My goodness, it’s only a little over a week until Web Essentials 04 kicks off. How does time go by so quickly? This looks to be (easily) the largest web standards event in the southern hemisphere this year. John Allsopp wrote me last week, informing me they’ve got loads of attendees coming from all over Australia, New Zealand, and even Japan. continued

In less than one month now, I board a plane bound for Sydney, Australia. As I’ve mentioned here once before, I’m honored to be speaking this year at Web Essentials 04. The first annual conference on web standards will be held at the University of Technology, Sydney. I’ll be sharing the stage with Dave Shea, Joe Clark, John Allsopp, Russ Weakley, and geez, a whole host of Australian natives who I can’t wait to meet. continued

I’ve given a few public presentations this year, and still have a few more to go. I could have used PowerPoint, or the more logical Mac alternative, Keynote, to assemble the visuals for each presentation. But I’ve never liked that route. Given the material I usually cover, I like to present in the same format I’m talking about. continued

In just under two weeks, I’ll be joining Adaptive Path in Washington, D.C. for User Experience Week 2004, 16-19 August. AP’s guest speakers also include Jason Fried and Christina Wodtke. Topics will cover team and process, strategy, managing politics, interaction best practices, efficient use of a CMS, and fitting general user experience methods and practices into your organization. continued

Q: What happens when you’re scheduled to appear at two conferences back to back to give a total of four presentations within six days, and you end up cancelling your appearance at one of the conferences because you’re unsure if your lower back, with a disc that herniated a month prior, might not do so well with the combined stress of preparing for and travelling to both events? continued

Feels like I’ve been running non-stop for the past week. I’ve been careful not to overdo it recently, as I injured my back about a month ago, and I’ve only gotten back into the groove in the past week or so. Regretfully, because of my back, I had to cancel my appearance in Portland at Web Visions. continued

This year is certainly my “coming out of the office” year in terms of public speaking. With three events down, and four more on the schedule so far, the year holds lots of opportunities to meet new people.

A big, huge thanks goes to the Sonoma County Web Developers SIG for hosting me on Tuesday night for a talk titled, Beautiful Interfaces with CSS. Except for getting out of the office late that afternoon, and getting stuck in over 2 hours of traffic on the drive up from San Francisco, it was really an enjoyable evening with a lively crowd. The smaller setting provided lots of opportunity for interaction and a good amount of questions mixed in throughout from the audience. continued

I’ve received a few requests for public links to the presentations I used for the CSS panels at SxSW. In the spirit of sharing information–and since they’ve already been linked from other locations–I’ll point to them here. If you weren’t there, you won’t get all the commentary that went along with them, but you’ll get an idea of what I covered for each panel. If you were there, thanks for coming; I hope we covered topics on both panels that were engaging and relevant to you. continued

Whew. The all-day and late-night, non-stop activity in Austin is enough to leave anyone exhausted once the event is over. (And to think some of the geeks are still there for the Music portion of the festival.) Yesterday morning, the hotel alarm clock had been set for 5:50am. The Veen brothers were coming to pick me up at the hotel at 6:20am for a way-too-early flight back to San Francisco. True to some law that states “an alarm clock will not go off when you need it most”, the alarm never sounded. Regardless, in some miraculous instance, I somehow bolted up in a panic at 6:18am. No idea what woke me up then, and why it couldn’t have occurred a few minutes earlier. continued

South by Southwest is flying by. I’ve only been here for two days, but it already feels like 10 with the number of people I’ve run into, all the parties, and the panels.

Well, today is double-down day for panels on CSS, and I happened to find my way onto both of them. I’ve been busy wrapping up my presentations for both, so I haven’t had time to be as social yet as I would of liked. But that’s all changing after the two panels are done this morning. More reports later.

But before I head over to the convention center, a big huge congrats to Dave Shea and all the CSS Zen Garden contributors on winning big last night at the Web Awards for Best Developer’s Resource and BEST OF SHOW. Holy cow, that’s cool!.