Wheelz Online

Ok, i know its been a while since I last posted, but I was busy on other things, more of which I’ll tell you about later.  But just to bring people upto date with @media.  Day two was a quiet different day and had a different feel to it.  The fist session was by Jon Hicks entitled How to be a creative sponge.  This was a useful session for me as I have the design skills of a dead monkey.  Basically what I need to do is collect crap.  Anything; tshirts, leaflets, prints and then keep it in a big box for inspiration.  I’ve started to do this and I have to say, it has helped a little.

After that I attended a session about the state of WCAG 2.0 by Shawn Lawton-Henry.  I was a little disappointed with this hour as I didn’t gain any knowledge and feel that my time would have been better spent on the concurrent session about accessibility.

Overall, I thought @media was once again a very good conference and I can’t wait until next year again.

Anyway, onto other things.  On Sunday this week, I will have been with my girlfriend for 3 years!!!  Thats 2 years longer than any other relationship I’ve been in.  Over the time I’ve known her, I have grown to love her more and more and I don’t know how I would cope now if she wasn’t around.  And I’m still a mess, still can’t clean up, and I’m sure I’ll never get pressents correct.

So i’ve just got back from day one of @media 2007.  I’ve seen some great presentations as usual and the one thing I’ve noticed upto now this year is that all the sessions seem to have a more visionary view to them.  Last year there were many session which actually showed how to do things, like Tantek Celik and microformats, but today it was all ‘fluffy’ talking about the future of things.  Some of it was very interesting.

One of the most interesting sessions was by Joe Clark’s session entitled “When Web Accessibility is not your problem”  In his slot, he talked about the WCAG 1 being flawed, which i agree with him on - to many things are open to interpretation for it to be useful.  But he postulated that a lot of the things to do with accessiblity shouldn’t bother the web developer.  For example, he spend a lot of time talking about text sizing.  The website should not give any help or clue on how to resize text, according to him, and that a person with visual difficulties should know how to do this anyway.  I find this idea very short-sighted as it assumes that everyone is familliar with web agents, and other technologies.  I believe his intentions are correct and that in an ideal world, much of what he said i would agree with, but at the moment this is the real world and they don’t ring true.

So tomorrow I’ve got some more interesting sessions i’m attending, both on accessibility and the future course of the internet.  Also I’ll be uploading some photos from the two days soon to flickr under the tag of atmedia07.

As I log into my work email this morning I get the message I’ve been waiting for.  I now have a place at @media 2007 Europe.  I first went to the @media event last year and had such a great time, both entertaining and interesting that I convinced my line manager to send me again.

So I hope that I get the chance to learn more about current trends this year from the likes of Tantek Celik, Dan Cederholme, Andy Clarke and Molly.  If anyone who reads this is going, please leave a comment and it would be good to hook-up sometime over the two days.