Back from WE05

•October 4, 2005 • 2 Comments

What a blast. The best conference I’ve ever been to (and no, it wasn’t the first). But I’ll talk about that elsewhere.

Nik Markovina at the Paddington MarketsOn Saturday (the day after WE05 ended) Nick, Kara and I ventured out to Sydney’s Paddington Markets. Lots of cool and interesting stuff, including some great photos including some printed on canvas which looked fantastic. But by far the coolest art was by a guy named Nik Markovina. Beautiful, dark and very twisted prints of what I think are oil originals. I bought Dave a small print of a representation of Sydney, complete with a fang-enhanced Opera house, snarling train and sleazy King’s Cross vendor. I wish I’d had room in my suitcase for something larger. He also had some metal sculptures – Nick was very keen to get a spiky tissue box cover for his better half, but unfortunately taking it back to Perth on the plane would not have been practical.

Of course I asked Nik if he had a web site, and as it turned out he had one at one point, but lost it due to domain name scammers. I did find it on the wayback machine though, on Kara’s suggestion – so check out the archive of markovnik.com, there are some awesome samples of some of his work there. To get it though, you have to visit the Paddington Markets in Sydney.

More cool stuff as I think of it.

Oooh, pretty.

•September 23, 2005 • Leave a Comment

So here we are, WordPress.com – pretty! I’m quite excited to be here, oddly. Take note: it’s amazing what a bit of viral closed-beta gmail-esque marketing can do for you.

Introductions? I’m a web developer from Perth, Western Australia. I split my time between ColdFusion coding, web standards, search engine optimisation and general other stuff. I’m also involved in an obscene number of industry organisations and user groups – Port80 (the Australian web industry association), the ColdFusion User Group of WA, the Web Standards Group, and Web Women.

I’m also a big fan of blogs. I collect them, in a way – I have a ColdFusion blog and a WordPress-powered web standards blog, which have been shamefully neglected over the last few weeks (stupid work). I maintain a WordPress-driven site for Triple S – an educational nonprofit organising science events for local students – and have been playing with another, more graphical layout for a music blog I would like to start.

So what am I gonna do with this one? I’m trying really hard to keep my CF and web standards blogs strictly on topic. I’d like to be a bit less mindful here. I’m off to Web Essentials in a few days so there’s lots of geeky goings on that I would like to write about. So we’ll just have to see what happens!