I’ve been thoroughly booked up the past few days. What with having a bit of a large night out on Friday with George, Will and Gwyz I was on surprisingly good form for Saturday’s Multipack, although I did avoid revisiting the beer.

Hosted entirely in Digbeth (just below Brum city proper) we had a really good turn out and I met a good number of new faces. Kudos to Mr Oxton who made a nice comment about me on his blog for the price of a Guinness.

Matt’s talk on ARIA was a nice little intro to a wider subject that I had previously known little about, whereas Bruce very neatly illustrated some of the finer points of HTML 5 as it stands and the political wrangling that always threatens with web-specs. Stuart rounded off everything with the most technical part - outlining the best bits of ‘new’ JavaScript and what we can look forward to from browser support in the future. I suppose it therefore was only fitting that he had co-ordinated with Apple to release the upcoming beta of Safari so soon afterwards… (I also quite surprised myself when I realised I had understood pretty much all of it).

Other things I took away from the day was a brief and sandwich-punctuated discussion about Microformats and Birmingham Social Media with Andy Mabbett; a chance to examine the new and neatly put together studios of One Black Bear; discuss wacky Japanese architecture with Jon Dennis and discover why exactly Tess was brandishing a thick PHP textbook at the last meeting. And of course it was great to see all the usual suspects as well. Photos here.

The only disappointment was that the sun didn’t last until Sunday but since then I’ve seen Raj, Tom and George, caught up on Lost and Flight of The Conchords (of which episode 5 is a cracker) organised go-karting for the weekend and been pleased by what the accountant had to say about the business helping to pay the rent.

Tomorrow I’m doing my annual attendance at the old school, answering questions on web design for kids about to pick their A-Level subjects. The buffet is usually excellent.

I’m also looking forward to the next couple of months. I’ve organised a trip down to Southampton on business, have a great piece of work coming up which almost makes me envious of myself (if that’s possible) and am eagerly awaiting delivery of rare book purchase (for me anyway) - the Typographic Desk Reference. It will nicely prop up the one other proper design book I own.

I think this photo most adequately sums up last Friday.

I’m pleased to announce a new type of event from Multipack launches this month; Multipack Presents - and it’s happening this Saturday, 21st February in Birmingham. Open to all, free to everyone.

On this day we will reluctantly peel ourselves off our Birmingham barstools and reposition ourselves at the new offices of Birmingham Web Agency One Black Bear in their Fazeley Studios for industry-related talks by web powerhouses, Messrs Machell, Lawson and Langridge.

Topics of these free presentations will be HTML 5, the new W3C accessibility tool WAI-ARIA and other emerging web standards. And it’s going to be good.

Pre-talk drinks are at 2pm in The Old Crown (Digbeth High Street), and the talks will be held in the studios at 4pm, though please come along and socialise beforehand (especially since we may need to enter the studios en-masse if the reception is not usually open on a Saturday!).

Kindly email supremos Campaign Monitor will be supplying some refreshments and freebies for attendees, and being as the whole thing is ruddy well free, there is no reason not to show up, although it would be very courteous if you add yourself to the Upcoming group so everyone involved gets a good idea of the numbers to expect.

Looking forward to seeing you all there :) Any questions can be fired at me or other Multipack types on Twitter. More info here.

It’s been a while since my last post. Around a month I believe, which is a fairly big gap by my standards. I believe twitter has something to do with this, but also a general lack of desire to write loads.

However it has allowed me time to contemplate the following three pieces of wordly-wise advice for you.

1. The speed limit on single lane national speed limit roads is 60mph and most people know that. If you think it’s 50mph, or 40mph, I suggest you re-read the highway code. Also if you don’t know it’s 70mph on dual carriageways, the same applies to you too. The government should take note; most people don’t understand the white disc with a black line through it. Perhaps it would be more sensible to put a number on all future speed limit signs so the whole thing is unequivocal. Sensible huh?
2. Gym members; if it was intended for that, they wouldn’t have called it a hair drier. Why you think anyone else wants to watch you heat your genitals while standing completely nude in front of a mirror is a mystery to me. Get it away from there before you do an injury to yourself. It’s not going to increase the size of anything, and even if it does, we don’t all want to have to watch.
3. If you’re installing iWork ‘09 and you had previously installed iWork ‘08, please remember that just because you installed it doesn’t mean the default program which opens a file has changed. I found this out halfway through a keynote presentation. Delete the old version to avoid and mid-presentation annoyances.

I’m not actually that much in a ranty mood, those are the exceptions to the rule. To counteract the negativity of the three points listed above, here are three positives from January 2009.

1. If you haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire, you really should do. It’s very enjoyable.
2. If I had to recommend some music right now, I couldn’t say better than The Black Key’s last album (2008), Attack and Release. And what better way to listen to it than through free online music service, Spotify
3. The Simon Amstell interviews Eddie Izzard experience was great. The audio recording will be available as a podcast on iTunes shortly.

That is all for now.