get connected with a PC, you have
to disable all firewalls. Since I don't practice unsafe wifi, that means updates
will occur in the evening on aforementioned modem connection.
A few quick impressions of day one before I collapse in bed...
day one quotable quotes
- Molly described web types as
The tribe of people who wear many hats.
She also reminded us that Blogs help people change the world.
I'm sure
a certain professor would also be happy to know she cited blogs and wikis
as killer apps!
- Jeff Veen, looking at a screenshot of the Quixtar site:
All I can tell
is ethnically diverse people are having a lot of fun...
- Jeff again:
Web 2.0? What happened to Web 1.0? It's barely out of alpha!
- Jeff again, again:
AHA! I have resonated with my audience!
- Eric Meyer, at the beginning of his talk:
I'd like to thank Russ and
Maxine for putting me on after Jeffrey Veen...............you tossers.
- Eric again, over the thumping noise of demolition next door:
I'll be
talking about A List Apart, apparently to a driving industrial beat.
- Kelly Goto, as the thumping kicks in again after she talked about drinking
too much caffeine:
Woah, is that my heart?
- Dean Jackson, after some slightly dodgy comments:
Uhh.... oh. This is
all podcast isn't it...
- Russ introduces Doug Bowman, describing him as the hundredth monkey of CSS.
Doug takes the stage and proclaims solemnly:
Oook! Oookook!
day one notable moments
- Molly gets First Code-based Joke with her reference to her niece,
carolyn:first-child
- WE05: a conference so completely attended, the organisers have to usher
people to their seats.
- At least one attendee considers Firefox a "killer app". I Showed
Restraint and did not yell out "go download Opera you philistine!"
;)
- Tantek Celik gets First S5 Presentation of the conference
(please forgive the use of
<sup>, Tantek..).
- Tantek proposes we play with combinations of existing XHTML elements in
order to produce richer semantic meaning. I'm sure it's the influence of reading
Neil Stephenson's The System of the World at the moment, but
I couldn't help thinking of this as semantic alchemy: creating
elements of greater value than the base elements ;)
- World first, right here at WE05! A live podcast of a room evacuation. Right
before I was about to ask Tantek a question, too.
- Eric Meyer was spotted crouched on the footpath outside during the fire
alarm, trying to connect to wifi. Photographic evidence to follow :)
- I made Tantek laugh with my "I (broken entity symbol) Unicode"
tshirt. It was judged "very geeky", which is perhaps slightly worrying
in context at WE05 ;)
More detailed notes will follow at a later date.
Labels: we05
How many of us test on slow connections? Really?
We might validate our code, run The Wave over our pages, check the colours against contrast/colourblindness issues... but the simple fact is most of us who work in web development use network/broadband access. Do we pull out a modem and check our sites over dialup? Not unless we are forced to do so. In fact many of us would have trouble organising that at short notice.
Right now, I'm sitting on a 28.8k modem connection in a hotel room (56k is the maximum, remember; not the guaranteed connection); marvelling at how my browsing habits have changed since I got broadband at home. I'm used to doing a number of things at once - some quite high-bandwidth at that - without any real problems. Today everything is taking longer and I've actually switched off images in an attempt to speed things up (oh wait. alt text is just for blind people, right?).
It's disappointing but not in the least bit surprising to discover many sites don't work so well with images turned off... still. This is 2005 people! Get with the program!
Like a twitching junkie played by a ham method actor, I am looking forward to the wifi at WE05 tomorrow ;)
Labels: broadband, dialup, we05
I'm procrastinating from packing, flying down to Olde Sydney Towne tomorrow for Web Essentials 05! The most buzzword-compliant conference of the year! :)
I can't find the building number though. Details, details.
For those lucky enough to be going as well, see you there! Photo? Hell no. Just look for the geek with the unicode joke on his tshirt. After a few goes you'll find the one that's me ;)
[Oh yeah, it's got an official tag too: WE05 (view on Technorati)]
Labels: we05
