Archive for the 'Personal' Category

New job

Monday, April 10th, 2006

After twenty years with Department of Consumer and Employment Protection and its predecessors the Ministry of Fair Trading, I started a new job last week, a secondment to the State Library of Western Australia.

To those of you not familiar with the mystical inner workings of the Western Australian public sector, a secondment is a temporary loan of an employee from one Government Department to another …

Yeah but um basically

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Are four words I need to remove from my vocabulary when I give a talk.

I have just heard the podcast of my talk I gave to the Perth WSG. Other than using those four words appearing far to frequently, I am fairly happy with the results. Even if I do not say enough, I tended to gloss over things, often skipping words that I included in my notes to add detail. I also spoke too slowly …

tagged

What not to do for presentations

Saturday, April 1st, 2006
  1. Assume that your s5 presentation will look exactly the same when viewed via a projector when using firefox, as it did on your screen. FF pays attention to media=”projection”, fortunately Safari ignored it.
  2. Assume you cordless mouse will work with S5 on your powerbook projector combination exactly the same way it did on you PC screen combination.
  3. Let somebody else buy you a drink, before you present. I was foolhardly going to buy a middy of beer before my presentation, but Kay offered to buy me a beer and I ended up with a pint. Mental note to self, next time try Red Bull.

Perth WSG March meet

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Another event to plug, you will find the offical information over on the Web Standards Group and organiser Kay provides more details on her standards blog, including almost saying nice things about me ;-).

I will be doing a presentation on the button element, going into more detail that what I have already done here. Do not worry if you are not located in this obscure corner of the world called Perth, Western Australia. I will post the presentation here and the scary part is that it should be podcast as is happening with most WSG events.

Suspected Ross River virus infection

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

Looks like my weekend in Dwellingup was not with out a price. Either that weekend or in the next week or so I got bitten by a mosquitoe and infected with the Ross River virus.

Weekend away

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

Well I survived the weekend in, with barely a scratch, other than a couple of close encounters with the thorns on blackberry bushes that were overhanging the trail in a couple of places and a grazed knee with the silliest of get offs.