Posts in the Personal Category

Posting has been very sparse of late, and will likely continue in that vein for some time.  We just this week held An Event Apart NYC 2006, and it was a really great time.  The two-day format let us not only have more content, but also more time for interaction, which was great.  We’ll definitely be using what we learned in New York as we move forward to Seattle and beyond.  And can I get a round of applause for our wonderful caterer, amazing speakers, and even more amazing audience?  There was so much great conversation with the attendees that Jeffrey and I barely had time to speak with one another.

For those interested in the Seattle show, we should have more information in the coming weeks, but for now let’s just summarize it as the very best parts of the NYC show, condensed to a single day, with an all-new and thoroughly excellent guest speaker.  Sound good to you?  It sure does to me.

I’ve been working on an update to the Definitive Guide and a beginner-level book for another publisher—more details to come soon.  Okay, I know I just said that about AEA Seattle.  Sorry.

And then there’s the evolution of a fairly popular personal project into something substantially less bottlenecked, thanks to a great deal of help from a professional acquaintance, which should happen in the next few days.  Details should be— well, you know.  Third verse, same as the first.

I don’t think I have any more semi-secret activity to half-reveal, but if I manage to think of anything else, I’ll post some details when I can.

Ah ha ha.

• Peep was published on Friday, July 14th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been six replies.

I’m very pleased to announce that as of yesterday, I am no longer married to Kat.  Instead, I am now married to Doctor Kat.  Dr. Kathryn Meyer, if you want to be a little more formal about it.

Yesterday morning, Kat successfully defended her dissertation, “The Temporal Patterns of Interruptions During the First Postpartum Day”, and thus earned the title Doctor of Practical Nursing.

And there was much rejoicing.

• Culmination was published on Saturday, July 1st, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

I’m back home from @media 2006, and as much as I’m happy to be reunited with my family, I’m very glad I made the trip to London.  All the people I met (and I met far too many to have any hope of naming them all) were great, very enthusiastic and passionate about what they do.  Forget the “reserved Englishman” (or woman) stereotype: if I were to create a single composite image to represent my experience, it would be a warm, wide grin.

From all the commentary, it would seem that people very much enjoyed my keynote, “A Decade of Style”, and several people commented on its similarity to last year’s keynote by Jeffrey Zeldman.  I knew he’d talked about the Web Standards Project, but I didn’t fully appreciate the danger of topical overlap.  Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to have hurt its reception, and I’m glad people found my little trip down amnesia lane to be of interest.  Personal narratives can be highly compelling, but they can also be unimpressive or (even worse) boring.

Of course, there was plenty of love for other talks, but you can understand why I might have been most concerned about how my talk was received, it being the one for which I was responsible and all.  I don’t get nervous about speaking in front of audiences, but I do fear boring or annoying them.  If there’s one thing I strive not to be, it’s a waste of others’ time.

As usual, there’s a quickly expanding body of photos over at Flickr.  I just have two things I’d like to suggest that @media photo taggers please do (or don’t):

1. While I appreciate the photogenicity of London, pictures of Big Ben or Heathrow airport don’t really deserve the tag “atmedia”.  The venues, sure; the attendees, absolutely.  But a picture that shows all of the seats on your flight to UK were full isn’t really about the conference.  And do we really need to see what you ate for dinner each night?  I say thee nay.  (But then I totally don’t understand the impulse to habitually take pictures of one’s dinner, so maybe I’m a tad off base there.)

2. If a person is depicted in your photo and you know their name, you should put that in your photo’s tags.  Whether you use the proper format (“Joe Person”) or the compressed version (“joeperson”) is irrelevant, since Flickr treats them as being equivalent.  But it’s nice to be able to find all the photos of, say, Jon Hicks by a convenient name-tag.

   I’ve also seen people tagged with both their name and URL, so a photo of Jon Hicks might be tagged both “jonhicks” and “hicksdesign“.  That’s a decent bit of design redundancy and probably worth doing, but at the very least, tag the names.  I’m going to go clean up my omissions on that score this evening, so as to flesh out the semantic gooness of my own photo stream.

Just my two bits of tagging advice; take ’em for whatever you think they’re worth.  In the meantime, if you’ve ever wanted to see me wearing a suit, or with my fangs partially extended in anticipation of a fresh meal, well then—I guess it’s just your lucky day, innit?

• @media Impressions was published on Saturday, June 17th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been twenty-seven replies.

While in Chicago, we went for lunch at Navy Pier.  What can I say?  We were tourists.  As we were lead to our table, one of the waiters stopped me and said, “I love your shirt!”  It was my microformats icon shirt, and it turned out he had no idea what it was.  He just liked it.

A couple of days later, as we were passing through security at the base of the Sears Tower— Carolyn’s pick for what to do that morning— one of the guards burst out laughing and, pointing to my shirt, said “That’s right on, man!  I heard that!”  The source of his mirth was my ALA “Please code responsibly” T-shirt, the one with the car-off-a-dock icon on the front.

It’s literally been years since I had a random stranger comment on a shirt I was wearing.  Is there something about Chicagoans that they’re more conscious of other people’s shirts?

• Shirty! was published on Thursday, June 8th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Travel categories.
• There have been nine replies.

As Jeffrey said, An Event Apart Chicago was fantastic.  There was a great energy in the room—not only in the speakers, but in the audience as well.  The old talks felt like they had more punch, and the new material was crisp and fresh.  We got a lot of really sharp questions during our talks, and even the between-session chatter crackled with high-level insight and ideas.

There have been some great shots posted in the Flickr group, which includes a few humble efforts from yours truly.  Several of them give an idea of how packed the house was, and still there was a sense of intimacy.  For this, I give a great deal of credit the venue itself; as Jason said, I just want to take it with us wherever we go.

Thanks to all who made the day so great.  With the energy charge of Chicago still humming in my head, I’m looking forward to AEA New York more than ever.

• Sweet Home Chicago was published on Sunday, June 4th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

One of my grandfathers served in the Navy during World War II.  The other worked in a critical industry and so was exempted from the draft.  After living and working in the Phillippines for a few years, he and his family left only a few weeks ahead of the Japanese.  Many of their friends and their friends’ families did not make it out in time.  Most of them spent the rest of the war in Japanese POW camps—assuming they survived that long.

A semi-distant relative worked on the Manhattan Project.  A few days after one of the test detonations, he and his children wandered the test site, picking up shards of alien glass littering the desert: bright leavings of a new technology whose more subtle dangers had yet to be identified.  All three of them eventually died of cancer.

None of them ever held a rifle.  None of them were soldiers.  They still died casualties of war.

It is they, and the countless people whose stories echo theirs, who I remember today.

• Memorial Day was published on Monday, May 29th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

A couple of interviews that involved me were recently released, and I’ve been very tardy in linking to them.  Life has been like that of late: I passed a major career anniversary last week and completely failed to note it.  I was lucky not to overlook Mother’s Day, which is not really something you want to do when there are children in the house.

So anyway, the interviews:

• Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria at An Event Apart — a bit o’ chat from AEA Atlanta, conducted by the lovely and talented Amber Rhea of CSS Insider fame.  At the beginning of the podcast, I learned something about Amber I hadn’t previously known.  It was… odd.  At least for me.
• Web 2.0 Show – Episode 18 – Eric Meyer — in which we talked about my career path and professional history, self-publishing, running an event, and getting started in CSS.

I’ll be showing up again on the Web 2.0 show as part of an ensemble cast in their discussion of ma.gnolia, but I don’t know when.  I’ll probably linkblog it when it comes out.

Ya know, I remember when interviews were printed, not audible, which was preferable because I tend to sound more intelligent in print than I do in person.  Of course, I also remember acoustic-couple modems, so maybe it’s not that I’m less intelligent so much as more senile.

• Spoken Words was published on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Standards categories.
• There have been eight replies.

This one will be of interest to the dozen or so of you who regularly give presentations that involve some sort of (Powerpoint, Keynote, S5, whatever) slide show.

Just before An Event Apart Philadelphia, I went out and bought a Keyspan Presentation Remote.  I picked this particular make and model because I’d used one at Web Essentials 05 and it’s programmable, which always hooks me.  It also has the ability to control the mouse pointer, change the audio volume, and more.  So I bought one.

Bad move.  As attendees of An Event Apart can tell you, we had problem after problem with the damn thing, both with the default settings and with the customized configuration I’d set up.  It turns out the remote has two “modes”, and the default mode can be only partly reprogrammed.  Sadly, it won’t stay in the alternate mode.  If you don’t interact with the remote for a minute or so, it goes back to default mode, which means it stops doing what it’s supposed to do (advance slides).  We ended up just not using it.

While I was at IceWeb, I borrowed Molly‘s (or maybe it was Andy‘s) Kensington Pocket Presenter to deliver my talk.  This little baby is simple as anything: largish back and forth keys that map to Page Up and Page Down, a red button for the laser pointer, and a “stop” button that blanks the screen in supporting applications.  That’s it.  And that’s what makes it great.  Even better, the USB receiver slides into a storage slot in the remote itself, and doing so turns the whole thing off, is pure genius.  It fits easily in the hand, both in terms of size and shape.  It’s the iPod of presentation controllers, designed to do one thing and do it very well.  It’s enough to make me reconsider my whole “one device to rule them all” stance.

I picked one up at the Apple Store the other night for not much more than it costs at your favorite online discount e-store, and I couldn’t be happier.  The one little quirk I noticed was that the first time I plugged one of these into my PowerBook (running Tiger), the system said I was plugging in a new keyboard.  I dismissed the dialog box, and it’s worked without a hiccup ever since.

So: Keyspan remote bad, Kensington remote good.  Of course, if you really need a presentation remote that can do a convincing impression of a slow-moving mouse driven by an Etch-A-Sketch interface, then you may disagree with me on this one.  Me, I’d rather just have a slide controller, and if I need to do something with the mouse, I’ll walk over to the computer and use the mouse.  Shocking!

• Presentation Remotes was published on Thursday, May 4th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been fourteen replies.