cazmockett.com

Great evening at the Geek Dinner last night, with guest Molly Holzschlag. I’ve only been to one other, where Chris Anderson gave us a talk about The Long Tail, so I was a bit surprised that Molly didn’t give a presentation as such, but we all enjoyed her company and she was pleased to chat with anyone about anything.

It was nice to catch up with existing friends; Sheila Farrell, Robert Lee-Cann, Ross Bruniges, Ian Forrester and Chris Heilmann, plus make some new ones! I had interesting chats with:

• Laurence Postgate about freelancing, design, beer and rugby
• Paul Boag on freelance photography
• Molly about her nomadic lifestyle!
• Andy Mitchell about beer and geeks
• Eystein Alnæs on web design, Norway and Huskies
• David Long about blogging and design
• Frances Berriman on girlie geeks

So there we are, a good group of names I can now put faces to – see you at the next one folks!

Oh, and fresh from the recent Microformats WSG-meet, I’ve marked this up with a load of hCard info

You may have wondered if I’ve gone into hiding as the blog has been very quiet lately. Well, the answer’s no, but I have had a week off doing stuff at home and not going near the computer very much. Makes a nice change, every now and then!

Emerging from my exile, I’m blinking in the bright light of day and trying to catch up with a bit of blog reading, writing and other pc-related stuff.

Olly Hodgson has some excellent links, which I’ve been following up, and then generally getting lost in the blogsphere. I’m also waiting with baited breath to see how The CSS Div almost got himself killed…

Here’s a few good posts about accessibility issues:

• Bruce Lawson talks about making accessible PDFs
• Punkchip gets to grips with relative & absolute units and makes some excellent suggestions about Accessible Radio Buttons and Checkboxes
• A List Apart gives us What Is Web Accessibility? and Working with Others: Accessibility and User Research
• And Rob Cherny has an interesting post entitled Ajax and Accessibility: You’re Doing it Wrong (Hijax)

As an antidote to my recent exile, I’m also being very sociable this week, with the upcoming events in London to attend – WSG London #2 – Microformats and the London Geek Dinner with Molly H. Will report back on them later in the week.

I’ve recently signed up for Upcoming.org so I can keep an eye out on what’s in the pipeline in the near future. Two events caught my eye, coincidentally on consecutive evenings (all we need is a third one and they’ll be like London Buses…)

Thursday 19th October
Web Standards Group Meeting # 2 where Microformats will be discussed. See Muffinresearch.co.uk for more details.

Friday 20th October
London Geek Dinner, special guest Molly E. Holzschlag. See the Geek Dinner website for more details.

Both events look like a good evening; perhaps I’ll see some of you there.