Posts in the Personal Category

Have I been busy?  Oh so very much yes.

A couple of questions for the crowd.

1. In order to get to Japan, I’m flying to Newark, New Jersey and then direct from there to Tokyo, Japan.  That second leg is a 13.5 hour flight.  Whee!  The good news is that I scored a seat with a power outlet, so I can compute my way across the Pacific.  I’d like to take along some DVDs and listen to my music library, but that’s the trick: I need good, comfortable, middle-to-high quality headphones that will be nicely audible even on an airliner.  Any suggestions?  They don’t have to be noise-cancellers, although I’m not opposed to such devices.  I’m just wary of their price tags.
2. My desktop machine is a G4/500, circa 2000, and it runs OS X fine so long as I don’t try to run too many concurrent applications.  I should probably know this, but I don’t, so help me out: what kind of RAM chips does it take, and where do I get said RAM for a good price?

Thanks.

• Wanted: Headphones and RAM was published on Friday, April 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tech categories.
• There have been fifty-three replies.

As recently announced by Mark Baker, Tantek Çelik and I will be co-chairing a full-day track on microformats as part of Developers’ Day at WWW2005.  We’ll announce the details in the near future, but we can already say that have some great speakers and topics lined up.  I encourage anyone who can to come check it out.  You can register at the WWW2005 site; make sure to check the option for “Developers’ Day, 5/14” when you do.

Tantek and I will also be presenting a poster on XMDP at the conference, and on Tuesday, May 10th, I’ll be delivering a half-day tutorial on Standards-Based Design—assuming enough people register, anyway—as well as delivering the afternoon keynote at, and participating in the closing panel for, the 2nd International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A).

Add to that an expected public appearance in Tokyo the evening of Friday the 13th (for which I hope to have details very soon) as well as a few other agenda items, and I’ve started to wonder if I’m going to have any time to sightsee while I’m there.  That’s becoming something of a theme, actually: I’m not expecting to have more than a day or so to make the rounds when I’m in London this June.

For some reason, I’m reminded of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles: “Work work work work work!”

• WWW2005: Microformats Track was published on Monday, April 4th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS, semantic web, Speaking, and W3C categories.
• There have been nine replies.

Terri Schiavo, as you’re no doubt aware, died this morning as the result of twelve days of starvation and dehydration.

I am not qualified to judge the actions of anyone involved in the situation, nor do I have a clear sense of what the “right thing” to do was in that particular case, but I know this much for myself.  If it is acceptable to end a life, then it should be mandatory that the ending be as quick and painless as possible.  Withholding sustenance strikes me as a horrible form of euthanasia.  An overdose of painkillers, or a painless poison, would be far more merciful.

Years ago, long before she was diagnosed with cancer, my mother made me promise that, given certain circumstances, I would help her by ending her life.  Those circumstances didn’t come about; instead, an aggressive, pervasive malignancy destroyed her body and took her life.  But had those circumstances come about, no matter how much keeping that promise might have meant to me and to her, I do not think I could have starved her to death.

Again, this is in no way a comment on whether or not Mrs. Schiavo should have been allowed to die.  It is simply a wish that we might make termination procedures more merciful, or else stop them altogether.

• At The End was published on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.

There’s the World Tour, which is exciting and all that, but then there’s the fun of hometown gigs.  It just so happens that I have two coming up in the near future.  Here they are, along with some brief information on what I’ll be talking about.

NOTACON 2

Conference dates: 8-10 April 2005.  Both my talks will be the morning of Saturday, 9 April.

• The Construction of S5; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM — a look at where S5 started, why it grew, how its growth was accomplished, what kinds of design decisions had to be made, and where it’s headed in the future.
• Humanely Wielding a Clue By Four: Reflections on Managing a Massive Mailing List — a look back at three-plus years of managing css-discuss, this will be an unvarnished peek into the life of a list administrator who actually cares about the list.

Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (NEOUPA)

Metting date: Tuesday, 24 May 2005.

• Rapid UI Prototyping and Easy A/B Usability Testing with CSS — an updated version of the short talk Molly Holzschlag and I gave last year at User Interface 9, this will look at ways to use CSS and standards-oriented design to quickly develop UI designs and to do comparison testing of different designs.

Neither event is free, but then, neither event is terribly expensive, either.  So come on down!  They should be a peck o’ fun.

I’m also speaking at the NASA Glenn Research Center this afternoon, but that’s an internal gathering, not a public event, which is why I didn’t mention it before.  I haven’t been there since the late 1980s, so it’ll be interesting to see if anything’s really different.

• Localized Content was published on Thursday, March 24th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland, S5, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been two replies.

World Tour 2005 continues to add dates.  In addition to Japan (May) and Austraila (September), I’ll be heading to London for a one-day workshop on CSS, XHTML, and standards-oriented design to be held Saturday, June 4th.  You can get all the agenda and other details on “Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” from the Carson Workshops website.

This is a limited-access event: only 40 attendees will be allowed.  Suppose you’re one of that 40, as of course you should be if at all possible.  Not only does that give you a 1-in-40 chance of winning a full copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004, it also gets you the “Survival Kit”, a disc containing all kinds of examples, articles, tools, and so forth.  You’ll also get a whole day of high-tempo, practical instruction in CSS-driven design, with plenty of opportunity to pose questions and get answers.

While this won’t be a workshop for total beginners, it won’t require advanced knowledge of CSS and XHTML, either.  Basically, if you’re at least somewhat familiar with HTML or XHTML and know the basics of writing style sheets, then you’ll fit right in.  Even if you’re beyond that, I’ll be covering a  lot of ground that you should find interesting.

And then there’s always the opportunity to hang out that evening, after the workshop is officially over, and talk about whatever comes to mind.

“Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” — London, UK on Saturday, 4 June 2005.  Hope to see you there!

• Workshopping in London was published on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

So late this morning—that would make it the fifth and final day of the conference—I was doing what everyone else in the freakin’ conference was doing, and taking pictures of attendees while standing in the hallway.  As I held up the camera to get a high-angle shot of a group of friends, one of the badge checkers was suddenly leaning around me to look at something.  “You don’t have a press tag on the camera,” she said.

“No, I don’t; it’s a personal camera,” I told her.

“You still have get a tag,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” I said.  But she wasn’t.  I offered to put the camera away, but she wasn’t really satisfied with that.  “You’ll just pull it back out again, won’t you?”

She was right, of course, but that just didn’t seem like a problem to me.  She said, “All right, I’ll tell you what.  When you get a chance, go down to the press booth and get a tag.  All right?”

Now, most people would have agreed just to get her to go away and ignored the request.  But me, I’m a little different.  My sense of the totally absurd had been engaged, and I decided to do just as she had suggested and obtain a press tag.  Porter Glendinning, having heard the story and possessing a similar sense of the absurd, came along to pick up one of his own.

So yes, along with Porter, I am now duly authorized and my camera tagged with badge #331 to indicate that I am an official SXSW Videographer/Photographer, and as such am permitted to take pictures of people standing around in hallways talking.  Also, I have official authorization to take pictures of people taking pictures with their own personal non-tagged cameras.  That’s fun too.

• Pressed was published on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

So at the end of “Where Are the Women of Web Design”, someone made a comment to the effect that the conference seemed very sexist, and that there was too much sexual content—that the conference isn’t a boys’ club, so we should knock off the dirty jokes.  I asked a question of that person in response, but rather grievously misspoke in doing so.  Here’s what I actually said:

Are those same people offended by all the sexism in mainstream advertising?

What I meant to say was:

Are those same people offended by all the sex in mainstream advertising?

My sincere apologies for any confusion or misunderstanding my mistake may have caused.

• A Clarification was published on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

Just a quick link to my slide deck (when did that term gain currency, and why didn’t I get a memo?) for “Emergent Semantics“.  I was honestly surprised by the number of attendees, and there were some great questions and ideas from audience members.  Throughout the rest of the day, I had some great conversations with people about their own microformat ideas.  Another measure of the level of interest in microformats and the semantic web was attendance at Tantek’s “The Elements of Meaningful XHTML“, which was so heavy that after the seats and floor space in his room filled up, a knot of people stood outside the door, turning their heads slightly and standing on tiptoe in an attempt to hear what he was saying.

On a very related note, I’ve updated my blogroll with some new met values.  I’ve met a ton of people I’d never met before, and hope to meet still more—so if I do assemble a metroll, it’ll have to wait until I get home.

• Emergent Semantics was published on Monday, March 14th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the semantic web, Speaking, and XFN categories.
• There have been seven replies.