maniacal rage

If you listen to the podcast of the closing panel from @media 2006, around the 24:16 mark, you'll hear Jon Hicks mention my name in the context of his thoughts on the trend of developers hoping to get bought by companies like Google and Yahoo!, and what that means for the quality of web applications. We spent a good deal of time the night before talking about what he mentions, and it was nice of him to mention me. At the time, however, it scared the hell out of me because I was digging around in my bag making noise and when I heard my name I thought someone was calling me out for being an ass.

(I meant to post this a while back, but I forgot, and the audio wasn't available until a few days ago.)

I'm currently sitting in on the wrap-up panel here at @media 2006, so now is as good a time as any to give an overall impression of the conference:

• The panels and presentations were, on a whole, a little light. I knew coming in to this that the general target audience for the conference was a little lower-level than I would generally be interested in, but I was surprised by some of the presentations (the accessibility one, for instance, the Dave Shea typography presentation for another) and their lack of useful information. It's interesting hear Dave tell you which fonts he likes, but I'm not sure anything he presented helped us. (Everyone at the conference had heard of sIFR, so how does talking about it being available help anyone?)
• The Javascript Libraries session was interesting, if only to hear about all the different libraries people are using and hearing a panel talk about the pros and cons. Simon Willison (who looks about twelve years old and works at Yahoo!) seems like a genuinely smart guy who had some interesting thoughts on the whole JS library movement.
• Tantek Çelik's presentation on microformats was the most interesting to me, since I've been following the whole microformats thing but haven't implemented any. His presentation definitely got me thinking about all the places that I should be and could be using microformats and I think I'm going to start doing it in the very near future (one might see microformats in the next version of SimpleLog, perhaps...).

If anything, it was worth the trip just to meet some of the people I've been wanting to meet in person for a long time. When there's someone who you genuinely like and agree with, it's fantastic to meet them in person and be able to have a conversation in thirty seconds that would take days via email.

Finally met Reid Philpot in person (he used to run explodingfist.com), as well as Dan Cederholm (whose second-day keynote was quite good), and had a few beers and good conversation with Jon Hicks last night. Jon's a great guy and it was nice to finally meet him in person.

On a whole, I've had a good time these past few days. The conference was a little lacking information-wise, but I think I knew that might be the case going in. I'm off to France tomorrow to meet up with Katia and to start our vacation.

The wifi connection here at the conference center is crummy. I feel like technology conferences should never have that problem. Ever. Especially a web-based conference.

I just got out of the accessibility session, and I have to say it was one of the most boring and useless bits of information I've ever heard. I'm interested in accessibility, but, in general, I don't practice making sites I create accessible because I don't tend to create sites specific to disabled peoples. Nearly everything I create is text-based and I code to XHTML standards, so it's a reasonable assumption that my site will be accessible to most people. I am still, however, interested in the technology and standards, and so I was interested in the session. I was hoping they would fill me in on how current accessibility technology works and some best practices. Instead, it was simply forty minutes of talking about the current status of the documentation. The entire session was about the quality of the documentation. Yuck.

If you want more accessible sites, you should convince more people like me to get into making our sites accessible. But you're not going to do that by complaining about the verbosity of documentation.

I'm going to be at @media 2006 this year, in jolly old London. Should be a lot of fun. I was planning on attending SXSW back in March, but it didn't work out due to some huge projects that needed to be finished. Luckily, @media 2006 worked-out schedule-wise.

I'll be in London from June 14 to June 17, then I'm heading to Paris where Katia's meeting me for a well deserved vacation in France. We'll be driving to places like Mont-Saint-Michel, the beaches and Chartres, after spending a few days in Paris. Should be loads of fun.

If you've got any suggestions for things to see in Paris, please do tell (garrett at maniacalrage dot net), and if you're going to be at @media2006, please let me know—I'd love to meet up!