Dylan Schiemann

April 18th was definitely a day to remember. Web’09 had a great group of attendees and a solid collection of speakers. I was up to give my talk after the morning break, and gave a talk on the Open Web. While I have given this talk several times before, each time I deliver it is quite different. The conference had a number of vendor-specific pitches, which gave me some fresh fodder.

Today was by far my best delivery of this talk, if the audience response and Twitter feedback was any indication. Most importantly, I had fun and I think it made the conference more enjoyable all around, which is a rare accomplishment at a technology conference. I also had the new experience of soliciting Twitter feedback during the talk, which gave me some great ideas for future iterations of the talk, as well as a great way to follow-up with people about the talk. I believe the Web’09 people are still working on putting the talks online, but it should be available soon. All in all, it was a very fun experience.

After lunch, I walked around the harbour a bit, and had lunch and drinks with one of the attendees from the conference, and then Rob Coup joined us for a small Dojo Beer event before the conference after-party.

Among the discussions about Dojo and other topics, another topic I’ve often held dear to the heart is a goal of eliminating the term “red head” from the vernacular. Why? Well, because it’s only my hair that is red, and because we don’t call people blackheads, brownheads, or yellowheads. So, for a while I’ve wanted to come up with a new name, and the best I had come up with was “redh” would was an abbreviation for red hair.

However, redh was pretty odd and unlikely to have any staying power, so when I heard that the phrase Ginger was popular in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland, I immediately took a liking to it, in spite of some potentially derogatory interpretations of it. I hope we can replace “redhead” with “ginger” in the US vernacular asap. I also found it amusing to learn that the term “borange” is used to describe people with orange-brown hair, but that term doesn’t really apply to me.

After the Dojo Beer event, I returned in time to attend the Web’09 after party which was a lot of fun. I talked to a bunch of people that attended the conference and had a great time. To top it all off, Morgan Nichol and Mike Forbes knew that I like cider, and took me to a cellar where I got to try a home brew cider that was legendary. Web’09 was one of the best conferences I’ve had the chance to attend, and hopefully I’ll get invited back next year!