Long time, no post. I was actually expecting to write a “this is my last post” entry as I’m completely disillusioned with my “career” or lack thereof. Instead, seeing as I paid for the event myself, I’m just going to list the presentations I will be going to on the two-track schedule.

Thursday June 7th: Day One

• Beyond Ajax with Jesse James Garrett.
• Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details with Jason Santa Maria.
• High Performance Web Pages with Nate Koechley.
• Interface Design Juggling with Dan Cederholm.
• Five Simple Steps to Better Typography with Mark Boulton.
• When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem with Joe Clark.

Friday June 8th: Day Two

• How to be a Creative Sponge with Jon Hicks.
• Tough one this but I think I’ll go see For Example… with Hannah Donovan and Simon Willison if only because I love last.fm.
• Advancing Web Accessibility with Shawn Lawton Henry.
• Royale With Cheese with Andy Clarke.
• and finally the Hot Topics Panel with questions supplied by the attendees.

Sadly conferences have become a necessary injection of enthusiasm for me (like the book buying and reviewing) but meeting like-minded people is what makes conferences so important to me. I hope to see as many of you as possible and needless to say accessifyforum.com members will be there in force and Saturday sight-seeing is in early-stage discussion already.

Better late than never I suppose, I’ve been busy with job interviews and the inevitable disappointments of tables-based design and being able to query a database for content triumphing over top-quality semantic markup and CSS generation you see (another story). I brought a couple of friends from work with me for this meeting and after a challenging game of pub cricket (on a train!) we met up at the Bricklayers Arms with Jim before heading to the university campus. Stuart has a more timely review posted at Muffin Research so get the lowdown from there. I just wanted to post a quick thanks to Stuart for organising another great meeting and to the speakers for taking the time to prepare and deliver their presentations. Of the three I think that Mike Davies‘ was the most useful of them for me due to the fact that his presentation revealed the benefits of the accessible redesign of the Legal and General website. I should have brought a manager along, they would have loved the Return on Investment (RoI) figures! If ethics doesn’t capture the business mind then RoI surely should.

As ever, it was great to see everyone again. Mike got his virtual head-rub from me, cool as always to see Jim and Ann and to meet and chat briefly with Niqui. It’s a weird pub is that Bricklayers Arms with two bars on two floors so it was little more than a shared joke with Gez and Mike as we left the top bar to catch our train back to Ipswich.