I will fly to San Francisco on Monday to work in Santa Clara and stay in Sunnyvale for the next 2-3 weeks. So far my stops beside working are:

• Go to Stanford and give a talk on web development (invitation by John Foliot)
• Visit the Flock offices to talk shop and pick up schwag.

Anything else I should be doing while I am there? I got a rental car and a cheap hotel room :)

[tags]visit,silicon valley[/tags]

Just finshed giving my BarCamp Paris presentation written on the Eurostar on the way over:

• Casting online shadows – PDF 100kb
• Download casting online shadows on slideshare

It talks about how people go online, what they do to get known and how online communication and its non-human nature can paint a totally wrong picture of who you are. I am chuffed as this is my first non-tech presentation :)

Photos by Gonzague Dambricourt

[tags]online identity,barcampparis11,yahoobarcampparis11,identity,commenting,emoticons,communication,security[/tags]

On Wednesday the 16th of May I’ll be giving another free talk at the WSG UK meeting on JavaScript. It is free, I promise not to bore you with too much code, and we can get totally leglessmeet up for a quiet drink at the Bricklayer’s Arms, the fabled location for the Pubstandards London afterwards.
On the more interesting side, Steve Faulkner will talk about JavaScript and Screenreaders after me!

Speaking of which, Pubstandards is the following day, so you might as well stay in there.
[tags]webstandardsgroup,wsg,london,free,talk,presentation,pubstandards[/tags]

As I am about to head for the US and work there for some weeks I thought I use the opportunity to buy some stuff and get it delivered to the office so that I have it without having to carry a big suitcase full of stuff.

Alas, I cannot, as the reason is that on both of the web sites I tried to order from you can only use US credit cards. The calls to the call centres went like this:

“Hello, I am trying to order some clothes ($500 so far), so that they are in the US when I arrive but I have a UK credit card”. “Oh I am sorry, we cannot accept those, but I can give you the address of our UK branch if that helps” “how would that help to get them to the US?” “Let me ask the supervisor…”

So please please please with sugar on top: if you want to be an international company that wants to make money online then take on Visa cards from anywhere in the world, that is the idea of having a Visa Card!

[tags]ecommerce,idiocy,rant,credit cards[/tags]

It is time to take a stand:

• Find a workmate who doesn’t close his tags, uses unencoded ampersands or commits other atrocities.
• Leave this stark warning by the markup mafia on his desk (or even better in his bed when you are on a work trip)

Thank you!

[tags]silly,markupmafia,geek,humour,sad,webstandards,html[/tags]