Journal tags: aea10

I was in Amsterdam at the end of last week for the Fronteers conference. It was a good conference but the fact that Jake Archibald was on the bill meant that my presentation paled in comparison—he remains one of the finest and most entertaining speakers I have ever seen.

I gave a talk on The Design of HTML5: much the same talk as I gave at Drupalcon. You can download the slides if you want, and the video is already online.

The presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license so feel free to download the video and do with it as you will. I’d love to get the presentation transcribed. If six or seven people are willing to transcribe about ten minutes of audio, we can get this done fairly easily. Get in touch if you don’t mind spending some time on it and I’ll try to co-ordinate the efforts. I can’t offer any financial reward, but of course your efforts will be credited and you’ll be helping to make the information more findable.

If video isn’t your thing, you might enjoy listening to an interview I did recently for the Einstein and Sock Monkey podcast.

My next speaking trip will be to California. I’m off to San Diego for the final leg of this year’s An Event Apart. If you didn’t make it to An Event Apart this year, don’t fret: tickets are now on sale for next year’s six shows, and I’m proud to be speaking at all six.

I’ll be heading out to San Diego at the very end of October. That means I’m not going to be in Brighton for this year’s Crawl of the Dead, which is a real shame.

After San Diego, I’ll be heading up to San Francisco. It’s been far too long since I was last there. I’m really happy that I’ll be there for Science Hack Day San Francisco that Ariel is organising at The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto on November 13th and 14th. It’s going to be an excellent event and I highly recommend that you sign up if you can make it.

While my flight to the States is already booked, I haven’t yet sorted out my travel from San Diego to San Francisco. On the off-chance that anyone out there from San Francisco is planning on travelling to An Event Apart San Diego by car, let me know if you fancy a travelling companion for the ride back. I hear it’s a beautiful scenic drive.

Every instantiation of An Event Apart is a joy to attend, but it was particularly enjoyable to be back in Seattle. It’s where my brother-in-law Jeb lives so I had the opportunity to hang out with him, his wife Anne and their oh-so-cute dog, Mesa—owning a cute dog seems to be mandatory in the Seattle suburb of Green Lake.

After a couple of days with Jeb and co., I upped sticks to the centre of town; the Edgewater Hotel, erstwhile host to The Beatles and Led Zeppelin—the origin of the infamous Shark episode, which currently enjoys a Snopes status of sort of.

I digress. But what a digression.

Anyway, I was ensconced in the Lynchian surroundings of the Edgwater for its proximity to the Bell Harbor conference centre, location of An Event Apart and, for the first time ever, A Day Apart.

The conference was superb. An Event Apart is always superb but the bar was raised even higher this time—intimidatingly high if, like me, you’re supposed to speak after Eric, Dan, Luke and a constellation of other web stars have already blown everyone’s minds. If you were there, you know what I mean. If you weren’t there, but wish you were, you can redress your loss by attending An Event Apart at another location—Boston is up next.

The workshop day was also a blast. Dan handled CSS3 in the afternoon and I covered HTML5 in the morning. It was thoroughly enjoyable, although I feel bad about rushing it towards the end. People were asking such excellent questions that I neglected to watch the clock as well as I should have. The three hours flew by pretty fast.

Fortunately I’ll have more time to cover everything in more detail at my next HTML5 workshop. Come along to HTML5 for Web Designers in Brighton on April 23rd for a full day of markup spelunking. I’ll see you there if you fancy learning about the design principles of HTML5, how to turbo-boost your forms, what the new structural elements mean for your document outlines, and what you can do with audio and video. Phew!