Thursday, April 6, 2006
My favorite breakfast at home. Day 1 of 2 of the CalWAC web accessibility conference in downtown San Francisco. I was almost late getting to the keynote because my e-mail agenda said the Sheraton Palace Hotel was at "2 Montgomery" but it really should have said "2 New Montgomery." I still don't understand it completely, but I think technically there is no "2 Montgomery." If you're at 1 Montgomery and look across the street, there's no 2 Montgomery. However, if you look half a block down, you can see 44 Montgomery. I was very confused by this. I was surprised to see a full breakfast catering spread upon arriving at the keynote since our registration for the conference was only $200. I picked up my typical conference freebies (128 MB USB drive [useful], gym or overnight bag with conference name and year [not so useful], name tag, folder, conference materials). Although I had eaten at home, I had some yogurt and fresh pineapple and strawberries. The keynote speaker was Molly Holzschlag (molly.com) and although she delivered a decent enough opening speech for the conference, you could almost feel the burden carried by all of the web developers in the room with respect to accessibility issues. It was as though you could see the collective thought balloon from everyone in the audience saying, "How am I ever going to learn everything I need to know and do what I need to do with as few resources as I have?" Well, the conference is a great way to start, and we can only make progress by chipping away at it as best we can. I certainly could not have done a better job getting everyone in the audience motivated. My morning class was "Making PDFs Accessible" by Sean Keegan. I learned a lot I hadn't known before. Chatted with Alex K. Lunch by myself at Lee's. My afternoon class was "Advanced Topics in CSS" by James Craig. There was an evening reception for the conference, but I was beat and Patrick and I desperately needed to do some grocery shopping. Patrick and his mom walked around the Castro today. Home. Nap. Grocery shopping with Patrick at Safeway. Dinner at home with Patrick: pizza, salad. Started coding Lodestar—we're very late this time. Very tired. Bed.