Posts in the Personal Category

There’s been much talk of this year’s SXSW and how overwhelmingly huge it was.  I don’t have a whole lot to add to that, really.  I thought last year was out of control.  This year left it standing.

Without question, the best panel I saw was “How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards“.  This was not due to the topic, though that was good too, but because the panel was tightly assembled and packed with good information.  Most panels are a collection of folks who sit onstage and leisurely toss out assorted thoughts for an hour; I should know, having been on many such panels in the past.  For this one, everybody had specific points to make and made them concisely.  There was a lot of preparation, and it showed.  It very much raised the bar, as far as I’m concerned, especially since I’m thinking of proposing a panel or two for 2007.  Kudos to all involved.

Also:

• It was interesting to sit on the “How to Roll Your Own Web Conference” panel with Jason Fried and hear his experiences.  You may recall that when I wrote about event pricing, I said one way to find an event’s optimum price was to run it over and over and keep raising the price until you stopped selling all the seats.  That’s exactly what’s happening with the “Getting Real” workshop.  It will be interesting to see where they level off.  Assuming they do.

• John Allsopp‘s presentation during the WaSP Annual Meeting was an interesting experience for me.  It also covered a bit of the same ground I plan to cover in my keynote for @media.

• In two different lunches, I told people from computer book publishers that their whole business model is in danger of collapsing.  Interestingly, both (more or less) agreed.  Sadly, it seems that only one is working for a company that’s aware of this fact, and it isn’t the company you’d probably assume.

• I’ve decided I much prefer El Sol y La Luna to Las Manitas when it comes to the food.  Las Manitas, of course, wins on the basis of proximity.  Also for not deafening its patio patrons.

• No joke: I got into our rental car in Austin and the Avis Preferred hangtag said “ETA: CSS“.

Good times.

• SXSW Summary was published on Saturday, March 18th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been six replies.

After a short evening walk, Tantek and Kat and Carolyn and I arrived at 219 West in Austin, Texas for the WestCiv gathering.  The crowd inside was quite loud and densely packed, saturated with so many Web geeks that it was threatening to precipitate a site right onto the carpet.

Just as we got close to some people we knew, a staff member appeared at our elbows.  “I’m very sorry, folks, but this is a 21-and-over establishment,” he said with a distinct lack of sorrow.

So if you wondered where we were, or happened to spot us in the 90 second window before we left, or I walked past you without interacting and never got back to you… that’s why.  We weren’t blowing you off; we just ran afoul of an odd local custom.

As a result, we’ll be absent from the vast majority of the evening gatherings at SXSW.  Hope all you kids have fun.  We’ll be hanging out with the other grown-ups and getting some sleep.

• No Kidding was published on Saturday, March 11th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been eleven replies.

So tomorrow I head out to SXSW along with most of the rest of the industry, just like everybody else.  There are, as usual, about two dozen sessions I want to see, all of which conflict with each other.  I’ll be on three panels, two Sunday and one Monday (as listed over at Complex Spiral), and will be doing book signings on Sunday around lunch time.  There will be a bookstore there, but if you already have a book of mine, bring that too.

Only a few days after I return from SXSW, I’ll be shipping out again for MIX06 in Las Vegas.  They’ve been running a “Remix MIX” design competition in the spirit of the CSS Zen Garden, and I’ve consented to be one of the judges.  I’m actually looking forward to MIX for a whole bunch of reasons, but at the top of the heap has to be a chance to try out IE7 and talk to the team members in person.  That’s three-quarters of the reason I’m going.  Also, I’m curious about Microsoft’s “Atlas” framework for AJAX development, but that’s more of a bonus reason.

Besides, if you look deeply enough, you discover there are really only two “scenarios” (a.k.a. tracks) at the conference:

• Next Generation Browsing Experience
• Beyond the Browser

Yeah, I think I’d like to know what they’re thinking.  So off to Vegas I go, once I’m back from Texas.

Yee haw.

• Southwest Twice was published on Thursday, March 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

Once was lost, now is found: “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps” has been resurrected from the Great Bit Bucket Beyond and given new life on Mozilla.org.  In fact, it looks like just about all the technical articles written by me and the other members of TEDS are available.  Look through the full list of CSS articles, for example.  You can dig into any number of topic areas from the main page of the Documentation section.  (Scroll down to the “Mozilla Developer Center Contents” headline.)

Some other popular articles from my Netscape days gone by:

• Consistent List Indentation
• Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover
• Understanding Underlines
• Liberty! Equality! Validity!

So far as I’ve been able to determine, some of the less technical pieces, like the interviews with Doug Bowman and Mike Davidson, are not available.  Not now, anyway.  Perhaps one day that too will change.

• DevEdge Content Returns was published on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the History, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been six replies.

Not long after noon this past Tuesday, my grandmother Constance died at the age of 98.  She was my father’s mother, the last of my grandparents to die.  At this point, if I were to start with me and trace the tree diagrams of my mother’s and father’s families all the way back to their root elements, my only living ancestor is my father.

It is always sad when a loved one dies, but it’s what she wanted, and I respect that decision without reservation.  Her health and physical abilities had deteriorated greatly, and she was tired in a way that I cannot hope to comprehend.  She had seen her children grow up and have their own children, and then become grandparents of their own.  Her life had been long, her joys and sorrows beyond counting.  She was ready to call an end.  In many ways, she had been ever since losing her husband a little over three years ago.

Tomorrow we go to join the gathering family.  I think Grammy would have wanted nothing else but that: the family together, forming a great circle of strength and love in which each of us can shelter.

• A Grand Lady was published on Friday, February 24th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Registration for AEA Atlanta has been open a week now and one-fifth of the seats are already claimed, so you might want to step up the pressure on your boss.  The early bird deadline won’t be here for another three and a half weeks, but seat availability may not last that long.  (As I’ve mentioned before, it didn’t in Philadelphia.)

Even better, the value of any one of those seats just went up.  How so?  We’ve just announced that we’ll have two (count ’em!) guest speakers joining us: Jason Santa Maria, who delivered one of the highest rated presentations in Philadelphia; and Atlanta native Todd Dominey of Dominey Design, Turner Entertainment, and What Do I Know.

What will they talk about?  You’ll have to come to Atlanta to find out.  Personally, I can’t wait.

• AEA Atlanta Heats Up was published on Monday, February 6th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

Registration for AEA Atlanta is now open, so y’all sign up and come see us, y’hear?  It’ll be both a hoot and a holler.  Shoot, we can all have a Coke together.

Just make sure to sign up before March 3rd, unless you want to miss out on the $50 early bird discount.  If you need to exert a little pressure on your boss to cough up the funds, AEA Philadelphia sold out about two weeks before the early bird deadline.

Just sayin’.

• AEA Atlanta Registration Open was published on Monday, January 30th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

Inspired by some recent conversations and a post by Dave Shea, I’m going to share with you my Sooper-Dooper No-Patent-Pending DIY Anti-Jet-Lag Technique.  I used it in my trips to and from the UK, Japan, and Australia this past year, and I didn’t have jet lag going either direction for any one of those trips.  The technique is so simple, you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it first.  Unless you did, in which case you can feel all smug.

Here it is: after getting your usual amount of nightly sleep, wake up at your normal time in the target time zone.

All right, maybe it doesn’t sound simple.  What I mean is, figure out what time the day starts at your destination.  Then modify your sleep schedule to synchronize with it before you get there.  So if you always get up at sunrise, arrange things so you sleep your usual time and wake up at the same time the sun is rising at your destination.

I’ll use my trip to Australia for Web Essentials as an example.  Going there, I flew across America to Los Angeles and then had nine hours before my flight across the Pacific.  The United flight from LAX left at 11:15pm, and arrived in Sydney at approximately 7:00am Sydney time.  Perfect: that’s about when I get up anyway.  I need about six hours of sleep in a night, and the flight was 13.5 hours long.  So I kept myself awake for the first half of the flight, and slept for the second.  When we landed Tuesday, I was all ready to go.  Sure, I was tired, but I was completely synched up with Sydney’s time zone. 

Coming back was tougher, because we departed Sydney at 1:30pm and landed in Los Angeles at 11:15am the same day.  Still, I knew what I had to do: wake up around 7:30am Los Angeles time (give or take an hour; I’m not overly picky about the time I wake up).  So I slept only an hour or two the night before leaving, in order to intentionally shorten my waking time during the flight.  Part way through the flight, I went to sleep, and woke up a few hours before landing.  While I was exhausted all that day, I was in step with LA’s time zone.

As I say, I did the same going to and from Japan, and when I went over to London.  Synching to the UK was actually pretty simple, because going there was a seven-hour direct flight that landed at 7:00am.  I just made sure to sleep for as much of the flight as possible.  The return flight was a special case, as it left in the late morning and landed in the early afternoon, Cleveland time.  So I just kept myself awake until my usual bed time, and got a full night’s sleep.  Ta-daaa!  No jet lag.

It is no shame to support this technique with medication; I do it myself, in fact.  Tylenol PM works well for me, as does Ambien.  I do not, however, medicate myself into wakefulness upon arrival.  No melatonin, which never has any effect on me anyway; and no caffeine, which I basically never consume in any form.

If you use this approach, odds are that you’ll be pretty tired on the day you arrive.  Just keep going until whatever time you’d normally go to sleep, and then sleep until your normal wake time (or maybe an hour or two later, if you’re feeling indulgent).  The next day, you’ll be back up to speed and still in synch with the local time.

Admittedly, this does require some forethought and planning, but it works for me every time.

• How to Avoid Jet Lag was published on Sunday, January 29th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been thirteen replies.