BarCamp is a (geek) conference built like a wiki, we can have a democratic schedule built on the fly.  Want to discuss a topic?  Any topic at all?  Come to BarCamp and paste your topic and name in one of the many timeslots.  At first I decided to be a fly on the wall and sort of take it all in, but then I changed my mind and decided to join up with Bram Piyoto and be an “assistant” presenter where design meets tech.  Hopefully I come across as being less of a jackass than I really am, here’s to hope.

And then came Sunday, while sitting in on a panel discussing hacking existing WordPress themes I decided to address a need of how to build a theme from scratch. Because I once wrote a post detailing how to simply build a wordpress theme, I decided to build on the basic idea.  But instead of discussing building Eleven3, I discussed my most recent project, HomeSkillet Records.  As I did it last minute, I had a little tiny room with about 8 guests, it may have been light, but it sure was a captive audience! You’re sort of forced to listen with numbers that small – but I hope it was useful for people.

Mmmm Brain Power

Anytime a bunch of geeks get together there is a lot of brain power getting kicked around, so that’s pretty awesome.  What’s great is the general goodwill everyone has.  People are happy to be here and love a chance to have their thoughts and ideas expressed or learn new ones.  Traditionally, other conferences are a little bit idol worshippy feeling, which is fine (cause I am so into Shaun Inman and Jon Hicks), but this one is the opposite.  There are a few “names” here, but generally speaking everyone here is just here to geek out, prettttty awesome.

I had a blast and met many people who I have seen on Twitter – it’s always good to meet people in real life. I am not a stalker.

One might think this would be an easy trip at 1:30 in the afternoon, nope! Let’s start with the first stop on the agenda, the auto shop. I’m not going to name name’s as my fiancee’s cousin works there and they’ve been good about the situation as-so-far. But I have had to bring the car BACK for the third time for the exact same problem. My POS Jeep can’t seem to get fixed. This last time they had the car while I was in Alaska! Two Weeks! Today I picked it up, I was weary of it working at all.

It got to the Apple Store fine, I purchased my iPhone and was back in it in a matter of minutes. On the way back through Portland, I started noticing that familiar smell of burning rear differential. I was at a fork in the road where I could either turn right and go home, or turn left and head to the auto shop. I opted for the autoshop.

By the time I got there, not only was the car smoking profusely, it was also making bad sounds. I can’t really explain it other than the fact it sounded like the rear axial was freezing up and breaking. I was able to pull in and get a yup, it’s broken again. I took the loner Subaru and headed back to my house, mostly irked because it was all eating into my new iPhone time.

Eventually I got home and am waiting for the number to switch with Verizon. Phone is dope so far. And I haven’t even received a call or text!!!

That was my adventurous day, pretty soon I will vow to never leave home. Too dangerous.

The problem is, her normal doctor’s office is closed today. Any new doctors she would like to see require a three week wait time for new patients. That leaves us with a handful of emergency/urgent care facilities in the Portland area.

This shouldn’t be to hard to compile a list right?

Wrong.

First of all, the handful of emergency/urgent care facilities gets filtered down one more level to the places her insurance “allows” her to go. This is modern medicine living in the leader of the free world. Sweet.

I take my fight to the web. A few personal things; a) I don’t want to drive 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back, this isn’t life or death, it’s a headache that is really painful. b) I am not good at sympathy. c) I am looking for a phone number so I can call these places to find out if they take our insurance and if they administer the migraine shots d) I am good with the web, or so I thought.

First search, I go to google maps and lookup local doctors, nothing close. I look up physicians, kinda close. I call them up, they tell me that if I am a new patient, it will take three weeks to even see me. No good. So being one to make assumptions that usually help me jump a few steps ahead, I assume all small healthcare clinics are going to have me jump through that hoop.

Next up, hospitals! Urgent Care to be precise. I google “urgent healthcare portland oregon.” Two hospitals show up. One thirty minutes away, the other thirty minutes away. I live in Portland, and I know there are more hospitals than that, and I know they are closer. Keep in mind, all I want is a phone number. While the google maps results were dismal, the google search results were worse. No I do not want to sign up with your health insurance that is so conveniently bundled with your hospital! I just want a fucking phone number!

Ok. Calming down. I know there is a Good Samaritan Hospital and a Kaiser Hospital within 15 minutes of me. I search both of their sites. They look like they were designed and built by the same team; 6 years ago. I can’t find a phone number to save my life, thank god it’s not a life or death situation. On the Kaiser site I find a link that says “locations”, YAHTZEE! Click. Popup. “Download our brochure with all of our locations conveniently listed.” PDF pops up and it’s roughly 45 pages, but it looks nice. I scan the table of contents and find Oregon. Go to the Oregon page, no phone numbers, only addresses. Ughhh…

Next step, go over to yahoo and google the address. The Kaiser Job Board shows up and has locations with a list of phone numbers (never even thought to look there). I call Kaiser Central on Interstate and the “we’re sorry, this line has been disconnected” comes through. Fantastic. I dial the second line, it’s the Kaiser operator, she transfers me to urgent care. I ask them if they give the shots for migraines, yes. Super! Do you take any kind of insurance? No, only Kaiser Permanente. Lame.

I go back to Danielle, tell her I can’t find anyone to help us, or I can’t find their numbers. So let’s just go drive to the other hospital I know of that is close and see if they will give you your shot covered by your health insurance. She says she is ok and we’ll wait a few hours.

I’ve lived in England and have gone through Social Healthcare, and believe me, it wasn’t all roses either. Why can’t we pay one company a reasonable fee, be able to go wherever we choose, and get what we need?

As for the website, here’s my final thought: Companies need to stop launching sites and forgetting about them. A site is never done. It’s organic, there is always room for improvement. Do Doctors get their MD and then suddenly stop learning? No! The web is more and more the place people go to get information, if you’re frustrating someone like me, who is an advanced web user, then I can’t imagine the problems less advanced users are having.

Please fix your websites, all of you.

I had a colleague ask me about this site, asking if it was mine. While I do live in Portland, I do love CSS, I am shocked that Google would bestow this honor upon me. And as James Hall, a CSS guru from The Good Harvest, told me, blogging about the fact I am known for Portland and CSS will make my Google Search ranking even stronger for those terms!

So here I am. Feeling fancy! Indulge me in my narcissism and run a search for portland and css. Oh happy joy day.

Ok, back to the code.

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Update: Ok, no longer number one, stupid Google! That lasted all of 20 minutes.

The cherry blossoms are in full bloom and it means spring is here. Thank goodness, the winter always drags on me. Just like it did in Sitka, Alaska where I grew up. Yes. I am a different breed. The grass will need to be cut soon. The first project out the door is HomeSkilletFest. This site changes once a year for each new fest. I don’t know how I am going to think up a new theme every year, but I guess that can worry can wait.

I’m feeling quite good these days as I finally feel like I’m on the right path. That’s all I have to say about that.

I went and saw four different speakers. From the four that I went to, nothing groundbreaking, or new to me was presented. However, I think it was a huge value to the majority of the audience there. Out of the four I attended, I got ideas for more posts, found I was thinking in the right direction, and thoroughly enjoyed the celebration of geekdom that is webvisions.

What follows is my account of the minority of speakers I saw.

I have to admit, this is all from memory. I didn’t take notes in school and I am afraid I don’t take notes now.

“Rapid DOM/AJAX Development” – Jonathan Snook

Aside from my A.D.D., Jonathan’s presentation at WebVisions helped clear up whether or not the plethora of libraries available on the web are a good or bad thing. Ultimately he said something along the lines of, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Hence, I have decided I am going to take on Prototype as it’s somewhere in the middle of potential and file size. Now where were those resources?

“Ruby on Rails” – Michael Buffington

I wasn’t lost in any of the other presentations as much as I was lost in this one. Staring at an unfamiliar coding language is a bit of a “deer in the headlights” experience for me. I am by no means, even good at server-side coding. But for some reason, when Michael showed us all how to create a game, he made it look easy.

Part of his advice was to download textmate for macOSX (recent switcher) so I will gladly oblige. I really need a simple language to turn the ideas in my head into actual applications. I know this will be no fast ride, but I am definitely jumping on the bandwagon.

He also made a, “who cares about internet explorer users,” comment which is something I have been thinking myself (having some eleven3.com IE issues). I chuckled.

Thank you Michael.

“Tagging in the Real Web World” – Thomas Vander Wal

It was a trip watching Thomas Vander Wal speak, I kept thinking, “this is the guy who coined folksonomy.” He’s a bit of a celebrity in my industry. I also couldn’t believe I didn’t bring a notepad, a laptop, or a camera. And then it came to me, “CELLPHONE!” Hence the grainy photo you see here.

The topic of his speech was tagging. I find myself thinking a lot about tagging and the outright awesomeness that encompasses it. I freak out a bit when trying to tell people why they should use del.icio.us or some other social bookmarking service. It’s relevant data, and it’s a lot of it.

Thomas also brought up the two sides of the coin that I have often explained to people, why users are doing it for themselves (which makes it useful), and the fruits they reap (tag-based rss feeds). Of course he went more in depth to the how’s and why’s, but for me it affirmed many of my suspicions (like the fact tag clouds suck), and it was really nice to hear it dissected by someone as prominent as him.

** As the memory comes closer to present time, the posts get longer. Imagine that.

“Social Metadata and the Relevance Revolution” – Gene Smith

Gene is from the middle of nowhere, Canada, and being from the middle of nowhere Alaska, I felt like we should play hockey or get drunk and fight. None of that happened, but I was entertained by some audience participation and discussion of socially constructed information architectures (as he said, fancy websites).

Essentially he discussed certain elements of highly trafficked websites, elements that were created by the site for visitors to use. At some point in the process the visitors take over and the elements become useful.

He had a graph that explained surfer actions, from personal to participatory on the y-axis, and low to high engagement on the x-axis. This activity I am doing right now? Half selfish, half social good, and my engagement is very high. Cool, a paradigm to explain why we do all of this internet stuff, and how ego-centric it all is.

He went on, I am done giving his presentation an injustice, the rest of it can be view here (PDF).

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So what did I think? I think WebVisions was very cool. Granted my conference experience is very limited. But I just can’t help but love a salesguy-less conference about the internet. It was the real issues presented by real people. Thanks to all of the speakers and the folks at WebVisions. I will definitely be there next year.