Last night was the inaugural session of Refresh Bellingham, which is something like a cross between a single-presentation micro-conference (for FREE!) and a bar/grill social event for web geeks. Taking place at Extremes Sports Grill (yes, their website terrifies), it turned out to be a blast!

The speaker was Jeff Croft, who is some sort of hybrid between a super-designer and a karaoke megastar. His presentation was on grids in web design, and was a speedy trek through the history of grids in typography and the ways to apply them to your websites in this day in age. He’ll have slides at some point, so I’ll put them up as soon as I get the link. It was great to watch, and now I’m closer to understanding what the point is for line-height.

It’s for conga lines, right?

After the presentation, the crowd (I saw at least 45 people there, we had people standing during the presentation) walked across the way into what I’ll call the “party room” and proceeded to eat, drink, or do a combination of both while chatting away with people from Bellingham to Mt. Vernon to Seattle.

If you live in or near Bellingham, and want to have a great opportunity to learn more about web standards, talk shop with people who care about such things, or just have an excuse for a night out, I suggest you take the opportunity to come to the next Refresh (we’re on the third Wednesday night of every month. Check out the website for more.)

In one week, An Event Apart will be in Seattle. Seattle is less than a two hour drive from Bellingham, which is where Mindfly Web Studio is located and where I live.

It’s a gorgeous town. It’s also a bit too small to attract the conference circuit.

Having never been to An Event Apart, I would love to attend one that is so close. But the conference budget was used to attend the fabulous Web Directions North 2009 in Denver, and I’m additionally in the process of getting ready to move to a new apartment, so I can’t justify the expense.

Poor me. As tempting as it would be to go Annie Wilkes-style and abduct a presenter as today’s comic suggests (featuring Eric Meyer in the role of victim), I think I’ll pass on becoming a kidnapper and just cope with the disappointment.

However, along with a couple other Mindfliers, I am looking to see what interest there is in the local web developer community in forming a wagon train and crashing whatever social events are occurring in the evening after the conference stops for the day. Details are sketchy on who, how, or with what vehicles, but if you’re local, and you’re interested, feel free to start tweeting me about it.

The real debate is what day, and what venue. Perhaps some Seattleites or AEA organizers could shed some useful light into this? Monday seems like the right night, but the MT Opening Night party is likely an attendees-only event that would take up a huge chunk of the available social time, resulting in us Bellinghamsters crouching outside in some sort of tent city, hawking “Death to IE6″ wares and playing the bongos.

Actually, your average Bellinghamster doesn’t need an excuse to start playing drums and making hand-made necklaces. Things get a bit granola-esque up here.

Of course, even if I miss the event and it’s pool of attendees completely, I plan to haunt the web’s stream of useful notes, presentations, and articles that will pop up in it’s wake. I love that part of this industry.

Speaking of conferences, Jeremy Keith put up a blog post discussing his presentation at Bamboo Juice, which helps illustrate his impression of thinking long term (which I touched on in my last comic update). I’d like to point out in particular the line: “Think about what you would put on the gold disc attached to Voyager; now publish that material online.”

As of yet, I can think of nothing that I’ve ever generated as content, online, on paper, or otherwise, that deserves to take up space on a probe’s first contact disc. That is, unless topical humor about web standards counts as memorable. Which makes me wonder, what was humor like in Sumer? I can’t help but feel that largely the jokes wouldn’t translate well.

Straight from the city of Bellingham, WA (city of residence for yours truly) has come Tatango, a web application that broadcasts messages to groups of mobile phones that you configure. I’ll be honest that I don’t know all the details, as I get too much traffic on my own phone already and am thus not seeking more. However, for those of you that aren’t messaging hermits like myself, it looks like a great way to keep in contact with your friends with a lot less effort than painstakingly messaging each.

Check it out.