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.

It’s been well over a month since Web Directions North 2009, and with SXSW having occurred since then I’m sure that WDN’s awesome sessions and wacky evenings have largely faded into distant memory. However, there’s a few things that were never spoken of that came to my attention during that fateful week in February, and I feel it’s my duty to report them to you. Hence, today’s comic.

I’ll be honest: I cannot be sure that all three things depicted reflect the truth. However, I do know for a fact that Mark Trammell did perform the duck dance. I’m not sure if it’s an ancient ritual designed to summon waterfowl or merely a remnant of the disco era, but it was glorious to behold.

Dave Shea’s hair is seriously something that perplexes me. It seems perfectly sculpted, with this well-mannered shelf that seems to be immune to wind or IE-bugs. I’ve noticed it before in his pictures, but when you’ve seen him in person it’s even more amazing to behold. Seriously. Is it hair gel? Spray? Amazing genes? (Fun fact, in the pre-vector CSSquirrel comic here, the guy running from the demon in panel #1 was meant to be Dave Shea. I’d obviously failed to capture his hair’s look, though.)

Now, re: Jeff Croft’s libido… that may be a bit fictionalized of an event. However, when I last met him he was told about a comic I’d done featuring him, and had mistaken me for the artist responsible for this masterpiece, and not my own humble poke at HTML5 featured here. Now, to prevent further confusions, I can simply state “I was the guy that drew you in bed with a squirrel.”

I’m not sure if that’s something to be proud of, but I bet it’ll be hard to forget.

Hopefully now that this important exercise in documenting the nonsense of WDN09 is complete I can get on with comics involving the usual, such as Opera vikings, IE blunders, and Andy Clarke’s knickers.

I’m currently at Web Directions North 2009. Unfortunately I’m writing this on my iPhone, so this will be short to prevent me from going insane. Here’s my thoughts so far:

1. RDFa – Yes, the syntax is complicated at first. But the next phase of the web is symantic, and microformats, though convenient, are only a stopgap issue, and RDFa will be a powerful way to express relationships for computers.

What really irks me is that HTML5 won’t support RDFa because Ian Hickson opposes them, and he functions as the sole gatekeeper to the standard. This annoys me on a number of levels: why is a web standard that will effect billions of future sites being controlled ulimately by one person; and why would someone seriously think the leading semantics format we have not be needed for a web that is clearly and rapidly heading towards a Semantic Web?

I’ll rant more on that in the future.

2. Accessibility – there’s a lot of things that I’ve been doing right for accessibility, but Derek Featherstone pointed out a lot of potential pitfalls with AJAX that I need to start payingca lot of attention to.

Ok, the writing on my phone is driving mad, so I’m going to sign off now. More later!