Since I’m going to be arriving in London a week from today, I wandered over to the Professional CSS / XHTML Techniques Workshop site to see how things were going. I discovered that there are only three seats left for the Friday session, Saturday having sold out long ago. So if you’ve been hesitating, might be best to overcome that hesitation in a timely fashion. I’m just sayin’.
Just as I prepare to leave for WWW2005 in Japan, John Allsopp has announced the details for Web Essentials05 in Sydney this September. Everyone’s fave Molly kicks things off with a keynote, and there will be some great speakers: Tantek Çelik, Jeff Veen, Kelly Goto, Derek Featherstone, Douglas Bowman, Russ Weakley, Cameron Adams, John Allsopp himself, and more.
Oh, and me. I’ll be there, too. You can get all the details at the WE05 web site. I heard great things about WE04, so I’m really looking forward to WE05. Hopefully I’ll see you there! It’ll be a fair dinkum, and very likely truly bonzer, no worries.
Did I use any of those colloquialisms correctly?
I just talked with Ryan, organizer of the XHTML and CSS Workshop happening in London on Saturday, 4 June 2005, and he says there are only a few seats left—there were but seven when he contacted me on Friday, but for all I know it’s fewer now (and no doubt it is if you’re reading this post in the archives, instead of when it was first published).
Thanks to the very strong registration numbers, Ryan is seriously considering adding another day. If that happens, it will mean the Saturday session is all sold out, so if you want to attend that day, you’d better get your reservation in quickly. We’ll spend the day learning about the ins and outs of standards-based design, as well as chewing over attendee questions and generally having fun while we learn a ton. And don’t forget about the exclusive Survival Kit CD-ROM that all attendees will receive.
All in all, a good time is in the offing, and it’s yours… but only if you grab a seat.
Update | 22 Apr 05: the Saturday session has sold out, and the Friday session has been scheduled. Registration is open!
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!”
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.
Conference dates: 8-10 April 2005. Both my talks will be the morning of Saturday, 9 April.
Metting date: Tuesday, 24 May 2005.
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.
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!
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.
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.