August in America, day two

Once I knew I was going to be speaking at An Event Apart DC, I got in touch with my dear friends Dan and Sue in Baltimore to see if we could figure out a way to meet up while I was relatively nearby. I went to art college with Dan over two decades ago. I haven’t kept in touch with many (any?) people from back then, but Dan and I have remained firm friends, sadly separated by an ocean.

Dan told me his plan for today was for him and Sue to take the kids down to his Dad and stepmother’s place in Calvert county, and he asked if Jessica and I wanted to join them. “Absolutely!”, I said, without knowing anything about Calvert county or what a trip there might involve.

As it turns out, this particular place in Maryland was a little piece of paradise: a beautiful pastoral setting where the green landscape and blue sky is interrupted only by the flitting by of the occasional gorgeous-looking butterfly. Also, it has a pool.

This setting was already perfect, but we made it the quintessential Maryland experience by feasting on crabs for lunch. Sure, you’ve got to work to get at the flesh, but oh, what tasty flesh it is, redolent with Old Bay seasoning.

It was a perfect afternoon: eating crabs, swimming in the pool, and most of all, catching up with old friends.

I was still basking in the glow of it all when we got back to Alexandria in time for the traditional pre-conference speaker’s dinner for An Event Apart. I never even had the chance to freshen up before heading out for the meal: as soon as we got back to the hotel, we spotted Ethan, Kristina, and Karen in the hotel bar and that was it. We joined them, then Jason joined us, then one-by-one everyone else showed up. The whole thing coalesced into the gang of speakers and off we went for a meal in old town. Once again, it was all about the company.

August in America, day one

It’s Pride weekend in Brighton but alas, I wasn’t able to stick around for the festivities. I made my way to Heathrow for the flight to Washington to kick off my American trip.

The flight from Heathrow to Dulles takes just about eight hours. The average in-flight film is just under two hours, so you might think that this would be a four-film flight. But when you factor in the take-off and landing phases, it’s actually more like three films with a little bit of TV to top it off.

I have some ideas about what makes a good airplane movie. You don’t want to watch anything that’s too good; you’ll just be annoyed that you saw it on a little screen on an airplane seat instead of on a big screen in a cinema. But you don’t want to watch anything that’s too crap because, well, it’s crap. So what you want is a down-the-middle three-star pleasingly mediocre movie.

I watched Oblivion, Iron Man Three, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Pretty good airplane films, all around. Actually, I ended up enjoying Oblivion far more than I was expecting (probably because my expectations had been quite low).

With the flight time whiled away nicely, Jessica and I arrived into Dulles at six in the evening, and what a nice warm evening it was too.

The lovely people running An Event Apart really know how to take care of their speakers and that includes a car service to pick us up at the airport and take us to the hotel. That makes such a big difference after a long transatlantic flight.

In this case, the ride from the airport to the hotel was a fairly lengthy one: Dulles is a good forty minutes away from Alexandria. So we settled in and enjoyed the scenery …what there was of it. The route was mostly filled with “nothing to see here” buildings. I’m guessing that Virginia has more than its fair share of windowless bunker-like buildings—this is, after all, the Lothlorien of the internet in America, where the backbone meets the server farms. Looking for “The Cloud”? It’s probably somewhere in Virginia.

As we’re being driven to our destination, I turn to Jessica and I say:

Chicken wings.

You have to understand, I have this weird travel-triggered craving. Whenever I fly to the United States of America, I get the urge to have my first meal on American soil be …yes, you guessed it, chicken wings. I have no idea why this is or when it started. And it’s not like I usually crave chicken wings all that often (not that I’d be able to get proper Buffalo style wings in the UK anyway).

Once we’re settled into our hotel room, we do a little bit of research and start walking the streets of Old Town Alexandria in search of the Hard Times Cafe. We find it. We get a table. We get some beers. I get my wings. They taste good. They taste really, really good.

I should have just left it at chicken wings, but they specialise in chili. I couldn’t resist.

So now I’m back at the hotel, and I’m stuffed full of beer, chicken wings, and chili. This strikes me as an eminently suitable way to begin my American sojourn.

The United States of August

I’m going to be in the States for most of this month.

See, I’m speaking at An Event Apart DC in a couple of days, which is the first week of August. I’ll also speaking at An Event Apart Chicago in the last week of August. With such a short span of time between the two of events, I figured it wasn’t really worth flying across the Atlantic, flying back, flying over again, flying back again…

I looked around to see if there were any other events going on in between the two Events Apart and saw that UX Week was happening in San Francisco right before the Chicago AEA. I offered my services for a workshop, they readily accepted, and that sealed the deal: August was definitely going to be spent stateside.

My travel plans within the States look like this:

• Alexandria, Virginia;
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
• Sierra Vista, Arizona;
• San Diego, California;
• San Francisco, California;
• Chicago, Illinois.

If you’re going to be in any of those locations, let me know and maybe our paths can cross.

Bye, bye, Brighton. See you again for the first week of September.

Brighton in September

dConstruct is now exactly five weeks away. To say that I am excited would be quite an understatement.

I am insanely excited about this year’s dConstruct. I think the line-up is quite something—a non-stop parade of fantastic speakers. And the speakers themselves are equally excited, spurred on by the excellent company they’ll be keeping. Seriously, this is going to be an amazing day.

I’m also excited about all the other events happening around dConstruct as part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

The first week of September will kick off with the Reasons To Be Creative conference: three days of three tracks of all sorts of design and code.

Reasons finishes on Wednesday, September 4th, which is the same day that Seb will be running his fantastic CreativeJS workshop. I took this workshop myself a few months back and I can’t recommend it highly enough—you’ll come away feeling like you’re superpowered. Seb is a great teacher. And don’t be put off by the whiff of coding; this workshop is for everyone. In fact, I think designers with very little experience of code would be best served by it.

There are still some tickets available for Seb’s workshop and remember that booking onto the workshop also gets a complementary pass to the dConstruct conference day as well.

In between Seb’s workshop and the dConstruct conference proper, there’s Improving Reality, that wonderful conference on technology and culture curated by Lighthouse in Brighton. I’ve really, really enjoyed the last two years so I’m going to be there again this time ‘round on Thursday, September 5th.

Then right after dConstruct, there’s a weekend of good stuff happening over the Saturday and Sunday:

• Brighton Mini Maker Faire — a day of interactive exhibitions on the Saturday followed by a workshops and panels on the Sunday. There’ll be talks and panels on the Saturday too, including a panel moderated by Maggie Philbin!
• The Big Sussex Market will be running all weekend as part of the Brighton and Hove Food Festival. This will be on New Road, right by the Brighton Dome where Maker Faire will be happening.
• Indie Web Camp will also be running all weekend, just round the corner at Lighthouse. This little gathering is something very dear to my heart. I was talking about just the other day on the Breaking Development podcast.

Phew! That’s quite a full dance card.

If you’ve got a ticket for dConstruct, remember that as per the terms and conditions, if you need to cancel or transfer the ticket you’ve only got one more week to do so.

If you haven’t got a ticket for dConstruct, what are you waiting for?

See you in Brighton in September.

An Event Alarm

I’m at An Event Apart. Somewhere. It’s in a room in a hotel. The room is smaller than the usual ballroom-sized venue, but I know it’s An Event Apart because Luke Wroblewski is giving a talk. I think it’s a talk about how he led a group of people who were trapped in the desert to safety. Somehow he saved them with data.

I’m speaking next. But there’s a pressure on my bladder that I need to relieve. I’ve got another ten or fifteen minutes ‘till my talk so I reckon I have enough time. I go out into the corridor in search of a toilet. I find one and do what I need to do.

But when I go back out into the corridor, I can’t immediately find the room that the conference is in. That’s okay, I think. I’ve still got time. But as I wander the corridor more and more, I start to panic. I’m supposed to be on in five minutes! Now the hotel building seems to be cavernous, like one of those Las Vegas hotel-casino hybrids that contain a labyrinthine mini-city. I’m supposed to be on stage now! Up escalators, down stairs …I can’t find the room. I’m really panicking now. I was supposed to be on stage five ago …Jeffrey’s going to kill me. I grab someone who looks like a hotel employee and beg him to help me: I was supposed to be on stage ten minutes ago! But he can’t help me. I’m really freaking out.

Then I woke up. I don’t think if I’ve ever had the classic “final exam” dream, but I think this is the closest equivalent.

An Event Apart DC is ten days away. I’m giving a new talk. I thought I was prepared for it. My subconscious begs to differ.