Back from a week's holiday in our usual haunt, Pembrokeshire. The pick of the pics will be online soon. While I was away I had no mobile phone signal and no Internet. I didn't miss either as much as I expected, which was good because it's a sign I'm not totally dependent. Even the TV didn't have satellite or cable so we just had good old 5 channels, which was OK because the kids needed a break from cartoons and MTV. Time instead for having fun with the kids and taking lots of photographs. This picture is Matt's sandy hand from the beach at Wisemans Bridge.
Month: August 2004
Not that David Davies
Ok, so I indulge in a little vanity surfing, I use PubSub to keep track of who's commenting on my weblog posts. I have one PubSub subscription for my weblog URL and another for 'David Davies', figuring that there aren't that many bloggers with the same name yet (though it is a popular name in the land of my fathers, Wales, so come the Welsh weblogging revolution who knows – although I'm only 1/4 Welsh myself). Anyway on a good day I may get maybe one or two entries in my PubSub feeds. But today, I got 33! Wow, did I suddenly get popular overnight? Sadly no, it's another David Davies, one that stepped in to temporarily replace the Chief Exec of the FA in the wake of the Mark Palios/Sven-Goran Eriksson fuss-over-nothing 'scandal'. So for the time being at least, David Davies is making the (sporting) news headlines in the UK.
There are other David Davies' that jockey for top position in Google. Currently yours truly is top but I share the top 10 with a Welsh politician, a philosopher, a painter, a molecular biologist, and our friend from the FA – though from his old TV presenter days.
Back from California
Back from alt-i-lab 2004 and back from California. Lots to say about the conference and my first exposure to the inner workings of IMS. Fascinating insights into the standards and specifications world including the true nature of specification adoption after talking to people both inside IMS and out. Notes from the conference later. I had the unexpected but considerable pleasure of meeting some of the people I most admire from the weblogging world, notably Raymond Yee, Scott Leslie and David Wiley. I hadn't expected to meet any webloggers at this meeting let alone three such distinguished exponents. Raymond, Scott and David are really nice people and I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with them. It's a real treat to meet people from the weblogging world in the flesh and for me it de-emphasizes weblogs and weblogging per se and instead emphasizes the people behind the blogs. Scott and I along with Mark Stiles had a great evening out at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Redwood City and even the trip to Shooters bar afterwards was an experience (Mark has a great photo that I'll try to get a copy of). In the meantime, the accompanying photo is courtesy of David's camera, thanks David and looking forward to spending more time next conference.
The real highlight of my time in California though has to be my post-conference road trip around San Diego courtesy of Jack Mancilla. It was an incredible experience and I took lots of great photos. I am so indebted to Jack for being such a good host. I'm just getting the pictures web-ready so I'll post them soon along with notes from the trip.